It’s 8 p.m. on a Thursday in late January, the sun set over two hours ago casting darkness over the University of Wisconsin’s campus. As students shuffle home to their houses, dorms, and apartments, some begin to plan for the night ahead of them. They send texts to their group chats, call their friends, plan where to meet, how to get there and where to go. But for some students, planning is a lot more complicated.
One UW student hears a ding from their phone as they walk into their dorm after an exhausting day of class. The text tells them to meet at their friend’s house in an hour, all the way across campus. They check the time — 8:05 p.m — too late to access Go Riteway to travel to their friend’s dorm. Questions arise — how will they get there? Will they be able to access certain dorms? Where do their friends want to go after? What food will they be serving? Will there be drinks?
These questions are not out of the ordinary for students with disabilities at UW. Every class, meeting, game or social event they attend requires careful planning and heightened awareness of accessibility challenges.
UW has taken steps in recent years to foster an environment of inclusion and elevate students with disabilities to achieve their full potential as undergraduate and graduate students.
Resources like the Disability Cultural Center, Teaching Assistant Association mutual aid networks and the Badger Support Network provide resources and community at UW, especially for students with disabilities. But this wasn’t always the case, according to the genetics department.
In the 20th century, UW researchers supported and practiced eugenics, advocating for increasing the reproduction of “favorably perceived individuals” and “preventing unwanted members of the community” through sterilization efforts. These efforts often targeted individuals with disabilities.
Despite ongoing efforts to improve the UW experience for students with disabilities, systemic issues still persist. From classrooms to social settings, students with disabilities often face predisposed ideas of what a disability looks like. As a result, students with disabilities are often forced to advocate strongly for themselves and cannot always rely on their school for support.
Reasonable accommodations
Under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504 prohibited discrimination or exclusion based on identity for all federally funded institutions, including higher education.
While the Americans with Disabilities Act was not originally ratified until 1990, the Rehabilitation Act made what many know now as “reasonable accommodations” possible for students with a disability at higher education institutions nationwide.
Since its passing, colleges and universities have applied the act in different ways. Some create general requirements to make education fair and accessible to all students, while others leave accommodations up to professors.
According to UW policy, reasonable accommodations do not give a student an advantage in courses, but they do give them an equitable opportunity to show their engagement, knowledge and dedication. Reasonable accommodations do not alter course material or content, but they may alter course materials to make them more accessible.
For example, a student may request a sign language interpreter or closed captioning if they are hard of hearing or deaf.
At some Big Ten schools, like the University of Minnesota and the University of Michigan, students needing accommodations are required to receive an accommodation letter from their access consultant — a specialist who decides which accommodations will reduce disability-related barriers and are reasonable for most classes.
Generally, these letters mandate a student’s professor to provide accommodations to students, such as longer test times, notetakers or additional excused absences for certain chronic health issues like Crohn’s Disease.
Currently, students are usually required to be authorized by a medical professional to access accommodations by the McBurney Disability Resource Center, however, this is not always the case.
From there, instructors and students set up a time to “discuss” accommodations to determine how to implement them. A professor can deny a student’s accommodation if they feel it is not reasonable, but they must contact the McBurney office before denying a request.
In the best-case scenario, students are already aware of and, possibly, have an Individual Education Plan or 504 plan — which are blueprints for how a school will support a student with disabilities — in place by the time they enter UW. For River Kratochvil, a fourth-year student at UW, this was not the case.
“I am someone that came into college with a lot of undiagnosed disabilities, I didn’t come in with an IEP from high school or 504 plan, so I came to college and was having a lot of struggles with that transition phase,” Kratochvil said. “I had a lot of struggles around specifically, course attendance, timeliness and executive functioning skills that I just did not have, or hadn’t been able to build up.”
After having trouble with the transition from high school to college, Kratochvil went on a journey to identify and find accommodations for their disabilities. After initially being diagnosed and receiving accommodations for anxiety and depression, Kratochvil was diagnosed with autism and ADHD, which are what most of her accommodations now address.
“A lot of times when you try and go to get a diagnosis for those things as an adult, people are just like what’s even the point?” Kratochvil said. “But that was a major part of me getting those accommodations because I came into college without any formal documents to prove disability.”
Recently, the McBurney Center has established a new system called the “limited flexibility plans module” for professors to set parameters for the accommodations they provide students. The intended purpose of this module is to ask instructors to do the work of establishing parameters, rather than letting the responsibility fall on students, Associate Communications Director for Student Affairs Darcy Wittberger said in an emailed statement to The Badger Herald.
But, some students feel the new plans ultimately give professors more leeway to limit flexibility by allowing them to “set reasonable parameters for flex accommodations.”
This new model ultimately encourages students to advocate more for themselves in the classroom setting than before, UW senior Emmett Lockwood said.
“McBurney wants to work on this model of saying students should advocate for themselves with their professors, but that’s not a model that is mimicking what happens in the workplace,” Lockwood said. “It’s a model that doesn’t take into account that students already have to do advocacy to get to the place of getting approved for accommodations.”
In an emailed statement to The Badger Herald, Associate Director of Student Services at McBurney Kyle Charters said students can always use an access consultant for support throughout the process, and faculty are encouraged to reach out to McBurney if they are unsure of a student’s accommodation.
“A student’s Access Consultant is always available as a resource if a student is struggling to request their accommodations, or if they are seeking support in communicating with instructors,” Charters said.
While McBurney requests students communicate their needs with their professors openly, some worry it could damage relationships with professors, according to UW junior Lyn Talley.
“It can put students in a vulnerable situation where they’re enforcing their own access to education at the risk of their interpersonal relationship with this professor,” Talley said.
For students who enter college without complete awareness of their disability — such as Kratochvil — it can be even more damaging to expect a high degree of self-advocacy to obtain certain accommodations, according to the ADA National Network.
Campus culture
Academia has not always been welcoming to students with disabilities. Its competitive nature often reinforces misconceptions about accommodations and the contributions of individuals with disabilities.
One particularly unwelcoming field is STEM, especially medicine.
Jennifer Koehler, a UW biomedical sciences graduate student pointed out that many topics lectured and discussed in their classes treat disabilities, like autism, as something which requires a cure.
“The end slides [in lectures or seminars] are always about how we can treat and/or cure autism,” Koehler said. “There isn’t that much pushback against that, and that feels very isolating.”
At one point in class, Koehler encountered a presentation arguing it would be a “beautiful world” if scientific research could cure genetic diseases.
“This is just dehumanizing in a lot of ways,” Koehler said.
Koehler is not alone in feeling this way. Amelia Hansen, a graduate student researching infectious diseases at UW, said lab instructors often assume no immunocompromised students are present in the lab — disregarding their ability to research while dealing with chronic illness.
“They’ll say a collective ‘we in the room aren’t at risk of Cryptococcus, but immunocompromised people are,’ and it’s assuming no one in this room is immunocompromised,” Hansen said. “That’s just wrong. You don’t know who’s in your audience, and there are disabled people and immunocompromised people doing science right now on campus, and it should be that way.”
Alongside the prevalence of microaggressions in the STEM field, Lockwood has faced similar rhetoric in his political science and philosophy classes at UW.
“I’ve been in poli sci classes — as someone who does research on disability and politics — where folks have said that folks with certain disabilities shouldn’t be able to vote,” Lockwood said. “I’ve been in philosophy classes where I’ve had students say to me that they believe it is morally permissible to kill disabled people.”
These inherent biases have lasting consequences on the morale of students with disabilities, Lockwood said.
Students can report microaggression through UW hate and bias forms, but Lockwood argues by the time UW addresses discrimination, the damage has already been done to the student.
The results of hearing and dealing with these biases often have mental health consequences for the students subjected to them, leading to increased isolation for students with disabilities.
Mental health impact
Students with disabilities often experience stressors beyond that of an average college student in self-advocating for accommodations and ensuring social environments are accessible — all while dealing with microaggressions from some peers.
The hidden labor costs, as Lockwood put it, associated with attending a higher education institute can impact a student’s ability to adapt and feel accepted on a large campus, especially if they are dealing with mental health issues on top of it.
Students with disabilities were 2.5 times more likely to meet the criteria for mental health problems than students without disabilities, according to the National Institute for Health.
For students at UW, this data is not surprising.
“It’s easy to understand why students [with disabilities] feel isolated when you’re on a campus where it’s a struggle to get students to even stand up and offer someone their seat on the 80 [bus],” Lockwood said. “If my peers are not able to do that bare minimum amount of decency, how am I going to get included in these other social events?”
The ADA National Network highlights social inclusion as a noted predictor for success in higher education. Despite this evidence, students with disabilities are more likely to lack a “sense of belonging” in college environments, with social inclusion being a missing factor in the lives of students with disabilities.
Social, physical and instructional inclusion for students with disabilities should be addressed in the coming years to adapt to the influx of students entering higher education, especially as post-traumatic stress disorder and intellectual disabilities rise in K-12 students, according to the ADA National Network.
The NIH conducted a study into mental health trends in higher education settings and found students with disabilities have fewer coping strategies compared to their non-disabled counterparts, highlighting the importance of mental health resources on campuses.
University Health Services have not adequately met the needs of students struggling with mental health, according to a 2023 study conducted by Neurodivergent-U. According to the findings, students have to wait an average of two weeks before a counseling appointment is available. For students experiencing emergency mental health situations, it can be frustrating to have limited options on campus for support.
According to an emailed statement to The Badger Herald, Interim Director of Mental Health Services Dr. Ellen Marks shared UHS currently offers Access Appointments for students seeking mental health resources, after which students may be referred to counseling, behavioral health support or psychiatric care.
“We aim to have Access Appointments available within two weeks of scheduling, even during the busiest times of the semester,” Marks said. “Our average wait time for an Access Appointment last academic year was 4.4 days, but certainly those times vary based on the time of the year.”
Even when a counseling appointment is made available, some students report the services are not adequate for certain mental health disorders, such as PTSD.
“Graduate students have free access to a certain amount of mental health counseling, but they [UHS] just weren’t equipped for the level of care I needed,” Koehler said. “So then I went to UW Health to get care and that took about 10 months to get an appointment with someone.”
In general, there is a serious shortage of mental health experts across the U.S., leading 160 million people to live in a designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Area, according to the National Alliance on Mental Health. Less than 50% of those experiencing a mental health issue received care in 2021, which is the most recent data provided by NAMI.
Looking forward
So how can higher education institutions go about implementing change for students with disabilities? Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the systemic problems students face.
One proposed solution to the academic problem has been universal design for learning, which would require courses to be created with students with disabilities in mind. This means accommodations recommended by McBurney would already exist for courses, like closed captioning, extra test time and flexible absences.
But universal design is not necessarily applicable to all situations, according to Lockwood.
“You will have folks at the university saying it is not budget-friendly for every class to have a sign language interpreter,” Lockwood said. “[also] if a professor creates a slideshow and uploads that slideshow to Canvas, that slideshow is now the intellectual property of the university and not the professor.”
Lockwood instead advocates for a “mixed method approach,” wherein professors implement some aspects of universal design. But, there will still be accommodations students with disabilities will always need, requiring professors to remain flexible in how they implement those accommodations and resources.
One thing schools can start to implement is extra support to aid students with the transition between high school and their post-secondary career, whether that is a job or college.
As students with disabilities enter higher education, the ADA National Network argues there is a need for strong, deliberate transition programming, including peer-to-peer mentoring, academic coaching and increased understanding of reasonable accommodations.
Additionally, students who are aware of their disability typically already have the proper documentation to request and access accommodations. But, the transition can sometimes require students to obtain new “proof,” which can be costly, according to the ADA National Network, which warrants more collaboration between universities and high schools.
To address the issue of understanding reasonable accommodations campus-wide, Lockwood encourages graduate programs to educate students on how to teach and support students with disabilities. Due to the nature of UW being an R1 research institution, many professors were never formally taught how to teach students, especially those with disabilities.
While UW has introduced certain efforts to educate instructors on teaching students with disabilities, those programs are currently voluntary meaning only those who want to learn ultimately seek them out.
“The better, systemic solution is to look at how teaching gets taught in grad school programs, and looking at how do we train the grad students,” Lockwood said.
In the short term, students with disabilities struggling to find belonging on such a large campus should seek out communities, clubs or organizations to support them. These organizations include the DCC, Chronic Health Allies Mentorship Program or Advocates for Diverse Abilities. For Hansen, CHAMP provided a community and friendship network to support her throughout her undergraduate and graduate career at UW.
Students experiencing urgent mental health issues can seek out same-day or next-day support through Uwill Telehealth counseling, daily drop-in Let’s Talk sessions or through contacting the on-call counselor or 24/7 crisis support line.
In the face of a complicated accommodation system, social isolation and mental health issues, UW students with disabilities are a resilient group, relentlessly self-advocating on a campus that can sometimes work against them.
“I’m a firm believer that the dropout rates for students with disabilities are not because of students’ disabilities,” Lockwood said. “I have succeeded in college not in spite of my disabilities, but alongside being a disabled student.”