As the number of students receiving accommodations rises, what would it mean for Yale to form a community with disabled identity at its center?
The student secretary sits behind a folding table erected to one side of the foyer, lacking a real desk. 35 Broadway, tucked behind the Shops at Yale, is spacious and quiet. Cleaning product hangs in the air. Save for the small plaques identifying these rooms as the home of Student Accessibility Services (SAS), the office could belong to anyone.
Before I entered Yale as a transfer student this fall, I had never even seen a public conversation on disability. “Disability” was appointments after school, weekend trips to big medical centers in San Francisco that didn’t make sense to my friends, and the immediate, unspoken isolation that comes when I am given 50 percent more time to complete the exam that everyone studied hard for.
Now, at Yale, a vast network of accessibility services is just an email away. In 2015, SAS provided accommodations for 720 students. Nine years later, that number has more than quadrupled. With just seven employees on staff, SAS now services some 3,000 students across the entire University. Extra time on tests, single dorm rooms, dietary accommodations, and assistive technology, among many other accommodations, fall to SAS to administer, regulate, and support.
Yet even at Yale, where I have access to previously unimaginable resources, where students have actively organized around disability, and where nearly one in four students receive accommodations, I hesitate to say I have found a community. As national debates over the increase in accommodations continue, they focus almost entirely on accommodations themselves: Are they effective? Are they fraudulent?
These debates overlook another question. Even as more students seek support from Yale, these students remain decentralized and often invisible to one another by virtue of their shared hidden identity. With these challenges, what would it mean to form a community with disabled identity at its center?
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Yale’s Resource Office on Disabilities was founded in 1982 and renamed Student Accessibility Services in 2019. The office assisted its first cohort of twenty-four students in 1983-84. Early history of its operations is scarce, but the office describes itself as established “in response to the growing population of students with disabilities enrolled” at Yale.
This “growing population” has roots in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 504 of the act mandated that “no qualified individual with a disability in the United States shall be excluded from, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination” under any program receiving federal financial assistance. The law’s passage would have outsized effects on colleges throughout the country, but only with time. The federal government’s initial failure to implement Section 504, spurred by lobbying from employers reluctant to change hiring practices, led to protests and sit-ins around the country in the summer of 1977. It was only after these efforts, that Section 504 became widely known and enforced in schools and workplaces nationwide.
Similar spikes at institutions across the country have provoked responses ranging from concern to praise. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, James Madison University professor Alan Levinovitz called for a scaling-back of accommodations and pushed “study-skill programs, peer-support groups, and temporary interventions” as alternatives. These measures, he argued, would “help students make it through stressful periods without giving them a permanent biogenetic explanation for their challenges.” For Levinovitz, the over-medicalization of students’ struggles diverts attention away from other sources of the difficulties they encounter, such as academic underpreparedness and mental health, while also diminishing the weight of more serious medical diagnoses. On the other hand, advocates at the U.S. Government Accountability Office and elsewhere have argued that the rise in accommodations can be attributed to a historical lack of resource-awareness amongst students, and a growing number of students with long-term disabilities enrolling in college.
Kimberly McKeown, who has directed SAS since 2021, doesn’t attribute the growing number of accommodations to any single factor but notes that the office saw a higher number of requests, specifically for mental health conditions, following the pandemic. SAS does not keep disaggregated data for instances of each particular disability. Mckeown noted, anecdotally, a dramatic increase in students seeking accommodations for dyslexia.
In some cases, the experience of receiving accommodations changes not only a student’s practical relationship to living and studying at Yale but also their identity.
“I didn’t have much experience with accommodations before I came here,” Nida Khan ’24, a mentor in Yale’s Disability Peer Mentors Program, remembers. “I came to college not really knowing what my disability was. I was just sick and I had nerve pain in my hands.”
Khan’s recognition of her disability, and her evaluation and diagnosis, came only after she had struggled with challenges she could not name.
“I progressively kept getting worse and worse each semester,” Khan recalls. “It got to the point where I realized, okay, this isn’t just that college is hard; this is something specific.”
Khan was diagnosed outside of Yale, but began receiving accommodations via SAS. Some were common, like extra time on exams and extensions for assignments, but one of the most helpful accommodations was highly specific: an automatic door opener activated by simply swiping her I.D. at any door on campus.
“People didn’t even know that was a thing until they saw me do it with my I.D.,” Khan remembers. The technology was “a game changer” for her, “an unexpected accommodation that really helped my life.”
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That a technology so obscure has such a profound impact on Khan’s life speaks to difficulties of finding connections across such a varied identity. Rose Bender, a current Yale medical student who graduated from the College in 2020, came to Yale and immediately faced this problem, struggling to find others who shared her experience. The first connection she made was by coincidence.
“Through one of my extracurriculars, totally unrelated to disability, I met somebody who happened to have the same chronic illness as I did,” Bender said. “We became very good friends, and decided we wanted to start a group for students with disabilities.”
That group, Disability Empowerment for Yale (DEFY), was founded in 2017 as Yale’s first student-run advocacy organization dedicated to disability. DEFY marked the first organized effort by disabled students to create their own support system, independent of University structures. Their goal was not to usurp or replace Student Accessibility Services but rather to provide something that SAS could not: a group that focused on disabled students’ experiences themselves rather than on providing purely institutional solutions to their challenges.
Having a single banner for students to organize under proved effective. DEFY was instrumental in creating the American Sign Language program at Yale and in crafting Yale’s new policy on accessible course materials and websites. Their most well-known achievement, however, has been the institutionalization of two academic mentorship programs: the Disability Peer Liaisons and the Disability Peer Mentors.
“When I got to Yale, other groups had Peer Liaisons that are run through the colleges and set up as soon as you get here,” Bender recalled. “I thought, why is there nothing like that for students with disabilities?”
Bender’s friendship with someone who shared her experience showed the advantages of the comprehensive, holistic mentorship offered by Peer Liaisons at Yale’s established cultural houses. She wanted to ensure that this kind of support wasn’t left to chance. Bender started an informal Peer Liaisons group within DEFY, creating an email list and handing out flyers around campus. The first year they had “maybe four or five mentees,” Bender says. The program grew to fifteen the next year, and DEFY petitioned for its institutionalization while continuing to work as an independent advocacy organization.
They took the informal program to the two offices most likely to accept it: SAS and the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. To DEFY’s surprise, both offices agreed to host the program, and it was split in two: the Disability Peer Liaisons, which would fall under the auspices of SAS, and the Disability Peer Mentors Program, overseen by The Poorvu Center.
Last year, the Disability Peer Mentors came under the direction of the Office of Educational Opportunity (OEO). Now, while the Disability Peer Liaisons continue to resemble other holistic Peer Liaison programs on campus (activities include taking mentees out for food, check-ins, and advising on life at Yale in general), the Disability Peer Mentors are now trained only in academic mentoring, a move made by the Poorvu administration which, according to Bender, altered the goals of the program fundamentally: “It’s not being true to the spirit of the program,” Bender says of the Disability Peer Mentors’ new role under the OEO. “Putting it under that umbrella and that group, and taking away our unique training and community aspects, there’s a lot lost.”
While the Disability Peer Liaisons still exist in their originally intended form, they are only available to undergraduate students who are registered through SAS—unlike the Peer Mentors. For those unregistered, the path to holistic mentorship is not clear, if it exists at all.
With increased visibility, resources, and organization, institutionalization brings the risk of moving student-centered programs like Disability Peer Mentors toward another service-based model.
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When I arrived on campus this fall, I was overwhelmed not only by the sheer number of resources sent to me as soon as I had scheduled a meeting with SAS, but also that these resources came from Yale’s administrative offices, and framed what was provided in terms of “support” rather than “community.” In the same string of emails from SAS, I learned how to schedule a meeting with an assistive technology expert and be paired with a Peer Liaison.
As it stands, the physical, communal space for disability at Yale is The Good Life Center at SAS, a room within the SAS office and an offshoot of the larger series of campus relaxation spaces under the “Good Life” banner. Improvised from the skeleton of administrative suites surrounding it, the Good Life Center is an island of color and comfort between SAS’s white walls. Sunlight streams down through skylights. Accessible seating of varying heights and styles surrounds a central table, where lichens creep over the sides of a planter. A shelf holds coffee and tea.
But according to Sovy Pham, a junior who works as a Peer Liaison at SAS, events hosted there usually have low attendance—a challenge the Peer Liaison program itself shares.
“The number of students who receive accommodations versus the number of students who request a Peer Liaison, it’s drastically different,” Pham tells me.
Pham’s initial experience with formal accommodations, like Khan’s, began at Yale. With a diagnosis, Pham says she can explain her situation more easily to professors: “My ability or inability to complete certain assignments. There’s a reason for it, for the way that my brain functions differently than other people’s.”
“There’s this split stream at Yale,” Khan observes. “A lot of these accommodations are actually super common. It’s not just people who identify as disabled. People get accommodations who don’t spend as much time thinking about disability and what it means to be disabled and have a disabled body.”
Translating such a subjective and personal experience into a shared identity and, beyond that, into a community, is a difficult task. The close relationship between disability and the medical and legal mandates of student support, specifically student confidentiality and evidence-based approval for accommodations, can make connecting with others who share the experience more difficult.
“With SAS, students don’t have to tell anyone that they have a disability, and that’s everyone’s choice. This is not to say that SAS is opaque on purpose, but students are empowered to make that choice,” Pham notes. Disability, because it is often defined in terms of an individual’s capacity rather than their outward appearance, can also be literally invisible, regardless of the rules in place to ensure privacy.
This invisibility bleeds over into support and advocacy spaces as well. As a Peer Liaison, Pham says she doesn’t know anyone who is a Peer Mentor, despite the fact that those programs were once one and the same. She also advocates for causes related to disability as a member of the Yale College Council, including an effort to create a disability cultural house at Yale, but does so mostly independently of DEFY.
“I think disability is unique as an identity because it necessitates institutions, because it is the institution that determines your ability to some extent,” Pham muses. “Institutions create the parameters for how disabilities manifest.”
Pham offers an example: “I’m Asian, right? If I go to the AACC, or if I don’t go to the AACC, I’m still gonna be Asian at the end of the day. My relationship to my identity does not have to be necessarily tethered to an institution.”
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Writing this article has been the only time, at Yale or anywhere else, when I’ve talked to others about the experience of disability in a sustained, non-trivial way. These conversations have helped me see how others engage with disability: not as a barrier to be triumphed over, but as a way of living. At the most basic level, forming a community around disability would require defining “disability” outside of a particular institutional transaction.
For those who want to have these conversations and bridge the divide between statistical debates over accommodations and how students actually experience them, there is no single path forward. DEFY and other advocates on campus have called for the creation of a Persons with Disabilities Cultural Center since 2019, but with low attendance at existing events on campus, it’s unclear if a designated physical space is the largest barrier to creating a community. To move forward, we need to acknowledge that the difficulties in creating a community around disabilities may stem from the very institutional measures intended to support them.
— Andrew Storino is a sophomore in Trumbull College.