Fall 2022 will be the third start to an academic year during the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed over six million people worldwide and one million Americans.
For disabled students, faculty, and staff, many at higher risk of COVID-19 related complications, the pandemic presented a strange silver lining—classes, conferences, meetings, and socialization moved online. This sudden adjustment to asynchronous, virtual learning allowed many with physical or mental disabilities open access to their education.
Earlier this month, the CDC released its newest guidance for how the public should behave with COVID-19. While continuing to encourage vaccinations, the CDC ended its recommendation to quarantine after known exposure to COVID, instead urging the wearing of high-quality masks. It also no longer encourages schools and other similar institutions to run tests on asymptomatic individuals.
Helen Rottier, doctoral student in disability studies at University of Illinois Chicago.
The new regulations are coupling with academia’s push to return to in-person, often at the expense of the online flexibility that benefitted many in the disabled community. At the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), students and teachers in the disability studies program and at the Disability Cultural Center are concerned that access to online and asynchronous learning options will disappear even while COVID continues to spread.
“[This new guidance] enables institutions, especially colleges and universities, to make rules based on their own motivators, whether that’s campus culture and politics or what they think is going to get students to enroll and pay for classes,” said Helen Rottier, a doctoral student in disability studies at UIC.
“I think students are fearful that they’ve been excluded from their school communities because of the steps being taken to really push for in-person,” said Rottier. “Removing the [remote] option, that we have demonstrated is possible, is just a slap in the face to disabled people who, for the first time, were able to attend big disability community events, to engage with educational content.”
