The first class of every semester comes with a long list of anxieties. What will the professor be like? Are the readings difficult? How many papers will we have to write?
For some students with disabilities, it isn’t always that simple. When I open up my syllabus on the first day, I only have one question: What’s the attendance policy?
Many students’ lives are complicated by factors outside their control — issues that cause them to miss class more than one or two times. Living with depression, anxiety, chronic pain, autoimmune diseases, or other illnesses means constantly weighing a number of competing priorities. These are the conditions under which many Hamilton students live and work — conditions that most attendance policies don’t address.
Invisible disabilities are the least well understood and recognized by faculty, mainly because they are not easy to address with accessible course materials, exam alterations, or tutors. They require an extra level of flexibility about class attendance and the use of more creative evaluations to monitor student progress.
The path to accommodation for these disabilities isn’t always clear. Some students may be unaware that their condition — like chronic illness, brain injury, neurological disorder, or mental illness — qualifies as a disability. Others might hesitate to request accommodation, either because of previous negative experiences or because of the overwhelming stigma that dismisses these disabilities as less valid than those that are more visible.
My illness is loaded with assumptions — that I am lazy, apathetic, unwilling to participate, or simply unfit for higher education. When I don’t show up to class more than a few times a semester, it is implied that I simply don’t care enough about the course to warrant a good grade, regardless of how hard I work or how much I learn.
When a professor insists that students not miss class, it not only unfairly pressures disabled students, but also sends a clear message that students with invisible disabilities or mental illnesses are not welcome at this institution.
While requesting disability accommodation is an option, making a formal request required me to jump through endless hoops — getting clearance from the Health Center, taking multiple trips to the doctor’s office to get forms filled out, and then constantly negotiating and renegotiating absence policies with professors.
This process isn’t just time consuming, it’s also expensive. Getting a diagnosis alone is a financial privilege.
I didn’t have insurance for years leading up to college. When I finally received coverage under Medicaid, I spend months moving from doctor to doctor. Some physicians couldn’t accommodate a patient under the age of 18, other practices closed down, and certain doctors were openly hostile or unwilling to take my chronic illness seriously. Even now that I’m on Hamilton’s insurance, each trip to the doctor for treatment or paperwork costs me an additional fee.
With each barrier I face, I find myself forced into another negotiation. Do I go to the doctor or use this money for other needs? Do I try to attend class while in pain or do I risk a grade deduction?
The lack of a standardized absence policy allows for a wide range of possible outcomes. In some classes, attendance isn’t taken. In others, two or three absences are permitted. And in some, no absences are permitted — or each absence deducts from a student’s participation grade. While I’m grateful for all the professors who have been understanding and flexible with their policies, not all professors on this campus are fully prepared to address their students’ needs. Some may even refuse to comply with student requests.
This puts the burden on me to spend my entire college experience fighting for my right to be here and excel academically at this institution. It’s exhausting, time consuming, and humiliating to put myself at the mercy of professors every semester, living off the hope that they will be kind enough to excuse my absences or work with me to establish an alternative form of participation. It forces me to prove that I am “sick enough” to merit missing class.
When disability, socioeconomic status, and other social barriers combine, these strict absence policies can pressure students into negotiating the most crucial aspects of their existence. Even with disability accommodation, it places additional barriers in front of students with disabilities at a point in their lives when they are already the most vulnerable.
Rather than lowering the barriers to education for disabled students, it’s time that we remove them altogether.
In order to do so, we need to take a hard look at the way these institutions are built from the ground up. How do individual class absence policies create additional challenges for students? How can we shift the way we view participation, active learning, and engagement in the classroom? How can we make the path towards accessibility resources available for all students?
This doesn’t mean that every professor should allow unlimited absences or tardies for their classes, but unnecessarily strict policies only play into a larger system of structural oppression against those with invisible disabilities. No student should feel as though they have to choose between their health and their academic success.
It’s up to professors and administrators to closely examine their own policies, challenge their assumptions, and start recognizing the way their class structure might be excluding certain students while catering to others.
Part of offering an inclusive learning experience is meeting the needs of all students. For students with disabilities like mine, changes to the absence policy would be a good start. Widening the definition of active participation could include options like one-on-one meetings during office hours, small group discussions, written assignments, or online activities. Opening up new avenues for participation and expression in a classroom makes it easier to assess the performance of students who are disadvantaged by traditional curriculum expectations.
In an ideal classroom setting, students would not have to ask for accommodation because those barriers would no longer be present. While that future might a distant one, the first step towards eliminating these barriers starts in the classroom. It starts with a commitment to affirming that I and all disabled students belong here.
