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#highered

25 posts20 participants1 post today

5 years ago today, on what was then the 30th Anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, UC Access Now released the Demandifesto, calling upon all of the University of California to not only finish meeting the bare minimum of the law, but to exceed it and make UC truly accessible to *all* the public that funds it.

Some responded with lies and placation. Performative "Disability Month" event programming. UC is still inaccessible & systemically ableist.

We would write the Demandifesto differently if we were writing it in 2025 - not asking the offices of "disability management" to be better, but to get rid of them entirely and make the highest common denominator accessibility the norm at UC. Make it the business of every dept to be accessible, not just fobbing it off to abled "specialists".

But spread the Demandifesto by boosting this toot. Let us not give up on demanding better from our institutions.

archive.org/details/disability

scholar.google.com/scholar?oi= #Ableism #HigherEd

@disability @academicchatter

Internet ArchiveUC Access Now Demandifesto : Megan Lynch on behalf of UC Access Now : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet ArchiveUC Access Now is a loose non-profit coalition of students, staff, and faculty working for accessibility and inclusion for all disabled people in the University...

"...for the last three years, a group of students who call themselves the 'Womb Service,' has run a contraceptive delivery network for their classmates at locations just off campus. Last month, without warning, university officials revoked the group’s status as a student organization, taking away their ability to meet or advertise on campus."

19thnews.org/2025/07/depaul-st

The 19th · Their student-run birth control service was banned on campus. They're still delivering.“Womb Service,” a contraceptive delivery network, lost its status as a student group suddenly last month. It's still going.

Columbia University agrees to pay $200 million fine to settle Trump administration dispute.

@axios reports: "Columbia University's acting president, Claire Shipman, noted that the university 'has not admitted wrongdoing and does not agree with the government's conclusion that it violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act' in the settlement."

flip.it/YoAFVq

President Donald Trump holding up a signed executive order poses with U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon at the White House on March 20, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Axios · Columbia agrees to pay $200 million fine to settle Trump admin disputeBy Rebecca Falconer
Replied in thread

@oatmeal @academicchatter @histodons
#HigherEd administrators ‘bending the knee’ to #fascist #Trumpizm is occurring all across the #UnitedStates with the self-inflicted destruction of decades worth of increasing access to #STEM #education and improving global competitiveness of the #American #economy.

For instance the laudable June Anderson Center for Women and Non-traditional Students at Middle #Tennessee State University was just abruptly shuttered.

For US universities, the choice is fight or capitulate.

The folks at #Columbia U. chose the latter and will now pay the US government $200+ million.

And they’ll get most of their research funding back.

The settlement gives #Trump a win. He promised during his campaign to “rein in the progressive ideas at elite universities that he said amounted to a ‘Marxist assault on our American heritage and Western civilization itself.’”

#USA #USpol #HigherEd #ColumbiaUniversity

wsj.com/us-news/education/colu

"In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities were partially or fully destroyed.

Against that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to dedicate a special issue to “education and Palestine”. The Harvard Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US.

“The field of education has an important role to play in supporting students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing what has been happening in Gaza with histories and continuing impacts of occupation, genocide, and political contestations,” the journal’s editors wrote in their call for abstracts.

A little more than a year later, the scale of destruction in Gaza was exponentially larger. The special issue, which was slated to be published this summer, was just about ready – contracts with most authors were finalized and articles were edited. They covered topics from the annihilation of Gaza’s schools to the challenges of teaching about Israel and Palestine in the US.

But on 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher cited “a number of complex issues”, shocking authors and editors alike, the Guardian has learned."

theguardian.com/education/2025

The Guardian · Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publicationBy Alice Speri