Senator and Faculty Senate Representative Marion Santo ’23 introduced the Office of Accessible Education (OAE) Faculty-Academic Accountability Act during Thursday’s Undergraduate Senate meeting.
The act aims to ensure faculty and departments properly accommodate both students with OAE letters and those who have underlying medical conditions that could affect their academic performance.
The act was sponsored by Stanford Disability Alliance (SDA), who Santo said she met with on Friday. SDA representatives reported and gave evidence of a pattern of some professors disregarding OAE accommodations, according to Santo. Santo added that representatives told her OAE advisors advocating on behalf of their advisees “were verbally abused, nothing was ever done, and the students were never given the accommodations that they still needed,” Santo said.
The Daily has reached out to the University for comment about these claims.
The act requests that the Faculty Senate hold annual OAE training for departments and faculty and provide resources for reporting potential discrimination towards students with OAE letters. It also calls for remedial training for faculty who are found to discriminate against students with OAE letters and asks that the following question be included in course evaluations: “If you had any academic accommodations, how well did this course perform with granting your accommodation?”
Senator Amira Dehmani ’24 stressed the importance of the resolution.
“Around 25% of students have OAE letters,” Dehmani said. “Teachers that aren’t giving the accommodations that students need must be held accountable, and the Faculty Senate needs to give them that accountability.”
The newly introduced act also mentions the Equitable Learning Act, which calls for a more accessible model of learning for students with disabilities and was approved by the Senate on Jan. 13. The Equitable Learning Act is currently being reviewed by the Graduate Student Council (GSC) and will be voted on at next week’s GSC meeting.
Santo also announced that The Anti-Doxxing Recommendations Act, which was passed by both the Senate and GSC last week, made it to the Faculty Senate’s action calendar and will be voted on next Thursday. A livestream of the vote can be accessed here.
Representatives from Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) were also present at the meeting to clarify questions from senators about access to dining halls after hours. R&DE representatives explained that all undergraduate students can access all dining halls, with the exception of Arrillaga Family Dining Commons, after hours as a study or collaborative workspace.
Lastly, senators unanimously confirmed former Senator Joshua Jankelow ’24 as a member of the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) Constitutional Council. The council has five members and adjudicates cases where the constitutionality of an act by a member of the ASSU is called into question under the ASSU Constitution.
The article has been updated to reflect that SDA provided Santo with evidence of their claims.