Disability Futures

Some online discussions of this case expose assumptions about disability, religion, and appropriate accommodation that need to be challenged. For example, moving the student off Panjabi’s course on espionage and onto a different one, as the university did, is notaccommodation. It’s excluding him from the course he wants to take — and has paid for. Using a sign language interpreter or speech-to-text translation, as some have suggested, isn’t appropriate either: Sears may not be a sign language user, and in any case because both modes of translation involve an extra step they create a delay that makes it much harder for a student to be part of an ongoing discussion.

The limits to accommodation must surely be different for an impairment that, with the best will in the world, can’t be changed. We can respect faith-based positions on a variety of issues while still recognizing that, compared to disability, religion really is more of a choice.