Law Professor Brings ADA’s Global Legacy to Campus Symposium
G’01, L’01, the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor of Teaching Excellence 2024-2027 at the College of Law, has spent her career teaching at the intersection of constitutional law, disability law, human rights and international security. The Meredith Professorship has given her sustained support to pursue her focus on universal design in higher education, not as an abstract principle, she says, but as a lived challenge institutions are navigating in real time.
As part of her teaching award, she has organized a daylong symposium on April 10 at the College of Law, sponsored by multiple University partners, including the Burton Blatt Institute, Center for Disability Resources, Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) and the College of Law’s Disability Law and Policy Program. The event will examine the transformative global impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the evolution of universal design principles in higher education.
That global lens is grounded in True-Frost’s own research. Studying accessibility law at the European Court of Human Rights, she has found that the ADA’s most significant international influence has been conceptual rather than doctrinal: the foundational idea that disability is a rights issue, not a welfare issue and that the burden of accommodation belongs to institutions rather than individuals.
True-Frost hopes the event will prompt a harder look at how higher education institutions approach accessibility.
“Inclusion is not a disability resources office problem,” she says. “It is a campuswide design challenge—and getting it right is how we honor the promise that higher education makes to everyone who comes here seeking to grow.”
Below, True-Frost shares what she hopes students, faculty and administrators take away from the symposium.
Each of these areas is fundamentally about the relationship between people, power and accountability—about when institutions are obligated to act, who bears rights against whom and what happens when those obligations go unfulfilled.
In practice, I try to teach across these areas without letting doctrinal boundaries become intellectual walls. Centering on human beings who live across abstract boundaries helps. A student who understands equal protection doctrine is better equipped to analyze discrimination claims under international human rights instruments. A student who has worked through the structure of treaty obligations has sharper instincts about federal-state relations in constitutional law. Disability law, which sits at the intersection of rights, access and institutional design, illuminates both domestic and international frameworks in ways that I find endlessly generative.
The first thing I hope is that administrators and faculty members will stop treating accessibility as an accommodation only—something triggered only by a formal request, addressed individually and then set aside. That framing places the burden entirely on students to identify themselves as needing something different, which is both inefficient and, for many students, genuinely difficult, and loses track of important progress made. Universal design asks a more productive question: what can we build into the course from the start that serves everyone better?
In practice, that means thinking carefully about how material is presented, not just what material is covered. Are readings available in formats that work for students with visual impairments or learning differences? Are in-class discussions structured in ways that don’t systematically advantage students who process quickly or speak without hesitation? Is the physical space—or the digital one—actually navigable for students with mobility needs? These are not edge-case questions. They are design questions that improve the learning environment for every student in the room.
I would also encourage us all to examine our assumptions about what participation looks like. The Socratic method, which remains central to legal education, for example, can be a powerful pedagogical tool, but it can also replicate existing hierarchies of confidence and privilege if it is deployed without intentionality. Building in multiple modes of engagement, written and oral, individual and collaborative, gives more students genuine access to the intellectual work of the course.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I would call on all of us educators and administrators to listen. Students with disabilities, students from under-represented backgrounds, students navigating circumstances their professors may never have faced —they often know exactly what would help them learn. Creating genuine openings for that feedback, and responding to it with seriousness rather than defensiveness, is itself a form of teaching.
The conversation I most hope this symposium sparks is a simple but radical one: who belongs here?
Higher education has long operated on an implicit answer to that question—one that was built into the architecture of our buildings, the structure of our syllabi, the pace of our lectures and the assumptions embedded in how we measure success. That answer has too often excluded people with disabilities, not through malice but through indifference—through the failure to ask, at the design stage, whether the environment we were building could actually accommodate the full range of human minds and bodies.
The ADA changed the legal baseline. The UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities pushed further, insisting that inclusion is not a favor extended to people with disabilities but a right they hold and institutions owe. Universal design takes that principle and asks what it would mean to try to build for everyone from the start, rather than retrofitting for some after the fact. I want higher ed to wrestle seriously with that question, not as an abstract legal compliance exercise, but as a genuine reckoning with what kind of community we want to be.
