Hi everybody on behalf of the SE ADA Center, the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, and the ADA National Network, I want to welcome you to 504 at 50. I'm Barry Whaley. I'm the project director of southeast ADA Center. Section 504 at 50 is an oral history series created in recognition of 50th anniversary of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In our series, we speak with leaders of the disability rights movement who advance the cause of equal rights through their tireless work.
Today we talked with Katherine MacFarlane. She's an associate professor of law with Syracuse University College of Law. Professor MacFarlane is a leading expert on civil procedure, civil rights litigation and disability law. She has also served as a special counsel to the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, where she worked on the overhaul of regulations implementing section 504 and focusing the regulations higher education provisions. Prior to joining the faculty at Syracuse University, Professor MacFarlane was an associate professor at Southern University Law Center at the Idaho College of Law, a teaching fellow at Louisiana State University Herbert Law Center. She has also served as assistant Corporation Counsel in the New York City Law Department serving as lead counsel in federal civil rights actions. In addition, she's worked as a law clerk for the District of Arizona and the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She's a graduate of Northwestern University and Loyola University Law School, where she served as chief articles editor of the Loyola Law Review. Cat, it really is an honor. Thank you.
Thank you so much. Very, it's an honor to be here.
Let's start with a little bit about your background and how you became a disability advocate.
Sure, I have something of a traditional background as far as legal academics are concerned. I did well in my undergraduate studies and in law school. And then I went on to to federal clerkships and big law and government work. And then I entered academia in my early 30s. But at the same time, all of this relative success was happening, I was secretly struggling with quite severe disabilities, I have rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory eye disease. I've had them since I was an infant. And I've never been in remission. So I've had countless surgeries, medical management, and my disease is intense and time consuming, and expensive.
A month before I started law school, I had my first cataract surgery. Until at least the last 10 years, very few people knew about my disabilities. I came to disability law and advocacy really, initially out of necessity, I had accommodation requests denied despite providing decade's worth of medical records, about my never in remission, autoimmune disease. And during the accommodations, process, confidentiality, which has always been really important to me and other people going through the process was really never a concern of those who were evaluating or implementing my accommodations. And really, the accommodations process was brutal. And I refuse to accept that it had to be that way. So I learned the law. I pushed back, I started writing about my experiences and healthcare, and then my experiences in the workplace. I eventually testified in front of the Louisiana legislature and spoke to the Congressional arthritis caucus. I don't know if everyone's aware that there's also an arthritis caucus in DC and started to get a bit of a higher profile when it comes to being a person with disabilities who also teaches and writes about disability law.
You know, sounds like you came to law as a means of advocacy for yourself. I think that's fantastic. Let's talk more about these barriers that you mentioned in college, especially the issues of disclosure of disability and your rights to confidentiality, those sorts of things.
Sure, so I'm going to step back a little bit before college if your Okay bearing the Kat McFarlane life story. I lived abroad until I was 11 years old in Italy and returned on and off and my father still lives there. And as bad as things can be in the US, they're much worse in certain foreign countries. So I walked quite pigeon toed as a child and Italian teenagers would walk behind me and mock me and make noises that were supposed to, you know, crude imitations of people with intellectual disabilities. And as a kid living abroad, there was no creativity or imagination with respect to involving me and PE, I had to sit on the sidelines and recess and I felt so excluded from, you know, the fun stuff that was happening at school. But then when I moved to the States, I had these amazing creative coaches and teachers and Middle School, who just accommodated me. And so there was an athlete in me I quite athletic against all odds and never being in remission.
And so my life changed for the better, but with respect to what was inspiring me, so I'm aged 11 or 12. And I'm learning about the US Civil Rights Movement, which I think really led to what I do today and becoming a lawyer. I love learning about snick. And John Lewis and young people involved in advocacy. And this was a time when the country was talking about Rodney King and Hillary Clinton and tail hook and Anita Hill. And it was a really interesting time to be a young person, I knew I was interested in racial justice, and gender justice, and the law seemed like a path.
For me, despite the wonderful education I had, I never learned anything about people with disabilities in school. Maybe not until law school, when you learn about the most extreme forms of prejudice and certain constitutional cases, I never met a single person who had the same medical issues as I did until I was in my 30s. So there was no community for me, there was no group for students with disabilities in college, not in law school, never it at work, really never until I've just formed one myself a few years ago for law professors with disabilities. And so that aspect of my life was quite lonely in some ways, still is.
But anyway, to advance finally to college, I didn't know what I was doing when I first asked for an accommodation. So I've always had quite a few mobility limitations, and I went to Northwestern and Evanston. It's a beautiful, sprawling campus. But when I'm flaring, making it from one end of campus to another in 10 minutes is just not possible. And so I broached the idea. And I think it was with the Office of Student Services about whether one of the classes could be moved. And they were very perturbed by the request. And the way they facilitated it was to have a professor asked my entire class, whether they would okay, they would be okay with it being moved. And I sat in that class petrified that I was going to be outed as the person who was going to make all of their lives terribly uncomfortable. And everyone said no. And so I just walked from one class to the other and extreme pain, and that was the end of it. In
Chicago, winters are not are not very comforting, either.
Yeah, it was, it was sad. And it was it was never called an accommodation, there was no interactive process, there was no check in with me about whether I was okay, and I wasn't okay. And then I just No one, close the circle, I was just left to my own devices. And it triggered a flare, it triggered quite a bit of additional pain, which I didn't need.
So fast forward to law school, I realized I could no longer take notes, or at least take notes for the duration of a law school class with my hand. So I switched to using a laptop, if there had been a laptop and in my classes, I don't know if I would have done that I'm very vocal and against laptop bands, because of the disclosure it forces on students with disabilities who get accommodations. In law school, I there was an exercise that what else had to do in their legal research class where you get like 10 minutes, so you have to run around the library to find different hard copies of books about exercise. But I talked to my professor and said, you know, depending on the day, this might be difficult for me, is there a way that I can still show you that I know what I'm doing that, you know, mitigates whatever slowness I may be experiencing. And he referred me to the Student Services office. And then I was threatened with discipline, disciplinary action, because I disclosed my disability to my professor which was, you know, it was a goody two shoes was horrible thing to, you know, be facing and not really understanding why I used disabled parking at law school in the parking lot attended with would yell at me about how it wasn't intended for me.
California Bar originally denied my request for accommodation. So again, I'm very stubborn, and I have an innate sense of self worth. And once I knew what the law was supposed to do, I fought for it, and then some and now, I don't want anyone to go through any of that. It's ridiculous. I'm fine. I survive, but you shouldn't have to have a JD or you know, devote your life to advocacy to get what the law provides for you.
The law can only go so far right? I mean, there's unconscious bias at every turn. And you know, somebody's yelling at you for using a parking place it just uncalled for without ever thinking about hidden disability. Right? Yeah.
You know, the other thing you had mentioned, you know, when you talk about kind of the history of the civil rights movement, and we have a sense that people really don't learn about the disability rights movement at all. They don't know the heroes. They don't know, Burton Blatt or Judy Heuman, or Ed Roberts, any of those people and were true civil rights pioneers. That's part of the reason why we wanted to do this oral history series, not only in celebration of 504. But to capture Tom Owens thoughts on, you know, what the Capitol Crawl looked like? having you with us just just makes that even more rich. So thank you. Thanks.
So, you focus much of your professional career on on protecting civil rights and people with disabilities and during 2022 and 2023 are appointed special counsel to the US Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights overhauling section 504. Let's start with the basics. What was the need for the law to be revised? And what was your role?
So most of the regulations implementing section 504 hadn't been updated in 45 years now 46 years since before I was born. So there have been some very practical changes. For example, we use different language with we use much better language to describe disability, the Americans with Disabilities Act, in theory was intended to toss out the medical models, some of the regulations in the ADA have advanced and the section 504 regs should catch up.
And in the context of education, education is so different, right? I mean, the idea that you could take classes online, or you could teach online, we also know much more about pedagogy and testing, and integration and the importance of integration. Now, there's technology available to people with disabilities that isn't captured by outdated regulations. Another reason why now the Biden administration, ran on cane campaign promises to people with disabilities, and in particular wanted to help young people with mental health concerns with mental disabilities with some intellectual disabilities. So there was real political commitment to it.
The bigwigs brought into the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education, have a track record of supporting students with disabilities. And then I'd also say there been some developments in the context of Title Three of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the way it regulates private test companies. So I'm thinking of things like the LSAT. And so through quite a bit of fighting by disability advocates and lawyers, there are now better standards with respect to what kind of information is shared with universities, when test takers take the LSAT with accommodations, and those agreements, respect for confidentiality, and privacy and prevention of discrimination needs to trickle into section 504, as well.
And then finally, I'll say that COVID-19 has been so disproportionately punitive on people with disabilities, people who are high risk with disabilities, and the regulations in the context of education needed to consider those particular needs and to encourage creativity and flexibility. At the Department of Ed, I focused on regulations that govern adult education, which was so wonderful to learn about, I learned about the history of GED programs, and really the federal government's commitment to it. And then I focused most of my time on how we would address really the the quality of life of students with disabilities in higher ed, and then specifically how accommodations could change.
And so I was brought in, in part because of some of my scholarship surrounding documentation and disability. And now it wasn't just the McFarland method that was, you know, adopted by the federal government, but for the first time in my life, my own experience, my own challenges, my own perspective, as a person with disabilities was valued was sought out, and also the voices and experiences, we listened to so many stakeholders and students with disabilities in particular and what higher ed has been like for them. The regulations were really lean governing higher ed and case law is not. It's hard to come by into the extended existence, very institution focused, for example, there's hardly any court cases that say you're asking for too much documentation, just give it to them. No. But decisions are usually Well, she didn't provide the 10th letter so she's therefore not disabled. So we wanted to change that conversation and hoping that the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking comes out and then in the next few weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services just released there. So there's a lot of momentum there is need for change. And I think just a commitment to reflecting the lived experiences of people with disabilities
I would think that experience must be must have been personally for you just so enriching to be able to shape and reform 504 regulations.
Yeah, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. And it was, I worked with some of the best lawyers I've ever worked with, and people who are either have disabilities themselves or have people in their lives, who've experienced challenges and education. But they were so interested in things like, well, what was it like rushing a sorority on a college campus, when you add a mobility impairment? How long did it take you to get these accommodations? You know, how should we be demanding when it comes to things like ADHD, and I've just never been in an environment that was so open minded, I suppose to the disabled experience, while also being incredibly rigorous and fast paced, so I felt like I was working with the best lawyers who were also incredibly good hearted people, if you can find one of those at a job, you're in a good place. Yeah. And I've realized I'm now you know, pitching jobs as federal bureaucrats, to my students, I see how federal agency functions and people that you know, hung in there throughout different administrations, because they were so committed to the rights of young people in school.
Why is it important for students to understand their rights under 504?
I think that it's good to understand your rights, because a school will not necessarily spell out what your rights are to. So for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, nowhere to either those laws require documentation of disability, the provisions governing documentation, rather, or the guidance generally says, If a disability is obvious, you don't have to provide documentation.
So I think it's very empowering to be able to go into discussions with your institution and say, Can we, you know, pause for a minute, I'm trying to understand why these requirements exist. And then it's also empowering to people who have a bit of a policy role like myself, to be able to come in and say, How can we improve this process, here's a place where you're doing much more than the law requires or maybe even conflicting with the law. So I think there's there's power to knowing that I now think of section 504 as the catch all because it's going to, it's going to capture some institutions that the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn't reach some private religious schools. But also, whenever you have adherence to a law tied to federal funding, you have a little bit more power as a person who is protected by those laws, because institutions, maybe even more so than they care about not being sued, they care about keeping their federal funding. So you have powerful arguments to ensure adherence.
You know, it's interesting, I am of two minds when it comes to to knowing your rights. Of course, I'm an educator. So it's my life's mission, but I dream of a day when it doesn't take a GED or doesn't take advocacy on behalf of a person with disabilities to get what they need. And, and maybe that means never having to think section, you know, like section 504, in the ADA, maybe your most effective when we're not constantly thinking about how to make them live up to their purpose, you know, I tell my my law students that they don't have to feel so vulnerable or helpless anymore, and that it's not a bad thing to bring all the skills, we're teaching them, you know, bring them to their own experience, or at least use that language of adequate efficacy, to get others to advocate on their own behalf.
So there's, there's really brilliant advocacy happening from law students with disabilities with respect to how the bar exams are administered. And you can just see that you can see the education, you can see everything coming together, I feel great pride, seeing students bringing all their skills to such important issues. But I also wish they didn't have to, I wish that their time could also be spent on securities law, if that's what they wanted to
Right. And although most of your work has been, as you said, with adults in post secondary, keeping my hat on as a parent, I think from that parental perspective, having an understanding of 504 in the secondary environment, nobody tells you about this, somebody will put a paper in front of you and said, Here are your rights, but there's really no explanation and unless you understand the law, then basically you are very ill prepared when you go into a 504 meeting.
Yeah, I don't know how parents do it, I'm so impressed by people who make the procedure their own. I've also I've been meeting students. And I think this is an interesting side effect of now we have several generations who've benefited from disability law and protection and K through 12. And so I'm meeting them as their undergrads and, and grad students. And they participated in their IEP and 504 meetings, which is brilliant, and I'm sure didn't make them popular, right. But then they come to college with a quite a bit of knowledge and expectations as they should about what their rights are. And it also means that that transition to self advocacy is a little bit easier when you started doing that as a teen.
And in my own experience, I was raised by a single mom, my mom made me do all of my own doctor's appointments starting as soon as I could drive, it was all on me and I was maybe a bit young. But I was completely equipped once I went to college to manage everything on my own. And it's another good way. I think, when you're thinking about your, your child with a disability, how can I prepare them by making them do what you do for them, so they're ready to go. And that speaks to medication, doctor's appointments and also accommodations?
So staying with your students, do you find that your students whether they have a disability, or they do not that they have an interest in disability rights and other civil rights law?
So I teach in addition to a first year class called torts, that's about drug manufacturing, and pretty rare in the middle of law school, black letter law, but disability comes up. And I indulge a little bit and I tell them about it. And in my civil rights litigation class, we talk about actions involving the police. And there's intersection with the way the police deal with communities of color and people with disabilities in those communities. And whenever I get to a disability focus unit, and my students are great that yeah, they love it. There's somewhat self selecting group when they take civil rights litigation or disability law. But there's something about this generation of students that understands difference or understands that it's okay that not everyone has a cookie cutter, and they expect people to be different. And so I think their facility and their ease with difference when it comes to gender and forms the way they observe and talk about disability. Now, it's still very hard to be a student with disabilities in law school, there just still aren't that many people, at least, that many students that feel like they can be open about it. But substantively, students are enthusiastic. And with respect to disability law, when I teach a unit about access to courthouses, I'll usually have students go and do some fact finding, pick a particular public place and think about it before we read this case. And after we read this case, and students tell me five years down the line, I can't go anywhere public without noticing whether it's accessible. And I think, Oh, that's terrible. That's terrible, so accessible, but I'm so glad they're thinking about it. Because these are students that are maybe going to go into politics are going to be leaders are going to have a role if their partner at a law firm, they have some involvement in HR. So I'm, I'm glad that I planted that seed and they can't get me out of their head.
Very good. These are students who are part of the ADA generation, they experience a world much different than the one I experienced prior to 1990. And I would imagine that their expectations are far higher in terms of integration and acceptance.
Yeah, and they're really, I love disability pride. And I love young people who just don't care at all, or will very much want to claim their own identity. That's something that I'm still working with myself. And so I try when I teach about things like confidentiality, to be sensitive to the fact that confidentiality is impossible for people with disabilities that are visible, and that it's not necessarily a goal for people that have invisible disabilities and to and to respect that and there are folks doing really interesting work within queer communities who are also disabled, that I'm really inspired by and they're, they're just very sense of pride and the the notion that I get to exist here and I get to exist on my own terms is is quite inspiring.
Yeah, yeah. Well, when you say that immediately, you know, the first person who comes to my mind is Lydia XC Brown, and they've done just fantastic.
I was gonna say I follow quite a few disabled creators on Tik Tok and social media has been a really wonderful space for disabled people to find each other. I'm educated and I feel like my language improves because I'm being exposed to young people who are talking to each other. other as much as they're, they're talking to middle aged people like me just to learn from tick tock. So, you know, there's knowledge to be gained everywhere outside of our more traditional spaces, too.
So we know you're a frequent contributor to the Harvard Law School bill of health blog, where you write about health care, and disability accommodations. This is an issue that is really at the forefront of se ADA Center and the ADA National Network achieving equity and health care. What are some of the specific disability rights issues you've written about?
It's a wonderful place, the Petrie Flom Bill of Health blog, let's all of us who write for them, right a little bit less formally. So a lot of your article usually has hundreds of footnotes, and they just let us get the point across. So I've been writing about how people with disabilities experienced the pandemic and experienced healthcare during the pandemic. And so, right now myself and many others are worried about how healthcare providers aren't masking anymore. And I know this, unfortunately, firsthand, because when I get my super dose of immunosuppressant chemotherapy in the room in which the immunosuppressants are pumped into my veins, no one is wearing a mask anymore. And so the response often to patients is we'll just ask them just have a conversation. And the the reason that accommodations processes that are somewhat formal exist are so that you don't have to have that kind of one on one negotiation, it should happen, at least outside of the room in which someone's about to put a needle in your arm. So I've been writing about the idea that even if there's a hospital policy that no longer requires people to wear masks that immediately there should be a referral to whenever office deals with modifications, and that it's not enough to say to someone our policy is they don't have to wear masks anymore. It kind of boggles the mind, because the whole The whole purpose of the accommodations model is that policies are gonna bend so that people with disabilities can still be there. And I've also tried to highlight certain aspects of healthcare that you have to really be you have to be a frequent customer, frequent consumer of health care, or someone with chronic illness to understand that, unfortunately, healthcare providers are not always concerned with the way you experience an appointment and in the icy rheumatologist and there's a national shortage of rheumatologist. So if I complain, there's no money going out the door, someone will fill my spot that person's insurance will, you know, keep the profit margin where it is. So there's, there's very little incentive to really to treat patients with dignity or care. There's a there's a lot of medical trauma happening surrounding the pandemic. And so I write these pieces that are meant to be really practical. This is what you're entitled to being told that a policy is in place is not enough. And then I try and share the perspective of this is why even you know, JD holding disability advocate, Professor McFarlane is still nervous in these interactions. And I'll, I'll add that, like many others, I've had care terminated by my rheumatologist three times. And the last two were on the heels of requests for accommodations related to the pandemic. Again, I'm fine advocate my way around discontinuation of care. But I always think about folks that are not in the privileged position I am, which is how I justify having a big map.
Along those same lines, thinking back to the summer of 2020, and the lightened discrimination, health care providers and hospital settings exhibited toward people with disabilities. And especially I'm thinking about the crisis of standards of care that really were so so egregious, I don't know, if you've written on that or have a comment.
As a person with disabilities, you know, that you're not high priority in life, there was something about the pandemic that just hit it home, you know, the idea that I could go into a hospital with a severe case of COVID. And by virtue of my own disabilities, you know, be ranked number 50, when a when a ventilator became available is kind of a crushing piece of information. It's not entirely surprising. And there are other examples. I haven't faced that kind of life or death, thankfully. But in the early days of the pandemic, it was really hard for people with autoimmune disease to get access to hydro. It's Plaquenil was a name brand because the president recommended taking it for COVID. So people with autoimmune issues all over the country, people with lupus couldn't get their drugs and then compounded by the dogs decision. There are quite a few medications that people with disabilities take that might also be used in medicine. abortion. So the drug methotrexate is used as chemo, it's used in autoimmune disease, it's used for all kinds of reasons. And so women with disabilities who were capable of becoming pregnant, were having a hard time accessing those medications as well, on top of all of this, to get a COVID vaccine, you have to stop your immunosuppressive medication at least a week before. So all of these pop up appointments were very difficult to fit into unless you would stop your medication. And when when many of us had COVID, we had to stop taking our immunosuppressant medication. So this is just a flavor of what the last three years have been like for people. And then I'll say, it was very difficult to watch life go back to whatever people thought normal was and to not be there and to continually feel the weight of your of your isolation and your loneliness. And you know, to wonder, just wear a mask, so I can be the same room it What was all this fight for. And so I've also been writing about the idea that so I wrote about Justice Sotomayor having to call into a Supreme Court conference call from her office, because she's high risk as a result of her diabetes and everyone but justice Gorsuch was willing to mask and my point was, yeah, great, she gets to go down the hall and call in. But the whole point of all of our fights for integration was so that he wears the mask, and we're there. She didn't fight this, to have to go and call in because someone didn't feel like putting a mask on. That's, that's unacceptable. And that's been a difficult conversation with the public at large. The idea that it's not enough just to have a phone line open that the goal should be within their zone of comfort, having all of us in the same room. Can't
we know that you're you're widely published academic law journals, law reviews, you've done some really cool things University of Alabama to Wayne, Stanford, could you tell us maybe about one or two of those articles dealing with 504 and disability rights?
Stir, and I'll tell you that my mother was most proud of me when the Kalamazoo Gazette recently did a write up. Professional moments that was apparently the way to make a mother proud now on the Zoom is home. Yes, Kalamazoo is home last summer, I wrote an article called accommodation discrimination. And the idea was to highlight the real start and end of all the work that goes into asking for an accommodation from the perspective of both an employee and a student with disabilities. So all of this work, and working with people with disabilities. The process of getting an accommodation, as I described earlier, is not pleasant. And it's, it's so punitive that it felt like a form of discrimination, but not necessarily one recognized by law. So I talked about things like, what's the first step that a person with disabilities undertakes? Well, they have to decide if they're willing to disclose, which is a serious decision for many people. And then you have to have enough time. And so as a student who's arrived on a new campus, trying to do all the things that young people have to do, I just trade for classes, figuring out financial aid, a student with a disability has to fill out, you know, five pages of paperwork, go to a new health care provider, maybe their insurance hasn't kicked in, do they have to miss class? Do they have the money to pay the copay? Is there an extra fee for a doctor to fill out that disability documentation. So there's that kind of unpaid work or life admin disability admin, as Elizabeth Evans describes it, and then you could get an accommodation granted, but then there are often these additional tasks that are delegated to students who are not paid for them. So things like, Okay, you get your accommodations letter. And the idea that this like is an actual letter kind of blows my mind that the student has to take it from the disability services office, deliver it to the professor, even if it's an accommodation that could have stayed confidential, for example, I don't need to know who has a note taker, I don't even really care if it's my student and his note, I just don't need to know it doesn't concern me. So then there's the outing of a student with disabilities. And then if a professor refuses, then the student becomes the negotiator and the power dynamic will never favor the student there. So I tried to broaden the description of what an accommodation process looks like and then came up with some ideas about how the law could treat the failure to implement an accommodation as the failure to provide an accommodation but it's it's still an out there theory and we have you know, people at work, students who obtain what they asked for, but it's it's never actually given. So there's a there's a real enforcement gap there. And my next project is looking at what do people with disabilities who want to vote absentee? What kind of documentation do they have to provide to show they're disabled enough in Louisiana. I realized this a few weeks I was I was in Louisiana before I came to Syracuse. So about three weeks before the election, and you know, COVID was a problem for me still, I wanted to vote absentee. And I didn't have enough documentation as a person with 40 years of disability that would have given me permission to vote absentee. Which, and so I'm doing a 50 state survey and I'm laughing, but it so the standards are, are way higher than what the Americans with Disabilities Act requires. So then, what are we really doing if we're not actually accommodating people? According to the standards of federal disability law, we're not accommodating people is the problem. So that's the next project always building upon? What does it actually take? If you say there's an accommodation or provision for people with disabilities? Who gets to take advantage of that?
That sounds pretty fascinating. I look forward to reading your research. Thanks. So we've come a long way. 33 years since the ADEA, is signed into law 50 years now for Section 504. How far have we come? What are our major accomplishment? What should we pat ourselves on the back and said, Yeah, we got it, right.
So I think that disability is now a part of the conversation when it comes to diversity, equity inclusion, there are offices on every college campus, even if it's required by law that in theory serve people with disabilities, people with disabilities, like Alice Wong, are unapologetically present on their own terms. And I was thinking of the documentary crip camp, I think about it a lot, in part because I'm jealous of that community. But also, it was so powerful, both because of the history it shared, but also the humanity it shared and forget this detail. But one of my favorite parts is when it becomes clear that the young people are sexually active because they're full. They're full people. And so you see the diversity of their experience. I'm not saying that's our major accomplishment, but it was a beautiful thing to see. I noticed little things and I and I happen to be in Dineen Hall and on Syracuse's campus, the building is structured in such a way that is so comfortable for someone with a physical disability to move in. So when I see things like a clearly marked a well lit, elevator, a restroom that people can get get in and out of without assistance, rail on elevator buttons, wide enough door for wheelchair to go through. There are things that I noticed in my everyday life when I see them that make me happy. And if I don't notice them, I'm also happy because it means that inclusion and accommodation has become a seamless part of life,
we still have a lot to do. I mean, we've talked about a little of that today, what's our biggest challenge right now? What, what do we need to address next?
Think COVID-19 And the fact that it's created a whole new generation and population of people with disabilities and the failure to treat COVID as a mass disabling event, I'm worried about people who are dealing with long COVID. And you sometimes see articles about people coming to the realization that there's no help for them. And it's hard to, you know, continue in their workplace. And you can see them talking through what people with disabilities are experiencing, but it's not their fault, there often isn't a connection. So going back to what I spoke of earlier, I want people with disabilities to be able to be present and and to be safe when they're in the same spaces at a time when COVID is not going anywhere.
Long COVID or post COVID symptoms just vary so greatly. I mean, you want to try to put it in above you know, in a package with a bow. This is what it is, but it's really so many things. Yeah,
it sounds so much like an autoimmune disease to me, too. You could title to our conversation would be Kevin farm talks about fiber for an autoimmune disease. But I and I try and tell people that this sounds so familiar to me. You don't want this. I know you don't want this because you don't want to talk to me. My own experience and I my heart really goes out to people because it's it's a difficult life to navigate. And I try and whenever I can I try and make the connection for people I hear from professors and students from around the country who are kind of newly dealing with disability and navigating the system. And sometimes the hardest part is, is calling yourself a person with disabilities just to get beyond that barrier and get access to the protection you need. So it's a difficult moment to acknowledge that
Well, And as as John Kemp has said, in conversation with him, nobody wants to trade places with us. Right? Yeah. Kat McFarlane. Thank you. This has been a great conversation. I want to thank you for your work as an as an advocate, as legal scholar, Law School professor, to advance disability rights, including ADA, section 504. We will let you have the last word. On the pedal, we wrap this up Kat.
So anyone that works with people with disabilities should review their accommodation policies and see if there are rigorous documentation requirements and imagine a system in which someone could either describe their disability or pull one page of a medical record. And that could be so simple and the focus would be on how do we help them as opposed to how do we challenge them to prove they are who they say they are?
Well said, Professor Katherine McFarlane, thank you again for being with us today. listeners. Thank you for joining this episode of 504 at 50 listeners you can access more interviews in the 504 at 50 Oral History series with archived audio accessible transcripts and resources at our website 504at50.org. If you have questions about the Americans with Disabilities Act, you can use our online form at anytime, or contact your Regional ATA Center at 1-800-949-4232. As always, those calls are free and they're confidential. 504 at 50 is an oral history podcast series created by the SE ADA Center. The Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, and is a collaboration with the Disability Inclusive Employment Policy, Rehabilitation Research and Training Center. Our producer is Celestia Ohrazda, with Mary Morder, Marsha Schwanke, and me I'm Barry Whaley
