Disability and Institutional Design
Advising workplace and higher education leaders on the systems and practices that shape access, participation, and retention.
Institutions often treat disability as an individual issue rather than a systems-design issue.
My work focuses on identifying where policies, processes, evaluation systems, and broader organizational design produce barriers to access, participation, and retention so organizations can build systems that function more effectively for disabled people.
Higher Education
On most campuses, disability is handled primarily as a legal and medical matter—managed through accommodations—rather than examined as part of institutional design or as a dimension of campus life alongside other forms of diversity.
I work with colleges and universities to examine how policies, processes, campus practices, and cultural and physical infrastructure shape access and participation for disabled students, faculty, and staff, and to redesign those systems to reduce barriers to participation in academic and campus life.
Workplace
Many organizations approach disability primarily through individual accommodations rather than examining how workplace systems, performance expectations, and organizational practices shape access and participation more broadly.
I work with organizations to examine how workplace systems and accommodation processes function in practice, identify where they produce unnecessary barriers, and redesign them so disabled employees can participate and perform effectively.
Speaking
I give talks that clarify how ableism operates in institutions and cultures and why accommodation systems break down, offering analytic frameworks leaders can use to understand and address these failures.
Featured Talks
• We Need to Talk About Ableism
• Structural Ableism in Institutional Practice
• Making the Interactive Process Work
I spent 24 years in higher education as a philosophy professor working on ethics and disability. My current work focuses on disability, institutional design, workplace systems, and higher education, drawing on both professional and lived experience navigating disability within institutional systems.