Every Northeastern student is familiar with the stress of housing selection: With your housing lottery number in hand, you eagerly wait for your selection slot only to watch all the best options get booked up.
This stress is tenfold for students registered with a disability. As students who are registered and have gone through the process, we know this stress first-hand.
It’s no secret among Northeastern’s disabled community that Disability Access Services, or DAS, provides little assistance and often adds unnecessary obstacles, from housing accommodations to academic and mental health support. As a whole, the department tends to be largely ineffective, causing more stress for students instead of alleviating it.
If your disability accommodation qualifies you for housing pre-selection — which allows certain students to select housing from a limited pool before everyone else — you can’t see available housing options until scheduling a meeting. In our experience, this 20-minute appointment is usually held with a random staff member, someone who is often unfamiliar with our needs. Following this meeting, we are often left aggravated and with more questions than answers.
While the regular housing process offers a wealth of links, resources and clear steps for students to follow, Northeastern offers little transparency about the DAS process — we’re practically left in the dark right up until our 20-minute meeting. Adding insult to injury, we often find out that our non-DAS peers ended up with better housing options, even if their housing lottery numbers were worse than ours.
Beyond DAS being hard to work with, it is also hard to find. In July 2024, the department changed its name from the Disability Resource Center, or DRC, to the DAS, stating, “This new name better reflects our commitment to providing accessible resources and supports to the Northeastern students and community” — but they didn’t seem to add any significant new resources. Worse, the portal is still listed as “DRC Services” on the Student Hub as of June 7. For students unaware of the name change, such negligence hinders their ability to find the resources they need.
Instead of offering individualized solutions, DAS tends to rely on a one-size-fits-all approach.
When students register with the DAS, they are first assigned a case manager to help them through the process. But the quality of each case manager isn’t consistent; as students registered with disabilities, we have both faced rude, short-tempered managers who have shut down legitimate questions in invalidating ways. These case managers don’t have the same understanding of our experiences as we do, leading us to tirelessly justify the requests we make.
Based on our experiences, it feels like DAS comes up with arbitrary “guidelines” for accommodation approvals or denials. Constantly being talked down to feels patronizing and unproductive; we are reduced to our diagnoses on paper without much empathy for who we are as people or what our needs may be.
Furthermore, DAS requires lengthy, invasive paperwork from psychiatrists, doctors and therapists. After your paperwork is submitted, you sometimes have to wait weeks to see which accommodations you qualify for, a process that makes us feel like the DAS review board is analyzing whether or not we fit their definition of “disabled enough.”
Recently, one of us made a request with the DAS for additional excused absences. Despite the request being fully relevant to their disability, they were told that such accommodations were typically only available to students with physical disabilities that flare up. The request was denied without further explanation or follow-up.
The other made a request that would require professors to notify them of high stress or high sensory activities. Despite the request being specifically made to address an anxiety disorder, it was denied on the basis of there being “no disability-related barrier to access identified that would be ameliorated by the request.”
The arbitrary nature of DAS’ decision-making becomes more clear when you look at its inconsistent application. One of our friends had this experience when requesting a single on-campus dorm room. Even though they cited the same diagnosis and reasons as we did, their housing request was denied, while ours was approved.
Ableism exists enough in the world as it is. DAS is supposed to alleviate concerns and support Northeastern’s disabled community; instead, it has become just another barrier. Northeastern has the resources, funding and infrastructure to provide better support, so why are we left facing unnecessary obstacles and indifference? We fail to see a world in which that is acceptable.
Antaine Anhalt is a second-year communication studies major and columnist for The News. He can be reached at [email protected].
Gianna DeMonico is a third-year business and design combined major. She can be reached at [email protected]
If you would like to submit a letter to the editor in response to this piece, email [email protected] with your idea.
