University of Puget Sound is committed to an inclusive learning environment. Accessibility and accommodations are two ways in which we strive to enable all students to meaningfully take part in our educational program and campus life. Accessibility aims to ensure that the educational environment is available to all students by default. Accommodations aim to ameliorate the educational environment for individual circumstances when the default is not good enough. The Puget Sound community believes that both tasks are essential to fulfilling our agenda of liberating “each person's fullest intellectual and human potential to assist in the unfolding of creative and useful lives” (https://www.pugetsound.edu/about-puget-sound-0/mission-core-values).
The University is committed to the mission of providing access and accountability, rejecting the misconceptions that sometimes exist surrounding these concepts. Granting students accommodations in the academic process does not provide an unfair advantage to certain students. By allowing students to fulfill course requirements in ways that mitigate their disability-related barriers, accommodations provide a level playing field for all students. Likewise, reasonable accommodations do not weaken academic standards or excuse a student from learning and demonstrating that learning. Instead, accommodations allow students to demonstrate the full scope of their abilities and thereby enrich the University’s academic mission, including the pursuit of “knowledge of self and others” and “an appreciation of commonality and difference.”
Accessibility and accommodations at Puget Sound are also part of a wider societal commitment to inclusion. Federal Law mandates that post-secondary higher education provide a student disclosing a disability with reasonable accommodations, meaning adjustments to the tasks or environment that enable individuals with disabilities to have an equal opportunity to participate in an academic program or a job (https://www.apa.org/pi/disability/dart/toolkit-three).