Universities benefit everybody when they tailor their activities for disadvantaged people, according to an Australian disability advocate, who says inclusivity can also help rebuild the sector¡¯s social licence.

University of Queensland law professor Paul Harpur, who has been blind since his early teens, said the range of non-traditional groups ¨C mature-age students, Indigenous Australians, people with disabilities, religious minorities and other previously eschewed communities ¨C now comprised the majority of university enrolments, and efforts to accommodate them also assisted the white Anglo Saxon males who had once dominated university classes.

Harpur cited a move by universities to distribute Zoom lecture transcripts, ostensibly to help deaf students. ¡°They also help international students and students in noisy environments, working on the train.¡± Another example was universities¡¯ efforts to clarify assessment tasks for neurodivergent students.

¡°Back in the day, you¡¯d get a list of instructions which didn¡¯t make sense,¡± Harpur said. ¡°Wouldn¡¯t it be better if you had instructions that made sense? It¡¯s not about making it better for this group or that group. It¡¯s about making it better for everyone.¡±

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He said that with disabilities now affecting 12 per cent of the student population, and up to 20 per cent in some courses, efforts to help them also benefited staff. ¡°When you make it easier for students with disabilities, you also make it easier for academics.¡±

Harpur divides his time among academia, advocacy and reform. As a member of the Higher Education Standards Panel (Hesp), which advises the education minister and the regulator?the Tertiary Education and Quality Standards Agency?and helps set the sector¡¯s threshold standards, he is leading research into how universities meet their obligations to the disabled community.

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The project, announced on the sidelines of this year¡¯s Universities Australia conference, has three aims. The first is to unpack how universities and colleges interpret, identify, monitor, report and review their duty to support students with disability.

The second is to identify the challenges that institutions encounter in discharging their disability obligations. The third is to find out whether these efforts meet community expectations.

Harpur said the world had moved on since universities crafted their approaches to disability. The student population identifying as disabled had more than doubled in the past decade, while the ¨C the first treaty to enshrine access to higher education as a human right ¨C had produced flow-through impacts.

Both developments had fostered new ways of doing things, with institutions often exceeding their compliance obligations. ¡°There has been an explosion in students, professional staff, academics and university administrators innovating on disability.

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¡°If you want to see the power of universities to change lives, look at how they impact upon the disability community. Those processes [can] create better social licence for our universities, and hopefully reduce some of the criticism that our sector confronts.¡±

Challenges remain despite the advances, Harpur noted. A 2024 by a New South Wales?parliamentary committee criticised services for disabled students and complaints handling processes in the state¡¯s universities, and recommended a review of their governance.

Administrators need to consider the downsides of inaction, Harpur cautioned, saying students¡¯ expectations had ¡°shifted¡± and people denied ¡°reasonable adjustments¡± now had multiple options for redress.

¡°If [universities] get adverse findings in a national student ombudsman investigation, it¡¯s going to make it a very easy litigation,¡± he warned. ¡°I can say that as a lawyer.¡±

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com