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“

No 
exceptions” 
punctuates 

the testing section of Dr. Ron 
Caldwell’s Econ 101 syllabus. 

On four separate occasions in the 
syllabus, “no exceptions” clearly 
informs disabled and chronically 
ill students that their experiences 
won’t be taken into account and 
that they may face discrimination 
or 
infringement 
of 
their 
civil 

rights. While “no exceptions” — a 
clear violation of the Americans 
with Disabilities Act’s reasonable 
accommodations mandate — may 
be glossed over by students without 
disabilities, this ableist rule can be 
the difference between passing and 
failing for students with disabilities or 
chronic illnesses. 

This discriminatory and lazy “no 

exception” rule must be eliminated 
across campus if the University of 
Michigan wants to live up to its mission 
of serving “the people of Michigan 
and the world through preeminence 
in 
creating, 
communicating, 

preserving and applying knowledge, 
art, and academic values, and in 
developing leaders and citizens who 
will challenge the present and enrich 
the future.” A blanket denial of both 
legal and moral obligations to provide 
reasonable accommodations is an 

archaic violation of this mission and 
unfit to exist at the University or any 
academic institution.

For two students I spoke to, Dr. 

Caldwell’s “no exception” policy and 
the subsequent support of the policy 
from the Economics Department 
and the University, barred them 
from being able to succeed in their 
respective situations. A student with 
Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type II 
who, due to privacy protections, will 
be referred to as Peter in this article, 
and Cheyanne Killin, LSA senior and 
former Services for Students with 
Disabilities Student Advisory Board 
chair, were both greatly impeded 
by this policy. Even when a disabled 
student does everything right, these 
“no exception” policies create intense 
barriers and stresses in order to 
simply graduate. 

For Peter, Dr. Caldwell’s “no 

exception” policy resulted in having 
to take an Econ 101 final under 
medical duress, as the final exam 
period overlapped with prep time for 
a necessary and urgent procedure. 
Peter 
submitted 
the 
proper 

documentation at the beginning of 
the semester, including a Services 
for Students with Disabilities (SSD), 
a medical VISA that outlined the 

accommodations 
required 
for 

SMA2, and followed up with the 
professor via email, explaining his 
circumstances. He further invited 
the professor to read about SMA2 
and ask any questions he may have 
about the condition. Had Dr. Caldwell 
done further research, or reached 
out to Peter about his disability, he 
would have discovered that people 
with SMA2 must receive injections 
every four months to prevent further 
muscular atrophy. 

In a letter to University President 

Mark Schlissel and the Economics 
Department, Kathy Homan, president 
of the Washtenaw Association for 
Community Advocacy, wrote that 
“the injection (Peter) receives is called 
SPINRAZA. It’s a lumbar injection 
that can and has generated serious 
side effects for him, the most common 
side effects of SPINRAZA include 
lower respiratory infection, fever … 
vomiting, back pain, and post-lunar 
puncture syndrome … This is the only 
medication that has the promise of 
halting the progression of (Peter)’s 
Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type II.”

As the semester was coming to 

a close, Peter discovered that the 
window to take the Econ 101 final 
overlapped with the prep time 

needed for his injection procedure, 
rescheduled 
due 
to 
COVID-19. 

Within hours he reached out to Dr. 
Caldwell, explaining his situation 
and asking simply that the professor 
open the exam window earlier so that 
he could take the exam. Mind you, 
Peter wasn’t asking for more study 
time, simply asking he be given an 
opportunity to take the exam before 
his procedure. Instead of providing 
this reasonable accommodation, Dr. 
Caldwell stated that he hoped Peter 
would “understand that providing 
alternatives that, as per the syllabus, 
are not available to the rest of the class 
is a bit unfair to the other students.” 

He presented Peter with the option 

of taking the final during the prep 
time of his procedure, under medical 
duress, or a ranked score. Dr. Caldwell 
outlined the alternative in a June 23 
email, saying “Specifically, we rank 
order all students and find where you 
fall among the students for the exam 
that you completed. I.e. say you are 
40 out of 112 (this is just an example). 
Then I take the exam you missed 
(2nd exam in this case), rank order all 
students, and give you the score that 
the 40th individual received.” This 
arbitrary alternative is unreasonable, 
as it failed to provide Peter with an 

opportunity to demonstrate or test his 
knowledge, which is the entire point 
of assessments.

“I really felt like I should’ve had the 

opportunity to show my growth in the 
course,” Peter expressed. “Letting me 
take the test just a few hours earlier 
would’ve made that difference. The 
window encompassed my procedure 
so there was nothing I could do 
about it. It’s not like I was asking for 
anything extraneous, it’s not like 
people were taking it at the same time 
of day, it was an exam window. I don’t 
understand why I couldn’t have had 
an earlier exam window.” 

Naturally, after this disappointing 

and 
disheartening 
experience, 

Peter filed a grade grievance appeal 
through the Economics Department. 
As Peter arrived, via Zoom, at the 
grievance committee hearing, he was 
shocked to find the panel was solely 
made up of colleagues of Dr. Caldwell. 

“There was no specialist, the ADA 

coordinator wasn’t there, no one from 
OIE (Office of Institutional Equity) 
was there, no one from SSD was there, 
no one versed in the ADA was there … 
the professors were referring to Dr. 
Caldwell by nicknames, it all felt very 
out of place,” Peter reflected. 

Cheyanne Killin said that she 

deeply agrees “that this situation 
not only exemplifies the rampant 
ableism present in the University but 
is one of many examples that expose 
the need for major departmental 
and institutional change. Disabled 
students are viewed here as an 
afterthought 
or 
an 
additional 

difficulty, leading to our needs 
not being met and our needing to 
surmount 
intense 
barriers 
and 

stressors, seemingly alone, in order 
to simply graduate. For a University 
that overly prides itself on Diversity, 
Equity, 
and 
Inclusion, 
disabled 

and chronically ill students are, 
most certainly, not receiving those 
sentiments.”

The appeal committee’s lack of 

SSD representation, ADA specialist, 
or medical advocate underscores the 
systemic problems that exist in the 
economics department and beyond. 

“The University should make it 

mandatory,” Homan wrote of the 
situation. “That a certain ratio of 
any committee members making 
decisions related to the disability 
community 
and 
Americans 

with Disabilities Act have expert 
knowledge on both …” Ultimately, 
and surprisingly to Homan, while 
the committee was not in unanimous 
agreement, they “sided with the 
University over (Peter).”

Peter did everything right. He 

went out of his way to communicate 
and provide the right documentation 
to explain his situation to Dr. Caldwell 
prior to the exam, he enlisted the 

support of community advocates like 
Homan to help him following his 
unfair treatment and went through 
the department’s procedure that was 
supposed to remedy these situations. 
The University failed him at every 
step. 

While the evidence of one student 

being crushed by the system should be 
evidence enough to change it, it is also 
important to highlight that Peter is 
not alone. Killin reflected on her past 
with Dr. Caldwell, saying “I actually 
failed a course under the same 
instructor due to an ableist situation.” 
Just like Peter, the “no exception” rule 
in Dr. Caldwell’s class prevented her 
from having the same opportunity 
for success as her non-disabled peers. 
Killin was in the middle of having her 
disability diagnosed when she took 
Econ 101 in 2017. 

As her illness progressed and she 

became too ill to attend classes, she 
was given permission by University 
Health Service for medical absences; 
even with this permission Killin still 
went to her Econ 101 section to turn 
in her bi-weekly quizzes, required to 
be turned in in-person under the “no 
exception” rule. 

“However, 
as 
my 
illness 

progressed, I stopped being able to 
go to the classroom to turn in my 
exams,” Killin noted. “I emailed both 
Professor Caldwell and my GSI about 
this and asked if I could scan in the 
exams to them, even offering to take 
pictures of myself with the completed 
exam to assure my identity. Under the 
‘no exception’ rule, this was denied, 
and I received a full zero for the last 
two quizzes, which caused me to fail 
the course. I retook (the class) the 
next semester, under similar medical 
circumstances, with the only change 
being an accommodating professor, 
and got a B+.” 

Situations like this should not 

exist; disabled and chronically ill 
students should not have to play 
academic 
roulette, 
wondering 

whether the professor teaching 
their course will be accommodating 
or lean on discriminatory “no 
exception” rules like Dr. Caldwell. 
The University can and must remedy 
these infringements on civil rights 
if it wishes to live up to its mission 
statement and Diversity, Equity & 
Inclusion goals.

When The Daily reached out to 

Dr. Caldwell via multiple emails 
for a response on the use of his 
stringent “no exception” policy and its 
relationship to ADA non-compliance, 
he did not respond. 

I

t’s a pretty simple question: 
“Do you condemn white 
supremacy?” But even after 

three public statements, University 
Regent Ron Weiser (R) still has not 
answered it.

Weiser is an elected member of 

the University of Michigan Board 
of Regents and the incoming chair 
of the Michigan Republican Party. 
His incoming co-chair, Meshawn 
Maddock, is a prominent voice in 
the “stop the steal” movement that 
alleges Donald Trump won the 
election, and she helped organize 
busloads of Michiganders to attend 
what became a domestic terrorist 
attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 
6, an attack that was orchestrated 
in part by well-known white 
supremacists carrying Confederate 
flags and covered in neo-Nazi 
tattoos. 

The events of that day were the 

culmination of long-term planning 
from white nationalist groups, 
including the Proud Boys, that 
organized online to take over the 
Capitol not just in opposition to 
the certification of the Electoral 
College vote, but expressly in the 
name of white supremacy. The day 
of the attack, Maddock shared a 
since-removed video of the crowd 
on Instagram, calling the group a 
“sea of Patriots.”

In the video she shared, a man 

off-camera can be heard yelling, 
“We need to march on the Capitol 
when we’re done here and drag 
these people out of power.” Later 
in the day, members of this crowd 
came within minutes of killing 
members of the U.S. Congress and 
Vice President Mike Pence.

The day after the insurrection, 

when directly asked by Bridge 
Magazine about who incited the 
riot and his views about what had 
occurred, Weiser, who has been 
a major donor to the outgoing 

president and even landed on his 
2016 inaugural committee, failed 
to condemn his co-chair Maddock 
or white supremacy. Instead, he 
said that he had not watched the 
attacks or news surrounding it: 
“I watched Michigan destroy 
Minnesota in basketball, and that 
kind of contest is something that I 
strongly support.” He later blamed 
this response on oral surgery he 
received the day of the riots.

Weiser cleaned up his original 

response with a second statement 
saying 
he 
condemned 
“those 

people who turned (a protest) into 
a mob” and that his heart went out 
to those “unnecessarily” harmed. 
Later, in light of a growing number 
of signatories to a Change.org 
petition and an open letter signed 
by faculty, staff and alumni calling 
for his resignation, Weiser offered 
an additional statement that was 
substantively the same as his 
previous one, calling the events 
“incredibly tragic and wrong,” 
without referring to them as a 
terrorist attack or insurrection. At 
each turn, even without the haze 
of oral surgery, he still managed to 
miss the words “I condemn white 
supremacy.”

Apart from Weiser’s shocking 

disregard for the severity of the 
Jan. 6 insurrection, his statements 
are a matter of safety for anyone 
affiliated with the University. Let 
me put it in a broader context: 
Just months after I graduated 
from the University of Virginia as 
an undergraduate student, white 
supremacists descended on my 
former home, terrorizing students 
and, the next day in downtown 
Charlottesville, killing a young 
woman. If, in the immediate 
aftermath of this attack, any 
member of the UVa Board of 
Visitors had equivocated in their 
condemnation of these neo-Nazis, 

they would have been promptly 
shunned by the UVa community 
and rightly stripped of any titles 
or standing. Anything less, and 
the neo-Nazis who had already 
terrorized UVa would have felt 
empowered to come back for more.

That same danger in Michigan 

is very real. According to the 
FBI, armed insurrectionists are 
currently 
planning 
to 
attack 

Michigan’s Capitol, which, as we 
are all too painfully aware, was 
already attacked in April, followed 
by an attempt to kidnap Gov. 
Gretchen Whitmer. In fact, one of 
the men who attacked Michigan’s 
Capitol last spring participated 
in the Jan. 6 insurrection in 
Washington, D.C.

And yet, here at the University, 

even 
after 
three 
separate 

statements, the fact remains that 
Weiser has at no point condemned 
his co-chair, who was complicit 
in a terrorist attack on the U.S., 
or white supremacy itself, an 
abhorrent phenomenon and the 
avowed cause of the terrorists. As 
a result — and at a minimum — he 
must resign.

The stakes here cannot be 

understated. Failing to condemn the 
driving force of this riot will only 
let that force grow stronger. White 
supremacist activity on university 
campuses hit a record high in 2019, 
the most recent year for which 
data is available. Well before white 
supremacists successfully invaded 
the U.S. Capitol, they marched on 
UVa’s grounds carrying torches and 
chanting “Jews will not replace us.” 

In these moments, language 

matters. It is not enough to 
denounce violence by itself and in 
a passive voice. Our regents must 
loudly, explicitly and unequivocally 
stand against white supremacist 
ideology and the terrorist attack it 
wrought. There is simply no room 

to believe that what’s happened on 
other campuses can’t happen on 
ours. 

We cannot give officials three 

or more chances to get their 
condemnations right. The issue 
here is not just a matter of delay 
— it’s the reluctance to denounce 
something as odious as white 
nationalism or domestic terrorism 
at all. Any hedging is disqualifying.

The day Weiser made his 

first statement — deflecting to 
basketball — I, along with many 
others, emailed him demanding 
his resignation. After a handful 
of tense exchanges, I asked him 
point-blank in my latest email, “Do 
you condemn white supremacy?”

He responded that he is 

less powerful than I think — 
despite 
being 
the 
incoming 

chair of a state political party, 
an ambassador under former 
President George W. Bush, a 
significant donor to the current 
president and a member of the 
Board of Regents. He said that 
he has no influence over white 
supremacists, which ignores his 
leverage and responsibility as 
a public figure to prevent their 
normalization. He also said that 
as a Jewish person, he fears white 
supremacists himself.

When The Daily’s Editorial Page 

Editors reached out separately for 
a comment from Weiser, he did not 
respond.

U-M students also feel fear — 

only none of us have the power to 
do anything about it. Any official 
who refuses to readily identify 
and publicly condemn the danger 
of white supremacy only amplifies 
its danger for the rest of us.

T

here is a riot at the United 
States Capitol, but you happen 
to be in Miami, Florida on 

vacation. When choosing to post 
either a beach picture or an educative 
update of the insurrection, is it not 
obvious what is more important to 
share with your followers on social 
media? 

To “be political” has recently 

become a certain personality type. 
When some people choose to be 
apolitical, however, they choose 
to not involve themselves in the 
dialogues that occur on online 
platforms. There are two types of 
people who choose not to engage 
in those discussions on social 
media. The first know they are not 
invested in social media and don’t 
feel that posting anything will make 
a change in the world, but they may 
know they made a more important 
change at the polls earlier this year. 
These people are not truly apolitical, 
they are just nonexpressive. 

The issue is the second type of 

people, those who choose to not 
be political, and instead, show off 
their unaltered lives in this political 
climate. Being apolitical is a privilege 
— being able to ignore current events 
or how the decisions politicians make 
affect your daily life is an example 
of privilege. These people are not 
only demonstrating that they do not 
need to concern themselves with the 
changes in our country that impact 
tens of millions of others, but they 
are willing to actively steer societal 
conversations away from those 
changes.

On Jan. 6, Trump supporters 

charged the U.S. Capitol in a white 
supremacist attempt to stop the 
confirmation 
of 
President-elect 

Joe Biden. The response by the 
police to this event highlighted the 
stark contrast between the Black 
community’s 
experiences 
with 

the police and that of the white 

community. Namely, law enforcement 
was far more violent toward Black 
Lives Matter protesters this summer 
than toward the predominantly white 
rioters storming the Capitol building.

On 
the 
Thursday 
following 

the event on Jan. 6, Facebook 
CEO 
Mark 
Zuckerberg 
chose 

to 
suspend 
President 
Donald 

Trump’s Facebook account after 
being flagged several times on the 
platform for misinformation. This 
series of events established plenty 
of opportunities to get political on 
social media, and many college 
students did.

While many people chose to use 

social media to show solidarity and 
spread information, plenty of people 
were posting anything other than 
the content that mattered for the day. I 
was disturbed by a picture of a Spotify 
song recommendation or dinner 
array at a hotel restaurant in Florida 
amid the postings of rioters sitting 
at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s, 
D-Calif., desk and scaling the walls of 
our nation’s Capitol building.

With the heightened political 

atmosphere this past year with the 
election, the Black Lives Matter 
movement and the pandemic, most 
people can agree that 2020 was hard 
on our mental well-being. It is easy to 
see how people would need a break 
from social media and the constant 
flood of news. It is also easy to feel 
suffocated by all of the Instagram 
stories and Tweets that may begin 
to lose educational value over time. 
I cannot emphasize enough that 
choosing to not participate in social 
media politics is OK, but choosing 
ignorance in a tumultuous time by 
sharing examples of an unharmed, 
privileged life is not. 

8 — Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Stop discriminating against disabled students. No exceptions.

ANDREW GERACE | SENIOR OPINION EDITOR

Op-Ed: Weiser must resign

DANI BERNSTEIN | CONTRIBUTOR

Dani Bernstein is a third-year law 

student at the University of Michigan 

and can be reached at 

dbern@umich.edu. 

Dimitra Colovos can be reached at 

dimitrac@umich.edu.

What it means to “be political”

DIMITRA COLOVOS | COLUMNIST

MAGGIE WIEBE/DAILY

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Andrew Gerace is an Opinion 

Senior Editor and can be reached at 

agerace@umich.edu. 

Read more at MichiganDaily.com