The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1 - 145

The Evolution of Disability Law

tions of higher education. Following a review
of these laws, a recent and still pending
case—United States of America v. University
of Nebraska at Kearney (2011)—is presented.
Implications for practice conclude the article.

private colleges and universities and included
“an entire corporation, partnership, or other
private organization . . . which is principally
engaged in the business of providing education” (Section 504, n.d., para. 2).

Before reading further, it should be noted
that no article of this length can comprehensively address all facets of one law and
associated regulations, let alone three. Practitioners and educators should use this article
as a guide and endeavor to continue the conversation on individual campuses and with
appropriate personnel.

In its time, however, the impact of Section
504 was not immediately significant. Weber
(1995) commented that “drafting and promulgation of Section 504’s regulations took an
exceedingly long time” (p. 1094) and that these
regulations did not fully take effect until 1977.
Even with this delay, “in 1973 there were few
students with disabilities of college age with
the skills and preparation to attend college”
(Rothstein, 2010, p. 849). It was not until the
1975 passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act—which has evolved into
the Individuals with Disabilities Education
Act (IDEA)—that educational providers began
identifying students with disabilities so that
appropriate services could be provided (Ikeda,
2012). As Rothstein (2010) concluded, it was
thus not until “several years later that a student
with a disability would have been identified at
an early age and received special education and
related services throughout the years in K-12
education and thus be prepared for college”
(p. 849). As the development of these laws
indicates, access to higher education, though
certainly important, did not collide with the
notion of preparation for higher education.

SECTION 504 OF THE
REHABILITATION ACT OF 1973
In 1973, Congress passed the Rehabilitation
Act which included a specific section—Section
504—that prohibited “recipients of federal financial assistance from discriminating against
otherwise qualified individuals with disabilities” (Rothstein, 2010, p. 848). This was a civil
rights law, whose main focus was “promoting
access to individuals with disabilities” (Madaus
& Shaw, 2004, p. 82), and it was essentially the
first of its kind. As Mayerson (1991) noted,
Section 504 was the first time the term discrimination was employed to describe the exclusion
of people with disabilities solely because of
that disability; framing the law in this fashion
shifted the “focus away from the limitations
imposed by a disability, and turned it towards
the limitations posed by society through attitudinal and architectural barriers” (p. 2).
Section 504 included most colleges and
universities, the great majority of whom received some form of federal financial assistance (Katsiyannis, Zhang, Landmark, & Reber,
2009). However, Section 504 also applied to

AMERICANS WITH
DISABILITIES ACT
While the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provided an initial foundation, more sweeping
reform did not arrive until the passage of the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in
1990 (Hebel, 2001). With many similarities to

V o l u m e 4 0 , No. 1 • 2 0 1 3

145

The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1