Why Universities Avoid Responsibility (And What Parents Can Actually Do About It)
The hold music was a tinny version of “Take Five,” and I’d been on the phone for twenty-three minutes. My daughter sat at the kitchen table across from me, pulling at the label on a water bottle. She had just failed her first organic chemistry exam, and she was trying to explain what happened without crying.
It started in August. She has ADHD and a documented anxiety disorder, so she went to the disability services office before classes began, got the accommodation paper signed, and sent it to each professor. The chemistry professor never acknowledged it. Her accommodation allowed her to record lectures and receive extended time on tests, but when she asked if he could post the lecture slides, he said he didn’t use slides. She asked if she could record. He said, “No, because my lectures are my intellectual property.” Then she got a bad cold and missed a week. There were no notes to borrow. No slides to review. She sat down at the exam and blanked on half the questions.
I called the disability office first. The woman on the other end was sympathetic and said, “We did send the letter. That’s all we can do. Professors are independent in how they teach.” I called the department chair. Her assistant said the chair “doesn’t get involved in individual grading matters.” I called the dean’s office. The dean was in a meeting. A coordinator took my message and told me someone would follow up within ten business days. I waited. Nobody called.
The strange thing is that this wasn’t a case of a broken system. It was a system designed to break in a very particular way. Universities are not one organization. They’re a series of small fiefdoms. Professors control classrooms. Disability offices approve accommodations but can’t force faculty to comply. Department chairs can encourage, but they usually don’t overrule a professor’s methods. Deans oversee budgets, development, and public image. Legal offices manage risk. The person you need to hold accountable doesn’t exist. There’s no “office of the person in charge of this particular problem.” So everyone can be polite, express regret, and send you in circles until you stop asking.
I started to understand why universities so often avoid responsibility. It’s partly legal caution—any admission of fault opens a door to litigation. It’s partly the structure of academic freedom, which was created to protect scholars from political interference, but now also gets used to justify refusing to post notes or record a lecture. And it’s partly just diffusion: when hundreds of people have a small piece of your child’s education, no one owns the whole picture.
By the end of that week, I’d learned more about resolving problems in a university than I wanted to know. If you’re a parent of a student, and you’re bracing for a similar conversation, a few of these things genuinely helped us.
The first was the FERPA release form. We signed one during freshman orientation, so the registrar could talk to me directly. Without it, every phone call would have ended the same way: “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss a student’s record.” If your child is about to start college, sit at the dining room table and sign that form. Some schools call it a parent waiver. Some make it annual. Do it anyway. It’s one page, and it removes the biggest excuse a university office has for not talking to you.
The second was documentation. I kept a shared note on my phone with dates, names, and one-sentence summaries of every call. “Nov. 2—Megan in disability services says letter is on file. She cannot require professor to record.” “Nov. 6—Left voice mail for Dr. Reyes, chair of chemistry. No return call.” It sounds obsessive, but it helped me keep the story straight for the next call. It also made me sound less frantic. When I could say, “On October 30, a woman in your office named Tina told me that,” people stopped reading me as an angry parent and started treating me as someone who was paying attention.
The third was to keep asking for the policy, not the outcome. Instead of saying, “I want my daughter to get a makeup exam,” I started asking, “Can you tell me what the policy says about a professor who does not honor a disability accommodation? Can you send me that section?” The first few offices didn’t have an answer. The disability office eventually sent me a link to the student handbook, then to the graduate catalog, then to something called “Appendix R: Grievance Procedures.” It was dense and outdated, but it existed. Once you have a policy and a procedure, you have a road. You might not like where it goes, but at least you’re not wandering through phone trees.
The fourth was finding the ombudsperson. Every university has one, though nobody knows it until they need it. At my daughter’s school, the ombuds office is a tiny operation behind a glass door in the student center. The woman who answered was the closest thing I found to an actual human being who was not immediately defensive. She didn’t promise anything. She said she would “open a file” and “check with the disability office.” After she did, the dean’s office returned my original call within a day.
I also started emailing instead of calling. Email leaves a trail, and universities respond to writing differently. My daughter drafted a short email to the chemistry professor with a copied accommodation letter: “I am writing to confirm that I will be allowed to record lectures as part of my approved accommodations. Could you confirm there are no limitations? I want to make sure I’m following the process.” He replied four words: “Accommodations must be reasonable.” It wasn’t a yes. But it became part of the record.
What I wish someone had told me earlier is this: the accommodation letter is not a magic document. It’s a request for access, not a guarantee. The university’s position was that they had sent the letter. Their obligation, as far as anyone would say out loud, was to inform the professor, not to make him change. That is technically true, but it leaves the student holding the bag. The student ends up having to become her own caseworker. She has to follow up, remind, ask politely, escalate. She has to learn which offices matter and which ones just put you on hold.
In the end, my daughter didn’t get to retake the exam. Her grade on that first test stayed a 61. But after two more emails, three phone calls, and one visit from an ombudsperson, the professor agreed to post lecture slides before each exam. He still doesn’t record lectures. He never apologized. He didn’t have to. But my daughter learned something that has turned out to be more useful than any organic chemistry formula: a university will often do the minimum, and sometimes you have to be the one making that minimum happen.
I still don’t know if I’d say the university is “accountable.” It felt more like we wore them down, just enough, at just the right spots. She’s a junior now. The slides get posted on time. She keeps a copy of every email. And if something like this happens again, we know exactly what to do—and that’s maybe the saddest thing about it. We’ve learned to work the system. We haven’t changed it.
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