Addressing Structural, Social, and Symbolic Exclusion of Disabled People

Drawing on 11 semi-structured interviews with senior leaders at colleges and universities in the United States, this exploratory study investigates two questions: To what extent are leaders aware of how disabled students experience their campus and its organizational environment differently compared to their peers? How do leaders frame their support of disabled students? Integrating diversity management, organizational inequality, and symbolic inequality literatures, we present a typology of ability-based exclusion and show that leaders’ awareness of disability was limited to students’ experiences of structural exclusion, with minimal awareness of social and symbolic exclusion. This lack of knowledge restricted informants’ ability to conceive of and implement solutions to support disabled students. Connecting insights from one deviant case and cross-disciplinary conceptions of inclusion, we draw on the organization-development literature to provide recommendations for how leaders of higher education institutions and beyond can support the inclusion of disabled people, with particular attention to the challenges of doing this work in the context of critical public discourse around diversity, equity, and inclusion work.