On a recent Friday at around 1pm, I happened to walk into an office on my campus where a student, who was in a class I taught a couple of years ago, is employed as a work-study to answer the phone and greet folks who walk in. He was been bent low over a take-out tray of food, inhaling his lunch, when I appeared.

With wide eyes, in breaths between bites of food, he told me his lunch was just so good... but that was probably because he had been so hungry. I blithely ask him why, thinking he might have been fasting for some reason, or doing some sort of special athletic training (as he sometimes does) — we're very friendly, and it didn't occur to me that it might be an intrusive question.

He told me no, he was so hungry because he hadn't eaten since the previous day's breakfast ... because he couldn't afford to buy anything to eat. He didn't seem embarrassed about it, but merely told me with a very matter-of-fact tone.

Later that day, a group of faculty were still in our General Classroom Building at 5:15pm, chatting a bit after the weekly Faculty Academy meeting. This Academy, supported by our Provost, is a place where faculty interested in teaching are coming together for twelve weeks of Fridays to discuss issues of pedagogy and to learn about some new ideas, techniques, and technologies which might be of use in our courses.

On the Friday I'm thinking of, I had spoken to the Academy about OER, from basic definitions and context-setting through where to search for existing OER and how our campus can support faculty who want to adapt or even create their own OER. There were lively discussions during that session, which continued through 5:15 as some faculty talked about whether they could possibly use OER in their classes, or whether they even needed to do so. One faculty member said he didn't feel that much pressure to switch to OER at the moment, because he had found materials to require of his students which only cost \$65 — compared with usual textbook prices in his discipline (biology), that was extremely cheap.

I think the connection is obvious: To a student for whom a 29-hour fast due to lack of cash is not a remarkable thing, a \$65 educational resource for a class probably represents so many skipped meals, so many days of hunger, that even that very modest cost looms quite large.

Maybe my faculty colleague would say that it is possible that somewhere along the curve of individual [or family] income [or net worth] of the student body, there may well be a cut-off below which it becomes very hard for students reasonably to afford even quite inexpensive educational resources. He might also say that we can't serve everyone, that we just might have to give up on serving the students below that cut-off, in order to serve well the much larger part of the student body that hangs out above the cut-off.

I take my story of the hungry work-study as demonstrating that there is a least one student who likely lives below that affordability cut-off even for a \$65 educational resource. Of course, that one story is an anecdote and not data. But Sara Goldrick-Rab's team in the Hope Center For College, Community, and Justice at Temple University has done the hard work of carefully designing the study and scrupulously collecting the data. In their survey from fall 2018 of nearly 86,000 students at 123 two- and four-year institutions across the United States, they found that

• 45% of respondents were food insecure in the prior 30 days
• 56% of respondents were housing insecure in the previous year
• 17% of respondents were homeless in the previous year

Evidently, many students in typical classes nationally would likely be below the affordability cut-off. My colleague is going to have to revise his estimate of how many students will be excluded by his seemingly very modest requirement of a \$65 educational resource.

I want to make an argument here that though the numbers Goldrick-Rab's team has found are terrifying, and describe a national emergency, the only thing that matters about them for this discussion of the cost of [commercial] educational resources [vs OER] is that there is almost certainly at least one student in most classes for whom even very modest textbook costs are prohibitive. I'm going to base this on a close look at the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 [ADA]. (I'll also make a connection with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, below, for folks who are reading this and aren't in the US.)

On my campus, we are required by university policy to include the following language in all of our syllabi:

This is our localized version of a part of Title II of the ADA, which states

Let's think together about three aspects of this legislative quote:

1. The first is the question the actions of which service providers does the ADA constrain? I.e., what constitutes a "public entity"?

   The answer is right at the beginning of Title II, where a "public entity" is defined to be

   1. any State or local government;
   2. any department, agency, special purpose district, or other instrumentality of a State or States or local government; and
   3. the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, and any commuter authority (as defined in section 103(8) of the Rail Passenger Service Act).

   [That last one is irrelevant to our discussion today, I just included it for completeness and because it is so weirdly specific about trains.]

   So certainly the ADA applies to my institution, as we are a state university. But actually, pretty much the same requirement is imposed also on private educational institutions in part from Title III of the ADA, and in part from Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which applies to any program or activity operated by recipients of federal funds.

   Bottom line: Everyone involved in education in the U.S. needs to pay attention to the requirements of the ADA.

2. Well and good so far, but the next thing we might wonder is what constitutes a "disability" in the context of the ADA?

   Again, going to the text of the statue, this time to the preliminary Section 3. Definitions, we find

   The term "disability" means, with respect to an individual—

   1. a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual;
   2. a record of such an impairment; or
   3. being regarded as having such an impairment.

   It is interesting that the ADA puts an emphasis on physical or mental disabilities. One might suppose that they were going after things about which the individual could say "I was born this way." But that can't be it, because someone who becomes disabled as a result of an accident or illness gets the same protections.

   I contend, therefore, that the crucial component here is the part which says a disability substantially limits one or more of the major life activities.

   Again, I think the connection is obvious: does not significant economic disadvantage substantially limit one or more of the major life activities?

   I'm not making a legal argument that the ADA should be aggressively applied to economically disadvantaged folks in our society — I'm not qualified to make any legal arguments. Rather, I'm making the normative argument which I would summarize as:

   Bottom line: The moral and cultural value whereby we think it is simply more fair if public entities are required to provide full access to those members of our society who are experiencing a difficulty which substantially limits one or more of the major life activities should also apply to folks who are facing significant economic disadvantage.

3. Finally, how many people with disabilities can a public entity fail to serve before the ADA kicks in?

   This one is easy: the beginning of that above passage from the ADA was "[N]o qualified individual." Public entities don't get a pass for the first 50 disabled persons whom they fail to serve, or the first 17% [remember SGR's 17%?]. Any single individual with a disability deserves the protections of the ADA.

   Think of it this way: I've been teaching math at a variety of universities for more than 25 years, and in that time I've only had one blind student. When that student first came to me to discuss what I would be doing to enable her to succeed in my class, I did not have the option of saying to her "Oh, I haven't hit my quota for blind students yet, I'm too busy to figure out how to give you what you need to succeed in Calc II." As a legal — and of course moral — matter, I had to make success in my class as achievable for her as for the sighted students.

   [By the way, she was a great student, we figured out ways for her to flourish in the class, and she did quite well. ...Nor should this surprise us, there have been several world-famous mathematicians who were blind:

   • the great topologist Lev Pontryagin was blind from age 14 (his mother read him math books), and
   • Leonard Euler, about whom Laplace said "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all," went completely blind at age 59 but continued to be terrifyingly productive for the remaining 17 years of his life.

   to name but two.]

   Bottom line: According to the ADA, we must provide an education which is accessible to all disabled students: there is no (non-zero) number of disabled we are permitted to fail in this way.

I'm not making a legal argument [I repeat]. But I do think that the normative argument above suggests that

Of course, usually the greatest economic barrier students face is tuition. But I have very little agency or even voice in setting tuition at my institution (or others).

Which is in fact one of the things I like the most about OER: I do have a great deal of agency when it comes to the resources required for the classes I teach. What I take the above analysis to imply, then, is

Of course the "must" there does not have the force of law. But if you would not turn away a blind student from your class without accommodation, do you really feel comfortable telling a student who was homeless in the last year that they must find \$65 (or usually much more!) in order to succeed in your class because of choices you freely made about how to teach?

What if you don't care about U.S. law?

The above argument gets its force (I hope), from the "[N]o qualified individual" part of the ADA. If you are not interested in U.S. law, there is actually a similarly broad statement of principles I could instead cite: the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in Article 26 that

I don't see any way that "merit" can be measured by looking in a student's wallet, so I take this universal right to be putting yet another requirement on faculty to remove the economic barriers over which they have control. Again, this means we faculty must use OER.