Rodger is a tenured faculty member who cannot use stairs, however his office is on the fourth floor of his department building. Rodger, like many disabled academics, arranged his accommodations with his department chair rather than with HR. Rodger realized that the elevator was routinely shut off on weekends and the administrative assistant in his department told him he had to go through HR and register as an employee with a disability to get the elevator turned on on the weekends. Registering with HR required time, paying for biocertification, and then convincing HR to change the building policy, Rodger ended up bringing the question to his school's affirmative action officer who was able to directly contact the building manager, but it is still only occasionally that the building manager remembers not to shut down the elevator.

Example from Participant: Rodger

Jacky is a blind woman of colour professor in a tenure track job, her institution was slow to provide accommodations like a reader, screen reading software and a scanner. Since Jacky didn't have access to the accommodations she needed she ended up using half of her eight course buyouts in the first three semesters, which are supposed to be used over five years to support tenure-track faculty with research activity. This was paired with Jacky hiring a reader who then left the institution which left her with no reader mid semester. When Jacky appealed to her department chair for more course releases after her first year she was only offered an apology and then was cast by her dean and provost as being too needy and demanding. When course releases were finally discussed administration wanted to grant them on the basis of low-productivity instead of lack of accommodation which would've negatively impacted her chance at getting tenure.

Example from Participant: Jacky

Participants in the Disabled Academics Study noted that slow rolling makes accommodations both time consuming to put in place and time consuming to use often causing disabled academics to pay for their own accommodations, give up opportunities, or leave their job. 

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Slow Rolling describes how institutional processes, often those that are made to ensure access and inclusion, are often purposefully designed to move slowly to discourage people from going through these systems because having less people requesting access is better from an economic point of view. This concept is also called "rationing by hassle", "dragging", and existing within "not-yet-time." These systems are also described as making access "slow to come and fast to expire."

Slow Rolling

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Price notes that slow rolling and its effects are often invisibilized because of dominant narratives in academic that academic accommodations are smooth, linear and instituted promptly, and that the process of accommodations is easily navigable.

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