Last year, Prof Nakamura filed a public records access request noting that under Section 503  of the Rehabilitation Act, all federal contractors must collect data on the number of individuals with disabilities (IWDs) in their workforce. This would include UC Berkeley.

The response dated April 27, 2016 from the UC Berkeley Public Records Office was that UC Berkeley had:

• 24 “regular” faculty with disabilities
• 11 “other” faculty
• 70 “graduate student titles”
• 31 “other academic”
• 210 staff (54 rep and 156 non-rep) *1

FN: We assume rep means union representation.

UC Berkeley advertises that they have 1522 full-time faculty (caveat: this may not be the same as “regular” faculty), which would put the percentage of IWDs in the faculty ranks at 24/1522 or in terms of percentage, 1.5%.

Now it’s clear that these numbers are inaccurate — that they are much too low. We know just through personal connections that there are more than 24 or 35 disabled faculty.  All faculty were asked two years to report their status and new faculty are asked when they are onboarded in the HR database.

Why people are underreporting their disability status then becomes a key question.