A federal investigation will likely force the University of California-Berkeley to take down the online courses and lectures it offers for free—all in the name of “equality.” No matter that while campaigning for free community college, President Obama said that “education has always been the secret sauce, the secret to America’s success.” His Department of Justice must have missed the memo.
UC-Berkeley offers free online courses on several platforms, including iTunes U, YouTube, and edX. It offers massive open online courses (MOOCs) in subjects such as introductory statistics and financial planning. One MOOC teaches writing skills and includes practice assignments for the Advanced Placement (AP) examination in English Literature and Composition. Such a course could be useful to high school students who wish to take the AP exam but cannot afford expensive tutoring.
The horrors of free education are apparently too much for the Department of Justice. Last month, Rebecca Bond of the Department’s Civil Rights Division sent a letter to UC-Berkeley fretting that the free courses were not sufficiently accessible to people with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The complaints include a lack of captions on some videos for deaf listeners and “insufficient color contrast” in some video lectures which is “difficult for an individual with low vision to discern."
The letter demanded that UC-Berkeley retool its online content so that “individuals with vision, hearing, and manual disabilities can acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as individuals without disabilities with substantially equivalent ease of use.” Most egregiously, the letter instructed the school to “pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC-Berkeley’s failure to comply with [the ADA].”
The letter did not touch upon how, precisely, one can receive a refund for a free service.
Last week, Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education Cathy Koshland released a statement on the Department’s letter. She wrote that UC-Berkeley has never received clear regulatory guidance on how to comply with the ADA, yet the Department has decided to punish the school anyways. Her statement implied that the Department’s actions will probably force the school to simply stop offering its content online for free.
“In many cases,” wrote Koshland, “the requirements proposed by the department would require the university to implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for free.”
Her position is understandable. Much of the content on UC-Berkeley’s YouTube channel, which has nearly 300,000 subscribers and over 40 million views, comprises recordings of lectures given on campus. The expense required to write complete captions of professors’ remarks and descriptions of all content written on blackboards would be prohibitive—there are 13,800 hours of content on the YouTube channel alone. It is much easier to simply take the videos down.
Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson has pointed out the growing problem of lawyers filing frivolous complaints or lawsuits on behalf of disabled individuals. They take advantage of pliant regulatory bodies such as the Department of Justice or defendants wishing to avoid large legal expenses and pocket a hefty share of the settlement. One lawyer in Arizona filed over 2,000 lawsuits under the ADA in a single year. Lawsuits have also been filed against Harvard and MIT over those schools’ MOOCs alleged noncompliance with the ADA.
Universities should certainly strive to make their courses as accessible as possible to people with disabilities. But the government should not set up a dichotomy between “access for all” and “access for none.” About one percent of the American population has “severe difficulty” hearing or seeing, according to the Census Bureau. If an institution can make knowledge freely available to 99% of the population, the world is still much better off.
Instead, the Department of Justice has decided to restrict a world-class education to the ranks of the elite who manage to attend UC-Berkeley in person (total in-state cost of attendance:$33,418). Even worse, the Department has struck a blow against innovation in a sector that desperately needs some new ideas. Ironically, a law intended to promote equality has found itself with enforcers determined to do anything but.
This column originally appeared on Forbes.
Preston Cooper is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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