Reinstate Prof. Lasanski's "Spatial Justice" Seminar
We, the undersigned — Cornell faculty, staff, students, alumni, and members of the broader academic community — call on Cornell University to reinstate Professor Medina Lasansky's graduate seminar "Spatial Justice," provide her the real-time transcription accommodation she requested, and restore her thesis advising responsibilities.
Medina Lasansky has been Professor of Architecture in Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) for 27 years. She is the author, co-author, and editor of seven award-winning books and dozens of articles, and her students have gone on to careers as architects, professors, and consultants. Professor Lasansky has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair. Because her condition affects her enunciation, she relies on assistive technology to communicate verbally in the classroom.
For Fall 2026, Professor Lasansky designed a new graduate seminar, “Spatial Justice,” examining how the built environment is experienced differently by different bodies. Seven students were pre-enrolled by early August 2026. She built the syllabus, arranged guest lecturers, and prepared assignments months in advance, planning to use CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) — a live-stenography accommodation used at universities nationwide, including at the Rochester Institute of Technology's National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
Weeks before classes began, AAP administrators declined to approve CART. Instead, they required her to use Voiceitt, a lower-cost AI speech-to-text tool, without giving her time to train it on her voice and without testing or adjusting the classroom's acoustic conditions. She was then brought into what administrators called an "assessment," held in a Sibley Hall room with a noisy HVAC system and microphones that picked up ambient sound. The software failed to transcribe her speech accurately.
About seven people attended, most unidentified; several photographed the garbled transcription screen on their phones, and by the account of a faculty colleague who was present, almost no one in the room looked at Professor Lasansky or listened to her directly. Two attendees left before the meeting ended without introducing themselves.
Two days later, Cornell's Office of Civil Rights informed Professor Lasansky in writing that she could not teach the course because the assistive technology that the university had substituted for the one she'd asked for had failed. Her thesis advising responsibilities were also removed, and AAP canceled the seminar, leaving Professor Lasansky and her seven enrolled students without a course days before the semester began.
Professor Lasansky proposed alternatives: a real-time transcription assistant, a better-equipped classroom, additional AV support for the semester. Each was rejected.
This is not an isolated concern. In an August 27, 2026 guest column in the Cornell Daily Sun, a fifth-year AAP architecture student wrote that a search for "disability" on the Cornell Journal of Architecture's website returns "No results found," and described being steered away from disability-focused design work during his own career search.
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires universities to provide faculty with disabilities reasonable accommodations, reached through a good-faith interactive process — not a single unannounced test in an acoustically poor room, using technology the professor didn't choose and wasn't given a fair chance to learn. As Professor Lasansky wrote to the Office of Civil Rights: "I feel that I was set up to fail."
We call on Cornell University to:
1. Reinstate Professor Lasansky's "Spatial Justice" seminar for Spring 2027
2. Provide CART, or another real-time transcription accommodation of her choosing that meets ADA effectiveness standards, implemented with adequate lead time and appropriate room and AV conditions.
3. Restore her thesis advising responsibilities.
4. Commission an independent review of how the accommodation decision and the Sibley Hall "assessment" were conducted.
5. Establish a transparent, collaborative interactive process for faculty accommodation requests going forward, consistent with the ADA.
This petition will be shared with Cornell's president, provost, the dean of AAP, the chair of the Department of Architecture, the Cornell Office of Civil Rights, and the Cornell Daily Sun.