After exam controversy, Georgetown law students urge policy change

Brittany Lovely says Georgetown dragged its feet on accommodating her pregnancy. She wants better for other students

After controversy over the prospect of exam-day accommodations, a pregnant Georgetown law student said Friday that her university should make a public commitment to reforming policies for pregnant students, and others needing academic accommodations at the Washington Catholic school. 

Credit: Georgetown University.

Brittany Lovely, a second year law student at Georgetown, is expecting a baby in early December. Knowing that, she asked early this semester whether she could take a Dec. 13 criminal law final exam on Dec. 6 — earlier than scheduled — or take it at home on the scheduled date, when she expects to be at home with a new baby, recovering from childbirth.

Lovely told The Pillar she was denied those accommodations, and told by law school administrators that exceptions to the exam schedule would be unfair to other students. Lovely said that as she attempted to see her exam date shifted, university administrators urged her to withdraw from her class instead.

Fellow students and other members of the university community pushed back last week, circulating petitions and posting objections online. 

On Nov. 22, amid a public outcry, the university changed course.

Lovely said she was abruptly given permission to take the exam early, or to extend the exam deferral period into January, depending on when the baby came. 

With that permission given, a Georgetown University spokesman told The Pillar Friday that administrators had “reached a mutually agreeable solution with the student who raised concerns.” 

But that’s not how Lovely sees it.

While Lovely won an accommodation for her and her baby, she told The Pillar she has no reason to expect that Georgetown will treat the next pregnant student any better than she was initially treated, adding that she received no apology or acknowledgement of error. 

Lovely said she regards the administration as having “narrowly addressed” her needs, and she said Friday that the school should commit publicly to reforming its accommodation policies. 

When it made the once “impossible” become possible on Friday, Georgetown did not explain what prompted a turnaround over Lovely’s request. But university students believe it was likely due to the media attention Lovely’s plight attracted. 

Lovely’s classmates told The Pillar they were furious that the school was using the prospect of being “unfair” to them as a reason to deny her accommodations.

The situation prompted two students to circulate a petition saying they supported Lovely’s requested accommodations, which were “not in any way inequitable, nor do they harm my education at Georgetown,” they said. 

The petition quickly attracted attention beyond classmates, racking up more than 1.2 million views on twitter.com, while the university’s initial “no” to Lovely’s request drew condemnation from Hoya alumni across the political spectrum, and at least one professor.

Students told The Pillar that without a clear articulation of what, if anything, Georgetown believes went wrong in its treatment of Lovely, there’s little reason to assume another student would receive different treatment. 

For Georgetown law students Jon Corn and Meaghan Charlton, co-presidents of the Disabled Law Students Association, Lovely’s situation pointed to a broader structural problem with how their law school handles accommodations for both short-term and long-term disability needs. 

Georgetown’s policies are vague, Corn and Charlton said, making it hard for a student to know what accommodations they can anticipate.

When Lovely began seeking an exemption, she had reason to be hopeful. She only needed to shift one exam to make it through the semester. And the procedures laid out by Georgetown’s Office of Accessibility Services seemed to her promising enough at first glance.

 The school’s “Pregnancy Modification Request Form” asked students to propose a reasonable accommodation. However, the accessibility office notes, with appropriately lawyerly nuance, no accommodation request is guaranteed. 

Rather, “​​In certain situations, a student may be entitled to a reasonable accommodation due to a pregnancy-related condition.”

Lovely quickly discovered that the text carried a load-bearing “may.” 

Although Lisa Curtis, the Deputy Title IX Coordinator for the Law Center, was helpful, her authority was limited, Lovely said. In October, Curtis reported to Lovely that her request had been denied. 

After Lovely pushed for the reasons for the denial to be communicated in writing, she was told that university policy prohibited offering exams early, and that only childbirth during the exam period, not during other phases of pregnancy, merited an exam deferral, according to correspondence reviewed by The Pillar. 

According to Georgetown policy, pregnancy could only result in an exam delay if “pregnancy leads to medical emergencies or pregnancy-related complications” and an exam delay would need to be requested on an emergency basis, as the condition occurred. That policy meant Lovely couldn’t plan for her needs — If she gave birth or had a medical emergency, the school was only willing to defer the exam until Dec. 19, regardless of whether she could safely take the test. 

Corn and Charlton told The Pillar that kind of treatment isn’t unusual at Georgetown. The Disabled Law Students Association argues that Georgetown Law sets unreasonably high bars to receive accommodations, more stringent than those Georgetown undergraduates face, or that law students would encounter if they petitioned for accommodations on professional legal exams, like the LSAT or the bar exam. 

Georgetown University law library. Credit: Xp040407/wikimedia. CC BY SA 4.0

To Corn and Charlton, the law school seems to start from a position of skepticism and scarcity, even while the Americans with Disabilities Act and federal Title IX laws require the school to make reasonable accommodations, so long as they don’t require a “fundamental alteration” of the course work.

Disability accommodations are usually made without the involvement of course professors—the goal is to keep grading and the assessment of accommodations independent from each other. 

But after she was rebuffed by the Office of Accessibility Services, Lovely reached out to her criminal law professor to tell him what had happened. 

In all the back-and-forth, Lovely said no one had ever told her why shifting a exam date, or even just the location, would constitute a “fundamental alteration” of the course—the legal standard for finding a disability accommodation unreasonable.

Her professor, Paul Butler, had no idea why the accommodation was denied and encouraged her to keep fighting, Lovely said.

Butler told her he wanted whatever was best for her and the baby, Lovely recalled.

For reasons like those, Corn said he would like to see the school include a broader range of voices in its appeal processes. While the final appeal of an accommodation judgment goes to the dean of academic affairs, Corn would prefer to see a panel, including professors, consider cases. 

Professors, rather than administrators, might be better prepared to weigh whether an accommodation would require a “fundamental alteration” of the course work, he said. 

Georgetown’s reversal on Lovely’s request would suggest that it was — as she argued — possible to adjust a test date without compromising a legal education. And until this year, all Georgetown students could defer a final until January with extenuating medical circumstances.

Charlton told The Pillar she would like to see Georgetown return to that approach, rather than set a hard deadline of Dec. 19 for all fall semester exams. 

While Lovely has a personal, one-time exemption, a student who caught pneumonia as exams began would still be in danger of being forced to withdraw from courses if the sickness lingered, Charlton said. 

Charlton also pointed to other law schools’ more flexible accommodations for exams as a model for Georgetown: Other law schools offer “incomplete” or “in-progress” statuses which allow students to finish coursework over a longer period of time, but Georgetown does not. 

Until the Friday reversal, it didn’t seem to Corn — and to students petitioning on her behalf —like administrators were trying to problem solve with Lovely, but were instead treating her, and her requests as a problem. 

Administrators steered her towards dropping the course — receiving a “W” for “Withdraw” on her transcript — rather than try to find a way to help her complete the class, Corn noted. 

For Lovely, that solution was unhelpful, because the course won’t be repeated until next fall, too late for her to be prepared for a criminal law clinic she hoped to do in her third year of law school. 

The school’s initial insistence that she sit for the exam in person, even if she was fresh out of the hospital, struck Lovely as absurd—a “no” by another name. 

Taking the exam under those circumstances, she said, would mean “I’m still bleeding, I’ve got a diaper, I’m using ice packs, I need a peri bottle to use the bathroom,” all while taking a lengthy test. 

When Lovely made her case to the relevant administrators, she said she was brushed off with what seemed like contempt. 

One administrator “told me I could have planned better,” Lovely said, “and that I knew I had final exams.” 

If Lovely really wanted to complete the class, a dean seemed to her to imply, she’d be willing to sit the exam post-partum and bleeding. That dean told her, she said, that:“Motherhood is not for the faint of heart.”

Lovely told The Pillar that her recent ordeal wasn’t the first time someone suggested that law school was beyond her, and she wasn’t willing to believe she couldn’t do it — or that her request was unreasonable. 

“I’ve been through so much in my life,” Lovely said. “I am anything but fainthearted.” 

Lovely, 34, had come to law school later in life after struggles with addiction and a period of incarceration. She said she had been told that her history might make her a bad fit to practice law, but it was the support she’d received from her community that made her eager to learn to use the law to protect the vulnerable. 

Now, before she graduates, she’s determined to make her case a precedent that will help other students. And Lovely insisted that she doesn’t view her concerns as fully addressed, despite the statements from the university spokesman about “mutually agreeable solutions.” 

She said the school needs to talk about the failures of its process, and commit to more transparency. 

Corn agreed. And because of his work helping other students petition for accommodations, Corn wants to see the school revise its appeals process, to make it “fairer and more transparent” for students. 

The school could lay out a clearer description of its processes, what documentation is required, and what standard of proof will be applied, he said. 

Lovely said she enrolled at Georgetown Law because she admired its values of service. But the treatment she received seemed to her at odds with those values, and with Georgetown Law’s Catholic identity. 

Lovely noted that as contraception was specifically excluded from the student insurance plan, unless it was prescribed for another reason than preventing pregnancy, she expected that childbirth would be better supported. Due to the high student insurance deductible, Lovely left that plan and switched to Medicaid for prenatal care and her anticipated delivery, she said. 

Thomas More Chapel, Georgetown University Law School. Credit: Georgetown University.

For Charlton, the limited aid the school was willing to offer Lovely does not fit with the Jesuit value of cura personalis —“care for the whole person.” 

Georgetown University’s “Who We Are” page sets cura personalis at the center of its educational philosophy, defining the principle as “a profound care and responsibility for one another, attentive to each person’s circumstances and concerns and gifts.”

For his part, Corn said he does not want to see Lovely’s case cause a chilling effect for other students. 

“If she was treated this way, with such a clear cut need for accommodation,” he said, “what does that mean for a student with a more complicated disability?” 

He said he believes the law school’s tendency to steer disabled students toward withdrawal from a course or toward a leave of absence from the school is dehumanizing. He said he wants students to be welcomed and valued as they are, not subject to a throw-away culture. 

“We need more disabled lawyers,” Corn emphasized. 

While Georgetown University law school informed The Pillar of its Nov. 22 policy change, a spokesperson was not available for additional comment.