Southeastern Community College v. Davis

Davis was the first Supreme Court case to interpret Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In Davis, Frances B. Davis, a Deaf individual, applied to a nursing program at Southeastern Community College. The college denied her application because she was deaf. After her request for reconsideration was denied, Davis filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. [Page 919]Warren L. Pate and Philip A. Diehl of Moses, Diehl & Pate represented Davis at the trial. After a bench trial, the judge ruled that Section 504 did not require the college to admit Davis to its nursing program (Davis v. Southeastern Community Coll., 424 F. Supp. 1341 [E.D.N.C. 1976]). It reasoned that, because she was deaf, she could not “safely perform in both her training program and her proposed profession” (Id. at 1345). For example, according to the district court, she would not be able to understand others in an operating room or neonatal unit, because surgical masks would make her unable to understand others through speechreading.

Davis appealed this decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Marc P. Charmatz and Seymour DuBow of the National Center for Law and the Deaf Legal Defense Fund joined Diehl and Pate in representing Davis. The appeals court reversed the district court’s decision in Davis v. Southeastern Community College, 574 F. 2d 1158 (4th Cir. 1978). The appeals court reasoned that new regulations regarding “otherwise” qualified individuals with disabilities prohibited the college from considering Davis’s being deaf in assessing her application.

The college appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court in Southeastern Community College v. Davis, 442 U.S. 397 (1979). Charmatz argued the case before the Supreme Court, and DuBow, Diehl, and Pate worked with him on the case. Eugene Gressman argued the case on behalf of Southeastern Community College. Edward L. Williamson assisted him on the briefs.

The Supreme Court phrased the question on appeal as “[w]hether [Section] 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination against an ‘otherwise qualified handicapped individual’ in federally funded programs ‘solely by reason of his handicap,’ forbids professional schools from imposing physical qualifications for admission to their clinical training programs.” The Court reversed the decision of the Fourth Circuit. The Court held that Section 504 permitted schools to impose legitimate physical qualifications that excluded some individuals with disabilities from their programs.

The Supreme Court based its determination that postsecondary programs could impose legitimate physical qualifications on applicants on regulations and guidelines published by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). The regulations specified that a “qualified handicapped person” is, “[w]ith respect to postsecondary and vocational education services, a handicapped person who meets the academic and technical standards requisite to admission or participation in the [school’s] education program or activity....” 45 C.F.R. § 84.3(k)(3)(1978). Explanatory notes specified that technical standards referred to “all nonacademic criteria,” and that the individual must be qualified for the postsecondary program in spite of the disability, not except for the disability.

With respect to Southeastern’s nursing program, the Supreme Court concluded that the ability to understand speech without looking at the speaker’s lips was a necessary physical qualification. The Court rejected Davis’s argument that Section 504 required Southeastern to modify the program by providing individual supervision from faculty members when Davis interacted with patients and by exempting Davis from some of the required courses. The Court reasoned that “close, individual attention by a nursing instructor” was not the kind of auxiliary aid or service that the HEW guidelines required schools to provide and that, in light of Davis’s disability, safety concerns would require Southeastern to exempt Davis from all clinical courses. The Court concluded that making such changes for Davis would result in a “fundamental alteration” of Southeastern’s nursing program, and that Section 504 did not require Southeastern to take such steps. The Court further clarified that Section 504 encourages but does not require schools to adopt affirmative action programs for the hiring, placement, and advancement of people with disabilities.

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