Appeals Court Reinstates Disability Lawsuit Against Creighton's Med School

Creighton University must defend itself against a former medical student's charges that the university did not provide him with the accommodations he needed for his hearing disability to benefit equally from his education, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday. In its decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found that Michael Argenyi asked Creighton's medical school for several accommodations to deal with his hearing impairment, including Communication Access Real-time Transcription (CART), which transcribes spoken words into computer text. The university denied most of the requests because they differed and had not been made directly by a doctor, according to the court. (Argenyi took out more than $120,000 in loans to pay for the accommodations himself for two years.)

In ruling for Argenyi, and overturning a lower court's decision, the Eighth Circuit court said he had provided enough evidence to suggest that "he was unable to follow lectures and classroom dialogue or successfully communicate with clinical patients" without the accommodations, and that "a reasonable factfinder could determine that Argenyi was denied an opportunity to benefit from medical school equal to that of his nondisabled classmates."