From the Detroit Free Press:A lawyer for a cognitively impaired Huntington Woods man who sits in on classes at Oakland University but was barred from living on campus because he isn't enrolled in a degree-producing program asked a federal judge on Tuesday to rule that he is the victim of discrimination.
"He's simply asking for equal opportunity," Chris Davis, a lawyer for Michigan Protection & Advocacy Service, told U.S. District Judge Patrick Duggan as his client, Micah Fialka-Feldman, 24, (in picture center) and about two dozen supporters looked on. Davis wants Duggan to order the university to allow his client to live in a dorm on the Auburn Hills campus.
"This is not a case about discrimination," countered Robert Boonin, lawyer for the Oakland University Board of Trustees. "It's about seeking unequal opportunity."
He said the university has reserved its 1,800 dorm rooms for students who, unlike Fialka-Feldman, are high school graduates, have taken college entrance exams and have been admitted to obtain degrees.
Boonin said 1,400 continuing education students at the 14,000-student campus can't live in dorms. He said a student in the same program as Fialka-Feldman has been admitted to the university and is eligible to live in a campus dorm.
Fialka-Feldman has attended classes at Oakland since winter 2004.
He's one of nine participants in a special program that lets individuals with mild cognitive impairments attend classes to improve their ability to become self-sufficient adults.
Fialka-Feldman has difficulty reading and writing but attends 16 credit hours of classes a week and pays full-time tuition.
He applied to live in a campus dorm to eliminate his 3- to 4-hour daily round-trip commute.School officials initially accepted his $100 down payment last fall, but refunded it when they realized he wasn't in a degree-producing program. The trustees, the defendant in the suit, wouldn't waive the university's dorm rule.
Duggan took the case under advisement.