The Grassini Grimaldi Model of Institutional Filtering: Revised and Expanded Edition

This paper presents the revised and expanded edition of the Grassini Grimaldi Model of Institutional Filtering. The model argues that institutional procedures can nullify legal rights without openly violating them, producing exclusion through administrative architecture rather than explicit refusal. This revised edition advances the original March 2026 formulation in two decisive ways. First, it incorporates new evidence indicating that the Scottish higher education sector collectively considered and rejected the use of disability as a contextual admissions indicator, citing concerns about “opening the floodgates.” Second, it introduces a seventh mechanism within the model: coordinated sector level non compliance. This addition transforms the explanatory framework from one centred on institutional inertia and procedural failure to one capable of describing conscious architectural exclusion. Drawing on parallel disability discrimination proceedings against the University of Oxford and the University of St Andrews, the paper develops a structural theory of procedural gatekeeping, administrative neutrality, institutional time compression, the fiction of enforceable rights, spike profile exclusion, epistemic narrowing, and coordinated sector level non compliance in UK doctoral admissions. The paper further argues that the anticipatory duty under the Equality Act 2010 should be understood not only as a compliance obligation, but also as the legal infrastructure through which cognitive diversity is preserved within higher education and society. In this sense, the exclusion of neurodivergent applicants from doctoral admissions is not merely a rights violation. It is also a structural impoverishment of institutions and of the decision making class they reproduce. This upload is intended to provide a dated scholarly record of the revised model and its expanded evidential basis.