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Commentary
College Students with Disabilities Should
Learn Their History
By Deborah Kendrick
When I was a senior in high school, I
spent a little time reviewing college catalogs and making applications. That
doesn’t sound like much more than de rigueur, right? But let me explain a
little of the extraordinary context in which those ordinary circumstances
reside.
First, no one in my extended family had ever
graduated high school, so college was something of a foreign idea.
Second, as the only blind student in a large
public high school, I didn't exactly know how to go about researching
institutions of higher learning. This was the late 1960s, after all, so there
was no Internet. There were no scanners or reading machines. There weren't even
any books on cassette that I could borrow from the library.
So, somehow, I zeroed in on the fact that I
wanted to go to a small, private college.
 Somehow, I learned enough
of about three of them to decide I liked them. And, somehow, I got people to
fill in the applications for me.
Imagine my glee when my top choice accepted
me! I hadn't yet begun to navigate the whole sea of who is going to pay for
this and how, so I was in a state of bliss. Then my guidance counselor called
me in to her office and said we needed to have a meeting with my parents.
The college, it turned out, was a tad
conflicted about accepting a blind student. Let me repeat: This was the late
Sixties. There was no disability rights movement in Toledo, Ohio. I didn't know
anyone else with any kind of disability and, saddest of all, experience had
taught me that the only way to be accepted and popular was to minimize my
differences in every way possible, even if it meant doing things in ways that
were 10 times more difficult than they needed to be or just missing out on
experiences altogether.
There were several discussions and a meeting
of my parents, me and all the powers that mattered at my college of choice.
They had so many questions.
Could I take physical education? (My high
school had centered its phys ed program on gymnastics, and I had done well.)
That concern was crossed off the problem list.
How would I do in a science lab? Physiology
had been my favorite subject after literature in high school, so I waxed
enthusiastic about the skeleton, other models, working with a partner. We had
made it work.
Foreign language? No problemo.
The bottom line was this: If I agreed to ask
for no special favors (today we say accommodations) and, heaven forbid, didn't
balk at meeting any of the required course requirements, I could come to
school.
As inequitable as that bargain sounds today,
I was elated! It was a definite deal. In the fall, I would go off to college
— just like every other high school senior I knew.
I hired students to read for me. I talked to
professors about my need to have a separate room where I could bring another
student to read my tests to me. I schlepped probably a 30-pound
“portable” Royal typewriter across campus to type my answers to said
examinations. I schlepped another heavy piece of machinery, my reel-to-reel
tape recorder, to other dorms or classroom buildings when I wanted students to
record whatever they were reading to me. In the library, staff said there was
no place where it was acceptable for another student to read aloud to me, so we
did our reading in the women's room!
The point is, I was on my own to get my
books, schedule exams, introduce myself to my professors, and get by.
This was a small campus in Michigan. I had no
idea then that, although I was one of 2,000 at my school, students with
disabilities were beginning to make their mark on campuses around the country.
Some were even organizing and influencing significant architectural and
attitudinal changes.
Four years later, I attended graduate school
at a large state university where, already, the climate with regard to
disability constituted culture shock. There was an office specifically devoted
to what were then called “handicapped students.” Even more thrilling,
though, knowledge of that office was followed with a kind of euphoria as I
began actually meeting other students with disabilities. I met other blind
students, a deaf woman, kids with manual and power wheelchairs, a guy with leg
braces, another guy with cerebral palsy – and it was like coming home at
last.
For the 18 months of grad school, I enjoyed
the social aspect of having other students with disabilities around me, but the
accommodations concept was too new for me to reap any benefit academically.
In other words, I finished my education
before the protection of the 1977 504 regulations to the Rehabilitation Act
were passed and long before the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act came into
being.
In the 1860s, Gallaudet was formed as the
first post-secondary institution of learning committed to educating deaf
students. After World War I, some colleges and universities around the country
began looking at ways to include returning veterans with disabilities, and that
effort was stepped up significantly following World War II. The concept of such
students having rights, however, wouldn't come on the radar screen till the
baby boomers with disabilities realized that all the civil rights action and
legislation regarding African- Americans and women resonated exactly with the
discrimination they were experiencing as well.
Offices to provide services to students with
disabilities began cropping up around the country with some rapidity in the
1970s, and the numbers of students with disabilities seeking college degrees
increased right along with them. Whereas in the 1950s and ‘60s, scholars
stated that the only students with disabilities attending college were the most
highly motivated, the idea that disabled students had the same rights as
nondisabled started spreading. In 1978, 2.6 percent of all incoming full-time
freshmen identified themselves as having a disability. In 1994, that number had
grown to 9.2 percent. And it just keeps growing.
According to Richard Allegra, president of
the Association of Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), there are currently
more than 1,000 institutions holding membership in this organization, which
represent only a third or maybe a fourth of the total number of offices for
students with disabilities operating around the country.
In other words, while it was perfectly legal
in 1969 to make a student promise that she wouldn't ask for any special
accommodations – or flatly deny admission regardless of ability –
students today can pretty much count on some level of built-in special
assistance when they get to campus.
Common academic accommodations include
accessible classroom location; priority registration; early syllabi; assistive
technology; course requirement modification; open- or closed-captioned videos;
readers; interpreters; note takers; conversion of materials into audio,
electronic or Braille formats; extended test times; and a number of other
adjustments. All of this sounds terrific, but there are two inherent problems
with the status quo that worry this baby boomer who had to schlep that bulky
typewriter through the snow.
First, there are no disability services
police. AHEAD suggests best practices and professional standards, but if a
college is ignoring one cohort and favoring another or, worse, providing
useless accommodations in some cases, there's no overseeing body to tell them
to straighten up.
Second, I wonder if the sense of entitlement
might be sometimes weightier than the sense of accountability for some of
today's accommodated students.
For those of us who attended college before
the laws were in place to protect our rights, the expectations placed on us
were often one big, fat wake-up call. It was my responsibility, for instance,
to get my books in recorded format. If I didn't contact my professors early and
get my titles or the hard copies of texts to the recordings for the blind and
dyslexic headquarters in time, well, I just wouldn't have books when classes
began. If I didn't find, hire and schedule readers, I wouldn't know what the
printed material was that we were required to read. If I didn't get a
professor's permission to take the exam in a separate room, obtain a reader who
could read the questions to me, and find a spot where the clackety-clack of my
typewriter wouldn't disturb anyone, well, I guess I would just have failed.
If you're going to be a student with a
disability, there's no better time in history than now to do it, but those of
us who have marched and fought and stood on the shoulders of others who marched
and fought even harder have a responsibility to educate today's students with
disabilities about more than astronomy and Shakespeare. While some students I
spoke with for this article are indeed responsible for getting their own
accommodations in place, many are removed from the process, simply expecting
staff in the disability services office to take care of academic issues. All of
us can make the disability community a healthier one by imparting to students
news of the legacy they have received when it comes to “rights” and
the responsibility they have to themselves and others to be accountable for
their own accommodations.
For those who need an alternate classroom
location or a sign language interpreter or a set of class handouts converted
into Braille, there is much more at stake in utilizing the resulting
accommodation if you played a role in achieving it. And if you had a role in
putting the accommodation you needed into place, you're also more likely to
look at the bigger picture and want to get involved with improving the equality
of academic life for everyone. When the rights are aligned with
responsibilities, it is truly an amazing era to be a college student –
with or without a disability.
Deborah Kendrick, a newspaper columnist since 1986, is
senior features editor for AccessWorld.
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