The stories come to us from every quarter about colleges and universities that remain inaccessible to people with disabilities. Most recently we’ve received the following excerpted article from Minneapolis about the University of Minnesota. But the stories are legion and the breadth of the problem is wide. You can read the Minnesota article below but our aim in this brief post is to examine the matter. Why should this problem exist at all, given the fact that the Americans with Disabilities Act was adopted 19 years ago? What cultural forces or considerations have allowed college administrators to imagine that civil rights guarantees for citizens with disabilities do not affect their campuses? What allows the regents of the University of Minnesota to imagine that silence is an appropriate response to demands from students with disabilities that the U of Minnesota’s buildings must be made accessible? Above all else, what is the solution to this shameful situation ?
The short answer to the first question is that violations of Title II of the ADA have been poorly enforced by the Department of Justice, a matter that must be resolved promptly. Title II stipulates that older buildings (buildings constructed before the ADA went into effect in 1990) must be made accessible when these buildings are renovated. So for example, if you renovate a lecture hall in an old building you must make the adjacent restrooms accessible and you must renovate the entrances to the building. Title II does not say that the entire building must be renovated all at once, merely the remodeled areas. The framers of ADA had hoped that this sequential approach to renovation would be a palatable directive–its easier and in some cases more cost effective to make old buildings accessible “bit by bit”.
At the University of Iowa where I teach, administrators decided long ago that ignoring Title II is easy. Recent renovations to our student union’s lobby and hotel restaurant were carried out with no provisions to make rest rooms and associated facilities accessible (things like drinking fountains, telephones, signs, fire alarms, and the like). Indeed at the U of Iowa there is no administrative oversight for this matter–bids are posted for building renovations without any call for accessibility modifications. The building in which I teach, the so-called “English-Philosophy Building” has been renovated from basement to the top floor and it still has no accessible restrooms. Ignoring Title II is easy.
What’s interesting is the degree to which the experience with Minnesota’s regents (who simply have not responded to student requests to make the campus accessible) is replicated “to a T” at Iowa. The apparent prevailing assumption by administrators in higher education is that calls for accessibility are inconvenient and that silence is the best policy. Why not? The Department of Justice has a limited record of ADA enforcement in higher education. While there are cases in which the DOJ has steeply sanctioned colleges and universities for ADA violations (most recently Colorado College and the University of Michigan, both of which had to pay heavy fines and endure embarrassment) these are infrequent incidents. One can fairly imagine academic administrators saying: “Maybe these students or faculty will just go away?”
This matter leads us back to question 2: what cultural assumptions allow administrations at colleges and universities to imagine that the ADA doesn’t apply to their institutions? We cannot imagine that the University of Minnesota would post signs designating “Whites Only” facilities or signs that say “Colored Entrance”. And yet there’s a cultural “pass” for operating entirely inaccessible academic facilities for “those disabled people”. What assumption or set of assumptions makes this scandalous business possible? Surely having inaccessible buildings is bigotry and surely it’s illegal? Well, yes, it IS illegal. But administrators imagine that this isn’t bigotry at all. The cultural problem is that many college administrators conceive of disability as being somehow separate from the issue of campus diversity, preferring to think of accessibility within the framework of what we might call an old fashioned rehabilitation model of disability. By old fashioned we intend to suggest a Victorian inheritance: this model holds that people with disabilities are public exceptions, rare outside of their asylums and special hospitals, and when they show up in the village square they are only provisionally in public–why, don’t they have attendants or other people to look after them? Isn’t this the way it’s always been? Aren’t people with disabilities quite rare out here in the mainstream? Surely we can continue to think of them as rare exceptions to our body politic? And by extension, surely someone else, some specialized rehabilitation person will take care of the poor unfortunate disabled person who has somehow strayed onto campus? Isn’t there some office that looks after them?
The noted scholar of disability studies Lennard Davis writes in his book Bending Over Backwards a trenchant overview of the academic relativism that consigns disability to Diversity’s basement and argues for the critical importance of disability studies in higher education:
“The fact is that disability disturbs people who think of themselves as nondisabled. While most liberals and progressives would charitably toss a moral coin in the direction of the lame, the blind, or the halt, few have thought about the oppression committed in the name of upholding the concept of being “normal.” Consequently, one of the major tasks of this new field is to determine why this “fact” of disturbance exists, is accepted, and is promulgated. Disability scholars want to examine the constructed nature of concepts like “normalcy” and to defamiliarize them. David Pfeiffer writes that “normal behavior is a statistical artifact which encourages people with power and resources to label people without power and resources as abnormal.”’° Rosemarie Garland Thomson coins the term “normate” to make us think twice about using the term normal: “The term normate usefully designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings. Normate, then, is the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them.”’
Normates thus enforce their supposed normality by upholding some impossible standard to which all bodies must adhere. To further demystify such terms, disability activists have called attention to the routine ways in which language is used to describe people with disabilities. Such activists refer to themselves as “crips,” as in the video documentary by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder called Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back, and choose words like gimp, geek, deaf and blind over more polite euphemisms. Expressions like “confined to a wheelchair” are being replaced by the more active “wheelchair user.” And expressions that use impairments metaphorically to convey a negative sense–such as “a lame idea,” “turn a deaf ear,” or “morally blind”–are being seen as the equivalent of racial epithets. This obsession with being normal has a history, as I attempt to show in my book Enforcing Normalcy)2 The use of the word normal in reference to physical bodies appeared in English merely one hundred fifty years ago, coinciding with the birth of statistics and eugenics. Before the nineteenth century in Western culture the concept of the “ideal” was the regnant paradigm in relation to bodies, and so all bodies were less than ideal. The introduction of the concept of normality, however, created an imperative to be normal, as the eugenics movement proved by enshrining the bell curve (also known as the “normal curve”) as the umbrella under whose demanding peak we should all stand. With the introduction of the bell curve came the notion of “abnormal” bodies. An
d the rest is history, inclu
ding the Nazis’ willing adoption of the state-of-the-art eugenics funded and developed by British and American scientists, as Martin Pernick points out in The Black Stork.13 The devastating result was the creation of procedures for exterminating deaf and disabled people, procedures which were later used on the Jews, gypsies, and other “degenerate” races. But the Nazis were only the most visible (and reviled) tip of an iceberg that continues quite effectively to drive humans into daily frenzies of consuming, reading, viewing, exercising, testing, dieting, and so on–all in pursuit of the ultimate goal of being considered normal.
Disability studies demands a shift from the ideology of normalcy, from the rule and hegemony of normates, to a vision of the body as changeable, unperfectable, unruly, and untidy. Philosopher Susan Wendell sounds a clarion call that in the end provides a rationale for the disability perspective: “Not only do physically disabled people have experiences which are not available to the able-bodied, they are in a better position to transcend cultural mythologies about the body, because they cannot do things the able-bodied feel they must do in order to be happy, ‘normal’ and sane …. If disabled people were truly heard, an explosion of knowledge of the human body and psyche would take place.”4″
–from Bending Over Backwards by Lennard J. Davis, New York University Press, p. 24
We can argue that “the body normal” is still culturally of considerable importance in administrative circles within American higher education. That disability clouds the picture is entirely understandable. Disfigurement is a terribly problematic matter if the goal on campus is simply to look good (whatever your social background).
Academic accommodations for learning disabilities, special provisions for assistive technologies or note taking or the like are still, to this very day, unconsciously imagined by many administrators and faculty as being somehow a matter of cheating the system.
That accessible facilities are not part of the cultural capital of Normates should not be surprising given the historical exclusivity of higher education. But that the problem of ADA compliance remains IS surprising especially in a time when we are seeing wounded veterans returning to colleges and universities in the greatest numbers since the years following World War II. Clearly its time for the Department of Justice to demand compliance with the ADA in higher education. And its time for regents, trustees, college presidents, and faculty senates to demand that their campuses be audited for accessibility and adopt serious plans for reaching accessibility goals.
The final question and perhaps the most important one is to ask how a college or university can be culturally inclusive for people with disabilities, a matter that if answered properly will take away the embarrassment and distress of having to ask for simple acceptance within the academic community.
The following article was excerpted by The Inclusion Daily Express.
Students With Disabilities Fight For Equal Access On Campus
(Minnesota Daily)
October 21, 2009
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA– [Excerpt] For student Rachel Garaghty , Scott Hall’s doors are always shut.
University of Minnesota building Scott Hall has multiple stairways and lack of ramps that make it inaccessible for students with mobile disabilities, including those using walkers, canes or, like Garaghty, wheelchairs.
Areas of study located in Scott Hall include American studies, American-Indian studies, African-American and African studies and Chicano studies.
The Disabled Student Cultural Center (DSCC) is lobbying the Board of Regents to put funds toward making Scott Hall accessible to all students on campus — including those with disabilities.
DSCC has approached the board with the issue of Scott Hall accessibility for the past three years, most recently one year ago, but each time received no action, said Garaghty, DSCC’s former programming co-chair and current graduate student,.
Entire article:
Students with disabilities fight for equal access on campus
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2009/red/1021b.htm
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 