“You can’t get there from here,” is the old tag line of a well known New England joke. As we celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act the line has been circling my head like a horse fly. In our nation’s higher education arena the disabled are blocked by colleges and universities that don’t take the ADA seriously and in turn do the least amount possible to provide accessibility to disabled students and faculty. And campus visitors. Your grandmother shows up for graduation and needs wheelchair access to the convocation. The doors are locked to the adjacent building where the only ramps and elevators are located. No one can find the key because it’s Sunday. No one is in charge. The maladapted ADA Coordinator is at home drinking a root beer. I know thousands of stories like this. A student requires note takers and the university fails to provide them for over half a semester. She flunks the class. When after months of wrangling the university admits it could have done better, they still take another year to expunge the failing grade. This prevents the student from joining a sorority. The ADA Coordinator is home drinking a root beer. The ADA Coordinator is not a bad guy. He simply has no power to fix anything. He’s the master of a Potemkin village. There are disability statements on the website. ‘If you need access click here” it says on the Information Tech page. Click it, and well, years go by. They’re not equipped to solve your problem with the new Blackboard learning software or the brand spanking new admissions website. Small wonder that only one in four students with disabilities who enter college actually graduates. Small wonder there are so few faculty with disabilities. I’ve railed about this situation on this blog and in meeting after meeting. What’s really interesting is that in the meetings where I talk about these problems no one ever, and I mean ever, says “how can I help?” Even though on the face of it the non-disabled faculty are progressive types, access isn’t important to them.
Tag: Education
May 16, 2008
EDUCATION
Opening others’ eyes
Blind professor helping UI students, doctors see
disabilities in a new light
By Diane Heldt
The Gazette
IOWA CITY — Blindness is thought by many to be a great calamity,
still viewed in 19th-century Dickensian terms, says University of Iowa
professor Steve Kuusisto.
But the reality, says Kuusisto, who has been blind since birth, is that
his talking computer, his guide dog and public transportation allow him to do
most anything sighted people can.
“It’s not an obstacle to having a good job and a full life,” he said.
“Nobody has to have a second-class life. Really, the sky’s the limit.” That
philosophy, the 53-year-old Kuusisto said, fuels a new vision of disability
that is emerging. That vision moves away from viewing people with disabilities
as “defective,” he said, to finding ways for technology and society to help
them lead the richest, fullest lives.
It’s a vision Kuusisto (pronounced COO-sis-toe) brought to the UI last
fall when he joined the faculty as an English professor with a joint
appointment in the Carver College of Medicine.
At the medical college he is a “humanizing agent” who helps educate
doctors about disability issues. UI officials hope Kuusisto bridges the goals
of disability advocates and health professionals.
“I’m probably the firstever poet named to a faculty of ophthalmology,”
Kuusisto says with a smile.
Planet of the Blind 