Dartmouth still has a long way to go to become accessible to students with disabilities.
Dartmouth has been good to me. Sure, I have my gripes about dining plans going up by $200 almost every year—and the likely introduction of the Super-Size Mega Ultimate Green Plan. I have my gripes about the gummed up Blitz terminal keyboards in FoCo. It also annoys me how the registrar here requires that underclassmen stand in line in the chilly early morning to sign up for the classes of their choice. But, overall, these are minor qualms in the grand scheme of things.
As said, Dartmouth has been good to me. But then again, I don’t have to get around in a wheelchair.
I transferred here from the University of California, Berkeley, which, for all its faults, took the cause of accessibility to what I thought at the time was an overhyped extreme. It probably had something to do with the strict California regulations stacked on top of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the number of students with physical and learning disabilities on campus.
It was common for me to see people going around in wheelchairs—there were even a few students with a form of dwarfism that were permanently confined to a mechanized wheelchair-bed. Although they were unable to manipulate any objects with their small hands other than the joystick for their wheelchair, they were still able to get around just fine with keycards that automatically opened doors, and the copious numbers of ADA-compliant ramps stretching every which way from every University-affiliated building.
And Berkeley didn’t just accommodate physical disabilities. It was a relatively common sight to see students in the front of class with computers that transcribed the lecture into written words almost in real time. I though of it as a technological marvel until I found out it was actually a service the University paid for where typists in India real-time transcribed the lecture.
I suppose it wasn’t as difficult considering how many of the lectures were done through a speaker-system to thousand-student auditoriums, and subsequently piped to iTunes University to be posted online with full video. They didn’t need any new equipment to send off that audio stream across the world. Oh, and we also had a note-taking service that charged nominal amounts for full class notes of each lecture. By now, Dartmouth readers are probably in awe of the rich class skipping opportunities offered at Berkeley.
To be honest, for most of my career at Berkeley, I felt the same way. It was a great tool for slackers that didn’t want to walk through the clear California weather to get to class. It was probably expensive, only enriching the lives of lazy people. God, what a useless and inefficient system. And while I understood the physical accessibility accommodations better, did these students really need TWO ramps going to every high-rise in the new dorm complexes? Bah, Berkeley bureaucracy.
It’s perhaps one of the great ironies of my academic career that I never really had that much sympathy for students with disabilities while at Berkeley, one of the most accessibility conscious and “liberal” (though it isn’t really) schools in the United States. Or, maybe it isn’t. While at Berkeley, it seemed that students with physical or mental disabilities could go about their lives—not as easily as the rest of us, but acceptably nonetheless.
Dartmouth is different. I couldn’t quite place what felt so odd about the physical landscape here, compared to Berkeley. Unlike many, I didn’t have any drop-dead, “This is gorgeous,” reaction. Maybe it was the fact that the grass was somewhat yellowed, and the school felt too SMALL for the 32,000 students I was used to. But nonetheless, images of strident, athletic people bounding up the stairs and running around campus came into my mind. I figured it was mainly because I knew about Dartmouth’s sports prowess compared to most of the Ivies (it still didn’t prepare me for the vast disappointment of going from Cal to Dartmouth football).
That was probably part of it as well, but now, I feel it was also because of something else. Berkeley often felt chaotically styled and garish with its many ramps, blinking keycard sensors, and automated doors scattered everywhere. Dartmouth felt older, with an elevated sensibility. A flight of stairs in front of every building and no ramps or elevators in sight. It was an immediate feeling of difference in who would—or could—come here. I can’t imagine the girl with dwarfism that I said hi to every day coming and going from class in this landscape.
The physical inaccessibility of the campus is reflected into the “invisible” space, with its unfriendliness towards learning disabilities. I’m sure most of us have had classes where professors noted in their syllabi that students with “invisible” disabilities could speak with the professor. But in many cases, even if a student does go to a professor with such concerns, he or she risks being laughed at or looked at with skeptical eyes. The mandated accommodation is also sometimes lost in the fragmented faculty and administration relationship.
To be fair, it isn’t malice that drives this behavior. I spoke with an alum this past Winter Carnival whose feelings about learning disabilities encapsulated perfectly what many professors think—rich, privileged kids at Dartmouth just pay to be tested and diagnosed with these disabilities to get extra time on tests. It lets students be lazy—a view very similar to one that I used to hold.
One that I used to hold, at least, before someone very close to me found out that she likely had dyslexia. I watched her struggle through the administrative offices looking for accommodation, from Ward Newmeyer (the head of Student Accessibility Services), to her dean, to the SAS secretary, to Dick’s House, back to Ward… and so on and so forth. I was privy to the “deal with it yourself” attitude the College had towards testing and treatment. She struggled to figuring out insurance costs and had to find a way to avoid paying thousands of dollars since she didn’t have Dartmouth insurance. Yes, thousands of dollars. And the entire administrative framework, the one that we pay so much to support, gave her little more than a wave towards a general direction.
Since then, I’ve met a surprisingly large number of other students with similar issues. And many others that have “symptoms”—though they don’t see it that way—of at least mild cases of such disorders. I don’t think that people should be coddled in the same way that they are at Berkeley. That is going too far, and it does not prepare students to face the real world. But at the same time, each and every reading assignment shouldn’t be a personal trek to hell for these students.
Nor should moving about the campus, getting food, or just making it into classes.
At Dartmouth, the lack of sympathy for students with disabilities is only topped by the lack of understanding. I should know. I never understood, even when disadvantaged students surrounded me. I have two perfectly good legs, am relatively athletic, and probably read faster than average. It isn’t to brag about it,
it’s to give perspective. My position is similar to those of many students. And probably of most professors as well. We can’t understand what it is like to try to just pick up food from FoCo, which is not exactly designed for wheelchair-bound students in mind. Nor can we understand a routine reading assignment being a multi-night marathon of painful and largely unremembered text. Because we don’t understand, we can’t sympathize. Because we don’t see, we never care to know.
It’s why groups such as the newly founded ABLE are so important. But it’s only a first step. Action must follow awareness—but right now, we aren’t even aware yet. It’ll be a long time before I can see that girl I knew at Berkeley ever even wanting, or ever able, to be here.
