’m never quite sure how to explain my experience at Dartmouth as someone with a hearing loss. On one hand, I love Dartmouth just as much as the next person and have made the choice not to allow a few negatives to determine the quality of my time here. I have very real fears about sharing my experience with you, but I feel that the benefits of doing so far outweigh the costs. I don’t want to become a victim of my disability, and I don’t want to be defined by it. I also don’t want to become just another person who is offended. And this is not just about me, it’s about all of us.
I have a moderate-to-severe sensori-neural hearing loss, which means that if a personal with normal hearing can hear 100% of a normal conversation, I hear only 40-50%. It was diagnosed in kindergarten and my life related to it has been a whirl wind of trips to Denver to see the audiologist, MRIs, CT scans, raise your hand at the beep tests, blood drawing and doctors sticking all sorts of things in my ears. Yes, it was traumatic, and yes, I am a bit dramatic. But I still hate going to the ear doctor. Because of my hearing loss, I also have difficulty discerning what people say, though I can hear them talking. Additionally, loud noises are physically painful and cause migraine headaches.
Because of my disability, I receive special accommodations in my classes. Through the Student Accessibilities Service, I am provided a volunteer note taker in each class, as well as a front row seat. I also use remote captioning, which allows someone from across the country to hear the lecture and type it up as it’s happening. I see this transcript live in class on my laptop.
Having a hearing loss can be such a small issue, and I hesitate to make a big deal out of it, but things happen every day that do not allow me to ignore it. For example, in one of my classes, the professor always forgot to wear the microphone and I would have to interrupt his lecture to get him to wear it—he would often roll his eyes or drop the mic, making it clear to me that it annoyed him. The other day, I asked someone what I missed in a lecture, and he said, “Oh, nothing worth hearing anyways.” He doesn’t realize that he is making that choice for me. Even going out can be a challenge not worth dealing with—I can’t hear anyone over all of the noise in the frat basements, and at dance parties, the music is so loud that staying for even 15 minutes can give me a migraine.
To this end, not only have I not been able to ignore my hearing loss, but I’ve been forced to identify as someone who is disabled. It’s not about being a victim, but rather about navigating every day life here with that label.
If this is the first time you’ve heard about these issues, it’s not a surprise. People with disabilities, whether learning, physical, or otherwise, comprise one of the most invisible and marginalized groups on campus. But our “differences” affect the quality of our daily lives the most—some of us cannot even function in academics or beyond without our accommodations. The services we do have available specifically to us consist of the Student Accessibilities Office—so there’s someone to try to make sure we are provided all of the necessary technological accommodations, but nobody to counsel us outside of that.
The Student Accessibilities office is very limited in their capacity to provide support for students. They are great about making sure technological aspects are working, but in terms of the legwork of notifying professors, of policing them to make sure they’re accommodating me, this is something I do. Beyond this, it’s located within the Academic Skills Center. When disabled students need to talk to someone about their accommodations, they walk into an office with tutoring posters all over. They can ignore it, of course, but there are two messages being sent: first, that disabled students must be doing poorly in class and need help; and second, that the College simply didn’t care to add a separate office just for disabled students. In contrast, the office at my previous school was physically separate and a space just for students with disabilities. That office was designated to send notices to all of my professors, thus legitimizing my needs. Additionally, if and when students had a problem with a professor accommodating them, the office was always open and they could simply walk in and talk about how it made them feel; but also, and most importantly, what could happen from then on. The office here tries$mdash;$mdash;and let me give credit where it is due$mdash;$mdash;but in general, it seems to echo the consensus of the entire campus: figure it out on your own, only the strongest survive. Beyond this, there is absolutely no guidance or support outside of providing accommodations.
For example, just this week, the 9th of the term, a video wasn’t closed captioned despite the ample time given to do so. There was to be an entire class discussion on it and I was the only person in the class who didn’t have access to the video—I was made to be at a disadvantage because of my hearing loss. This, by definition, is discrimination. I cannot describe adequately the amount of frustration I felt, and also the pain over having to deal with this, of feeling completely excluded from a class because of a disability I have no control over and wish constantly to be able to ignore. Most frustrating during these times is the feeling of being all alone in this experience and of not having anybody to talk to who can offer not just basic support, but also to help me find a solution. This is a common problem. Naturally, those of us with disabilities can reach out to deans, to professors, to counseling services and the like, but in terms of an office or OPAL dean or someone intimately familiar with the challenges of having a disability, there is not one. Even last term, in a politically charged climate filled with rallies and speeches of tolerance and acceptance, somehow disability was left off of the list frequently.
It’s easy to think that discrimination and marginalization doesn’t happen to the disabled. However, in a competitive academic atmosphere, many people see my accommodations as giving me an unfair advantage over them, and my experiences with having a hearing loss are those of discrimination. In fact, my disability is constantly called into question because it might give me an advantage over those with “normal” hearing. But accommodations help to put us on equal footing with “abled” people—they are in no way giving us an advantage.
Unfortunately, the Dartmouth community includes people who are willing to question the validity of someone’s experiences as a member of a minority group, or willing to question the qualifications of those financially unable to pay for college, or willing to question the validity of someone’s disability and the accommodations they receive. It seems to me that there is a deep-seated fear within our community that someone is getting an advantage over you, that someone is getting something you’re not, or that you might have to share some of what you have. We have allowed our fear of other people’s advantages propel us to ripping our community and each other down instead of building each other up. This fear is unfounded and irrational. This fear, this extreme awareness of self-interest in competition, is what has lead to discrimination and marginalization, and to hurt and pain. It has to stop.
In writing this, my fear has been that you will ignore it as just another person complaining. But the point I really want to make is that in the end, we all have our own disabilities, our own uniqueness, our own difficulties and challenges. To extrapolate this clichÉ—we’re all different, we come from different backgrounds, and we experience life in totally different ways. Dartmouth
is a school that encourages these differences. But before we start looking at how we can avoid offending people or deciding who is more of a victim, let’s consider one thing: respect. All I want as a student with a disability, and all you want, is respect—for who we are, for our different experiences, for the challenges we face. From the stereotypes of the rich white frat boy to the black girl from the inner city, to the flamboyant gay man, to the kid with ADHD, to the girl with the hearing loss, we all want respect. Yes, this is horribly preachy, but really, how much does it take to think about what we say before we say it, to be willing to listen to others, to walk a yard in their shoes, to have genuine respect for each other and for ourselves?
