Disability and the University

Foreword to the First Edition

Mike Oliver

In 2017 I returned to my old university to deliver an open lecture. I had spent many happy years there as an undergraduate, postgraduate and then lecturer in the 1970s and early 1980s. The changes I saw that day were surprising to say the least. There were new buildings and people everywhere and the campus seemed much larger and much busier than I had remembered it.

University life was much more relaxed when I turned up as an undergraduate in 1972. There were just over 5000 students on campus and throughout the 10 years I spent studying and working there I only met 4 other disabled students and one lecturer who used a wheelchair.

As a disabled wheelchair user back in 1972 I quickly found that the built environment of the campus made no concessions to my mobility needs; only one of the 4 colleges had a lift and there were no ramps, dropped kerbs or reserved parking spaces. Nor did I expect any at that time and I spent years being lifted to wherever I needed to go by fellow students. My life was made easier too by helpful porters, cleaners and catering staff willing to go the extra mile with help and support.

Additionally, no concessions were made to accessing the curriculum; there was no extra time in exams, no support staff working with disabled students and no information in other mediums. Such things simply did not exist at that time and there were no expectations that there should be from the authorities or students themselves.

During my recent visit there were more than 20,000 students on campus of whom more than 2,500 were disabled. There were many more buildings, built or being built often where green spaces used to be, and the campus was much more crowded with people rushing everywhere.

The growth I encountered on my return was very impressive and not just in size and numbers. The information and support currently available to disabled people wanting to study and work at the university was also remarkable. There was a Student Support & Wellbeing Team employing over 120 staff full and part-time, and they provided a whole range of services including educational support, mentoring, study skills tuition and support groups to students.

So where did this all come from? In my view there have been 2 main drivers. The first of these has been the sheer determination of increasing numbers of disabled people to access all of the things that non-disabled people for granted. All over the world disabled people have been coming together collectively and demanding that they be able to take their rightful place in the societies in which they live.

The second driver has been to place the experiences of disabled people centre stage both in developing economic and social policies generally and specifically opening up access to universities to all disabled people who wanted to study and work there. Facilitating this has been the development of disability studies as an academic discipline in its own right countering the individualistic and over- medicalised approaches which existed before.

But, of course, the changes noted above over the last 50 years couldn’t have happened without the willingness of university authorities to accommodate all this. It would be wrong however to assume that nothing further needs to done and that all universities have become barrier free environments in the broadest sense of the term to all disabled people across the world. We should also note that global austerity policies have reversed some of the positive changes we have seen over the past fifty years.

This book makes a positive contribution to taking these changes into the future and hopefully reversing some of cuts already made or planned. It is based on the real-life experiences of those who have been there and done it. It also confronts outdated notions about what disabled people need and how best to prove it. Finally, it serves a guide to what needs to be done in the future so that, those looking back in 50 years time, will be as pleasantly surprised then as I am now about the changes that have taken place.

Mike Oliver

16/10/2018

Foreword to the Second Edition

Tanya Titchkosky & Rod Michalko

We are sure of one thing: while the meaning of disability is structured in limited and limiting ways by the academy, disabled students are always more and other than these meanings and structures make them to be. Living precariously on this more than/less than precipice of academic life, disabled students represent the occasion and possibility for critical engagement with all forms of institutional life in contemporary culture. Disabled students do, after all, embody the cultural contradictions that flow from the more than/less than life of disability, contradictions that disabled students paradoxically also challenge.

We too have lived in precarity on this precipice and in the midst of these cultural contradictions. Both of us are disabled (Tanya is dyslexic and Rod is blind) and both of us live our disabilities in the academy; first, as students and then as faculty. Interestingly enough, our experiences as disabled students were eerily close to that of students today, that is, the academy did not expect us to show up.

But, there we were, representing the coming together of disability and the academy. This meant that sometimes faculty and administrators, other students, and even ourselves, came to know that life with disability in the academy was both more and less than we all first thought. What is intriguing for us, is that we did not expect that our particular interwoven experiences of blindness and dyslexia, and the general ways disability was made meaningful, would or could play such a predominant role in our scholarly research and teaching. Nor did we expect that this role would remain a definitive feature of life with disability in the academy and one which we, alongside disabled students, continue to respond to in myriad ways.

This Disabled Students’ Manifesto is a lively testimony to these many responses. And yet, the university continues to excel in generating limited and limiting conceptions of disability as a problem to be solved, as an unwanted condition to be detected, managed, and even eradicated. Curiously, this continues in the academy in the midst of the sentiment expressed in the oft used phrase, “we’ve come a long way, but there is a long way to go.” Nonetheless, disabled students tenaciously remain, in Paul Hunt’s (1998 [1966], p. 18) terms, an “uncomfortable, subversive … living reproach to any scale of values” that conceives disability as only a problem to be solved, as merely objects of research. As a disruption to the dominant social imaginary of the normative order, disabled students continue to show how the academy needs to struggle to realize that disability offers a form of perception. Disabled students show, too, that disability can potentially offer a generative and even new understanding of the normative order and show how disability is needed in that order, including that of the academy.

Despite the increase in the number of disabled students, faculty and staff on university campuses, as Mike Oliver highlighted in his Foreword to the first edition of this volume, the academy stubbornly clings to its exclusive orientation toward disability. Our discipline of sociology, for example, participates greedily in this dominant social imaginary that significantly restricts the meaning of disability. Sociology typically frames disability as either a form of deviance (usually involuntary) or as the added-on lesser variable within the gender, class, race tri-factor. Framed this way, knowledge of adaptation, passing, or social control of disabled people is generated but knowledge of disability as a life-worth-living, as a way of perceiving, knowing and being, remains beyond the scope of the sociological “eye.”

Since the 1981 International Year of Disabled Persons, it has become more and more common for disabled people to be included as anticipated participants in society, including in the academy. The proliferation of university policies and procedures in relation to the accommodation of disability attests to this anticipated participation. These policies and procedures, which are now global, typically emphasize the student as responsible for any accommodation they might require. It is the student who is tasked with seeking out the office charged with accommodation. It is the student who is tasked with proving that they are legitimately disabled thus deserving of services. Anticipated is one thing, expected is another matter altogether.

Anticipated but not expected: this is the current predicament for disabled people on our campuses. While surrounded by anticipatory structures of individualized accommodation, disabled students are met with educational practices, platforms, protocols and policies that still do not expect them to show up. The academy limits its conception and subsequent engagement with disability to a matter of “fit.” Disabled students who do not easily fit are, therefore, not easily accommodated whereas those students conceived of by the academy as “easy-fits” are easily accommodated. This demonstrates why university admission platforms and student recruitment strategies are rarely touched by disability-friendly practices.

The second edition of A Disabled Students’ Manifesto raises many important questions in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a phenomenon that re-ordered university life. Did structural responses to pandemic protocols change not only forms of access and accommodation but also forms of meaning for disabled students? Have disabled students been recognized as more and other than an unexpected but bureaucratically anticipated problem population? Has the University awakened to its need for disabled students and disability studies for its own well-being? A Disabled Students’ Manifesto helps us to engage these questions and raises many more. It encourages us to think about the scales of value and the forms of knowledge that are organizing our lives together in all our academic relations, through COVID-19 pandemic measures and well beyond.

Questions of accessibility and accommodation might be understood as the beginning point for re-engaging the limited and limiting ways the university engages disabled students. What is required is for all of us to consider, now that we might find our way into the academy, what remains for us as disabled people beyond anticipated access procedures. What difference can and should disability now make?

CHAPTER 1

Post-Pandemic Opportunities for Inclusion in Higher Education

Ben Whitburn and Christopher McMaster