When it comes to studying disability on university campuses, it helps to understand how everything is connected, and how principles of universal design can support students with and without disabilities. It helps to understand how university institutions and infrastructure prop up ableism. It helps to recognize that offices like the Moses Center prevent students from getting consistent help by requiring students to reapply for accommodations every year, accommodations that are often uncertain or ignored by faculty. It helps to know that tenured white male faculty are the least likely to grant accommodations to students with disabilities, while nontenured women of color are the most likely to grant them, so when you’re trying to persuade a white man that you really need help, you’re going to have to work even harder than normal.

While navigating your university, it helps to be able to do more than laugh at a set of extremely heavy doors, but instead think about how universal design would improve those doors for people with disabilities and for everyone. Think about why we still have timed exams when there is no evidence indicating that a time limit helps people learn. Think about why speech-to-text and text-to-speech for people with disabilities were seen as burdens to implement until they became cool features for everyone on smartphones. Think about how easy it is to ignore people with disabilities, the fact that anyone of any age can have a disability, and the fact that people with disabilities are often just thought of as acceptable losses in something like, say, a pandemic. It’s a long video, but here’s a keynote speech from disability scholar Jay Dolmage that touches on all of that. The video takes a little while to get going, but I promise it’s worth it. The video is an hour and ten minutes long, so if you can’t watch the whole thing, I totally understand, but I’d urge you to at least watch the 5 minute clip starting here.

“What we do for the majority of students is seen as an investment, and what we do for disabled students is seen as a drain. That’s the big rhetorical problem… the real waste is the fact that up to 20% of students have disabilities and that we are losing them left and right. That is a huge loss to the intellectual potential of our country. It’s never framed as such, it’s framed as a natural thing and they probably shouldn’t be there anyway. It’s framed as steep steps sorting the society in a reliable way, and it’s simply not what’s happening. We are losing a huge number of people who have a lot to say, a huge value to our society and our culture, and when you look at that as the cost, the loss of those people and that potential, then it doesn’t look like very much to have an institutional contract with somebody who’s gonna make all PDFs and all websites accessible, that is a small investment.”

I’ll see you all at practice,

Lev “Witty nickname” Bernstein

Secretary, Quiz Bowl at NYU, 7E4 - 7E5