Clearing Barriers to Learning

"You've got to take an interest in other people for any kind of political or social activism," says Guy B. Wallace '88.

And Wallace has taken an interest in his fellow disabled students at Harvard.

"You have to have a sincere interest in the problems of other people. Otherwise it's just some kind of ego trip," says Wallace, who was paralysed from the waist down after breaking his neck playing rugby at age 16. "I'm not particularly interested in that."

For Wallace, no alternative ever existed to taking up the issues of disabled access and rights that personally confronted him at Harvard every day.

This work for disabled students is "clearly, radically activist," Wallace says. "[Improving the lives of the disabled] requires profound changes in the literal rock and cement of which the school is built, and it reflects the attitudes of the administration and of the community."

"In a wider sense, the whole view of what the normal person does and how they talk must be changed.... The whole view of disabled students, what they can do and what they should do, all these things should be changed," says Wallace, who headed up Action for a Better Learning Environment (ABLE), a disabled students group.

But at Harvard, administrators rarely have approached disabled issues broadly, Wallace says despite his appeals, meetings and negotiations with them.

Wallace's experience as a student confined to a wheelchair was a four-year struggle against frustration. As a freshman he had access to two suites in the entire Yard, both located in one entryway in one dormitory. As an upperclassman in Leverett House, one of the three houses at the College even partially wheelchair accessible, he had no access to the library, common rooms or most students' rooms. And, when the University said living on the 10th floor would be a fire hazard for him, Wallace enlisted the aid of a Boston lawyer to convince Harvard to let him live on an upper floor of the house high-rise.

Meanwhile, Wallace says, administrators faced the decision of how much money to spend to improve facilities for such a small segment of the student population. But even when the University made concessions at the threat of legal action or public embarrassment, Wallace says changes were always minor and limited to case-by-case modifications instead of general projects.

Scaled Back Plans

Although the Quad Houses have recently undergone $33 million in renovations, for example, only 20 percent of those three houses were made handicapped-accessible, Wallace says. Likewise, original verbal agreements to make one Yard dorm totally accessible were scaled back to plans of two suites in one entry, he says.

His efforts to persuade administrators to develop a "coherent plan that they would implement over a certain time that would gradually make the University accessible in certain areas, like the residence halls or the Yard" resulted largely in disappointment after long discussions and verbal promises, he says.

But Wallace adds that a new generation of wheelchair bound students--educated in public school systems that have been handicapped accessible since 1975--will arrive at Harvard and other universities with even "higher expectations." And more intensity.