Nothing but the minimum

The elevator in Thayer was broken again. For most of the dorm’s residents, this was more of a minor inconvenience than a major problem. For Allison P. Kessler ’07, it meant she was stuck.

Kessler uses a wheelchair to get around, so while the elevator was being fixed, Kessler’s friends had to carry her up and down the stairs so that she could go to class and lunch.

Experiences like that one explain Kessler’s advice to incoming freshmen with disabilities. “Make friends with big, strong people,” she says. Otherwise, you might run the risk of becoming a prisoner in your own room.

Even when elevators are working, entrapment remains a risk. Joe A. Ford ’06 took a Spanish class last year that required him to go to Lamont’s language lab regularly. The elevator that goes to the sixth floor was almost too small to fit his wheelchair; he could edge himself in, but once there, he couldn’t reach the buttons.

Problems for Ford began as soon as he arrived at Harvard. The University is not required by law to supply an aide for Ford, who has cerebral palsy and needs help with everyday tasks like brushing his teeth and getting dressed. It took three months for Ford to find an assistant he could afford. In the meantime, family members took turns living with him.

Ford also ran into trouble when classes began. The buildings where one of his courses was held was not accessible by wheelchair. Ford missed lecture until the class was moved. Kessler had the same problem—she missed three sections of a class held in Grays basement because the lift that helped her get to the room required a key she didn’t have.

Had Ford or Kessler gone to another college, they probably would have run into the same kinds of difficulties posed by inaccessible buildings, shopping periods and unanticipated technology failures. But the rough spots might have been smoother.

At Yale, for instance, an administrator would have contacted Ford before the start of shopping period to find out what classes he planned to attend. Then, before lectures ever began, the administration would make sure to place Ford’s anticipated classes in accessible buildings. And in the period when Ford was still searching for an aide, he could have turned to the Special Needs Awareness and Peer Services (SNAPS), where student volunteers on call from 8 a.m. until midnight would have helped him with everything from laundry to grocery shopping.

Harvard does what it is required by law to do. But it usually doesn’t do more.

The First Wave

Ford was born with mixed quadriplegic cerebral palsy and has been in a wheelchair since he was 18 months old. The youngest of eight children, he attended Denver West High School, a public school Ford says was highly responsive to his needs. So he was surprised by his experience at Harvard. “I had expected that Harvard would be at least as effective as my inner-city high school,” he says.

Entering public school during the 1990s, Ford was part of the first wave of disabled students who received any protection at all. Legislation promising accommodations and services to people in his situation was first drafted less than 30 years ago. Today that first group of disabled students makes up an increasingly large portion of undergraduates attending regular four-year colleges.

Graduate School of Education Professor Thomas Hehir served as director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs from 1993 to 1999. He says the expanded legislation has created results. “We’ve just really had little over a generation and a half of students who went through public schools, had the right to access public schools and increasingly those people are coming to universities and seeking equal access,” Hehir says. Disabled students like Ford are no longer willing to completely adapt themselves to college systems. They believe that the college system should work harder to adapt to them.

But when Ford and the roughly two hundred and fifty other disabled students who matriculate to Harvard each year arrive on campus, they may be surprised to find that the access here is not what they have been used to. As a private university, Harvard has fewer legal obligations to disabled students than a public high school. The only guideline is the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prevents Harvard and other colleges that receive federal funds from discriminating against otherwise-qualified disabled students. The open-ended protection leaves universities with far fewer legal obligations than public schools.

“Some universities provide above and beyond what the law requires,” says Hehir. “Harvard’s not that type of university.”

The Student Disability Resources (SDR) web site does its part to make it clear that Harvard is not “that type of university.” The site includes a letter to prospective disabled students from SDR director Louise H. Russell. The letter begins, “When you think about how thoroughly university admissions offices scrutinize applicants, it’s unrealabout what makes a good ‘fit’ for you: just because you’re smart enough to be admitted to a particular college doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a match made in heaven...” The letters goes on to warn disabled students that the structured help they received in high school will not be available at Harvard: “If you love to study politics and play rugby, would you want to go to a college that featured neither? Similarly, if you relied on editors and proofreaders from a supportive learning center in high school, would you want to go to a college that didn’t offer such an ongoing structured program as you knew it in high school?”

“I think on one hand, that’s a very appropriate message to convey,” Hehir says. “[Harvard] is not required to provide elaborate support systems that go above and beyond what the law requires.”

Russell, who has written extensively on the “transition to college,” says that the letter is designed to help incoming disabled college students “do their homework” before selecting a college. She says that different colleges provide different services, and students who are accustomed to one way of doing things should not be forced into another way of doing them at college.

Ford, however, finds the site’s tone off-putting. “I think that the fact that people have more responsibility [at college] is true for everyone. It is necessary to explain to disabled people what they have to do here. But word it in a nicer way!”

Structural Changes

One of the largest obstacles Ford faces is academic. Because it is difficult for him to read printed material, Ford needs books to be converted into digitally synthesized speech in order to study. Though Harvard is required to provide him with equal access in this area, his experience has been anything but easy. The only computer equipped to convert his books into speech sits in the Science Center, far from Ford’s home in Currier. Ford says he’d like to see stations installed in all libraries. But at Yale, his ideal system wouldn’t suffice: they put scanning stations directly in students’ rooms.

Ford wouldn’t say whether he’s confronted the administration with the fact that their programs don’t seem to measure up. But in the past, he said, he has written to them with words of advice and complaint. Concocting solutions to the obstacles he faces is a skill Ford mastered in high school, where his petitions succeeded in making life easier for him.

But while he has brought that proactive approach to Harvard, others take a different tact.

Before coming here, Kessler attended boarding school in Connecticut. As at Harvard, many of the school’s buildings were old and not handicapped-accessible. “I guess I’m kind of used to the bare minimum,” Kessler says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not annoying and not frustrating.” Kessler’s biggest frustration has been difficulty in accessing sports facilities and friends’ rooms. She found a way to participate in crew this year, but she can’t visit friends who live in Holworthy, Stoughton or Matthews.

Judith York, the director of Yale’s Resource Office on Disabilities, says that Harvard and Yale face similar problems with their buildings because so many of them were built before the law required them to be accessible. In the past few years, Yale’s campus has undergone extensive renovations; three brand-new buildings, which will all be handicapped-accessible, are under construction. York says that because Harvard’s building renovations have not been as vigorous as Yale’s, it is difficult to compare the schools’ levels of access. “We deal with a facility, what has been given to us,” she says. “We’ve got to make due with what we can do.”

Ford, who has often been forced to make do with what Harvard offers, has two pieces of advice for prospective students. “The most important thing for them to know is what they’re entitled to and to really push the University,” he says, “even if the University disagrees with it.” Second, “Going to Harvard is worth it.”

Ford follows his own advice. He has considered becoming a disability-rights attorney after graduation.