Higher Education's Studied Indifference to People with Disabilities Reflects the "Rehab Model" Ad Nauseum

 

There's a great article over at Getting Hired dot Com about the lawsuit that's been filed against Arizona State University by several blindness advocacy groups. The issue has to to with ASU's decision to provide its students with the Kindle Reader as a means of accessing textbooks--and yes, the Kindle is still inaccessible to blind people. I'll leave aside for the time being the relative technical issues involved in making the Kindle accessible for the talking points are tedious. Trust me, the Kindle can be made to talk without difficulty save for the fact that it needs a more expensive "out of the box" operating system.

ASU adopted the Kindle because it seemed easy. It seemed like a good thing. My general point (such as it is) is that higher education administrators tend to imagine that "someone else" will "take care" of "those people" who have disabilities. American higher education still imagines that the Victorian approach to disability is acceptable--that the disabled are taken care of by people who will read to them in the dark or laboriously turn their books into tape recordings or Braille.

This "rehab" model of Disability is of course the very thing that disability studies has dissected and about which we know a good deal. We know for instance that college administrators who imagine that accessibility is merely an inconvenience and that they can pass along the issue to others are ignoring the ADA and many state laws. But they do so with the built in assurance that the rehab model is acceptable. Someone else will retrofit inaccessible learning environments or physical facilities and assure accessibility for the blind or the wheelchair users or the deaf or what have you. Those "rehab people" will take care of that.

Here at my own university there's a Victorian rehab assumption in place wherein the administration routinely fails to make restrooms accessible for people with disabilities and they claim any variety of things depending on who you talk to. One fellow tells me that the ADA doesn't apply to the University of Iowa. Another tells me that they don't have any money. A third tells me that the university's philosophy is that "we've let you in, what more do you want?" Set against this is the old fashioned rehab model--the administrators I've talked to at the U of Iowa believe that disability accommodations are someone else's issue. So of course nothing gets done. How embarrassing it is that the University of Iowa, the leading public institution in the state that is proudly represented by Senator Tom Harkin, co-author of the Americans with Disabilities Act is indifferent to making its major academic buildings accessible.

The lawsuit against Arizona State reflects the indifference of ASU's administrators to the contemporary reality that students and staff with disabilities are no longer secondary citizens who can be told to "wait" for access. And yet the indifference of the ASU administrators is widely reflected across the U.S.. I see the same forces at work in my own back yard.

 

S.K. 

Comments

[Jill]

YES! People with disabilities are still treated as "other" and the "rehab" model is still accepted everywhere. We're working against it, though, and with more and more people getting on board, we're bound to beat it.

[Nancy Leonard]

How can I make Blackboard learning platform accessible to the blind and others with limited reading access? The software sites themselves don't even say! Thanks.

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Four short words sum up what has lifted most successful individuals above the crowd: a little bit more.

[Nike Dunk High Premium]

I will be asked to do everything the best I think! Can read your blog with my own than I found too much difference! I admire you!