By Rachel Zing
CU Boulder’s campus is beautiful – there is no doubt about that; it’s wonderful to walk through and observe, and the University Memorial Center is considered one of the finer buildings. The plaza outside the UMC is an ideal place to study, eat and hang out with friends, and it even has picnic tables on each level of the plaza down towards the fountain. Most of these tables have four seats, although many of the lower ones have an empty space for wheelchair users to partake in the sociality of it all. Seems idyllic, except for one small thing: there is no ramp to get down to the tables.
When I lived on campus, at the first floor meeting of the year we went over the procedure for fire drills and evacuations. Someone in the back brought up that they had braces to assist with walking and were unable to take stairs; they lived on the fourth floor, so how would they get out if the elevator was unavailable? There was no answer to what could be a life or death question.
There’s an evident trend here: CU Boulder routinely falls short of providing proper access to its students with all kinds of disabilities, both visible and invisible. Last year the Daily Camera released a series of articles highlighting several students and their struggles with securing the accommodations that CU is required by law to provide for them, such as lost medical information or unfair testing distribution.
CU has been investigated for failure to comply with ADA standards as recently as 2014; CU students are also unable to access the DOJ reports or CU’s response to the investigation through the university, because all the documents have limited access. The DOJ’s closing report, which is difficult to find, says that even though they won’t continue the case, the students with complaints are still justified in filing private lawsuits. CU’s proposed improvements only addressed academic accommodations, and says nothing about the inaccessibility of certain parts of campus or specific class models. The College of Arts and Sciences has begun to host an annual Disability Symposium, but it has yielded no concrete results and is given no power to enact possible improvements in Disability Services or elsewhere.
According to the CU Strategic Plan for 2021-2026, employees for the university don’t receive any assistance from Disability Services, which brings question, does CU have many disabled employees?. The strategic plan additionally fails to address anything involving the Disability Services department, where there is a severe understaffing problem.
In the Spring 2023 semester, there were eight access coordinators for well over 4,000 students with accommodations. My own required services are relatively simple, yet difficult to get proper assistance for and a logistical nightmare if something in the syllabus changes. I can only imagine how it must feel for those who can’t get into their classrooms, safely flee their on-campus homes in case of an emergency, or who have to witness an area ‘made’ for them be a simple performative act.
The 2024 Disability Symposium, the second to have occurred, makes a point to emphasize the experiences of disabled students and the obstacles they face, but only has one panel geared toward the higher education institution. Disability Services even launched Access+, which provides a space for disabled students to foster community and attend workshops and events. However, a room where disabled students can chat with each other, while thoughtful, does not change the fact that there are now only six access coordinators in charge of organizing thousands of student accommodations.
These attempts to address the ways CU has failed to comply with the needs of its disabled students can be helpful, but avoid the root of the problem. There are still several parts of campus that are inaccessible to anyone with mobility problems, not to mention the ways that learning disabilities are clustered together. CU Boulder has a lot to offer, including a plethora of academic paths that attract students of all sorts of different backgrounds. Those with disabilities deserve better than a program incapable of giving them a fair amount of attention.
Posted Oct.18