Treat College Like A Job

From Service Dog Training

This post is part of the Bloggers Unite Disability Empowerment Event

“Treat College Like a Job:” The Sanitization of Disability by Disability Services Providers

“Treat college like a job!” It’s a nice statement, isn’t it? Encouraging, prompting, and generally well meaning…it’s the type of statement you’d expect to find hung up with thumb tacks on the wall in your college advisor’s office, a not-so-subtle reminder that you should be doing more than sleeping late and partying. What could possibly be the problem with this statement?

This statement appeared on the website for the disability services office at my alma mater. It was, in fact, the motto for the office. Students with disabilities should “Treat college like a job!” Ok, yes, students with disabilities should take college seriously, but shouldn’t all students? And, when it comes down to it, is it any of their business if students with disabilities are treating college like a job?

The sole purpose of institutions like higher education disability services offices is to level the playing field between people with disabilities and people without disabilities. These offices take many different names; in employment they may be human resource directors, or equal opportunity offices. Government offices have ADA coordinators. All with the same purpose…to ensure equal access and equal participation for people with disabilities by the removal of barriers and the provision of reasonable accommodations. These offices are not staffed with counselors or life coaches, if a student parties away her undergraduate career or an employee performs terribly at his job despite accommodation, these offices are not responsible. Since these offices supposedly hold the institutional experts on one thing, making the legally required reasonable accommodations to ensure equal access and equal participation to whatever program, service or employment opportunity is in question; why is it that we find them so very often in the business of marketing cute slogans, encouraging people with disabilities to “treat college like a job,” implying that if we try hard enough, we can do anything, or that the only real disability is a bad attitude?

People that work in offices like these are the “disability people.” If it concerns disability, and is in that institution, it comes to them. This does not mean, unfortunately, that these people have any relevant education or experience in this field. Often, disability related duties are tacked on to other jobs, especially in employment based disability services offices. I conducted an extremely informal survey at a recent conference attended by many new ADA coordinators and was surprised by the number of people that told me they were assigned these duties because they were on vacation when the vacancy arose and thus could not protest. Are these people well-meaning? Yes, usually. Are they qualified and sensitive to the needs of the disability community? Unfortunately, rarely.

So, we get cute slogans. These slogans come from a deeply seated discomfort with the concept of disability. For many people, and somewhat understandably, disability is bad, thus, no disability is good. The strategy of many offices then becomes to minimize the disability as much as possible. What they don’t realize is that not only is this deeply hurtful and offensive to the disability community, it’s an entirely ineffective method of dealing with accommodations.

The reality is that there is still a deeply held, if somewhat subconscious belief, that disability means there is something wrong with you. Disability is conventionally defined as something about you not working like most people would expect, ie, something that is wrong with you. What I mean by “wrong” in this context, though, is that disability represents to many people more than just a loss or difference of function in a particular physical, mental or emotional capacity, but instead something that fundamentally, inherently makes that person less of a human. For people that feel this way, the only way to make disability somehow “ok” is to make the disability not the issue. Struggling in college? You need to “treat college like a job!” Can’t get up that flight of stairs to your office? “If you try hard enough, you can do anything!” The problem is no longer the disability…the problem is the person, somehow, if the person with a disability has failed, it cannot possibly be because they were not provided with the tools to even have the slightest chance of success, it is because they didn’t try hard enough, they didn’t want it enough, or they had a bad attitude about it.

This results in a culture that cannot stand un-sanitized views of disability. They cling to the one incident where a person with a disability made it work without asking for accommodations and hold that person up as the model of everything a disabled person should be…the disabled person who worked hard enough, who had a good enough attitude, and somehow magically managed to get through life without any *known* accommodations.

What happens to the un-sanitized disabled person? They are forever compared to the mythical other person. They are told that so-and-so had a disability like theirs and didn’t need X, Y, or Z accommodation, so why should they? After all, they should just try harder and then they wouldn’t need any help at all! Inevitably, this method of approaching disability forces people with disabilities into the incorrect and damaging belief that they are never good enough, never try hard enough, and if they could just have a better attitude, everything would be ok.

Please…on the day when having a better attitude adds elevators and when trying harder makes print books morph into Braille let me know. I’ll come out to join you in looking for the flying pigs.

--Tiffany Huggard-Lee 13:15, 24 July 2010 (CDT)