I remain deadlocked with my beloved alma mater, Amherst College, over its refusal to answer my question about how many blind and otherwise physically disabled students it has admitted in the past ten years. As I wrote in my July 5, 2021 essay “Snowflakes at Amherst,” its rationale amounts to a claim that a statistic has a right to privacy. That’s bad enough. But Amherst’s position may be symptomatic of a broader resistance to speaking openly about disability.
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The saga began when I was frustrated to find I couldn’t connect to a live presentation at my class’s reunion in 2021, thanks to Amherst’s reliance on a third-party portal incompatible with speech software. The experience caused me to question whether the College is providing blind and visually impaired students with the accommodations to which they are morally and legally entitled. If Amherst’s website operators don’t automatically ensure that third-party vendors meet accessibility standards for alumni, whose money the College relentlessly solicits, how conscientious are they when it comes to today’s students? It wasn’t an isolated incident. A later news item in an alumni circular linked to a document on the website that was also inaccessible.
Twenty or so years ago, Amherst’s website was an exemplar of accessibility. The College’s web designer even posted an accessibility guide for other colleges. Something has changed in the intervening decades.
Regarding the current difficulties, after saying they had cut the connection with the third-party vendor, Amherst’s officials sent only vague responses to my queries. It then occurred to me that lax oversight might indicate that in recent years, Amherst has admitted no blind students. In that case, there would be no need to serve the constituency because the constituency doesn’t exist. That’s when I asked for the number of blind and otherwise physically disabled students admitted in the past ten years and my request was refused on the grounds that disclosure would violate student privacy.
I could not, and still cannot, comprehend how this raw number would infringe on student privacy. I specifically stated I wasn’t asking for names or other personal details. I can only conclude that in denying my request, Amherst claims that a statistic has a right to privacy. I wrote again to ask them to justify this novel theory. I never heard back.
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The one statistic Amherst did provide was that in 2019, 27% of students used its Accessibility Services. However, every type of disability, such as dyslexia and autism, paraplegia and blindness, has its own accommodation requirements. It’s no use claiming that all disabled students are accommodated when “disability” covers such a broad range. Instead, each disability should have its own classification. When disability is defined too broadly, responses to student needs could be as unhelpful as those Amherst sent to my queries.
Obstacles for disabled students are rampant. The New York Times reports that the majority of complaints filed in the past federal fiscal year at the US Education Department involve disability. (The numbers haven’t yet been officially released, and I infer they cover students in public—that is, local—schools.) As with Amherst’s public statements, either the agency or the article provides too few details. The only allusion to any kind of specific disability is a mention of “behavior.”
I certainly can’t speak with any authority about most disabilities, even though I’ve made an effort to understand the different situations of people I’ve hired over the years. However, I am intimately familiar with blind students’ need for, among other things, accessible websites and documents.
I admit to being astonished that 27% of Amherst students used the college’s accessibility services in the year before COVID. It means that more than a quarter of the College’s population, consisting mostly of people aged between eighteen and twenty-two, deems itself disabled. It’s a remarkable number that begs for elaboration. Still, even though Amherst is secretive about the program, at least it dedicates resources to students with special needs.
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That said, Amherst shows no broader interest in advancing the causes of disabled people. The entire nation is lately determined to redress iniquities experienced by women and members of disadvantaged ethnic groups. If anything, this is even more true at Amherst, as almost every alumni newsletter attests. However, I can’t recall a single reference to disabled students or alumni in these newsletters during the past several years. Failure to showcase the lives and achievements of disabled students undermines the good that accessibility services presumably do.
I do worry that Amherst’s aloofness is a sign that disability has become a too-fraught subject. Some of the fault might lie with well-intentioned disability rights advocates who insist on a sterile vocabulary whose effect is to make people afraid to speak. As I explained in “Disability and Censorship,” these advocates demand that we stop using such words as “crazy” and “lame” on the grounds that they trivialize the experiences of people who have emotional issues (“crazy”) or difficulty walking (“lame”). Yet these words have entered the language, and to insist that people not use them is to curb spontaneous and free expression.
Language and experience interact with each other. By the time we’re adults, most of us have felt a little or even a lot insane, while anyone who has broken a leg or sprained an ankle has a sense of what it might be like to have restricted mobility. No question, an occasional moment of disorientation, debilitating grief or extreme anger is nothing compared to prolonged mental illness, nor is temporary lameness remotely like permanent paraplegia, which requires a lifetime’s adjustments and partial dependency. I myself have been frustrated when reading accounts of short-lived vision loss as if the experience really captures that of people whose vision loss is permanent. But I may have been overreacting. The desire to appreciate something of the lives of disabled people is creditable.
Indeed, I must acknowledge my own ambivalence about highlighting disability when talking about myself. As I wrote in “Identity,” I avoided the subject of blindness in my senior commencement speech. I still believe I made the right decision. Like members of other historically disadvantaged groups, I may seek equal opportunity, but I’d prefer to be known for what I’ve done and the people I’ve befriended.
In any event, as I explained in “Snowflakes at Amherst,” my academic achievement was also Amherst’s. Today’s Amherst should be much further along from that beginning.
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In terms of representation in the general population, there aren’t many blind people, and fewer still who are navigating the mainstream. The same is undoubtedly true for people with other disabilities. By contrast, the recent, long overdue reversal in attitudes toward gays and lesbians was surely aided by almost everyone knowing people from those orientations. The more mainstream society experiences and understands about disabled people, the less ignorance and patronization they will encounter. Here’s where colleges can give a huge boost, by both embracing disabled applicants and highlighting their achievements.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt went to extreme lengths to conceal his paraplegia. Such a poignant strategy would seem ill-advised with today’s media exposure. How misguided, then, for Amherst to shroud its disabled students in secrecy.
Hiding behind a dubious claim of a statistic’s right to privacy does nothing to protect disabled students. Rather, it harms them because it implies that disabled people need to be kept safe from the curious stare of mainstream society.
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