The first week of freshman year, I lived out of a suitcase until my parents could drive the rest of my belongings up to me. After a week, they finally arrived from San Antonio. Leading them up to the third floor of Morton in East Wheelock, I felt a pang of frustration that there was no elevator — no, not because I wanted to use it for my boxes. My mother has a form of muscular dystrophy, so it was difficult for her to climb up the steep stairs to my floor. Once she had managed to scale them, she waited patiently in my room while my dad and I explored campus. There was no way she could make that trip more than once. In fact, when she returns for my graduation, she will most likely be unable to experience the majority of this campus that I call home.
Growing up around my mother and my uncle (who suffered from a different form of muscular dystrophy as well before passing away three years ago) has made me constantly aware of the accessibility — or more often, inaccessibility — of my surroundings. Dartmouth, a world leader in education, should strive to provide a welcoming environment for anyone who enters these hallowed halls, including the physically handicapped. A look around campus, however, shows that the buildings here are anything but welcoming for people in wheelchairs, on crutches or who have physical conditions like my mother does. It is not a coincidence that there are seemingly few physically handicapped students around or that those who are generally are temporarily, rather than permanently, impaired. Accessibility is not a factor that potential students who are disabled will ignore in favor of perceived prestige.
The Student Accessibility Services’s website states that Dartmouth “adheres to the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act to ensure that otherwise qualified students with disabilities are not excluded from or denied the benefits of the Dartmouth collegiate experience.” Currently, however, physically disabled students are bereft of thorough accessibility to the same aspects of campus as other students. Yes, there are some ramps to some buildings, and most of the main buildings such as Collis have at least one elevator. But as a whole, Dartmouth lacks proper infrastructure to address physically handicapped individuals’ needs. Though East Wheelock meets some standards of accessibility — there is one ramp into Zimmerman Hall, and McCulloch hall has an elevator — in practice, the dorm is highly inaccessible to handicapped individuals. To get to the other dorms and floors, one needs to walk up and down numerous flights of stairs.
The College’s accessibility measures only address the needs of physically handicapped students and faculty. What happens when a family member, a visiting friend or a potential student is handicapped, and the student with whom they are staying lives on the fourth floor of Topliff Hall? Even academic buildings like Reed Hall currently lack elevators. SAS states that they will relocate classes in these cases, but again, that is a superficial response to an infrastructural problem. Though the administration plans to address this with the Dartmouth Row Modernization Plan, formally announced last July, it should have been prioritized decades ago.
Infrastructure cannot appear overnight, and renovating old buildings to increase their accessibility is a highly complex and expensive process; the price for installing a commercial elevator can reach over $100,000, with probable additional costs for our historic buildings. This expense is not negligible, but it is also not obscene nor extravagant over the long term for a school of Dartmouth’s status. Moreover, the logistics pale in comparison to the need for better, fairer infrastructure. While putting elevators in every residence hall and academic building is complicated, it should not be marginalized in favor of less crucial construction projects. Accessibility is not a luxury irrelevant to those lucky enough to be able-bodied. The needs of physically disabled people cannot be ignored or erased. It will not be easy, and it will not be cheap, but Dartmouth must make this campus accessible its current and potential students — and their families.
