How's that Buick workin' for ya?

Well, it's been a while since my last post. This morning NPR aired a piece by award winning journalist Kavitha Cardoza in which she explores difficulties students with disabilities are experiencing at UIS, including lack of adequate recommendations for on-campus housing, recreational facilities [though I hesitate to refer to adaptive exercise equipment as "recreational" as individuals with spinal cord injuries need this equipment to maintain functionality (see Christopher and Daina Reeve Foundation)], and expedience of classroom accommodations. As might be expected, most administrators questioned offered canned platitudes grasping at some conveniently elusive moral high-ground. If UIS wants to accommodate students because "it's the right thing to do," why didn't they access student need before student arrival and tuition payment and tell the student honestly that the university cannot accommodate the student's personal equipment? Unfortunately this is nothing new. As an undergraduate, a neighbor of mine in housing at my home university was similarly snowballed by the housing director when he requested extra space for his hygiene program. When he asked to demonstrate the program, involving assisted showering, bathroom functions and dressing, the director flatly refused. We in Sam Walton's America tend to believe, whether we'd be caught dead saying so or not, that if we ignore unseemly suffering, it will disappear--ignorance is nine tenths of happiness. But these aren't even the most disturbing implications of the report. The current director of disability services characterized the ADA in terms of Catolacs and Buicks. ADA requires a Buick but not a Catolac. First of all, this rhetoric smacks of pre-Civil Rights era "separate but equal" mentality. The accommodations requested are no more luxury cars than new textbooks and relevant curriculum. Listen for yourself [requires Winamp, which can be downloaded for free-google it]:

http://wuis.streamguys.net/playlist.asp?player=asx&file=/news/MEdisabl.mp3