By Julia Laquerre
Spring of 2022, students flooded onto Columbus Avenue from Northeastern Universities’ dorm, International Village. The fire alarm had gone off, the elevators shut down, and students ran down twenty-two stories. A few students were left behind, stuck waiting in their dorm rooms for Northeastern University police officers who allegedly never came.
The needs of people with physical disabilities are often overlooked, particularly by higher education. This inaccessibility extends beyond the university level and leads to the “employment and income statistics (of physically disabled people) at the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder for decades”, in the words of New Mobility’s’ Wheels on Campus information guide.
Curriculums and locations are often created to suit able-bodied and neurotypical people, and accommodations make these spaces accessible to disabled and neurodivergent people. To help students with disabilities excel, laws and regulations are set to ensure their needs are adequately met.
Northeastern is a university based in the United States and utilizes Federal Student Aid, thus is required by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to ensure “no qualified individual with a disability in the United States shall be excluded from, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity.”
Students with physical disabilities are informed, in the case of an emergency evacuation, the protocol is to send a Northeastern police officer to retrieve the student and bring them safely outside. The alleged actions of NUPD officers were in violation of Northeastern’s evacuation procedures, and the accommodations afforded to the physically disabled people who were apparently left in the building.
A Northeastern student on Reddit, “NEU_Resident” posted about their experience during the fire alarm. They claimed in their post, “Nobody came, nobody called me, and nobody texted me” they continued “none of the responsibilities of the NUPD or DRC (Disability Resource Center at Northeastern) were fulfilled and none of the accommodations afforded to me were met. Needless to say, this is a disgrace. The school needs to do better to protect its student body.”
In addition, International Village (IV) is one of the designated accessible dorms on campus, but its location prevents students with disabilities from easily accessing Ruggles station, which links the dorm to the rest of campus.
Instead of conveniently passing through Ruggles, a physically disabled student must use the ISEC Pedestrian Bridge. According to Google Maps walking directions, to get to Shillman Hall from IV takes an able-bodied person four minutes through Ruggles compared to ten minutes through the ISEC bridge. The walking prediction times provided by Google maps are based on the walking ability of an able-bodied person, so the predicted ten minutes will likely take a student with physical disabilities longer.
Ruggles station has one accessible door, therefore it does comply with the architectural standards established by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, set by the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. Chapter two, section 206.4.4 of the law requires all transportation facilities to have “at least one public entrance serving each fixed route or group of fixed routes shall comply with 404” entrance standards.
However, Title III of the Disability Rights Laws set by the ADA states, “public accommodations must remove barriers in existing buildings where it is easy to do so without much difficultly.” The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is addressing Ruggles Station accessibility in a two-phase action plan “focused on increasing Commuter Rail train access and making transfers and movement through the station easier for riders” and upgrading accessibility.
The second phase of the plan includes, but is not limited to, a “new, fully accessible Columbus Avenue entrance, new elevators, ramps, and bridge connections, fully accessible restrooms, door replacements, sidewalk/stairs/platform repairs.”
Living on campus makes navigating it that much harder. Students with disabilities are required to travel from classes to the dining hall, to their dorm rooms, and to other activities, they may have on campus. Their everyday lives are affected by how accessible the campus is.
Since they don’t live on campus, professors with physical disabilities have a slightly different experience.
Aliska Gibbons is a Northeastern University mathematics professor in the College of Science. About ten years ago, Gibbons had to leave Tufts’ Ph.D. program because of the inaccessibility of their campus. She stated, “compared to my other experiences, Northeastern has been pretty great.” For example, she can request all her classes in the same room back to back, so she doesn’t have to travel across campus.
When Gibbons began her career at Northeastern, she was able-bodied and got to know Northeastern’s campus well. She explained as she became immobile, she knew “what would work for (her) and what wouldn’t. If (she) had gotten to Northeastern’s campus while in a wheelchair the learning curve would have been really steep.”
The one critique she has of campus is most, if not all, buildings only have one accessible door and elevator, similar to Ruggles Station. She mentioned her office building as an example, “Nightingale doesn’t have a door directly to it that I can use. I have to come into the building from the furthest edge and take the elevator up and go through four buildings to get to my office in Nightingale.”
New Mobility is a member publication of the United Spinal Organization and published an informational guide “Wheels on Campus; a Guide to Wheelchair-Friendly Higher Education”. Northeastern University was not among the top 40 U.S. universities with the best wheelchair-accessible campuses. They interviewed Tom Webb, the disability director at Wright State University, about his experience with the ADA as a person in a wheelchair and as the disability director of a university highly ranked for its wheelchair accessibility. Webb spoke of the importance of going beyond ADA standards, “the ADA is just a building block, a kind of foundation.”
Andrew Gillen is a Northeastern engineering professor, and he understands how difficult it is to advocate for yourself at any university. He works as vice-chair and communications marking leader in the faculty affinity group ‘Disability Alliance’.
According to Gillen, the affinity group is working to get a “central pool of ADA accommodations for faculty and staff.” In his personal opinion, he believes central funding will “reduce conflicts of interest and people feeling uncomfortable seeking out accommodations if the funds came from a central kind of repository for the whole university rather than departments having to find the money somewhere.”
The issue of accessibility is not exclusively a Northeastern University issue, but a challenge many students attending universities face.
Gibbons, New Mobility, and Northeastern Diversability members have commented on how the ADA standards are not always suitable for people who fatigue easily or have muscle weakness. Students and faculty members are constantly advocating for college campuses to improve their accessibility standards beyond the ADA minimum.
The rise of university groups such as Northeastern University’s Diversability and Disability Alliance helps universities understand what students and faculty members with physical disabilities need to succeed beyond the ADA’s standards. To create change, people in universities have to find “the right people on campus, the champions who see the need, so you try to involve the entire college campus-wide… all departments have to be involved in order to create sustainable change”, Tom Webb.
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