Note: The author of this article has chosen to use identity-first language rather than person-first language. Some Disabled people use a capital D to denote community, the way one might write “Black person” or “Deaf person”. The author has done the same where appropriate, so “Disabled” denotes a connection to the community and “disabled” is simply an adjective.
Since 2012, many students and faculty have ardently supported the creation of a Disability Cultural Center (DCC) at Georgetown University. This advocacy intensified following the release of a disability external review, which revealed that the Academic Resource Center (ARC) struggled in many ways to meet Disabled student needs. This past year, thanks to advocacy work by the Georgetown Disability Alliance and other partners, the Georgetown Disability Empowerment Endowed Fund was created to collect donations in support of creating a DCC at Georgetown. While the DCC proposal created by GUSA’s Accessibility Policy Team is comprehensive, this article points to two additional issues that this center would help to resolve. Combined, all of these issues further cement the urgency for a structural solution to better support Disabled students— it’s time for a Disability Cultural Center at Georgetown University.
Not all Disabled students can or will choose to disclose their disability to their universities.
Nationwide, the National Center of Education Statistics found that 19% of undergraduate students and 12% of graduate students reported experiencing a disability. This widely circulated data is likely an underestimate. The Disabled population quadrupled between 1978 and 2011 (Carroll et al. 2020), and outdated statistics fail to recognize that the Disabled population continues to experience rapid growth and diversity (CDC). Furthermore, 65% of students who received “special education” services in high school did not disclose their disabilities to their universities because of “inconsistent transition planning into higher education, negative self-perceptions of revealing one’s disability, and stigmatization within the college environment”(Newman and Madaus 2015).
The under-reporting of disability requires intersectional considerations: Black and Hispanic Disabled students remain unidentified at higher proportions than white Disabled students, and younger and Neurodiverse students are also more likely to remain unidentified (Aquino and Bittinger 2019). For example, 56.7% of Neurodiverse students struggled with self-misunderstanding their disability (Lightner et al. 2012). Neurodiverse students who acquire their disability while in college also experience an additional cost barrier, as most Disability Services (DS) offices require students to pay out of pocket for controversial, expensive, and unnecessary “learning disability assessments” to validate their disability (Fletcher and Miciak 2017). These unique barriers explain why certain subgroups of Disabled students under-report their disability.
Intentional or not, many Disabled students do not register with their campus DS office. Why does this indicate a need for a Disability Cultural Center? The simple answer is that DS offices on college campuses are stretched thin; for Disability Services offices at 4-year private universities like Georgetown, the average caseload per staff member was 110 students (Brown et al. 2020). This ratio illustrates that students may not be receiving the personalized support that they need. Many Disabled students in higher education report feeling disempowered and isolated, and most attributed these feelings to ineffective DS offices (Francis et al. 2019). Importantly, this ratio only reflects Disabled students registered with DS offices. Thus, DS offices are either not adequately serving many Disabled students to their satisfaction, or they are not serving all Disabled students on campus.
Creating a DCC means providing an open-access resource that ALL Disabled students, staff, and faculty could utilize. It would provide a source of community and personalized support for all members of the Disabled community at Georgetown and could provide personalized support in ways that a DS office would never have the capacity to do. Is there proof that DS offices like ARC are not very impactful for campus climate and institutional accountability? Besides the very telling student and faculty testimonials by Disabled community members at Georgetown, there is damning evidence on the Georgetown Institutional Diversity, Equity, & Affirmative Action (IDEAA) website that further validates the need for a DCC. On their website, IDEAA continues to define intellectual disabilities using the R-word, showing both how out of touch they are and how much they continue to rely on ableist terminology that often originates from prioritizing the medical model over the social model of disability. Not only have Disabled community members demanded ending the use of the R-word, but President Obama also signed Rosa’s Law in 2010, requiring that the R-word be replaced by “intellectual disability” in all federal law documents. This derogatory choice of language by Georgetown IDEAA, combined with the disability external review and community testimony, makes it increasingly clear why ARC and IDEAA are currently unfit to fully serve the needs of Disabled students, faculty, and staff members.
The DCC, composed of Disabled students, staff, and faculty, could provide university administration direction on creating and implementing a mandatory anti-ableism training for all individuals affiliated with Georgetown University.
Regardless of how Georgetown community members view ARC, many components of the Disabled student experience do not fall under its purview, such as eliminating ableist microaggressions on campus. Ableist microaggressions are the “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities” that communicate hostile and derogatory insults to Disabled community members, whether in classrooms, residence halls, or through social interactions (Kattari 2015). Anti-ableism training could help reduce and ideally eliminate ableist microaggressions on campus.
Furthermore, anti-ableism training could help staff improve their creation and execution of accommodations in the classroom. Across the nation, university staff felt unequipped to develop accommodations or limited to producing accommodations in a timely manner due to slow information sharing processes within their universities. Thus, whether to fill knowledge gaps or to place pressure on their universities to address administrative burdens, it is clear that students would not be the only beneficiary of anti-ableism training (Bunbury 2018).
Disabled perspectives are often omitted or marginalized in key considerations. Imani Barbarin, a Black Disabled woman who runs the popular Crutches and Spice blog, eloquently described this ally problem as when “the voices of disabled people are overridden by those of abled allies with mere relational proximity to someone disabled.” Omission and performative allyship are two causes of the continued marginalization of Disabled community members at Georgetown University. Disabled community members should not be burdened with creating this anti-ableism module; however, members of the DCC would be an inclusive and authentic consultative body for ARC and university administrators to engage within their development of this training. Overall, anti-ableism training ensures that the Georgetown community actively considers Disabled perspectives and that non-Disabled allies do not further marginalize Disabled community members with performative actions.
Concluding Remarks—What Now?
First, if you have the financial means to do so, Georgetown community members can donate to the Georgetown Disability Empowerment Endowed Fund. This can help fast-track the implementation of a Disability Cultural Center on campus. As we wait for this crucial open-access resource to be approved and installed on campus, the Georgetown community can begin actively advocating with Disabled community members to promote disability justice- more importantly, non-Disabled members should amplify the needs of the Disabled community without further marginalizing their voices. One immediate action you can take is signing our open letter to Georgetown IDEAA demanding they remove the R-word from their website and that they hold themselves accountable. Finally, Georgetown often says “if you see something, say something,” and this applies to disability as well— if you witness ableism in any capacity, take action and be a part of the solution.
Alisha Saxena (she/her) is a Master of Public Policy (MPP) candidate at the McCourt School of Public Policy. She is the founder of the McCourt Disability Policy Initiative (DPI) and is also the co-Vice President of the McCourt Education Policy Initiative (MEPI). She works as a Research Associate at RepresentWomen, and has published a disability-related report with the organization called “Intersectional Disempowerment: Exploring Barriers for Disabled Female Political Candidates in the United States”.
