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Earlier in 2015, a student unsuccessfully challenged Virginia Commonwealth University’s policy of not allowing students with intellectual disabilities, enrolled in their ACE-IT program, to live in dorms on campus. ACE-IT is a five-semester program where students with intellectual disabilities, autism, or traumatic brain injuries take college classes and participate in campus activities. The rationale for denying access to dorm living is that dorms are only open to full-time students and since students enrolled in ACE-IT are not full-time but only take two classes a semester, they are thus ineligible. VCU is not unique in their policy about campus housing. While more students with intellectual disabilities are being targeted for inclusion on college campuses, these programs might not offer students an opportunity to live on campus. In addition, the programs might offer certificates that are geared to make graduates competitive for employment, as opposed to 4-year bachelor degrees, which typically emphasizes a more balanced course load in the arts, sciences, and humanities, in addition to preparing students for full-time employment or graduate school.
Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) begins with a statement about the rights of people with disabilities to education: “States Parties recognize the right of persons with disabilities to education. With a view to realizing this right without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity, States Parties shall ensure an inclusive education system at all levels…” And the Salamanca Statement advises “regular schools with this inclusive orientation are the most effective means of combating discriminatory attitudes, creating welcoming communities, building an inclusive society and achieving education for all…”
As a faculty member at an institution of higher education, I’ve been thinking about how the very premise of higher education tends to exclude those with intellectual disabilities. For example, if an institution focuses on admitting students with higher SAT scores who will graduate in four years, students with intellectual disabilities tend to fall into the category of students who might be excluded by such a policy. Do our biases regarding intelligence mean that those with labels of “intellectual disability” are assumed to not belong in our classrooms, libraries, and community events? Shifting standardized test requirements or financial aid calculations can alter which students are admitted on campus, potentially diversifying or homogenizing the campus, especially around markers of race, ethnicity, nationality, and class. How can institutions of higher learning become spaces where aspirations of the CRPD become a reality? (It should be noted the US has not ratified the CRPD). More explicitly, what changes are necessary so that students with labels of intellectual disabilities could have a place on campuses as students and community members, in integrated spaces, where labels of disability do not disqualify them from participation in the classroom, residing in the dorm, or graduating with a degree?
As I explore these issues, I’m reminded of one of my previous jobs, while I was still an undergraduate, as a job coach for people with labels of intellectual and developmental disabilities. I supervised the recycling enclave at a university. The enclave arrived on campus well before the first class of the day and collected recyclables from classrooms and common areas on campus. We transferred these recyclables to bins and receptacles outside the buildings, allowing the municipality to take them to the local recycling plant. During our shift, we largely interacted with custodial and maintenance staff, but not with students and faculty. After finishing the recycling route, we commuted to the sheltered workshop, a segregated employment setting for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, to finish our workday.
In thinking about the call for inclusive education as put forth in the CRPD (as well as other international documents such as the Salamanca Statement), I am struck with how the segregated recycling enclave I supervised explicitly mirrors assumptions about the place of intellectual disability in higher education. An enclave can be defined as “an area with people who are different in some way from the people in the areas around it.” As transient visitors to the college campus, disabled individuals were not expected to occupy the classrooms as enrolled students. The only reason for them to enter the classroom was to collect empty soda cans and water bottles.
This experience was over 15 years ago, yet I think colleges and universities still haven’t become entirely welcoming for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I am currently co-teaching a course on disability and inclusion, and as a class we are exploring how educational policies and practices, primarily at the primary and secondary levels, facilitate inclusion of students with disabilities into all facets of educational communities. If accessing primary and secondary education is constructed as a right, what about accessing postsecondary education? (This of course is not to deny that students with disabilities are segregated in special education school classrooms, or even not allowed to attend primary and secondary school at all.) Have the “enclaves” surrounding higher education been truly transformed by such postsecondary programs as ACE-IT?
Since 2010, the United States of America Department of Education has funded demonstration projects that aim to provide postsecondary opportunities for students with intellectual disabilities. Think College is an organization in the United States “dedicated to developing, expanding, and improving inclusive higher education options for people with intellectual disability.” My own university runs the Inclusive U program administered through the Taishoff Center for Inclusive Higher Education. Students enrolled in this program take college courses with their peers regardless of intellectual disability labels. Another example is found at Bethel University. Students enrolled in this program live on campus and participate in other aspects of residential community. As discussed above, these programs are not without critique, where participants of these types of programs might not earn degrees or diplomas; instead they might only be awarded certificates. These differences may create distinctions where some learners are expected to graduate with diplomas, while others are only briefly allowed into classroom and campus communities, and distinctions for employers, too, when some students apply with a 4-year BA and others with only a program certificate.
As these types of programs expand, I eagerly await to see if spaces of higher education welcome those with intellectual disabilities as learners, scholars, teachers, and community members. Significant progress is needed such as changes that address the inability to live on campus because of policies that exclude “part-time” students from housing. Course content can be made accessible in a wide variety of formats, instructors can clearly communicate course expectations, learning goals, and embrace robust expectations of accommodation, and all learners can be supported with open source assistive technology. Those involved in higher education can trace how “inclusion” is deployed on college campuses, and whether students are integrated into all aspects of campus. In addition, I welcome ideas about the ways in which higher education can actively challenge assumptions of intellect that persistently exclude those labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
