I visited Harvard Law School for the first time in the Spring of 1985, a few weeks after receiving an invitation to enroll. I was excited by the opportunity, and travelled to Cambridge to meet with the Dean of Students in order to discuss what my life, as a wheelchair user, would be like at HLS. Aside from an extended hospital and rehabilitation stay after disablement some seven years earlier, law school would be the first time that I would be living away from home.
“We’ll provide you with an unadapted room in the one dorm that has a ramp,” she told me, “a wooden chair for the shower, and a shower curtain instead of a door around a toilet stall.” “Otherwise,” said Dean Geraghty, “we won’t adapt anything or provide any accommodations: there’s no access to cooking or laundry facilities in the dorm. Moreover, the tunnels underneath the school used by students during snow, rain, and other inclement weather are inaccessible for lack of an elevator; similarly, there’s no elevator to access the school cafeteria; and you’ll need to sit at the back of nearly every classroom. But we’re very happy to have you join us in the Fall.”
This meeting was five years before the Americans with Disabilities Act would compel changes, but a decade or so after the Rehabilitation Act already required them. But my mind was not focused on legal compliance so much as feeling supported and included. “That’s not very welcoming,” I mused out loud.
“Well,” the dean replied, using the four letter word never employed at Harvard “if you don’t like it, you can go to Yale.”
In the end I attended HLS, and found it an amazing, if paradoxical experience. There were some wonderful faculty and classmates, many of whom remain friends to this day. There was also the vast majority of people who were uncaring, or at the very least unaware, of what it was like to be different, to be constantly inconvenienced and at times excluded, and to feel like I was not valued in the same way as my other classmates. I could share many examples, but here are two. Becoming, proudly, the first known member of the Harvard Law Review to have a disability, and in doing so, breaking a century-long barrier, but needing to crawl up the stairs in Gannett House due to lack of access. Supporting the sit-in precipitated by my beloved professor, Derrick Bell, to protest the lack of racial diversity among HLS faculty, but being told by him that disability was an entirely different issue as far as diversity.
Perhaps one of the best insights I received about HLS, and the University generally, came from Rocco Forgioni, who efficiently ran HLS’s facilities operations in the days before computers, employing a notebook, sharp pencil, and a sharper tongue. “Harvard always gets things right,” he told me. “You may not live to see it, but in the end Harvard always gets things right.”
And so it does. The University is a work in progress as far as including persons with disabilities as students, staff, faculty, and visitors. Great (albeit incomplete) advances have been made on creating an accessible environment, both physical and virtual, and great (albeit decidedly uneven) advances have been made across the University’s 12 schools in providing accommodations that enable effective participation. Conversely the University, as a whole, has yet to make students, staff, faculty, and visitors with disabilities welcome to this fabulous academic institution. Two illustrative examples suffice. Disability was completely absent from Harvard College’s diversity report with the exception of the claim that the College complied with disability laws. Disability was likewise completely absent from a well- circulated and well-publicized “pulse” survey on inclusion that touted “your voice matters.” Hence, disability is increasingly incorporated in the University’s programming, but persons with disabilities have yet to be made to feel that are welcome.
DISABILITY DISCLOSED, now in its second iteration, makes great strides toward welcoming disability as a valued identity and as part of Harvard’s culture by speaking openly about the achievements experienced by Harvard students, as well as the challenges that remain for Harvard students. The contributors openly and proudly navigate disability as part of their life experiences and in doing so encourage greater discourse and solidarity around disability as part of our identities and as an essential element of human diversity.
Warm congratulations to the terrific students who contributed to and supported DISABILITY DISCLOSED. I look forward to our continuing collaboration.
Michael Ashley Stein