Diversity includes a discussion of disability

To the editor,

It has been very encouraging to see all the efforts in the last couple of months to increase the student and faculty diversity on campus. Diversity Week, a week-long series of events hosted by Stanford University last quarter, was extremely valuable in fostering important discussions about the diversity of students and faculty on campus.

Underrepresented minorities and people hailing from lower socioeconomic classes were discussed extensively. However, the need for Stanford to recruit and admit more students and faculty with physical disabilities was, unfortunately, largely ignored.

I have a special connection to the physically disabled community as I am physically disabled myself. I have hemi-paralysis; my right side is partially paralyzed. I have gone to great lengths to find other people with physical disabilities on Stanford’s campus, but I have been largely unsuccessful. There are few undergraduate or graduate students with physical disabilities, and, as far as I know, no professors with obvious physical disabilities.

I went to the University of Arizona for one semester before I came to Stanford University. At Arizona, they had a state-of-the-art Disability Resource Center. They had various university-sponsored athletic teams for students with disabilities, such as wheelchair rugby, wheelchair basketball and wheelchair tennis. Every building that you entered or corner you went around, you were almost certain to see a person with a physical disability. As a result, inclusion of students with disabilities was considered when planning athletic activities, social activities, dorm events and field trips. I have not found that to be the case at Stanford. Inclusion is rarely considered because there is little demand for it.

Take a look around our campus. How many people do you see rolling through the quad in wheelchairs? What about waiting in line at the Tresidder Subway? Or navigating the Lagunita Dining complex?

Stanford could be a perfect place for students and faculty with physical disabilities. It is one of the top universities in the country in almost every department. It has a relatively accessible campus with top-notch athletic and academic facilities. And besides, we are blessed with beautiful weather twelve months of the year, compared with our East Coast counterparts.

Many in the Stanford community may never have extensively considered that Stanford has few students and faculty with physical disabilities. I would like to be the person who poses this inquiry to you: Why are there not more students and professors with physical disabilities on campus, and what can we do as community members to increase that number?

Joe Kay

Class of 2009