Staff Ed: Campus construction worsening accessibility on campus
If you have been around campus for the last few weeks, you have most certainly noticed the construction zone that currently makes up the SUNY Geneseo campus. This is largely made of three main missions for improvement: the Milne Library, the College Green, and Sturges Hall, for a variety of reasons (a few of them asbestos-related) with the ultimate goal of bettering the campus as a whole for future students.
While striving to make a campus that better serves our modern times visually, technologically, and functionally is not a bad thing, and the laws encompassing how and when federal funds must be distributed are restrictive in their time frame and flexibility. This does not negate the fact that all the fencing, closed-off paths, and building entrances work to lower accessibility for a campus that already exists on a hill.
Having the opportunity to access higher education is already a privilege that many people do not have access to for one reason or another, but concerns for accessibility for people with visible and invisible disabilities should not ever bar people from getting the education they want and deserve. Doing so further dissuades minority groups, like people with disabilities, from going after higher education goals because while access to education on campus should be the school’s job, it often is a burden placed on the student, who may not want to choose between education and their own physical and mental wellbeing.
Pushing through the trials and tribulations of the first year of college is difficult enough as it is, with feeling included on campus being one of the most important factors that lead to underclassmen dropout rates. This is particularly true for minority groups, including people with disabilities: first-year students with disabilities have a 35% drop-out rate for colleges nationwide, and making the ability to get to class more difficult does not aid in the attempt to drop this number—in fact, it likely has the ability to increase it.
The college’s mission statement around accessibility not only includes equal but also comprehensive access, but in the current state due to barred access, it does not seem to be providing either.
It can already be hard for those with mental illnesses to want to get ready for the day and find the motivation to get to class; the extra hurdle of finding alternative, and at times more time-consuming, routes to get to class, can further deter them from going and cause them to listen to that little voice in their head instead. The same goes for people with mobility issues or chronic pain; they should not be responsible for finding alternate routes that are still accessible for them to use that might put more strain on them, or that might take more time, and require navigation that they would not typically attempt.
People with disabilities, as well as everyone else on campus, have a right to their own time and should not have to factor in time added to find new routes now that multiple main pathways and entrances to buildings have been blocked off. The current navigational requirements to move around campus cause unnecessary obstacles in the day-to-day lives of students on campus and prevent them from easily accessing facilities and prominent areas on campus. I’m sure we all want the college to make improvements so that future students can go to a school without asbestos, but it should not be at the growing expense of the current student body.
Thumbnail via Kendall Cruise