A Disabled Student's Perspective of Warren Wilson College
Rowan Dorrian | April 25, 2024
When starting at Warren Wilson College (WWC), I was surprised by the amount of conversation around community care and social advocacy. With that, I was further surprised by how little action and belief stood behind those words.
As I am finishing my first year of college, I have been reflecting on my time here as a Disabled student. I tend to place myself in settings that promote themselves as inclusive and progressive — for example, often taking social justice-oriented classes. However, when I walk into these classrooms holding my cane, I am often met with stares and invasive questions about my medical history before the conversations turn to the importance of uplifting underrepresented voices. I have also found it jarring to sit in classroom discussions about community care while being the only one to wear a mask.
I may not know every aspect of accessibility and inaccessibility on this campus, and I know fellow students with different disabilities than mine have their own experiences with these things. In my own experience, I can say easily that I am angry and disappointed, and I have heard similar words when speaking with others about this. With the community that we claim to strive for, I would expect more than uncomfortable silences in response to the word “disability”, or aggression and hostility in response to any mention of COVID prevention.
At a time in which we are still amidst a pandemic that has killed millions and disabled even more — despite much of this campus’s dangerous and anti-scientific choice to ignore it — it is especially important to foster proactive accessibility and care for the health of our community. Anyone could become Disabled at any time, and with the way things are now, this campus is not and will not be prepared to accommodate that.
While it is far more comfortable to pretend that WWC is a bubble away from bigotry and oppression, that in itself is a privileged standpoint. The lack of working elevators in dorm buildings that go unfixed for weeks, uneven and cracked pavement that make it impossible to get around in a wheelchair, cross-contaminated food, lack of automatic doors, and further inaccessibility and dismissal of accommodations is an injustice — not just to Disabled students, but to all. This has the potential to impact everyone, and it does. It should not be ignored.
It is disheartening to hear from former students and read in archived works about ignored advocacy from years ago that is still happening today. This is not a new conversation. This campus has been creating a space that forces Disabled students to transfer or otherwise leave for decades. Even from the very little coverage of HIV and AIDS through The Talon and The Common Tongue in the late 80s and 90s it is clear that chronically ill, immunocompromised and otherwise Disabled students have been treated as disposable since at least 1988.
In the early weeks of this semester, myself and Eli Styles began to work together on creating the Disabled Student Alliance club after I joined him and a group of four other students in running a Changemakers Summit session on proactive accessibility. Since then, my eyes have been opened to a significant amount of ableism that I had not seen before, particularly in terms of silencing our club and Disabled students on campus in general. Since the beginning of our efforts, there has been pushback from The Echo Newspaper on reporting on any of our work, which is unfortunately unsurprising when there are only four other Echo articles that focus completely on disability.
In addition to this, we have faced consistent vandalism and destruction of property in relation to any tangible work of ours. This has included erasing personal whiteboards, destroying and writing on posters promoting COVID caution, tearing down our regular meeting posters, tearing down our event posters and throwing away informative zines. More recently there have seemingly also been targeted efforts to make the few spaces intended for disability access a challenge to use through breaking and trashing them.
I have been raising alarm bells to the administration about the root of these actions since the very start with little to no real help in response. A small student group should not have to tackle and work around the constantly arising inaccessibility and ableism, but what else can we do when the people who are paid to help will not listen?
“I think this campus is not a safe space for Disabled people,” Styles said. “The lack of accessibility is appalling and the lack of willingness to fix that is potentially even worse.”
Eli and I discussed the challenges we face as Disabled students.
“There are people who are just outright not accepting and disregard your physical disability, or laugh at you, or make jokes about it. Then there's people who think they're being helpful or progressive but are actually just othering you because they aren't educated on disability. And then there are people who are actual allies, which is a much smaller group than it should be.”
When it comes to disability at WWC, it is very easy to feel excluded and disconnected from the community and student life, which Eli also talks about.
“I’m afraid of harassment and the potential of violence. I’m afraid of my autonomy being taken away from me because of how people treat Disabled people, especially [those] that are in wheelchairs,” Styles said. “I feel very disconnected from everything on campus except for the Disabled Student Alliance.”
We finished our conversation by discussing what we want to see improved in the future and our hopes for WWC.
“Every person on this campus is able to do better than they are right now, and that includes Disabled people,” Styles said. “Being Disabled does not preclude you from being ableist. And in order to be an activist and to be a member of a community that cares for the members of the community, you need to be open to learning. That's something that I continue to do every day. This community will never get better if the people within it are continuing to be hostile and close-minded towards the idea of including Disabled people in the way they deserve to be included. Warren Wilson considers itself, both the student body and in the way it's advertised, to be a progressive utopia for people to come and be accepted for their identities. But what happens when they can't access the space in the first place and they are told that their identities don’t matter, and they have to fight to be recognized as a real human with important things to say?”
What can one do when faced with having to choose between inclusion and an education? This is a decision I have had to grapple with. I have found that I am going to be added to the list of Disabled students who have been forced to leave because, despite what we are paying for and everything we say, we are not given the same access to classes, food, housing, work and more as abled people are.
Apathy and ignorance to pandemics and disability is preventing us from being able to progress into a space of genuine care for our communities. WWC talks about creating access for all and promoting a space for graduates to make a difference in the world after college. Yet how can we claim this when disability is left out of this promise completely? Within capitalism, productivity is prioritized over everything else, and this mindset leaves Disabled people behind. Radical care for our Disabled peers is a way to defy this and make a change.
For a campus that prides itself on its “radical inclusion,” it does not hold up when it comes to putting those words into action. With an evident pattern of Disabled students transferring due to a lack of equal access to an education and to the most basic need of adequate food, it should be clear to everyone that major change needs to be made. Yet only a select few students seem to truly care about this issue, and often those students are the ones who are directly impacted.
We cannot claim to care about creating spaces for marginalized students when we do not make those spaces accessible or safe. If WWC is more concerned about profit than equity, it should not claim to be “progressive.” Disabled students deserve the right to take up space on this campus and in the world as a whole.