Free A Song in the Night by Bob Massie Page B

harsh physical realities. Though I was now able to walk without braces, my knees remained weak. I still had joint bleedings, which wouldregularly confine me to a wheelchair for a week or more. Seen through this lens, the Yale campus presented many barriers. It had been built with the assumption that every student would be perfectly mobile. Classrooms could be reached only at the top of long stairways in buildings that were far apart. The mostly Gothic design of the dormitories and refectories, bunched together in “colleges,” meant that everyone had to navigate through a maze of difficult hallways and stairs. The architects seemed to have been committed to the idea that every passageway or building entrance required at least three randomly placed steps.
    Moreover, Yale was in the middle of a city, New Haven, so the students traveling between class and college activities had to cross urban streets all day long. Cities at that time did not build curb cuts to allow wheelchairs to roll smoothly from sidewalk to crosswalk. As I looked around, my heart sank when I realized that I could easily be confined to a small room, missing events and classes, forcing classmates to carry cold plates of food from distant dining rooms back to my point of incarceration. And while the admissions office expressed concern about my problems, no one was all that eager to discuss or to solve them. The Americans with Disabilities Act had not yet passed the Congress, and indifference or insensitivity toward people with disabilities was still more the rule than the exception.
    This was in direct contrast to Princeton. After I was admitted, the admissions office designated a specific person to help me resolve each difficulty. Though the campus was self-contained,it was still hard for me to navigate on foot. We hit on the solution of obtaining a small electric cart that would transport me from class to class. The university promised to put in external electric plugs anywhere I needed them—outside my dorm room, the dining room, and the major classroom buildings—so I could charge the cart as necessary. If I had a bleeding and needed care, I would be permitted to enroll directly in the school infirmary, without the usual medical review, so that I could have a quiet place to recover, three meals a day, and easy access to friends who would drop by with my assignments. The university offered to exempt me from the lottery for dorm rooms so that I could find the right room. If I experienced a lasting problem, the authorities said, they would even reschedule my class discussion groups to meet on the first floor so I did not have to climb stairs to attend.
    Of course the academic opportunities at both institutions were superb. I understood the tremendous privilege that each represented. Change was rippling through both universities and many other elite institutions as they tried to find a way to balance their traditional exclusivity with their desire to be more diverse. Every college in the country, including the Ivy League schools, was trying to figure out how to boost their enrollment of students disadvantaged by race or class and give them the support that would guide them toward success. Yale and Princeton had also just fought major battles with their own conservative alumni, who did not want them to admit women. The first women at Princeton had arrived only five years before I enrolled, and the first full class that included women had just graduated.
    Schools were new to the issue of how—or even whether—to support students with disabilities. For some schools, the idea of admitting students with disabilities seemed perhaps to contradict the idea of gathering together “well-rounded” participants who were fully equipped to compete and to succeed. Subtle differences in attitude led to huge differences in outcomes. One school, with the best of intentions, told me, in essence, that it would be content for me to come as long as
I
could conform