On paper, WashU adheres to the guidelines set by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Still, students with disabilities say they need the University to do more to make spaces physically accessible.

Issues include the difficulty of locating accessible pathways in campus buildings and a lack of accessible routes within older, historic buildings that are exempted from ADA regulations.

Senior Jayne Crouthamel is the president of Ability WashU, a club representing students with disabilities on campus.

“Ability’s mission, as a whole, is to make WashU a more accessible place physically and a more inclusive environment for people, as well as potentially helping those with disabilities in the greater St. Louis community,” Crouthamel said.

Ability WashU completes Community Health Environmental Checklists (CHECs) for buildings on the Danforth Campus, evaluating buildings according to accessibility standards for the slope of wheelchair ramps, the size of accessible bathroom stalls, the heights of sinks in bathrooms, and more.

Crouthamel said that she and other club members have found that there are many small changes that could be implemented easily to improve accessibility.

Ability is currently advocating for the administration to put reflective tape in stairwells on campus. It says that this kind of simple addition to the campus infrastructure could support students with visual impairments, who are often overlooked, because reflective tape would highlight the edges of steps and make them more visible in the dark, preventing potential injuries.

Crouthamel said she has physical and visual impairments as a result of a neurological condition, and would benefit from an addition like reflective tape

Buildings on the Danforth Campus have varying levels of accessibility because many of the buildings were constructed before the ADA was signed in 1990.

Sophomore Cameron Lubbe, another member of Ability’s executive team, said the Women’s Building is one of the biggest accessibility problems on campus. The building houses sorority suites and affinity spaces, including the Muslim Student Association (MSA).

However, Pride Alliance and Transcending Gender, two organizations dedicated to supporting LGBTQ+ students, decided to move out of their designated space inside the Women’s Building due to accessibility concerns. Currently, both organizations choose to book rooms on campus that are located in buildings with elevators and other ADA-required accommodations.

“We say that we’re giving these groups a space, whether it’s LGBT people, or the MSA, or even sororities that do not get houses on this campus like the fraternities do,” Lubbe said. “But [it’s] … not a space that everybody can use, and I think that that’s a really big problem.”

Understanding the role institutions hold in eliminating barriers to access as well as the mental burden associated with disability is crucial to understanding the experiences of WashU community members. 

According to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Professor and expert in disability studies, Cynthia Barounis, the language used to discuss disability often reflects the view that disability is  an individual’s problem. She said that we should instead focus on the role institutions play in creating access barriers.

“[Disability] often gets couched in a language of tragedy or misfortune or as a medical problem to be fixed, and that, I think, persists as a kind of common-sense logic about disability, when in fact, it is a political identity,” Barounis said.

Experts in the field recognize two models of disability: the medical model and the social model. The medical model has historically been the socially acceptable definition of the word “disability,” focusing on the part of an individual’s body whose functional abilities vary from the average person.

In comparison, the social model recognizes disability as a political identity, acknowledging that disability is, in part, socially constructed by environmental barriers to accessibility. 

“The classic example within the social model is that disability kind of happens at the moment when somebody who uses a wheelchair encounters a set of stairs — that’s really where the disability happens,” Barounis said. “So in that sense, it’s a very real thing. But that’s also something that we have really constructed culturally — we take human variation and label it medically.”

She added that the widely understood definition of disability leaves many people out.

“We wouldn’t necessarily call somebody who wears glasses disabled, even though they have a vision impediment,” Barounis said. “Normalized social structures in place make that impairment not disabling — we wouldn’t call it a disability.”

Camila Dayan, a junior and executive member of Ability, said that one of the elevators in Seigle was broken earlier this semester for a period she estimates to be four to five weeks.

Although Seigle has two elevators on different sides of the building, Dayan said there were no signs directing people to the other elevator. Failing to provide signage is a violation of Missouri’s elevator code and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Representatives from WashU Facilities Planning and Management (Facilities) said that elevators require special contractors and parts, resulting in longer wait times for elevator repairs. Facilities also said that they do their best to provide signage for outages in a timely manner, and that routine maintenance requests on the Danforth Campus can be submitted to the office via an online form on the Facilities website.

Maintenance requests in buildings on the South 40 and any building under the purview of the Office of Residential Life (ResLife) should be reported to Student Affairs via a separate form on the ResLife website.

Facilities said when it comes to addressing accessibility concerns, issues should be communicated with Disability Resources (DR) and Student Affairs.

However, this line of communication is complicated by the accessibility issues in question being maintenance issues, which fall outside of DR’s purview.

According to Dayan, Facilities was also slow to fix a flickering light in Seigle this past semester. She said she emailed both DR and Facilities to try and resolve the situation, but expected DR to resolve the issue because she considers the flickering light to be an accessibility concern.

Dayan knows people on the WashU campus who have conditions like Tourette’s and epilepsy who could be triggered by the flickering, and said she was frustrated with DR’s delegation of the light bulb issue to Facilities.

“I emailed DR, and DR replied, being like, ‘That’s not our problem,’ and I was like, ‘It is your problem because it does actually pertain to disability,’” she said. “There are some people who I will not name, who have things like epilepsy or Tourette’s, who cannot have a flickering light, but they were like, ‘Well, this isn’t a disability issue; it’s just a mild annoyance, so it doesn’t pertain to us.’”

Chris Stone, Director of DR, clarified that while DR and Facilities are separate entities, and DR is not responsible for maintenance, the two offices are in frequent communication with one another. 

Stone said that one of DR’s main roles is advocating for a universal design for learning that aligns with WashU’s philosophy of giving all students the resources they need to thrive academically. To facilitate learning for individuals with disabilities, the office tries to be as proactive as it can about potential accessibility concerns by communicating with campus administration, especially about concerns related to construction.

“As we’re talking about things, we’re involved in the conversations, whether it’s about activities happening or new programs, projects, if they’re going to be disrupting traffic or parking or anything for special events, we’re having those conversations and making sure they’re on people’s minds,” he said.

Representatives from Facilities said one of the ways DR interacts with them is that DR connects them to students to gather feedback in assessments of campus conditions, and that they also collaborate with Student Affairs leadership.

Together with Facilities, DR is working to consider opportunities to improve inclusion for students with disabilities. 

Stone mentioned Facilities is undertaking a series of Accessibility & Inclusion Design discussions to explore a few identified academic buildings (Seigle, Simon, and Cupples I) to get feedback on barriers recognized by students with disabilities and students who are transgender or nonbinary.

Ability WashU works closely with both Disability Resources and WashU Cares. Crouthamel said that DR is a good resource for students who need accommodations based on a documented disability but doesn’t go above and beyond those needs.

“There are times when, specifically, Disability Resources is not always the most responsive because they are very by the books,” Crouthamel said. “They will do what the law tells them to do, period.”

Crouthamel and Ability WashU’s advocacy for adding reflective tape in stairwells, as well as DR’s inaction in response to student requests, demonstrate how the WashU administration has the untapped potential to further empower students with disabilities on campus.

If the university made spaces more accessible to all students by eliminating the environmental barriers that create the idea of disability in the first place, these physical conditions would no longer limit their ability to navigate and exist on campus independently like any other college student.

WashU published a map on the Facilities website that logs the accessibility of buildings on campus. However, this map does not always provide necessary details about where accessible entrances and pathways may be.

Barounis said that she does not suffer from any permanent physical disabilities, but that she encountered this challenge when she broke her foot.

“I looked up my classroom [and saw it was] listed as accessible,” she said. “But I found it very hard to access information about it. Like, it’s listed as accessible, so there’s probably a ramp or something, but I showed up to the classroom, and there was no ramp. So we had to hold class outside that day. Luckily the weather was good.”

Facilities said that the online campus accessibility map is updated as new spaces are built, but that the information on the map is static, and it does not include updates for temporary accessibility issues like a broken elevator.

According to Lubbe, physical accessibility shouldn’t be as much of an issue as it is, given that WashU is an institution with an $11.5 billion endowment.

“I am used to institutions saying that they can’t do things because they don’t have the money, and that doesn’t always apply to WashU,” he said. “I feel like we have the money to make our school more accessible. I’m upset that that’s not always what we choose to do.”