State University sees rise in students with disabilities

As changing societal attitudes encourage more students with disabilities to pursue higher education, the faculty working with these students will face unexpected challenges.

An increased enrollment of students with disabilities will be especially felt at public universities such as SUNY, said David Du Bois, an associate professor at SUNY’s Empire State College and co-chair of the UUP Disability Rights and Concerns Committee.

“Public higher education has always helped advance the agenda of people outside the mainstream,” Du Bois said.

SUNY had 15,500 students with disabilities in 2000, the most recent year for which statistics are available, Du Bois said. The actual number may be higher, though, because many students choose not to reveal their disability.

Despite the increase, faculty members may not always know the best way to respond to a student with a disability, said UUPer Elizabeth Hall, an assistant professor of education at SUNY Geneseo and a recognized authority on disability rights within the SUNY system.

At Geneseo, Hall is working with her colleague Tabitha Buggie-Hunt, a UUPer and the college’s disability services coordinator, to plan a workshop for faculty members about students with disabilities. Such workshops can help faculty members respond to such students in the best and most appropriate manner. And, as Hall notes, the better prepared that faculty members are, the better they can work with all students.

“Some faculty want to know what the disability is, and that’s confidential,” Hall said. “So, that’s an issue. There are some faculty members who think the accommodations are unfair. Some faculty members might think, ‘I don’t have a student in my class this semester, so I don’t have to worry about it.’”

Hall encourages faculty members to keep an open mind, and to seize every opportunity to learn more about these students by attending workshops and speaking to the experts on their campuses.

The lesson that faculty will take from such efforts?

“Students with disabilities can learn; they can succeed,” Hall said.

— Darryl McGrath