College Facilities Evolve From Accommodation to Inclusivity

The “academical village” that Thomas Jefferson designed for the University of Virginia in the early 1820s is among the most beautiful and influential arrangements of buildings and landscaping in the world. It’s a National Historic Landmark and a Unesco World Heritage Site, and it offers a select group of students and senior administrators some of the most sought-after campus housing anywhere.

But it’s not easy to get around if you have mobility issues.

Jefferson divided his broad quadrangle, known as the Lawn, into three levels with short, steep drops between them. In the flanking colonnades, stairs separate one stretch of student rooms from the next. There are more stairs leading down to the basement-level bathrooms, and there are steps leading up to the front doors of the 10 pavilions, which originally housed classrooms on the main floor and faculty apartments above. Jefferson topped off the design with a monumental stairway leading up from the grass to the Rotunda.

The academical village is the university’s iconic centerpiece, says Alice J. Raucher, whose title is architect for the university, “but there’s a 40-foot drop, which Jefferson himself terraced. He was not thinking about access.”

“There’s kind of an accessible route to all the levels, but you have to go outside the Lawn and use the alleyways,” says Cory Paradis, an undergraduate architecture major who uses a wheelchair. “It’s definitely challenging.”

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More than a quarter-century after the Americans With Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990, making campus facilities equally accessible to everyone remains a challenge for colleges everywhere. While the most pressing problems were eliminated long ago — many bathrooms were made wheelchair-friendly, ramps were added at building entrances, curb cuts were installed — the historic structures and landscapes that colleges have cherished for generations still present countless obstacles to anyone who can’t climb stairs or walk significant distances.

This is true even at institutions like Virginia, which can afford projects that would get back-burnered elsewhere, like overhauling the entrance to the main engineering building so that wheelchair users can enter alongside their friends instead of having to circle around to a side door. Here, elevated walkways and ramps abound, and recent improvements have included regrading the front of the chapel to eliminate the two front steps.

It’s not only money that has encouraged such changes: The university also has an energetic committee monitoring accessibility and making recommendations, which Mr. Paradis has joined. “They’re doing great things here — I think it’s just a matter of time,” he says. This semester he has signed on as a teaching assistant for an architecture course in which students are assessing the accessibility of the grounds, as the campus here is called.

Donald E. Sundgren, associate vice president and chief facilities officer, says the university has advanced from doing the minimum necessary to meet the needs of those with mobility impairments to understanding that their experience at Virginia should be the same as anyone else’s. “We’re moving from accommodation to inclusivity,” he says.

He also notes that improvements undertaken to improve accessibility typically benefit everyone. The renovations to the entrance of Thornton Hall, the engineering building, have created a new outdoor space for events, for instance, and a new elevated walkway to an auditorium in Maury Hall also offers a second emergency exit, allowing the maximum capacity to be increased.

But despite money and the best intentions, navigating the grounds can still be tough for Mr. Paradis. The university sprawls across ravines and roadways, and while recent sidewalk repairs have improved his daily trip to the architecture school, topography remains a big challenge. Just getting from his room on the second level of a residence hall to the lower level, where some of his friends like to hang out, requires going outside, heading over to a sidewalk beside a main road, and taking a long detour around behind the dorm complex to a lower-level door. Once inside, he can’t get far, because the lower level is actually several levels with “some insanely steep inclines” between them.

“All of the rooms that are in the basement I can’t get to by myself,” he says.

Many colleges, of course, aren’t nearly as rich as Virginia, and for them, accommodating students or faculty members with limited mobility can be even more of a hodgepodge of circuitous trips, temporary ramps, and classroom changes. At Wilson College, in Pennsylvania, a recent expansion of the library has made it entirely accessible. But the only accessible entrance to the neighboring building, Warfield Hall, involves going through a ground-floor auditorium and then using a special elevator installed by the main stairs. Even then you can’t reach the third floor, which has classrooms and faculty offices.

“Any time we go into a building that we’re trying to improve or renovate, we address accessibility,” says Brian Ecker, the college’s vice president for finance and administration. “And as we look around campus, we’ve been working on our pedestrian paths, proper grades, hand railings, and parking.” The college now has enough accessible facilities that it can accommodate individual needs with a little planning, he says — by moving a class off the third floor of Warfield, for instance.

Indeed, making case-by-case accommodations is a common approach. Until this fall, that’s how classroom accessibility worked at Trinity Washington University, says Patricia McGuire, the president, who describes her District of Columbia institution as “at the exact opposite end of the spectrum financially from UVa.”

“We were constantly moving classes to accommodate students who could not navigate the steps,” she says, adding that Trinity had about 10 students with mobility challenges last year, out of about 2,200. This fall, thanks to a brand-new four-story academic building, “we no longer use any classroom anywhere that isn’t fully accessible,” she says. She adds: “A new building is not just about satisfying the edifice complex. It’s often cheaper and easier to build a completely accessible new building than to retrofit all your old buildings.”

Not even a $38-million construction project resolved all of Trinity’s accessibility issues, however. The 225,000-square-foot Main Hall still houses some classrooms and dorm rooms as well as many offices. “It’s 110 years old,” says President McGuire. “It’s all staircases and different levels.” A few years ago it had only a single elevator with a door you had to pull open, but the university has since added two new elevators — a million-dollar undertaking, she says.

“It’s very hard to get a donor to give a ramp or a door opener or elevators,” Ms. McGuire notes. “These are not glamour projects.”

Jonathan Ceci, director of the landscape-architecture studio at the Baltimore architecture and planning firm Ayers Saint Gross, and Amelle Schultz, a senior associate there, say that more and more of the colleges they work with are no longer worried “just about getting someone from an ADA parking stall to the front door of a building.” Now, they say, colleges are adopting strategies “to make the main path of travel an accessible route.” Colleges, and the architects they work with, have recognized the benefits of what’s called universal design, an approach pioneered in the 1960s that advocates designing all facilities so they’re accessible to everyone.

The institution that has impressed them the most is the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. In the mid-1970s, the university’s Board of Regents designated Whitewater as the system’s accessible campus — notwithstanding a topographic rise called a drumlin that receding glaciers deposited in the middle of what’s now the campus. Now, Mr. Ceci says, “some of the things they’ve done on campus you don’t even notice till you look for them,” such as including extra paving beside campus benches for wheelchair users.

Elizabeth Watson, director of Whitewater’s Center for Students With Disabilities, says that at last count the campus had only five entrances with stairs and “maybe two doors that don’t have automatic door openers.” Recent residence halls incorporate wider, wheelchair-friendly corridors, suites with two accessible bedrooms, and even refrigerators with floor-level freezers, so wheelchair users can reach the ice.

Even so, “we still make mistakes,” Ms. Watson admits. Two dormitories from the 1960s remain to be remodeled, she says, and she is “still dreaming of designing the perfect bathroom to work for the most numbers of people.”

At Princeton University, says Ron McCoy, the university architect, the majority of buildings are fully accessible. “But we still have a generation of Collegiate Gothic dorms with multiple entrances and stair towers” that are difficult to equip with ramps and elevators. Doing so isn’t entirely impossible — you could gut the building and reconstruct it with standard interior corridors and elevators — but it is costly.

Here in Charlottesville, the challenges are being tackled one by one. In its most recent overhaul, just completed, Jefferson’s Rotunda got a new elevator that looks like it’s been there forever and is easier for anyone to use than the elevator it replaces. And the university has asked a landscape-architecture firm to suggest ways of making Jefferson’s Lawn more easily accessible.

As for the coveted student rooms on the Lawn, “we haven’t had a student with ambulatory challenges live on the Lawn,” but recently one was accepted, says M. Wynne Stuart, who is associate provost for academic support and classroom management and who chairs the university’s committee on barrier-free access. That student chose to stay among the friends she had been living with previously, but in the meantime the university identified three rooms that would have worked for her, with reasonable bathroom access and nearby parking.

What Virginia faces is “an endless opportunity to get better,” says Ms. Stuart. Ravines and stairs will always remain, but the university is committed to go “beyond what’s required by code,” she says, “to do what’s right.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.