Indifference Toward Disabled Scholars, Especially at Conferences, Troubles a Disabilities Scholar

A key part of academic life is attending scholarly conferences, where colleagues gather to share knowledge and make the connections that could lead to their next joint research project, paper, or book.

But for people with disabilities, like William J. Peace, attending such meetings is almost always frustrating, if not impossible at times. Although the Americans With Disabilities Act is nearly 25 years old, Mr. Peace’s experience at academic conferences shows that the change it was designed to bring about has been to slow to come.

“Things aren’t improving at academic conferences,” said Mr. Peace, 53, a bioethicist and disability-studies scholar who has been a paraplegic since he was a teenager and who uses a wheelchair. “I spend a lot of time—hours and hours—advocating for myself.”

Recently, Mr. Peace took to his blog, Bad Cripple, to write a post about the obstacles he encountered while attending a three-day philosophy-of-disability conference at Syracuse University last week. The conference, he wrote, “has been an access nightmare.”

Among the problems Mr. Peace faced: The conference hotel’s shuttle bus had a broken wheelchair lift, and the placement of the tables and the food on the buffet made it impossible for him to serve himself. Papers that were posted online were inaccessible to blind scholars, and organizers thought about the need for interpreters for the hearing-impaired too late.

Mr. Peace said he had worked with the conference’s organizers to deal with accessibility issues, but things just didn’t work out as they had planned. However, the situation could have been worse, he said, like it was eight months ago at Hobart and William Smith College.

At a conference he attended there, a sign directed attendees to enter the building by walking up three steps. The room where the conference was held was similarly inaccessible to people who use wheelchairs. The irony was that the gathering was a workshop on humanities, health, and disabilities.

“It was probably one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had,” Mr. Peace said.

Mr. Peace took to his blog to write about what had happened, and not long afterward he heard from the institution’s president. The room that wasn’t accessible had been made so.

“That was a terrible thing, but something very positive came out of it,” Mr. Peace said.

‘A Real Cultural Disconnect’

Mr. Peace, a distinguished visiting professor at Syracuse University, attends three or four academic meetings a year and also gives talks in his field at various institutions. He earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University, where he studied the effect of the Cold War on anthropological theory, but over the years his career has evolved into bioethics and disability studies.

“I consider myself an academic, I publish regularly, but I also do a lot of advocacy work,” Mr. Peace said. “This is a multilayered problem, based on a real cultural disconnect.”

Lennard J. Davis, a professor of English, medical education, and disability and human development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said many organizations just don’t think about people with disabilities.

“It doesn’t even occur to them,” Mr. Davis said.

He has plenty of knowledge about what it takes to make conferences accessible to people with disabilities. He is one of the founders of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, formed in the late 1990s. The panel focuses, in part, on making sure the association’s annual meeting meets the access needs of all attendees.

Even with a “very cooperative president at the time,” it took two or three years to get everything worked out, said Mr. Davis of the committee’s work in the early years. But today, he said, the MLA signals early on to conference-goers with disabilities that their needs will be met by allowing them to check off what they need—an interpreter, for instance—without having to contact someone to request special accommodations.

Mr. Davis, who grew up with deaf parents, is also mindful of people with disabilities when he’s a conference presenter. To prepare for the Society for Disability Studies’ annual meeting, held last week in Minneapolis, Mr. Davis made multiple copies of his paper to pass out to people who may have had trouble hearing him read it, and he made copies in large type for those with visual impairments. Mr. Davis also planned to describe the slides in his PowerPoint presentation and post the words to a video clip as it played.

Mr. Peace said he knows that there aren’t large numbers of scholars with disabilities, but that’s no reason for conference planners to assume they won’t attend. He is preparing to go to another scholarly meeting in the fall, and already he has made countless telephone calls and traded dozens of emails to try to secure a hotel room that is wheelchair-accessible.

“I’m determined to go,” Mr. Peace said. “But if I weren’t presenting a paper, I would just throw up my hands and forget it.”

“I’m not doing all of this for myself,” said Mr. Peace of his advocacy work. “I’m doing it for the next generation of scholars, so they won’t have to go through what I have.”

Correction (6/16/2014, 2:09 p.m.): This article originally misstated the affiliation of Lennard J. Davis. He is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, not the University of Chicago. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.