During last week’s Rose Cafe, Erin Sember-Chase spoke to us about disabilities on campus as well as obstacles she has had to face in her own life. She is the Assistant Director and Disability Counselor at Cornell Health.

As a college student, she remembered facing an obstacle in which she could not hear her professor very well. The class was called intro to theater. She sat in the front row and had a hearing aid but she could not hear the professor because not only did he not wear a microphone the room seemed to have poor sound acoustics. So, one day after class she politely went up to the professor and asked if he could wear a microphone because of the circumstances she was facing and he refused. He said to her, “As an actor, I know I can project my voice”. So she told her mother and she had to call the president of the university because there was no Student Disability Services.

The importance of the Student Disability Services was highlighted  in the Disabilities Rights Acts. People and allies banded together to get this act passed. This occurred 27 years ago.

We also discussed our experiences with disabled students. I remembered in elementary and high school how the disabled students were kept in their own classroom essentially segregated from the non-disabled students and we were never educated on why this was. Other students explained inclusion classes which were when high performance students were paired with disabled students. The way administration would make it feel, like the students were not competent and that they needed help, which effected the equality between those students.

There is also a cultural aspect with how different countries deal with disabled people. For example Erin explained how she used to have a service dog and when she was in NYC they were not as understanding as people in Toronto, Canada.