For a university that prides itself on progressivism and diversity, Portland State is readily demonstrating that advocacy at this institution is nothing more than a token endeavor. The university continues to overlook students who have disabilities by providing those students with only minimal assistance and funding the programs assisting them at scarcely functional levels.
Portland State is teetering on the brink of discrimination by ignoring the consistent and longstanding demands–even pleas–of students with disabilities and their advocates, who ask that the university give them the additional assistance they need for their education. Now, a new group must start making demands: the entire student body.
Services such as the Disability Resource Center are paid for in large part by the tuition dollars students pay each term. Portland State administrators and Oregon University System officials must release their chokehold on our money by giving the Disability Resource Center the personnel and the technology it needs to operate effectively.
Currently, the DRC staff overextends its resources while aiding students with disabilities through phenomenal levels of support, offering assistance such as more accessible textbooks and testing assistance.
But without additional funding, the DRC will remain understaffed and unable to provide the timely services to all of the students in desperate need. As the university passively watches the DRC sit underfunded and understaffed, 27 students with visual disabilities are currently waiting for reformatted textbooks, which allow them to study like any other student, so they may interact in their classes and continue their education.
Instead, these students often get their texts after their classes have moved on, only because the DRC lacks the staff and the technology to complete the intricate process of converting texts to digital and audio formats quickly.
The university must respond swiftly, and the student body must demand they do so.
These students should not be forced to wait for their books merely because of disability. The university can, and must, find a way to give the DRC more money for staff and technology so that every student can have an equal education.
These students and their advocates can call for help only so loudly, as the administration watches with their hands clasped firmly over their ears. The student body must make clear to the administration that establishing an equal, progressive and diverse university is necessary for the success of everyone in this community-something that can be done only if this growing inequity is put to an end.