In the U.S., much is being made of the 25 year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In activist circles, commemoration has meant celebration of the progress that has been made alongside calls to action regarding systemic disadvantages that remain. It is fortuitous that the launch of this blog coincides with this anniversary, both inviting reflection on how this policy has made an impact on higher education.
First, I will briefly lay some conceptual groundwork. It is widely noted that the ADA is a civil rights law grounded in and justified by the social model of disability. Roughly, the social model maintains that a person’s biological differences – or perhaps impairments – become disabling only within a particular social context in which there is a mismatch between the mode in which she functions and the mode for which the social environment has been constructed. Thus, most of the disadvantages of disability are socially constructed, according to this model. In contrast, the medical model says that the disadvantages of disability are inevitable because disability is, ontologically speaking, a biological deviation from the norm that is, by definition, disadvantageous.