Smiling in the Margin

The inside of the Great Hall's kitchen is a mess. Thawing gray vegetables and slabs of uncooked, pink ground beef litter the countertops and a pale yellow splatter from cream of broccoli soup stains a section of the floor. It's a place that most Duke students do not confront--or even consider--but this was a part of Candace Tingen's world. She sneaks into the back door and service entrances of some of the academics buildings where she has class. She never visits some of her friends. Hers is a world that few students or administrators will ever experience.

    

   Tingen relies on a motorized wheelchair to navigate Duke's campus... and life. As other students watch, she zooms to class and then on to the Bryan Center, taking the circuitous route of slate-colored sidewalk others so easily pass by on the grass. They swipe their DukeCards and blithely yank open heavy doors, which for her require an ordeal of opening the door with both arms and thrusting her legs between the door and frame until she can re-center herself and motor through.

    

   A junior, she has been using a wheelchair since high school due to a degenerative muscular disease that has been progressing since she was an infant.

    

   For someone in a wheelchair, nothing at Duke is easy or straightforward. So when Tingen, as a freshman, wanted to eat a meal at the Oak Room, the multiple flights of stairs seemed to mock her. Her only option was to drive through the Great Hall's kitchen and take an outdated service shaft elevator up to the restaurant on the second floor of the West Union building.

    

   While college is a time when many students gain life experience through "trial-and-error", for Tingen the phrase takes on a new meaning. Her journey began in April 2001. Tingen, a biology and women's studies double major from Hillsborough, N.C., visited campus during Blue Devil Days, an Office of Undergraduate Admissions program that allows admitted students to tour the campus. When she and her mother appeared at the Bryan Center at the beginning of that day, no one there was aware of the options for a wheelchair-bound person to see the campus.

    

   "It was very scary because I couldn't get anywhere," she says. "I was going up into the Clocktower Quad and there were only steps at that time, no ramp, and at that time we were like, 'Oh no, what if I need to get over here.'"

    

   Despite her fears about the accessibility of Duke's campus, Tingen still chose to come to the school.

    

   "Later we learned that there was a handicapped-accessible map, but it doesn't really show where the doors are, where the ramp is," she says. "The only problem is getting used to campus because if you don't know the campus you don't know where the ramp is--it's actually behind the building in the service entrance. It's a lot of trial and error to learn how to get into buildings and the quickest way around."

    

   The campus' accessibility map is a maze of lines and routes most students don't know exist. Because there is no ramp near the Chapel, where many students take a shortcut to Science Drive, Tingen often leaves from her West-Edens Link dorm room, drives down the Wannamaker firelane, up Towerview Road and right onto Science Drive--a route that is at least twice as long as the more direct path.     

   Similarly, for much of her freshman year, Tingen accessed the Levine Science Research Center by entering on the ground entrance near the North Building off of Research Drive. Because nobody told her of a closer accessible entrance, she traveled well out of her way more than a hundred times.

    

   "I think it is hard to figure out where to go. It took me my whole freshman year," she says, smiling and raising her eyebrows in bemused exasperation.

    

   Experiences like Tingen's, particularly at Blue Devil Days, are not new to Mary Thomas, executive director of the Disability Management System for Duke University and Duke University Health System. Thomas, who oversees a "central clearinghouse" and a staff of six, is charged with ensuring the University and the Health System meet the standards outlined in the settlement and ADA itself.

    

   The terms of the University's settlement with the justice department outlined several key areas of focus--including both academic and residential building improvements. As part of the agreement, Duke promised to provide better access to parking, buses and classrooms, among other things.

    

   DMS had been housed within the administrative confines of the Office of Institutional Equity from its inception, until July 1, 2003, when Executive Vice President Tallman Trask took the program directly under his wing as part of a shift of institutionalizing plans within Duke.

    

   "By establishing DMS, we're trying to be more and more proactive," Thomas says.

    

   I go to meet Thomas and some of her employees on a chilly January morning in their office off of Oregon Street. The electronic door of the nondescript office building opens to reveal an ADA heaven. The door into the DMS office is marked in Braille and has a low-mounted assistance button for wheelchair-confined visitors. In Duke's sea of non-compliance this one office stands out as an island of accessibility.

    

   The DMS model is based on managing the accommodation requests of students, staff and visitors and following ADA compliance. People in need of accommodation petition DMS. Emma Swain, director of student access, or Barbara Briner, assistant director for employment and public access, are in charge of determining if the request is valid, if it falls within the scope of ADA and, if so, how accommodations can be implemented.

    

   Thomas, Swain and Briner express genuine concern for disabled individuals at Duke. Swain talks of establishing legitimacy with professors about her students' needs. "You have a right to say what accommodations you want," she adds.

    

   In fact, DMS even had a solution--of sorts--to Tingen's Oak-Room dilemma: A student wanting to eat there could call ahead before dining and DMS would provide a motorized apparatus called a StairTrac that allows a mobile person to move a wheelchair-bound person up stairs.

    

   Briner has perhaps an even more difficult job--juggling the needs of those who arrive on campus only for a short stay, as well as employees' needs.

    

   "We try to go out of our way to do things, such as assistive listening during concerts and performances and commencement, that ADA doesn't necessarily require us to do," she says. "We try to support employees too with the framework of 'What are their limitations?' and 'How can we help them?'"

    

   During my hour and a half there, I am introduced to everyone in the office, shown every accessibility tool in the storage closet and weighted down with handouts and fliers. As Thomas and I talk, I notice the walls plastered with updated maps of accessibility on campus and lists of places that people have reported as wheelchair-unfriendly.

    

   In making the campus increasingly ADA compliant, Duke must weigh the costs of technology and plant improvements as it allocates resources. It costs thousands of dollars every year to provide assistive aids such as sound amplifiers or to run the handicapped accessible van between campuses. Tingen uses these vans to get to class because, although the buses are handicapped accessible, loading and unloading her can take up to twenty or thirty minutes. Modifying the campus' fundamental problems to reach complete accessibility would cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

    

   "Equal opportunity is not only a matter of conscience, but also of good human relations," reads the opening message--above the signatures of President Nannerl Keohane and Chancellor for Health Affairs Ralph Snyderman--of "The Americans with Disabilities Act & The Rehabilitation Act of 1973: Your Rights and Responsibilities at Duke University/Duke Health System," a heavy Duke blue cardstock leaflet distributed in the DMS office. Stereotypical images grace its cover: the ADA's official wheelchair symbol; a symbol of hearing impairment; a person with a cane; American Sign Language gestures.

    

   Keohane and Snyderman's statement has trouble standing the laugh test. "Equal opportunity," or any politicized way of referencing provision of accommodations, is not simply a matter of conscience, but a matter of judicial settlement, of law. A wheelchair-bound student, who graduated from Trinity College in May of 1997, initiated the Justice Department complaint early in his or her graduating year on the grounds that Duke violated ADA. Duke simply isn't employing its "conscience"--it has no choice.

    

   The University, it seems, has always been overly and unduly optimistic with what it perceives as its ADA compliance. In July 1999, awaiting the results of the inquiry by the Justice Department, then-Vice President of Institutional Equity Myrna Adams told The Chronicle, "Our sense is that we're in compliance [with ADA]."

    

   But a 23-page settlement, $32,500 in penalties and four years later, the University has learned little beyond the requirements for navigating the maze of timetables, lawyers, penalties and damages to both the original complainant and the Department of Justice. The question still remains of whether Duke will ever be fully ADA compliant.

    

   There are signs all around campus that pieces of the settlement have not been met and although some of these delays, according to Thomas, "could not have been prevented," with the justice department "right there behind us about the schedule," the very basic fact that the school has not leapt at the opportunity to follow the settlement's timetable indicates where students and employees like Tingen fit in the University's list of priorities.

    

   Duke must answer fairly formidable questions. What value does the University assign to those people in need of accommodation, and what value does it assign to the beauty, cost or time constraints of filling these needs? Can an institution of higher learning really defend its practices of non-compliance with ADA?

    

   One of the key issues facing Duke's conformity to ADA regulations is the exemption of historic buildings of a certain age from meeting some of the act's requirements.

    

   Old buildings such as Few Quadrangle off of Main West campus are exempt from the act's requirements because of their age and design as long as they are not renovated. When the University undertakes a renovation of a grandfathered dorm, as it did with Kilgo Quadrangle this past summer, it is required to bring it up to compliance.

    

   "They've done a remarkable job with the Kilgo renovation," Thomas says. "They've made that compliant, they really did a model job."

    

   Not renovating other exempted buildings has had adverse effects on the experiences of the mobile impaired, such as Tingen. "I had friends on upper floors in Brown, and there are no elevators in any of those old dorms," she says. Whereas many students could not imagine a world where they were barred from friends' rooms, for Tingen it is an unavoidable fact of life. "We basically work it out where they come over to my room, or we meet at a restaurant or something instead of going to the room," she says. "But I mean it would be nice to get to every room."

    

   She recognizes the inherent difficulties in refurbishing all of the campus to meet every line of ADA regulations. "I realize these buildings are old and I'm not too sensitive about it. As long as the buildings are old, I can deal with it, but if the building is new, then I wonder why they couldn't have done something about it," she says.

    

   With six monitoring reports already submitted to the Department of Justice, Thomas claims the University is "right on target" with plans.

    

   "We've had timeline problems," she says, adding that there were "problems with the process of implementing institutionalized procedures."

    

   However, other signs around campus tell a different tale. Of the 1,335 official parking spaces in the Blue Zone--the student parking location for undergraduates living on West Campus--11 are specifically designated as handicapped accessible. According to the settlement, for a parking lot of that size, there should be a minimum of 23 of these spaces.

    

   In addition, it has taken the University almost four years to implement a change in the blue light safety phones around campus, a change outlined in the settlement as part of the "Remedial Actions" to be taken up immediately by the school.

    

   Access to campus enrichment, such as lectures and performances, has also been an issue with the University's accessibility accountability. "The Nelson Music Room was a big point of contention," says Marianne Marlo, who graduated from the University with a Masters of Liberal Studies in 2000 and who was employed at Duke Medical Center from 1978 until 2003. "At one point there was a lecture [in Nelson] I really wanted to go to, but I had called the department in advance to make sure I could get in, and they said I couldn't. It wasn't accessible."

    

   Following local media attention to Nelson's inaccessibility, the University provided a StairTrac. Eventually Nelson was closed as a public space and the University built White Lecture Hall, which, as an annex to East Duke now provides an accessible pathway to Nelson.

    

   "[These things are] open to the public but not really open," Marlo says. "They sure weren't open to me."

    

   Although it's clear that the University is not fully handicapped accessible, DMS does work to address any problem it can handle. The nature of seeking accommodations places the burden upon the disabled, and DMS can only work to fix those problems that are brought to its attention.

    

   "I think that perhaps, because of the lawsuit, things like that, people have a perception that we are not a navigable campus [for a wheelchair]," Thomas says.

    

   This creates a Catch-22 as fewer students or employees who need accommodations come to Duke. This minimizes the number of people exploring the campus and identifying problem areas, and in turn makes the campus less appealing for future applicants. "It's hard to know what's a problem unless you're in a wheelchair and encounter an issue," Marlo says. There also is the misconception that the settlement is wholly responsible for the efforts to modify the campus and arrange accommodations. "That's what I heard a lot of when I got here first, is that they had to be accommodating because of the lawsuit," Tingen says.

    

   Both Tingen and Marlo report that DMS was very responsive to their needs when presented with problems it could tackle. Additionally, neither faced any explicit discrimination at the University because of their wheelchair use. "I've never had a class that I've had to switch because I couldn't get to the room," Tingen says. She adds that DMS is repeatedly offering her other accommodations.  

    

   But Duke has a crucial and costly decision to make, a difficult balance to determine. What is the value of disabled students' happiness compared to the cost of adjusting the first floor of Brown, or creating a ramp for entrance to the Biological Sciences building in front of the building instead of through the service entrance? Which is more important to Duke?

    

   If the University's tepid response to the settlement has given any indication of its priorities, value seems to be placed on the latter. Nevertheless, Tingen, who must make her friends come to her because she cannot reach their rooms, keeps rolling.