Prof says campus accessibility remains ‘deplorable’, pitches campaign to change that by 200th anniversary
A Mount Allison professor is calling out a lack of progress in terms of physical accessibility on university campuses, and pitching a target for his own campus to fix the problem by the time it hits its 200th anniversary in 2039.
Dr. Mario Levesque teaches politics at Mount Allison, and also does research on disability issues. About 10 years ago he started Mount A’s first course focussed on disability, and a year and a half ago he got trained as an accessibility auditor through the Rick Hansen Foundation. He says that Mount Allison has a lot of work to do making the campus physically accessible.
Levesque points to his own building on campus, the Avard Dixon, which has an accessible washroom on the fourth floor, but no elevator. “Four storeys, so that makes it challenging,” he says. And this past fall, Levesque got some first hand experience with that challenge.
“I was on crutches for the bulk of last fall, and my office is on the third floor, and no elevator,” says Levesque. Though the university offered to find him a space to work elsewhere, Levesque says he needed access to his office and everything in it. That meant climbing the stair several times a day with his crutches, which Levesque says is a safety and liability issue. Some days if he wasn’t up for the climb, the professor moved up and down the stairs in a seated position.… Continue