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. “That’s the state of accessibility in some of our universities in Canada, in 2024,” says Levesque in frustration.
The issues extend beyond his own building, says Levesque, recalling a student during the April exam period who was unable to get into the newly renovated McCormack Gymnasium, because the entrances to the Athletic Centre have no ramps.
“She had torn her ACL and had surgery on it,” recalls Levesque. “She notified me basically the morning of that she couldn’t get in the gym.” With no time for accommodations through the university’s Meighen Centre, Levesque helped the student get in through a back door, where there were fewer steps. He calls the situation “deplorable.”
Levesque says that Mount Allison is actually losing out on students due to physical accessibility challenges, with a handful of students effectively turned away each year. “Those students end up at Carlton and SMU, which are much more accessible than our campus,” he says.
Up until 2019, Mount Allison was tracking its progress in campus accessibility under its Accessible Facilities Policy. The last update to that list in September 2019 notes that planning work for an Avard-Dixon elevator and washroom upgrade is scheduled as part of a “3 to 5 year plan” for alteration and renovation projects. The list also included conceptual plans for the renovation of the Athletic Centre to make it fully accessible.
Kris Kierstead, Mount Allison’s director of facilities management, says in an emailed statement that the lists attached to the Accessible Facilities Policy are “due for an update,” and that will happen sometime this year. Kierstead said all major renovations on campus include accessibility upgrades.
Kierstead also said that a washroom upgrade is in the works for the Avard Dixon building this summer, though he did not mention plans to introduce an elevator. As for its Athletic Centre, the school has “recently started an investigation into the addition of a ramp and some other accessibility upgrade additions for the gymnasium level of the Athletic Centre,” writes Kierstead. “We hope to implement this in the short-term while we work on a longer-term plan to make the Athletic Centre fully accessible and barrier free.”
Though Levesque says he feels there is not “much buy-in from senior administration” on accessibility issues at the school, he does give the university credit for the progress they’ve made since 2012, in particular on sidewalks around campus and steps coming in and out of some campus buildings. He also acknowledges the challenges, with Mount Allison’s location on a hill, and the age of many of the buildings.
Those are challenges he thinks the university can overcome.
“Mount A’s been voted 24 times out of the past 33 years as the number one undergraduate university in Canada,” he says. “And yet we’re not accessible… We’re only accessible for able-bodied kids. So from that perspective, I think that we can do better, I think we can rise to the challenge.”
When it comes to Maclean’s rankings of Canadian universities, Levesque has been working on convincing the magazine’s editors to include accessibility in their rankings.
“I’ve been in touch with them the past three years, working with them, trying to figure out how would Maclean’s include an accessibility measure for each publicly funded university in Canada as part of their rankings… They rank things on terms of student scholarships, they rank things on class size. There should be something there for physical accessibility of the campus.”
Levesque also thinks that provincial governments could incentivize more rapid conversions to accessible campuses by including bonuses for meeting accessibility standards in funding formulas.
He’s also interested in seeing fundraising initiatives from the university itself, and is pitching a major target to coincide with the school’s next big anniversary in 15 years.
“Mount Allison is going to celebrate its 200th anniversary as a university in 2039. How about we have an ‘Accessible Mount A’ fundraising campaign for 2039?”
Levesque believes alumni would back the conversion of the school’s remaining buildings to open them up to all. “Who wouldn’t donate to making the campus accessible?” he asks. “I’d be incredibly shocked that someone would not want to make sure that all students can go and get a top notch education.”
