The year 1990 means two things to Marshall Mitchell.
It is the year he began working at Washington State University, as well as the year the Americans with Disabilities Act — the first comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities — was passed.
Mitchell, the university’s ADA compliance officer, works to ensure that facilities and technology on campus are accessible to students, employees and other people with disabilities.
“WSU poses a few barriers that can be changed and some that cannot,” he said recently. “While the terrain and the weather are not changeable, the lack of resources for programs and the attitudes that do not include people with disabilities as part of the diversity efforts are.”
There is a lack of understanding and appreciation for people with disabilities on campus, Mitchell said.
“Last fall, WSU and University of Washington officials expressed alarm that their enrollment of ethnic and racial minority students was not equal to the percentage of the state population,” Mitchell said. “However, there has been no concern that the students with disabilities population is significantly lower than the percentage of the population.”
In an effort to increase students’ understanding of people with disabilities, Mitchell helped establish WSU’s disability studies minor, one of only a few in the nation.
In his “Disability and Society” class, Mitchell tells his students that although the media tend to emphasize a person’s disability, people with disabilities have many different aspects to their lives. One of these aspects just happens to be an imperfection that is labeled a ‘disability.’
Mitchell hopes the 100 students taking disability studies classes each semester learn things that will influence the way they work and make decisions for society.
Mitchell came to WSU from Texas’ Amarillo College, where he designed and directed a program for accommodating students with disabilities. He is a graduate of the University of Montevallo in Alabama.
