A Moving Question

WHO SAYS disabled students can't take a class in the Geological Lecture Rooms? There's no need to climb a single step. Just take the ramp into Tozzer Library, pass from there toward the Peabody Museum, through the museum gift shop, wait for the attendant to unlock the fire door, walk through the museum, and enter the back door of the Geological Lecture Room, Presto.

At least one disabled freshman has had to do just that every time she wanted to go to a class this year. The student requested that the class be moved, but Registrar Margaret E. Law says that the faculty member involved refused to move the class to the room her office had found. Regulations require Universities receiving Federal funds to guarantee equal access to education to disabled students--a requirement that includes moving rooms when necessary. But the official Harvard policy is not couched in the absolutes of the Federal rules. Administrators say they will "make every effort" to accommodate students, but they cannot guarantee absolute success. Thomas E. Crooks, special assistant to the dean of the Faculty, says for example that wheelchair-bound students will never be able to take Fine Arts 13, since it is given in the Fogg Museum.

And what is already a less than absolute commitment seems now to be threatened by a new requirement that disabled students list eight classes this spring from which they will choose next fall. In a memorandum to disabled students. Crooks says that "we shall face even greater difficulties than usual in accommodating the special needs of handicapped students. "Some students fear that language like this will return to haunt them in the fall, if they want to ask for a course that isn't on the list.

WHETHER THIS request by the college is purely an informational move, designed to help accomodate disabled students while Sever Hall--Harvard's largest classroom building--is closed for renovations next year, or an attempt to force disabled students to commit themselves now to all of their fall courses depends on who you talk to.

With Sever closed, the College will be a little short on classroom space. Administration officials say that this space shortage will leave them little flexibility if a disabled student requests that a class be moved to an accessible room. By trying to initially schedule classes that disabled students will take in accessible rooms, they will avoid some of this difficulty.

But many disabled students say they feel some compulsion involved, and fear that this amounts to de facto pre-registration for disabled students. "I think in the fall they will say 'we gave you the opportunity to name classes in the spring and this wasn't one of them,'" Rani Kronick '84, president of A Better Learning Environment (ABLE), said last week.

What may well be at fault in this confusion is the great reverence the Harvard administration holds the case-by-case method of adjudication. All that disabled students now have that they can bank on is a promise that administrators will do their best. As Kronick says, "It's not going to help us to have them say they've done their best. If they don't move a class, you can't take it."

Once a commitment is couched in these vague terms, it becomes easy for Harvard to say that its best just was not good enough. A professor refused to budge. The Fogg Museum is just a factor to be reekoned with. Once the College can say this, it can certainly say that with Sever closed next year it will move even fewer.

THE LIST of eight courses is "purely informational," John B. Fox '59, dean of the College, says, and to a large degree this is true. No one would argue that the College should not have as much information as possible in its scheduling of classes. The issue centers around to what extent disabled students should be made to feel that they are signing away their rights to shop for classes in the fall.

"The reason they came on hard is to make students take it seriously," says Thomas Healy '83, a student advocate for the handicapped who works with Crooks's office, adding that he believes that classes will still be moved in the fall. And maybe they will--at least to the extent that they are moved now. But the College should make a real effort, when taking actions such as the request for the eight fall classes, not to come on quite so hard.