The University could soon become the 10th school in the country to boast a cultural center for students with disabilities and chronic illnesses. As part of a growing nationwide movement to give college students opportunities to connect with disability culture, the Chronically Ill and Disabled Cavaliers are calling for a physical space in which students can congregate, study and share stories with others who empathize with their experiences.
The CIDC is a student group dedicated to creating a community that supports disabled and chronically ill students at the University.
The group’s goal for the Disability Cultural Center is threefold — it would provide students with resources to support them in problem-solving, connect students to one another and in “destigmatizing disability” for the abled public, said Annie Zetkulic, third-year College student and CIDC Outreach Chair. The center would supplement — not replace — the Student Disability Access Center— the University’s designated access agency for disabled students — with whom CIDC already works closely.
“Our space would ideally be very student-oriented and student-run,” Zetkulic said. “It would be a community space, whereas SDAC has the connections to the institution and the accommodations that can be provided officially.”
First-year College student Rix Prakash — inspired by his older sister who played a role in establishing Duke University’s Disability Cultural Center — is leading the charge to bring the number of collegiate disability centers into the double digits.
“A lot of [students] don't feel like they have a safe environment where they can go and talk about the problems that they face today,” Prakash said. “We are trying to create the Disability Cultural Center to build a safer, more inclusive environment at U.Va.”
The center would encompass both undergraduate and graduate students, and Prakash is hoping to create a mentorship program between the two groups.
Mausam Mehta, fourth-year Commerce student and president of CIDC, believes that the public needs to start recognizing disability as an identity, rather than an ailment, to properly support the community.
“Disability has always been categorized as something that needs to be fixed,” Mehta said. “It is generally synonymous with unhealthy ... We are really hoping to change the messaging around the identity, and we want people to understand that while disability and chronic illness do pose many challenges that create access barriers and are in need of solutions, disability is also an identity that we can be proud of and that we can own.”
Mehta said the Student Disability Access Center’s current location in the new Student Health and Wellness building emphasizes the perception that disability is inherently connected with health and reinforces the need for a separate disability cultural center that could potentially be located alongside the cultural centers within Newcomb Hall. Currently, Newcomb hosts the Multicultural Student Center, the LGBTQ Center, the Latinx Center and the Interfaith Center — all of which opened in 2020 — and the Veteran Student Center, which opened in September.
“Students come into the University with this hope of building a community because a lot of times, disability and chronic illness do pose additional challenges or even just require things to be done in different and alternative ways,” Mehta said. “It is really easy to feel alienated when you can't see that experience in people around you.”
In this way, CIDC hopes to create a safe space for students to share experiences and to educate the broader University community.
“By having an actual physical location, it's going to allow students who are studying in the room — perhaps because they don't want to engage with people who don't understand them or might judge them — to come to these areas and start to have some discussions with their fellow students who understand where they're coming from,” Prakash said.
Modeled after Duke’s Disability Cultural Center, the students’ vision for the center involves study spaces, meeting spaces for organizations and artwork to help students connect with their identities.
Zetkulic said having this kind of center would have been tremendously beneficial to her time on Grounds.
“There would have been a lot less shame associated with having illness on Grounds,” Zetkulic said. “It took me a long time to be honest with people I was meeting about what I needed. I think that it would have been a bit of a second home to me if I had had the opportunity to talk to people who I knew, if not had some real life experiences, could sympathize and empathize a lot with me.”
In addition, Mehta said the Disability Cultural Center would serve as a way to work toward better resources and accommodations for disabled students —including designing buildings and housing to be more accessible and adjusting how the buses run.
“There is a lot of work to be done with the overall accessibility of the University,” Mehta said. “All of those things cannot happen until we, as a center and as an identity, are able to pool our voices, bring forward statistics and testimonials and have conversations with administration. That happens when we have an identity that is recognized by the University.”
For Prakash, who was born with hearing loss, it has been challenging to find seats at the front of classrooms and to effectively hear lectures — an issue that such a center could help him address.
“With the Disability Cultural Center, we could have some students who are able to take notes, for example, which could help out my community with hearing loss,” Prakash said. “And, for all students who have general types of chronic illnesses or physical or invisible disabilities, we can help them [to] talk about their problems and how we can address them.”
Mehta said the root of many problems associated with accommodations is that faculty are often unaware of how to properly implement them, which creates a discrepancy between the services students are supposed to receive and how those services are carried out.
This often dissuades students from requesting disability-related services in the first place — less than half of college students with disabilities are registered with their school’s disability office nationwide, according to Educause. At the University, 2,409 students are registered with the Student Disability Access Center, while it is projected that 5,000 students from the total undergraduate and graduate student body have disabilities, based on a normalized nationwide figure that 19 percent of college students are disabled.
“Awareness is still an ongoing journey because just because you have something written on paper does not mean that people understand its purpose,” Mehta said. “If they don't understand the purpose, they don't know how to fulfill that purpose. What we run into a lot is students who have requests that might seem a little unusual to professionals or professors, and it's harder for them to get what they need.”
This movement comes at the same time as the push for an Asian and Asian American Student Center, and Mehta is optimistic that the two campaigns will propel one another forward.
“I'm really excited about the work that they're doing,” Mehta said. “Collectively, we have a lot of power and a lot of voices … I am very, very on board with working with as many groups for awareness as possible, and allyship is really important.”
CIDC is currently collecting data to back their proposal, surveying the student body to see whether students would use a Disability Cultural Center and what features would be most beneficial.
Though survey data is not yet finalized, CIDC has found that 97 percent of respondents — among students associated with SDAC — are in favor of the formation of the Disability Cultural Center. From 164 participants, 55.3 percent responded that a center would be of use to them personally and 37.9 percent responded that it may be of use to them personally. Over half of students rated the University’s current level of accessibility as either one or two out of five.
Although the project is still in its initial stages, Prakash dreams of eventually taking the movement far beyond Charlottesville.
“The long-term goal is to have more universities in the United States or around the world start to create these disability cultural centers,” Prakash said. “[The current number of centers] is very misrepresentative of how many students actually need this in order to feel included.”
CIDC members met with SDAC executives Nov. 30 to discuss next steps for the center, which will ultimately be proposed to Student Council. If passed, the plan will then travel to the Office of the President for further approval.
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