Dr. Coombs. Hello this is Norman Combs from EASI, with our regular weekly Web cast. Our guest this week is Trey Duffy from AHEAD. But before I introduce him I want my colleague Dick Banks our electronic wizard to say hello.
Mr. Banks. Wizard? Good afternoon Norm.
Dr. Coombs. Hi. And Trey would you say hi?
Mr. Duffy. Hello gentleman, thank you for having me.
Dr. Coombs. I am presently in Philadelphia and Trey and Dick are both in Wisconsin. I have a warm spot in my heart for Wisconsin even when it is a cold winter day like today. I spent several years living in Milwaukee and got my Masters and my Ph.D. there. I got my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, and that is where you are Trey?
Mr. Duffy. That is where I am. And it is seventy and sunny today, how about where you are Dick?
Mr. Banks. And seventy and sunny? Dream on. I think it is like 10 degrees, and it is like a skating rink in the entire city of Menomonie.
Mr. Duffy. Well I am in southern Wisconsin down here, so we are warmer.
Dr. Coombs. I have a lot of fond memories from that and I loved going to school there. I reminisce from time to time about the good old days. When I was there the student body was around fourteen or fifteen thousand, any idea what it is now?
Mr. Duffy. It is a little over forty thousand.
Dr. Coombs. I would probably be lost. Actually I was there a couple of summers ago with my daughter. We went to the rooming house where I used to live. And it turned out senior citizens were living there and I figured I would be right at home. I thought I would be right at home. I mentioned Trey that you are the President of AHEAD. What does AHEAD stand for?
Mr. Duffy. Well AHEAD is the Association on Higher Education And Disability. And it is an international multicultural organization of people who are committed to full participation in higher education of people with disabilities. It has been around for about 25 or 30 years now.
Dr. Coombs. I always got the impression that it was mostly staff working to support students with disabilities in higher education?
Mr. Duffy. Everyone can join the association, but it is primarily those people working in two-year technical and four-year colleges all over the country. Also we have a lot of members in Canada and Mexico, and then internationally throughout the world.
Our primary job is providing direct services to students with disabilities and making sure that, or trying to make sure anyway, that campuses are as accessible as possible.
Dr. Coombs. So in the U.S. this means you tie in pretty closely with the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504, and probably Section 508 of the ADA?
Mr. Duffy. I think pretty clearly that people who do these jobs came into those positions as a result of the passage of Section 504 in the '70s, and then the ADA in 1990. And that colleges began to recognize, if they had not already, that there were things that they either wanted to do our had to do.
And so they began to create one person shops that provided services, or in some cases full-fledged programs. I do not think that there are that many colleges that would have gotten where they are today had it not been for passage of the legislation.
Dr. Coombs. As you might guess, I went to college before 1973. And I remember the woman at UW Milwaukee that I had regular contact with. And she was primarily a counselor for veterans and did some stuff for disabled students to. That was where UWM had its students.
Mr. Duffy. And I think that is probably how many of the services came about. Many of the services became apparent to college campuses after World War II when veterans of the GI Bill went back to college. And some of them obviously had disabilities and programs sort of sprouted from there.
Dr. Coombs. What kinds of things will the DSS staff do for disabled people?
Mr. Duffy. We sort of recommend that if you are going to work in the field that you get a medical degree, a law degree, and maybe something in architecture. Those seem to be the areas that come up the most often. It wouldn't be bad to get may be a Ph.D. in Psychology to the so that you can do some counseling.
Dr. Coombs. And computer science.
Mr. Duffy. And computer science, that's right. I think over the years things have changed from being responsible for primarily direct kinds of services like an interpreter or doing things in Braille, to more the advocacy and the administrative types of changes that needed to appear to make college campuses accessible to all people.
But also the clientele has changed, whereas 20 years ago members were primarily people with vision loss, hearing loss, or maybe mobility impairments. I would say that close to half of students served in DSS programs have learning disabilities.
And then there are psychological disabilities; attention deficit disorder is by far the fastest-growing population of students coming onto college campuses.
And then basic health impairments. Anything from multiple sclerosis to lupus, we have students with autism and Turets syndrome.
And just about any condition that exists we find students on college campuses with. So it has really forced people in our jobs to have a really broad background and understanding of a lot of different issues, whether it be the disability itself or the functional impact, or what it means to the student on the college campus.
It is very hard to say what would be they adequate preparation for someone in this job. It is very difficult to say this is the one degree that you should go get to prepare you to do it. In many cases, I think the primary job; I see my primary job as accepting change.
Being a thorn in the side of every corner of the campus to make sure that as they are planning for the future that they are taking into consideration hollered by the fact any student, or any employee for that matter, with a disability.
Dr. Coombs. Well that is a good job. I am overwhelmed listening to it. It makes teaching history sound a little straightforward and simple. I see why you listed all those degrees at the beginning. I have am a little curious about the role of advocacy. It is essentially your job to persuade the school to do something for a student, but it is the school that employs you. Is that a problem trying to put a bur under the saddle of the guy who pays your salary?
Mr. Duffy. There can be. I guess it sort of depends on the approach that you take. It is most easily understood by campus administrators that when we talk about being advocates, we try to talk about it in the context that we are advocates for reasonable accommodations.
We are advocates for doing the right thing. We are not advocates for students. We are advocates for both the University and for the students with disabilities who are seeking an accommodation.
What we are trying to do is to help the college make the decisions about what it should do in order to ensure that everybody with a disability has an equal opportunity. That is what are job is. Our job is not to advocate to get what it is they asked for. I think that is a common misconception.
I think it is also a mistake that a lot of college disability programs make. Which is they call themselves essentially advocates for students, and then they are perceived as not being interested in the overall health of the entire institution, but only on getting the student what it is he or she wants.
Sometimes students want more than what is appropriate for them to receive. So I think that there can be a conflict of interest but as long as we try to approach it from a perspective that we're trying to help the college make good decisions about what is best for everybody, it is a little bit easier for them to adjust to.
Dr. Coombs. I see that is a difficult job. Because in my experience with both having a disability and being around many people who knew it, I think often times people are overly timid to ask for what really we need and what is our right.
And the other hand, you come across occasional characters that are mean and nasty. It is nice to have the stereotype of the happy disabled person but that is that always the case. For folks to find that fine line, that is a tough job.
Mr. Duffy. Actually it is a tough job. And the toughest part is in creating a balance between not being paternalistic, versus burgeoning an individual with too much to do on their own when they already have enough things to do being a full-time student.
Mainly we want them to be good self-advocates. We want students to learn how to express their needs and to advocate for themselves. But we do not want to do it for them, because clearly that is part of the whole paternalistic history that we have of helping someone who has a disability. But on the other hand if you have to battle every day to get equal access, it gets to be a little bit exhausting.
Mr. Banks. And the other side of the coin is the fact that if you do not learn to self advocate for yourself and end up having somebody else do that for you, what happens at the end of school when you are out in the employment arena? You need to be able to advocate for yourself.
Mr. Duffy. That is exactly the perspective that we take. The approach that we try to use is that we will do a lot more for students when they are a freshman than when they are a senior. And we try to wean them for the need for us to intervene on their behalf. So if they come in the summer before they are freshman and during their freshman year, we expect to play a larger role in their efforts to advocate.
Especially when they come from a special education background where there is a tendency to have the resource teachers, or the special education teachers take a much stronger and larger role in accomplishing things for you. And then we wean them during their sophomore and junior years, and then we just kick them out their senior year.
Dr. Coombs. Is that common to provide any kind of self-advocacy training, seminars or anything?
Mr. Duffy. Commonly no, if necessary yes. We touch on it, we talk about it, but in reality most college programs including our own do not really have the resources to do all of the things that they would like to do for students. So that you end up prioritizing your needs.
Such things as self-advocacy seminars or training tend to follow little bit lower on the scale of things that have to get done. So they tend not to be done with as much rigour as they probably should be. You spend more of your time on the direct services and the problem solving of important issues that might have to deal with academics or financial, or others.
I am sure there is something with transition. Transition is something that we should spend a lot more time on with students as they enter college and as they transfer from other colleges.
But maybe that is a good segue for technology. Because we are trying to work in a way where we might be able to create some of these resources on-line and make them available to students so they can at their leisure sit down and go through some training in self advocacy on-line. The other problem that we have is when we do try to provide training of some kind students do not come.
Dr. Coombs. Yes.
Mr. Duffy. We have peer support groups and then they do not come. And that is because you have to physically go from one place to another at a certain time, and in this day and age this it is just not as doable as it once was.
Also with certain disabilities it is not as convenient to move around his much. So I think that there is a huge opportunity out there to create some of these types of opportunities for students where they can do it at their leisure.
Dr. Coombs. Well my memory is a little vague but I believe AHEAD was preceded by another organization that changed its name to AHEAD something like ten or fifteen years ago?
Mr. Duffy. AHEAD was originally founded I think in 1977 as AHSSPE, it was the Association for Handicapped Student Service Professionals in Postsecondary Education out at Wright State in Ohio. And essentially it is the same organization, it just changed names.
And when a strategic planning group looked at the Association and where it was going, and of course the phrase handicapped fell out of favor. We were looking for a name that was a little bit more appropriate and that is when the association adaptived the current name of AHEAD.
Dr. Coombs. I think it is good.
Mr. Duffy. Yes.
Dr. Coombs. So would it be safe say that 90 percent of the disabled students support staff are AHEAD members?
Mr. Duffy. No, I wish that was the case. I do not think that is true.
Dr. Coombs. Make any kind of guess?
Mr. Duffy. I can tell you that AHEAD right now has about only fifteen or sixteen hundred members. And there are five thousand colleges in this country. And of those fifteen hundred or so members, I think they only represent something like nine hundred colleges. So there are only any about 20 percent of the colleges in the country represented in the Association.
I think there has been a little bit of a drop off in membership actually over the last several years. And I think part of the reason has to do with, there are a couple of reasons.
One is that I think AHEAD gave away its services free of charge, so that there really was not an incentive to join the Association. If you had a problem and you wanted it solved, you would just call the association and someone would answer the phone and help you.
A lot of calls came from parents of high school kids and they continue to. But it also came from people working in colleges, and they would answer those questions. So people joined who I think felt an obligation and a commitment to the field of disability and higher education and knew that they needed an association that would not only provide the services but also stand as an advocate for higher education disability issues.
In addition to that other things popped up that were resources comparable to the kinds of things that AHEAD does. Whether it is a listserve, there is a great newsletter called the Disability Compliance in Higher Education that NRP puts out.
There are teleconferences that people can join and sign up for for a onetime visit. There are on-line courses; there are just a lot of other opportunities out there.
So I think one of the things that AHEAD had to do was say maybe we cannot afford to give away all of our services for free. Maybe we need to focus on the people who do pay in membership fees and concentrate our services on them.
So we have done that. We are now trying to provide a lot of our services through our web site. And there is a member, password protected, section of the web site where a lot of the resources are.
So my guess is that as time passes, more of the DSS personnel who before were able to get their answers done pretty much free of charge may be more inclined to pay the registration fee and become a member of the association.
Dr. Coombs. It is clear to me that AHEAD serves an extremely important function. You need some group of professionals that you can turn to rather than just trying to get answers from anyone. And so to have an organization like that is important. And I support you in urging people who are not members to seriously think about it. Before we started talking, you said there was some kind of special drive on right now?
Mr. Duffy. Yes. People can join as an individual member, I think it is about a hundred dollars. But there are institutional memberships, where the institution becomes a member for about two hundred dollars. And then others joining for a much lower price of sixty-five dollars.
We have for a short period a onetime offer of $99.00 for any institution that is currently not a member to join the association for this onetime charge of $99.00. And that will be in effect for a couple more months, and we're hopeful that some of these four thousand colleges that are out there and obviously have students with disabilities on their campus, will see this as a tremendous bargain for them to be able to take advantage of.
Also that allows you to pay a much-reduced cost if you happen to attend the annual conference. Which is probably the greatest asset that the association has. It is a onetime where we bring people together and get a little face time to sit down and talk about some of these issues.
And this year we happen to be meeting in Portland Oregon from the 24th through 28th of July. And if anyone is interested in more information about the association, it is www.AHEAD.org. And there are both membership applications on-line as well as a lot of information about that conference.
Mr. Banks. We will have a link from this webcast to the page.
Mr. Duffy. Great thank you.
Mr. Banks. No problem.
Dr. Coombs. Does your conference focus on different themes different years?
Mr. Duffy. Yes it does, we try to. Last year our conference was in Kansas City and our theme was universal design. And although the conference does address a variety of issues, we did dedicate one complete day just to the concept and issues around universal design.
The concept of our theme this year is the idea of widening the umbrella, which has a couple of different focuses. One of them is AHEAD itself trying to incorporate the inclusion of all different types of people. That just disabilities services people, but other academics, other student services professionals, high school counselors, people who do work with students were going on to college.
As well as trying to play on the theme of universal design, the fact of widening the umbrella meaning that we create systems and processes and environments that include everybody in its form.
We are having a one-day symposium again on Saturday, the last day of the conference, which will be completely dedicated to legal issues. Particularly with the recent decision on the Garette case. There is a lot of concern about the future of the ADA. So hopefully we will spend a lot of time on that.
Dr. Coombs. Does it put you on the spot too much to get you to talk a little bit about Garrett on the air?
Mr. Duffy. I do not know if it puts me in the spot or not. It is a relatively new decision, and what impact it is ultimately going to have I don't know that we can say.
I do feel personally rather worried that this is not the end, not necessarily the beginning, but another decision that both limit the scope of what it is to have a disability. And then if you do have a disability, what rights you may have. I think it is frightening. I was shocked I guess.
I was much more optimistic that Justice O'Connor having herself been someone, who has suffered from cancer and received accommodations on her job, would understand that this truly was a disability. And when someone would have a need to have some protection and was clearly discriminated against and suffered from a result of the employer's actions.
But I was quite disturbed by the decision, but I do not see it as an end. I believe it only affects state employees. I am concerned that we will continue to have more cases that will ultimately affects title two and title three as well.
Dr. Coombs. As a historian, I see it also undermining the central power in the government and splitting things up into state by state. One thing that has been a little bit encouraging with it is I have seen the number of things moving aggressively forward on disability issues. Of course that does not mean that all 50 states will, probably some will and some will not. I have been impressed with some of the things happening in Texas and California. So we can hope that it continues on that level.
Mr. Duffy. Yes, and then there have been great inconsistencies from region to region of the country. It does on the surface seem to be an issue of federal rights vs. state rights. But I am concerned it seems to be more of a the issue between the judicial and the legislative branches of government at war.
Mr. Banks. I think you are right on that one.
Dr. Coombs. As I said, as a historian I think we live in interesting times. It is interesting to watch them, but it gets a little real when it affects you personally. Well good, I am glad you managed to give some time to that. And we are all going to watch it very carefully.
Again we hope that people listening to the webcast who are not AHEAD members will not only think about it, but during the broadcast click on the appropriate link and go and sign up. Is there anything else that you would like to talk about, your organization, or the conference this summer?
Mr. Duffy. The only thing that I would add is that as an association and as professionals in this field, I do not think we see any greater issue or any greater threat to the equal access of students with disabilities then access to information technology and the impact that technology does have on individuals, particularly in education.
And if there is one area that we believe that requires our upmost attention, effort, and work, it is in the area of ensuring that as colleges and institutions of higher education progress towards depending almost totally on computing as a form of instruction that they do so in a way that includes all learners. Not just people with disabilities, but all learners. And that we are dedicated to doing whatever it takes to ensure that this message gets out and gets heard, and is responded to.
Dr. Coombs. Well you sure warmed Dicks and my hearts. EASI has been about the whole issue. It is kind of a three pronged focus for us education, disabilities, and information technology. We try to focus on where those three converge. And we are glad to have AHEAD on the same page as us when we look forward to working together.
Mr. Banks. Excellent.
Mr. Duffy. Great, as do we.
Dr. Coombs. Thank you very much.
Mr. Duffy. Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Mr. Banks. Thank you Trey.