Professor Rod Michalko was just a teenager when tiny colourful blinking lights began to obscure his field of vision. The process of losing his sight was gradual, and he remembers specks first appearing when he was a child.
Doctors are unclear about how or why Michalko eventually became blind, but he is not focused on diagnoses or prognoses. Hired by New College in 2007 to develop and teach a Disability Studies stream of four courses (part of the Equity Studies program at New College), Michalko asserts that being disabled is a legitimate way of being in the world. “That’s opposed to our culture’s deep desire to get rid of disability, to either cure it or even rehab it,” he says. “Being blind or being in a wheelchair gives a certain perspective on the world that’s valuable. I say that my blindness is not a condition; it’s part of who I am.”
After completing his PhD in sociology at the University of British Columbia, Michalko taught sociology at several Canadian universities. He has published such books as The Difference That Disability Makes (Temple University Press, 2002). Michalko is now working to raise the profile of Disability Studies, which examines prejudices and exclusionary practices through socio-political and cultural studies. He is also developing a speaker series. “Disability Studies examines and interrogates our culture,” he says. “It teaches us a lot about what it’s like to be human.”
When Michalko – who has used a white cane to help him get around since his beloved guide dog, Smokie, passed away in 2001 – explores campus, he is often surrounded by buildings made inaccessible to people with certain disabilities by stairs or narrow bathrooms. Classroom materials on paper, PowerPoint or film exclude non-sighted students, and Michalko says the university still struggles with making web resources optimally usable for everyone. “There are all kinds of ways to make things accessible,” says Michalko, “but first we have to think that’s important.”
Michalko finds most conceptions of disability “pretty tragic,” and hopes to serve as a role model for students. People with disabilities comprise about 20 per cent of his students. “Not that long ago it was rare for students to be taught by women or people of colour and its extremely rare for students to be taught by a professor who’s disabled, even to this day,” he says.
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2 Responses to “ Champion of Accessibility ”
As Professor Rod Michalko states, it is still extremely rare for students to be taught by a professor with a disability. Professor Michalko’s own story serves as both an inspiration for disabled students looking towards graduate studies and a lesson for senior university faculty that disabled people are fully capable of teaching and mentoring students.
Going beyond this, however, it would be encouraging to see disabled Professors in roles beyond that of Professor Michalko’s in Equity Studies at New College. Just as we find Asian professors across all faculties at U of T, not just in East Asian Studies, I look forward to a day when we will find disabled faculty represented throughout the University at numbers in accord with the general population.
While over the past two decades there has been significant progress made in gaining a representative faculty at U of T with respect to women and visible minorities, unfortunately little progress has been made towards hiring persons with a disability. The most obvious response to this is that the root of the problem lies in the small number of disabled students embarking on and completing graduate studies, as compared to women and minorities.
This problem is likely related to the nature of disability itself. Whereas skin colour or sex have absolutely no bearing on facility, persons with a disability may have trouble seeing, hearing, speaking or moving. Among some able bodied persons, this can lead to prejudice because they mistakenly assume that a disability means an inability to carryout one’s job or studies, or function well in society. This is a prejudice that links a disability to overall performance, worth or even in some cases intelligence.
I dearly hope that this institutional prejudice towards persons with a disability will one day be stamped out.
Name withheld by request
[...] work, just ask Tanya, she is also published and would like you to read her stuff as is Rod – best plug him too, you know what these writing/proffesatorial types are like – anyway Austin is a gentleman in [...]