Hey, universities are the new airline industry; how long before fat students are forced to pay 2 tuitions, ;).

i DO understand a need for documentation, i DON’T understand why our school still has “student desks” from the (i swear) 50s or 60s that most “average” size people don’t fit in and i don’t think ANYONE fits in comfortably. it’s insane.

believe it or not students have faked disabilities for the benefit of accommodations. up to and including blindness.

that’s why we have to have “a bunch of doctor’s notes”

sucks 8(

Also, in my department, when we moved to a new building, the faculty specifically asked for long tables with *separate* upholstered chairs (and we ordered several for each classroom that were bigger, just to be prepared).

I think those seat-chair-all-attached combos are uncomfortable for a lot of people, not just bigger folks.

I think it depends greatly on the school how “friendly” the campus is to people who might need things arranged a little differently. It may help to ask around when you’re visiting a school (or do a little online research when you’re first looking) to find a place that won’t make you jump through massive hoops just to get a different chair.

(Seriously? If I taught at a campus that made it that hard? I’d go to an office supply store and BUY a couple of the damn chairs, and keep them in my office or lab and roll them out as needed. Because going to college with some kind of disability or just being “different” is hard enough without having some bureaucratic office tell you that you can’t get the help you need without a bunch of doctor’s notes.)

As a DSS employee we have to have EVERY student, even those with obvious disabilities (in a wheelchair? service dog? yup gotta have the documentation) provide documentation. We can get into big trouble if we don’t. We have to prove and prove and prove what we do in our office and fight for every dime we get, so we HAVE to follow policy and procedure with every student or risk losing funding.

We *will* fax our form to students’ healthcare provider so they don’t have to pay for a doctor’s visit. Cuz paying 25.00 or whatever to get a form filled out would suck.

Nicely put.

I’m glad to see that people are starting to be receptive in fat activist circles to the way that disability rights activists frame disability. I’ve often wondered why fat activists have been as resistant to look at the utility of linking fat and disability using a crip pride theory, as many people outside of fat activism have been about reclaiming ‘fat’ as the preferred term for fat people over ‘obese’, or accepting HAES, for example.

What is disabling is our environment, our culture and not our bodies, no matter what they look like or how they function. Fat people can understand that just as well as more traditional ‘disabled’ people, and so I hope to see more fat activists willing to question the reasons why so many of us are scared of the word ‘disabled,’ when disabled people are trying to resignify the meaning of ‘disabilty’ in the same way that we are trying to resignify ‘fat,’ ‘overweight,’ and ‘obese.’

My first class, at a local community college, wasn’t half bad. The classroom was filled with those horrid little desk/chair combos, and I absolutely couldn’t fit in at all. But a quick call to the Disability Resources office fixed the problem with no fuss at all.

And then I went on to university…

Holy craptaters, what a nightmare. The disability resources office flat REFUSED to have facilities bring a separate desk and chair into my classrooms because… get this… they only serve people with medically documented disabilities. In other words, I would have had to go to my doc and get her to write a note that says, “Yep, my patient is fat. Please get her a desk that she can fit in.”

And even that probably wouldn’t have worked, though, because their definition of a disability is something that “substantially limits one or more major life activities.” Apparently, being able to sit in a classroom isn’t considered a major life activity.

After a couple of months of trying to get them to take care of me, I gave up. But I did find a solution.

What I did–and what was surprisingly easy–was to make friends with my department’s office manager–the one who does the classroom assignments for each term, and who is herself a big gal–and made sure she put all of my classes in the new classrooms that had better seating–either row seating with foldaway desks, or separate tables/chairs.

I only had one class that this didn’t work in, and the chairs there were juuuuust big enough for me to manage to squeeze into. I was bruised at the end of every class, but I got through it.

If I had to do this again, though, I probably would go to a different school–a smaller one, perhaps, where the bureaucracy behind getting a chair moved from one classroom to another wasn’t so bizarre.