On October 22, students protested in front of the Memorial Building in response to the Glover Alston Intercultural Center’s (GAIC) sidewalk-inaccessibility and impending closure by covering campus with the word “Ramp.” Prior to the protest, students say they raised concerns with the administration, saying that students in wheelchairs cannot access the sidewalk in front of the GAIC. They also raised concern about a ramp near the front door of the GAIC, which is dysfunctional for those who use powered-chairs, wheelchairs, and white canes. After receiving these concerns, the Division for Inclusive Excellence decided to close the GAIC until further notice.
The Glover Alston Intercultural Center is a space where affinity groups often gather for their events. It also provides vital resources for Whitman students in a manner that respects their privacy, because of how removed it is from the center of campus. These resources include contraceptives, a food pantry, and a free clothing closet.
Grace Hardy ‘27, president of the Whitman College Disability and Difference Community (DISCO), says she noticed the GAIC’s inaccessibility at the beginning of the year. The GAIC is where DISCO often holds their meetings and events. Hardy said that some students with disabilities are unable to access the GAIC because of the construction site, so a ramp is necessary. The Director of the Intercultural Center, Tebraie Banda-Johns, explained the placement of the current ramp in front of the GAIC in an email to The Wire.
“As far as I know, that ramp that was placed over the curb/ditch in front of the Communications Building, was placed there by one of the contractors for vehicle access, not by Whitman for pedestrians,” Banda-Johns said.
“Essentially the GAIC is an island in the sea of construction,” Hardy said.
The ramps installed by the city when paving the road, which blend the sidewalk into the lane, are fenced off by construction. All of the sidewalk left open by the construction site is raised from the lane and curbed, so the only way to get to the GAIC is by stepping over that curb. This means that students with wheelchairs and power chairs have no place to enter the sidewalk leading to the GAIC.
“I told them,” Hardy said, “this is what’s going to happen if we don’t do anything with this ramp. We’re going to see students getting injured. We’re going to see inaccessibility.”
While showing The Wire the ramp in front of the GAIC, Hardy mentioned a recent incident in which a community member was injured because of a curb in front of Cordiner Hall, and had to go to the ICU.
In early October, affinity groups leaders planned to host a Halloween costume party at the GAIC, DISCO among them. Hardy told the other affinity group leaders that the entrance to the building was inaccessible to some of her members, which led the leaders of Latinos Unidos, the Black Student Union, and Women of Color Voices to co-author an email with DISCO to the Division of Inclusive Excellence Vice President, Dr. John Johnson.
“It took until all of the affinity club presidents who were involved to email Dr. John Johnson for him to respond and say, ‘it looks like the best course of action for us is to close the GAIC’,” Hardy said.
Aaliyah Howard ‘27, president of Women of Color Voices and vice president of the Black Student Union, said that she and the other affinity clubs were invited to a meeting with Dr. John Johnson following the email. Howard said they were told in the meeting that administration has been aware of the possibility of the GAIC becoming inaccessible due to the ramp and has considered temporarily closing the building since the start of fall semester. Hardy and Howard questioned why the GAIC needed to be closed if the accessibility issues could be solved through the provision of an ADA-compliant ramp.
“We were very shocked because we had no idea it was so difficult to just put a ramp in place. There’s so many ramps on this campus available. Prentiss has them. Ren Fair has a lot of them. We were all just trying to figure out why his immediate course of action was to close the GAIC,” Howard said.
On Oct. 22, fliers were posted around campus that read,
“When our demands as students aren’t met, we must make ourselves seen. At the GAIC there is a ramp that is not accessible to the very students the GAIC is supposed to serve. Now the only solution is to temporarily shut down the GAIC and remove access to that space for everyone. Join us in writing “RAMP” on everything that isn’t a ramp to protest Whitman’s lack of acknowledgement of accessibility at Mem [the Memorial Building] @ 9pm.”
Protesters wrote “ramp” everywhere they could. Across the Reid pavement, they wrote “accessibility now,” and “we just want to get into buildings.”
Howard noted the welcoming speech that students receive at the beginning of every school year.
“You get up there on that stage in the beginning of the year and say, ‘you belong here. This is your home.’ Don’t lie to us. Don’t bring us here pretending like this is somewhere where we’re going to be fully supported, because it’s not,” Howard said.
The word “ramp” was written on everything that was decidedly not a ramp, in order to recreate the experience of students with disabilities encountering the ramp in front of the GAIC and still not being able to enter.
“Something that is so looked over when it comes to disability rights, is just talking about it. If we can just poke the bear in some way to get a conversation started about ramps, that is 10 steps further than we have been,” Hardy said.
Banda-Johns’s office and the Intercultural Center will be moved to Hunter 307.
“The food pantry and clothing closet will be relocated to Reid 208 (formerly the ASWC office),” Banda-Johns wrote.
Going forward, the GAIC will be closed for the rest of the semester, and there has been no communication with students about installing a ramp in front of the GAIC.
