University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offers a lot for physically disabled students. It is ranked 2nd in College Magazine's list of best campuses for students with disabilities and was also named a top wheelchair-friendly campus by New Mobility magazine. Ableism appears to be systemic on campus, however. A student tells us, "I have had teachers tell us we can do something with our future because 'you’re all able bodied,' which was not true and also implied that we wouldn’t have success if we were disabled. My disabled friends have returned from working in university buildings and said they were infantilized for their disabilities. I have been pulled aside by teachers and told my disability was making me incompetent in the class requirements."

The student's experience is somewhat reflective of UIUC's cultural attitude towards disability that originates from 1948 when Tim Nugent established the Division of Rehabilitation-Education Services (DRES), which embraced a medical/rehabilitative model of disability and notoriously placed enormous pressures on disabled students to be independent and to "overcome" their disabilities. UIUC's rehabilitative program was a marked contrast to the Physically Disabled Students' Program (PDSP) that was founded years later at UC Berkeley by Ed Roberts and the "Rolling Quads." The PDSP focused on peer support and advocacy, and embodied the social model of disability, according to which it is society's responsibility to remove barriers and accommodate differences.

The Daily Illini reports that last year, disabled students organized a protest to demand that UIUC address ableism and inaccessibility on campus. Alyx Bibbs, the organizer of the event, stated, "I’m a disabled individual, and there have been just too many things that I’m seeing on this campus, where it’s not just me experiencing it but other disabled individuals experiencing it, to the point where I don’t feel like it’s appropriate enough for me to say ‘OK, I’m going to graduate and this is all fine,’ because it’s absolutely not."

Some of the accessibility problems on campus identified by students include inaccessible bathrooms, ramps and sidewalks that are not safe to use, and frequent construction blocking accessible pathways. In three op-eds from 2023, students call out the rampant ableism on campus, including unequal treatment of certain disabilities when being evaluated for accommodations with DRES, the "inherently exclusionary nature" of Greek life on campus, and experiences with professors questioning students' accommodations. A student notes, "there is a lack of accountability for those with tenure and in positions of power."

UIUC is ranked 33rd among national universities by U.S. News, which is a slight improvement from 35th place last year.