A coordinator would also ensure that the disabled fully utilize what Harvard does have to offer them. When Drickamer looked into Harvard's resources for the blind, she learned that 6000 books are on tape in Lamont Library. "They're there for a different reason but they're an absolute gold mine--and no one had coordinated them." The Law School also has tapes available. Drickamer emphasizes, "There are resources to be tapped here. It's a matter of getting the resources together with the needs of the students; you need a middle person."

The presence of a coordinator might increase the small number of disabled students at the College. Not including the partially blind, there are five disabled undergraduates. "It's a lot more effective and encouraging for a prospective student if all the effort is not up to the individual," Drickamer adds. Thomas says that, to the disabled, Harvard "seems pretty impossible from the outside, but that's because no one's ever publicized that handicapped students should come here... and I think it might be a good idea to let people know about it."

Drafts thinks Harvard should actively recruit disabled students. He notes that after World War II, special education programs "were initiated mostly by colleges and universities. They tried to get people to take their kids with, say, cerebral palsy out of the home, where they'd kept them locked up, and into these special education programs... These kids are of college age now. I feel the universities have a special responsibility to recruit the disabled since they brought most of them to the point where they can attempt to get into school." L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of admissions, opposes an admissions policy which would single out applicants because of their disabilities but says "I think we will try more than we have done to make sure handicapped students have enough information."

Mary Anne Schwalbe '55, director of admissions, believes that Harvard's small number of disabled students results from the College's location in the northeast as well as the relative inaccessibility of its campus. "Most of the handicapped students we've talked with prefer areas where the winter isn't as hard," but, she adds, Harvard's location benefits those who do attend, because of the high-quality medical facilities in the area.

As planning officer James T. McGrath says, a "general consensus that a lot more needs to be done" exists among the administration as well as the students. Yet ABLE spokesmen Fiedler and Drickamer stress that "Harvard is not unique" in the problems it poses for the disabled, that it merely reflects conditions throughout society. They feel the University has been cooperative, in view of the problems it faces in meeting their requests. The age of certain buildings does not only present barriers to the disabled but makes the barriers' removal a problem as well. Sever Hall is a National Historic Landmark, and the Federal Historic Commission must grant permission before Harvard can alter the building's appearance. In Drickamer's words, "How do you put a subtle ramp on Sever?"

Harvard's decentralized nature creates and perpetuates the problem for students unsure where to go with their concerns and for the different branches of the University trying to help them. Adding the temporary ramp to Memorial Hall involved the facilities office, the central administration, the planning office and the Department of Buildings and Grounds.

The administration paid for the construction because it controls Memorial Hall. S. Bose of the planning office says: "It wasn't the central administration's fault. Why should they pay?" The problem, in his words, is "Who is to pay for what?" This past summer, the planning office, with Fielder's and Thomas's advice, chose locations for the more than 30 curb cutouts that were added near the campus last year. A federal grant to Cambridge paid for most of them.

The number and quality of steps towards increasing accessibility for the disabled will rise if Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph A. Califano Jr. signs next month Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The law would require institutions, including educational ones, which receive federal funds to make all of their programs accessible. The amendment "would have a really sweeping effect on the right to services for the handicapped," according to Cheryl Davis, a planner in Massachusetts' Department of Community Affairs and a Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design. At Harvard, one such effect would be to relieve the administration of the decision to create a coordinator's post, making it mandatory. Davis explains that Harvard would not need to make the entire campus physically accessible, as long as it could ensure a student access to all programs. Harvard would not have to install elevators in an inaccessible building if classes were made available in an accessible one. James Sharaf '59, an attorney in the office of the general counsel, says he "wouldn't imagine any problems in complying with the law."

A decision by the administration to follow the guidelines of Section 504, even if it does not become law, will remove the burden of initiating action from the disabled students. Francis A. Lawton, assistant dean for facilities in the Faculty says, "I think there are still things we could do without waiting for a specific problem to arise." The students with the problems agree. In Fiedler's words, "We don't want anything more than anybody else has--just the same opportunities they have."