Author: Christine McFadden

On Nov. 6, The Daily published a piece focusing on two specific cases in which disabled students said they experienced difficulties adjusting to their on-campus living situations. For the new quarter, The Daily followed up with a look back at these individual cases after speaking with administrators from the Student Housing Department.

For Nicole Torcolini ’12, a blind student living in Branner, and Stacy Bennett, a Stanford alumna living in a Hoskins Court apartment, navigating the places they call home can be very difficult.

In an interview with The Daily in November, Torcolini explained how haphazard bikes parked in Branner’s walkways and inconsistently locked double-doors made walks to her dorm room a dangerous and trying task. Bennett, who lives with current Stanford medical student Erik Corona, reported that parts of the buildings in Hoskins Court were inaccessible to wheelchair-bound individuals—among them the front lobby, which lacked ramp access. She also said then that her bathroom was too small to fit her powerchair.

Once the article was published, Corona wrote to The Daily in an e-mail that he and Bennett received immediate attention on the issue. Yet when they discussed their situation with officials, they were asked why they hadn’t originally listed their complaints when first moving in.

“To this I replied: ‘Our special accommodations request was lost,” Corona said. “Second, I don’t think it’s fair to expect someone to tell you beforehand that we would like to use the bathroom in privacy, or participate in housing events that our house dues are being used to pay for, or get the mail. We were told this place was wheelchair accessible, so naturally, we thought entering the kitchen or using the restroom in privacy would not be an issue’.”

While Corona went on to state that administrators expressed concern over their situation and eventually agreed to major renovations, he and Bennett eventually concluded that it was in their best interest to find off-campus housing.

Executive Director of Student Housing Rodger Whitney acknowledges that disabled accessibility is a campus-wide issue, but maintained that his department goes through “great lengths to meet the individual needs of our residents and improve accessibility in our buildings every year.”

According to him, the University, when compared to other institutions, is a frontrunner in providing disabled accessibility.

“In comparison with our colleagues in the various Ivy [League] Universities, for example, where the preponderance of their facilities are usually much older than ours, built before the requirements of modern codes and thus much less conducive to being made accessible, we are often able to offer students much more freedom of choice with our newer buildings and recent renovations at Stanford,” Whitney wrote in an e-mail to The Daily.

Housing’s Response

Although the Housing Department did not discuss individual situations out of a stated desire to respect the privacy of those students involved, Whitney said that when students brought issues of accessibility to his office’s attention, work was done directly with the Student Disability Resource Center (SDRC) to fix the concerns. Potential options for change include physical renovation to living quarters, programming adjustments or the possibility of reassignment.

“We often make extensive changes to a room to accommodate students, including, but not limited to, adding electric door openers, bed shakers ramps and horn/strobe emergency alarms (items we now keep in stock for faster response),” Whitney said.

Whitney stressed how imperative it is for incoming students to make their living requirements known to Housing ahead of time—usually through the Office of Accessible Education—before they move in. He noted that requests not made in time or put in at the last minute reduce the solutions available, as “all spaces are already assigned at that time and any projects needing structural modification often involve design, county permitting and resource allocation challenges.”

Teri Adams, associate director of the Office of Accessible Education, also believed that her office did everything in its power to accommodate disabled students.

“While I sympathize with the frustration of students who find that their housing doesn’t perfectly meet their needs, the combination of Housing Assignments and Housing Operations have made extraordinary efforts to meet the needs of students with all types of disabilities,” Adams, who is also wheelchair-bound, said.

However, Corona insists that he did apply for special accommodations. He described how he was then told by Housing that they had not received the special application submitted through the Disability Resource Center, although he says it can be verified that he submitted one to Adams.

“I personally communicated with Teri about it via e-mail,” Corona wrote. “After calling Housing, they told us the special accommodations request may have been lost or was stuck in the bureaucracy. Suffice it to say, there was no review of our application prior to our housing being assigned.”

Student Housing receives several hundred students requesting specific disability or access accommodations for their living quarters each year. According to Whitney, significant amounts of time consisting of individual consultations are put in to meet those requests. Additionally, an average of $125,000 to $150,000 is spent per year constructing the physical changes requests. Over the last 17 years of the Housing Capital Improvement Program (CIP), approximately $8 million has been invested specifically toward accessibility improvements.

Through the CIP, “enough of our 360 buildings have been made living or visiting accessible so that every program type (co-op, self-op, each fraternity and sorority, theme and focus house) has accessible options,” Whitney said. “All of our residence halls are living accessible, as is much of graduate housing as well.”

New buildings, renovated by the CIP to meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are “more likely to have level entrances and wider corridors and elevators.” Each renovated building has, at minimum, one wheelchair accessible entrance.

Yet for disabled students living in dorms without elevators—for example, the newly-renovated undergraduate residences Crothers Hall and Crothers Memorial—access to higher floors may still be a problem. Students in wheelchairs who have access to the first floor are cut off from visiting friends on higher levels of the dorm.

“Hanging out in someone’s room versus hanging out somewhere less personal is totally different,” said Crothers Memorial resident Diana Chang ’12. “I would be annoyed.”

Nevertheless, Housing says that the installation of elevators is often not feasible to include, both structurally or fiscally.

“As a result, some students do live in residences where they are not able to go upstairs,” Whitney said. “However, we have found that Stanford students are usually very good about going to the person who cannot come to them when they want to visit or study together.”

Future Renovations

In terms of future renovations being done to better accommodate disabled students on campus, the CIP and the Student Housing Asset Renewal Program (SHARP) monitor timelines for needed aspects of building replacements and prioritize the order of facilities to have work done. The next few houses scheduled for work are BOB, La Casa Italiana and Storey.

For buildings that were monitored in earlier years before modified ADA codes, Whitney noted that special projects are implemented in these places to keep them up to date.

“Along these lines, we are evaluating the potential of installing additional interior and exterior ramps and or modifying public and private entrances to the buildings across Housing in places such as, for example, an Escondido Village mid-rise,” he said. “Work completed last summer opened up the first floor of Blackwelder, and we are looking forward to implementing improvements in other EV residences as well.”

The ASSU Undergraduate Senate on Tuesday passed a widely-debated bill to reduce growth in special fees spending, resulting in an extensive dispute over the nature of the vote that took place, which many senators claimed was riddled with problems and parliamentary misconduct. Concerns were also raised about student group input into the bill.

Also last night, leaders expressed a need to drastically increase the undergraduate fundraising campaign for Haiti earthquake relief. According to ASSU Vice President Andy Parker ’11, although about $30,000 has been raised, only five to 10 percent of the undergraduate population has donated, putting Stanford $40,000 behind Dartmouth, who was initially encouraged by Stanford student government leaders to start fundraising.

Special Fees Bill ‘Approved’

Senator Alex Katz ‘12, who authored a bill that would make it more difficult for student groups to receive funding increases in each spring’s special fees election, said it “will make groups think a lot harder about what they really need to make their groups successful.”

The goal, he said, was to reduce growth in special fees funding; he cited the Stanford Film Society’s budget increasing last year by more than $50,000 as an example. Two reasons for such increases are the petitioning period being extended last year, allowing more time for the groups to obtain money, and the recurring problem, as Katz sees it, of students approving too many increased budgets.

“The fact that no one says ‘no’ is also a part of the problem,” Katz said. “I can’t promise that this bill is going to save the system, but this is a step in the right direction.”

He pointed out that the bill would give the student body an additional level of control. If special fees groups really need more money, he said, they would have to go to the student body and ask for it.

“At some point, the student body deserves the power to look over these budgets and determine if this increase is justified,” Katz said.

Some senators, including Adam Creasman ’11 and Zachary Warma ’11, noted that the tendency of the student body to approve budgets posed a significant problem for the special fees process that the bill did not address.

“The undergraduate body has not voted down a single budget we give them,” said Warma, also columns editor for The Daily.

Both noted, however, that the issue was not necessarily a reason not to support the bill.

No student group representatives spoke during the meeting’s public comment period. A round of approximately 1,600 e-mails to student group leaders informing them of the proposed change garnered about 20 positive responses, said Senator Anton Zietsman ‘12.

Deputy Chair Kelsei Wharton ’12 and other senators raised concerns, both before and after the vote, about the level of input student groups had into the bill, as well as their awareness of the fact that the bill had — at the time they received Zietsman’s e-mail — not yet been passed.

“First, 30 [responses] is not half-bad. Second, not a lot of people responding is a good sign,” Katz said. “We’ve given people multiple chances to come in and say, ‘This would really hurt us.’”

“The fact that people aren’t screeching down our throats is pretty darn good,” added Warma.

When the bill was finally called to question, the result was nine votes in favor, four opposed and two abstentions. Although the vote had technically passed, widespread confusion and dispute erupted when several senators realized that they had misunderstood the voting process.

One senator did not realize that abstaining his vote meant that it would not be counted in the senate quorum, therefore potentially altering the number of votes needed to pass.

For his part, Senate Chair Varun Sivaram ’11 did not realize that he could table the bill prior to voting, which would postpone calling it to a vote and allowing for more time for discussion.

“No disrespect — you’ve done your work, but I feel uneasy [about voting],” Sivaram said to Katz, who conducted an unofficial straw poll, determining that seven senators desired seeing concrete numbers about funding trends.

Sivaram conducted the straw poll after voting for the bill.

Senators voiced the need for a vote to “re-vote” on the bill next meeting once more data had been shared, allowing for a more educated vote. Although this sentiment was widely expressed, the bill was technically still passed.

“I’d just like to say that a vote was taken; a vote was passed,” Warma said. “If there had been — at the beginning of this, when we knew there was going to be a…vote — a motion to table should have been provided before the question was called.”

Other Business

Two subsequent funding bills for Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford and Los Saleros de Stanford were unanimously passed.

Parker also introduced Alisha Blackford, a graduate student in education, as a candidate for the position of Executive Director of the Student Service Division, a position that oversees the ASSU Shuttle, Wellness Room and Green Store. Parker currently serves in that role. Her appointment is set to come up for approval by the Senate and Graduate Student Council next week.

Hundreds of former UC-Berkeley Japanese-American students whose educations were interrupted by World War II and Japanese internment will graduate this month alongside current students.

The product of Assemblymember Warren Furutani’s Assembly Bill 37, signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger last October, the legislation calls upon University of California schools, California State Universities and California Community Colleges to issue degrees to anyone whose education was interrupted by Japanese incarceration.

“The main motivation is that it’s under the heading of ‘unfinished business,’ tying up loose ends,” Furutani said. The Japanese assemblymember has been working toward granting degrees to the former students for decades.

Serving on the Los Angeles Board of Education before being elected to the State Assembly, Furutani organized a high school cap and gown graduation for hundreds of Nisei—the children of emigrants from Japan, in this case second-generation Japanese Americans—who similarly had their high school educations interrupted.

“I’ve always thought: ‘what about those folks who were in college and then they got pulled out of college by Executive Order 9066 and were not given the opportunity to finish?’” he said. “For me, the motivation is that our Nisei are almost gone, and this was something to correct past wrongs.”

Legislation Long Overdue

Duncan Williams, who serves as associate professor of Japanese Buddhism and chair of the Center for Japanese Studies at UC-Berkeley, believes the legislation is long overdue.

“Of course I think it [AB 37] should’ve come a long time ago,” Williams said. “In my opinion, I would have hoped and thought that the UC system… would be a leader, but it seems like we’re at the tail-end.”

However, Williams points out that the UC system has a history of abstaining from issuing honorary degrees of any kind. In order to issue said degrees, the UC regions had to additionally vote to suspend the regulations. With the degrees approved, approximately 400 former students or families of students—UC-Berkeley had the largest population of Japanese students pre-WWII—will be among the first people in decades to be issued honorary UC degrees.

The ceremony will run jointly with the regular undergraduate graduation; Williams, who serves on the ceremony’s campus planning committee and who will be reading the names of the Japanese graduates, hopes the university’s undergraduates will be able to learn something from the Nisei.

According to Williams, a number of private schools on the West Coast have already issued similar degrees. However, Furutani states that private schools, not falling under governmental jurisdiction, cannot be mandated to do so.

It is Stanford’s policy not to issue honorary degrees. Japanese students who formerly attended Stanford during WWII and were forced to leave were honored at a ceremony in fall of 1993, but no honorary degrees were given.

“I can’t recall having received such an honorary degree,” said former Stanford student Eric Andow (’48), who was forced to leave campus when he was incarcerated in Colorado and subsequently sent overseas as part of the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

The ceremony was “just to reunite some people that were at Stanford at the time,” Andow said, and was attended by then-University President Gerhard Casper. Although a much larger population of students were forced to leave Stanford, only nine made it to the ceremony. Among the nine, several were able to re-matriculate post-war and finish their degrees—a course that UC-Berkeley students were unable to take.

“I was taking an engineering course, so it’s hard to try to continue from that point when you left… but I managed somehow because I was interested in getting the degree more than anything else,” Andow said. He returned to achieve a degree in engineering.

Mixed Emotions from Former Berkeley Students

For former UC-Berkeley freshman Jim Yamasaki, the honorary degree he will receive this winter is worth less than the hardships he overcame by having his education interrupted.

“Having received my B.S. degree in engineering at Northwestern in 1949, the honorary degree for my freshman year is nice PR for somebody and is appreciated as a gesture but really… why bother?” he said.

Originally from San Joaquin County-Tracy, Yamasaki was an excellent student, receiving nearly all As in school and working toward becoming the breadwinner of his family. His studies were interrupted, however, when his father’s liquor license was suspended, disabling the family business of running a tavern in Tracy. Curfew restrictions then forced him to return home.

“There were bigger problems than [the] interruption of my education… I had no time to worry about school,” he wrote in an e-mail. Shortly after returning home, Executive Order 9066 uprooted his family and relocated his life to the horse stables of the Turlock county fair grounds, and eventually to Gila Rivers Relocation Center in Arizona.

Yamasaki was unable to return to UC-Berkeley but found other methods of finishing his education. He emphasizes there were many, such as himself, who overcame them and found different paths to success.

From inside Gila Rivers Relocation Center, Yamasaki applied for a scholarship to leave camp and resume his studies elsewhere. He was accepted on a scholarship to the University of Utah, where he was subsequently drafted despite boasting the best grades in his classes among white students who were allowed to defer.

He became a 2nd Lieutenant and was transferred to military intelligence, ending up in Japan on occupation duty in counter intelligence. He spent the next year writing secret reports from field information for General MacArthur’s staff.

When Yamasaki returned to the states, he struggled to find a school that wasn’t already packed with GIs from the GI Bill or that would accept Nisei students in the post-war prejudice.

Yamasaki managed to matriculate into Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., thanks to the admission interviewer, who graduated from UC-Berkeley the same year he was forced to leave. He became the first Japanese American to go to Northwestern tech school and earned a B.S. in 1949 in Electrical Engineering.

Cedrick Shimo was faced with numerous challenges as well, but unlike Yamasaki, had his graduate education at UC-Berkeley interrupted by the draft. Shimo received his Los Angeles draft notice the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but was ironically refused passage on the train to L.A. because he looked like the enemy.

Shimo eventually volunteered for the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) and was transferred to Camp Savage in Minnesota. Just before graduating from the MIS language school, he was expelled for protesting a rejected furlough. He had asked for one in order to say goodbye to his mother before being sent to the Pacific Front, since no Japanese Americans were allowed on the West Coast.

He was transferred to the 525th, a special unit for “troublemakers,” demoted to the rank of a private, and eventually was reorganized into the 1800th, a similar unit for “malcontents.” When the war ended, he received an honorable discharge.

Shimo has spoken about his experiences of defying authority at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and UCLA, where he previously earned his undergraduate degree.

Though he is unable to attend the Berkeley graduation ceremony, he appreciates the degree.

“At least I got proof that I was in graduate school in case somebody doubts it,” he said.

While there is no deadline for California public institutions included in AB 37 to issue the degrees, Furutani stressed that time is of the essence.

“As you know, the average age [of Niseis] is 86 or 88—there’s no deadline, but literally they’re passing away, and if we don’t get this done right away, more and more are going to have to be given away posthumously.”

The first of the ceremonies will be held by UC-San Francisco on Dec. 4, followed by UC-Davis on Dec. 12, UC-Berkeley on Dec. 13 and UCLA in the spring.