Our History
Buckeyes for Accessibility (B4A) is the result of decades of student activism stretching back to at least the 1970s. In 1972, the Ohio State Senior Class Committee raised $75,000 to make campus more physically accessible. Despite The Ohio State University having hundreds of Disabled students by that time, only a few buildings were accessible prior to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA).
Some students, like Julie Cochran Rogers (‘70, ‘74 MA), graduated from OSU regardless of ableism and the university’s inaccessibility. During her time in Columbus, members of the Delta Chi fraternity carried her and her wheelchair up multiple flights of stairs to classrooms in Derby Hall, which had no elevator at the time. She went on to become a speech pathologist at OSU, where she worked with and advocated for dyslexic students before dyslexia was even widely recognized as a learning disability.
The Office for the Physically Impaired, now called Student Life Disability Services (SLDS), was established in 1974. That same year, Creative Living was founded to help solve issues with inaccessible housing. It took another ten years for Disability Services to be established on OSU’s regional campuses in 1994.
In spring of 1993, Students for Disability Awareness (SDA) was founded and hosted the first Disability Awareness Day at OSU. SDA brought awareness not only to physical accessibility issues, but also to student life and community issues affecting Disabled students through Lantern articles, protests, events, working directly with university administrators, and more.
Despite the completion of a Disability Task Force Report in 1995, which was reportedly 200 pages long, the report has never been officially released by the university to this day due to a lack of support from the Office of Student Affairs (now the Office of Student Life), OSU’s president (E. Gordan Gee), and the Board of Trustees at the time. The issues it brought up were shelved for years, and many of them likely persist today.
In 2000, years after SDA began advocating for an ADA Coordinator at OSU, the university became the last Big Ten university to hire an ADA Coordinator, Scott Lissner. He is still the ADA Coordinator to this day, and he has overseen a significant increase in ADA compliance and disability rights in general during his time here.
SDA changed its name, membership, goals, vision, and tactics many times over the years, but it was finally renamed Buckeyes for Accessibility in 2020, along with a change to our mission statements that now emphasize our commitment to making OSU more accessible to everyone through both support and advocacy.
B4A has also gone by the names Students for Disability Awareness, Unity, and Abilities.
More information and sources:
https://www.thelantern.com/1998/08/osu-should-comply-with-disabilities-act/
https://news.osu.edu/students-for-disability-awareness-to-host-forum/
https://www.thelantern.com/1998/08/osu-needs-to-be-more-disabled-friendly/
https://slds.osu.edu/about-us/our-history/
http://adigitalmagazine.com/publication/?i=636129&p=8&pp=1&view=issueViewer
https://www.thelantern.com/1999/01/university-concedes-van-to-disability-group/
https://www.thelantern.com/1998/08/disabled-students-ask-for-understanding/