Nov. 30, 2006

Marietta College campus and accessibility
Gilman and Thomas Hall problematic for disabled students

Jon Moffett
jrm001@marietta.edu

For students at Marietta College, life is pretty easy for the most part. Getting around the campus is generally quite simple, and nothing is more than a 10-15 minute walk at the most. Students enjoy using the mall as a super highway for most of the campus’s transportation. But for some students looking to attend Marietta College, these walkways and paved trails are simply inadequate.

If students with disabilities were to come to Marietta, they’d have a significantly harder time trying to enjoy their time here and just go about their everyday lives. Although most of Marietta’s academic buildings, dormitories, and other facilities are handicap accessible, most are only accessible on the first floor. The very heart of campus, the Gilman Student Center, is even a task for handicapped people to overcome in order to be involved in the daily rituals of a college student.

The Gilman Student Center is one of the main hubs of activity for students at Marietta. It houses the Career Center, the mail room, the campus bookstore, and most importantly, the main dining facility on campus. If a handicapped student were to enter the bookstore and then wish to eat at Gilman, they’d have to completely leave the building, go around and out of their way to find accessible ramps, and then circle the building to the front just to reenter for lunch or dinner. By standing at the top of the outside stairs in front of Gilman, a student can look down and see the labyrinth of stairs and hills which make up this area.

Although Gilman is one of the most popular places for students to go, it isn’t even close to being the most necessary. Most of the academic buildings are also poorly designed when it comes to handicap accessibility. Although a large majority of the academic buildings do have elevators in them in order to accommodate for students with disabilities, sometimes just getting in the building itself is a chore. Due to Marietta’s hilly terrain, it becomes difficult to navigate the landscape at times.

Most of the school’s facilities are completely accessible to students with physical disabilities because they have the luxury of an elevator. However, one of the college’s staples in the academic field isn’t so lucky. Thomas Hall, which houses the English, History, Foreign Language and Political Science departments as well as others, does not have an elevator in it. Thomas Hall is accessible via a large concrete ramp on the building’s Northeastern side. However, without an elevator, students who need special accommodations for physical disabilities, and classes that contain one or more of these students, are restricted to the building’s ground floor.

“It’s sad, really,” one MC faculty member stated, “it’s sad that if a student with a disability were have a class in Thomas [Hall] that he or she would be forced to remain on only one floor. This building houses so many departments and yet it doesn’t have to acceptable means to accommodate for all students.”

The idea of adding an elevator to Thomas Hall has been tossed around for the past few years at Marietta, but nothing has been done yet. It is estimated that the addition of an elevator to Thomas would cost approximately $1 million. With the projects that Marietta is currently undergoing, such as the new library, this project has been put on hold for the time being.