While attending Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1950s, Dr. Anita Silvers held several campus jobs, which were required of every undergraduate at that time as part of the overall student experience.
Because Silvers was unable to stand for very long, college officials assigned her work that could be performed while seated. In the kitchen of the dining hall, she peeled and cut vegetables and did other meal preparation tasks. In the library, she sorted and put books onto carts before someone else wheeled them down the aisles for re-shelving. College officials uttered nary a word about Silvers’ wheelchair or the pair of canes she used for navigating stairs, devices that she had used since contracting polio as a child.
“I would have been emotionally devastated if they had not assigned me to work like they did the other students,” Silvers says. “This was long before disability rights laws, so it was quite a big deal that the college structured these jobs for me in order to accommodate my needs. I never had to ask them to, nor make a case for it; they just did it on their own.
“For the first time in my life, I felt fully accepted.”
The empowerment cemented her long-held belief that, just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, arguably the country’s most famous polio patient, could be an effective leader, then so could she.
As a San Francisco State University (SFSU) philosophy professor, Silvers has always made it a point to advocate for students and others with disabilities, and to encourage them to do the same. Now completing her 50th year at the university, she is a nationally prominent champion of disability rights.
“I have neither the ability nor the right to say, ‘Here’s exactly how to do a certain task,’” Silvers says. “So I don’t know of any one, single way to do something. But I do look at what each person can do, and I can’t help but look at all students this way. If you ignore stereotypes, the students will guide you.”
