Dear Berry,
This is Mustafa Ozbilgin from University of Hertfordshire. I was able to
join the admin-eo list recently. Well, I better get on with the
questionnaire then!
Cheers,
Mustafa
Dear colleague,
I would be very grateful if every one who reads this would just take a
minute to answer the two questions below these are:
1)Does your your university have a disabilities unit ?
(if you have time could you tell me what it covers and to which dept it is
attached or whether it is independent)
Yes. We have a central unit at the Hatfield Campus. I think our disablited
student officer is Jo Honnigman at Hatfield. Also in each faculty there are
disability coordinators. In business studies, I am trying to do the
coordination work with Penny Wooley. There is a disability network which
organises informal awareness raising meetings. I am not sure that it is
called just that but it sounded so. I joined the group recently. I can
report in more detail later.
I have an observation about our work on disability. I think that we need to
think about the compound effects of disability, and other forms of
discrimination when we are dealing with each individual case. For example
the international students who are disabled may have difficulty in
accessing certain funds for special equipment, etc. Similar to dealing with
any form of discrimination, if not more so with disability discrimination,
financial resourcing is at the heart of the matter. Without allocation of
adequate resources provisions like special examination arrangements may
place undue work pressures on already over-worked administrative staff.
There are currently several provisions, that I will not name here, which
are running on good-will and alturistic basis. However, I believe that
these practices should be institutionalised with proper funding and
staffing. I think that continuing to comply with inadequate provisions and
displaying extreme cases of alturistic individual work only discourages
educational institutions to acknowledge the resource implications of this
area of work.
2)If your university has an EO officer or Unit where are they located in
your institutional structure?
(I am particularly interested to know how many work directly to your
executive or VC's dept and what work they cover)
Our equal opportunities officer directly answers to the vice chancellor.
The equal opportunities coordinators answer to the deans of faculties. They
have an extensive remit on issues of sex, race, disability, age, religion,
sexual orientation and other categories of possible unfair discrimination.
Well, I do not want to sound too optimistic. We have our share of
discriminatory practice to keep all of us working.
I am at present working to get a disability unit established and it would be
very helpful to give some numbers and possibly examples.
What sort of numbers are you after? The student numbers or the staff numbers?
Thank you in advance for your time. Berry
Please reply to: Berry Dicker, email:[log in to unmask]
TEL:01902 321197
Good luck Berry,
Mustafa
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