acpa position on Affirming Access and Accessibility 

With the increased focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, as an Association, we want to affirm the importance of Access and Accessibility.  ACPA – College Student Educators International boldly transforms higher education by aspiring to be higher education’s and student affairs’ most inclusive and community-driven association by leading our profession in centering social justice, racial justice, and decolonization as defining concepts of our time and the foreseeable future. 

Within our core values, specifically, “Cultural humility, inclusion, and human dignity,” “Active engagement with issues of inequity within higher education and within the Association,” and “Intentional reflection and organizational transformation to better serve members and the higher education community” – we take measures to reinforce the importance of Accessibility in our guiding principles, documents, protocols, and trainings.

As we consider ourselves a member-focused association, we define Access as the facilitation of conditions that enable all persons to interact with information or services with an equivalent ease(1) of use in an equally integrated manner.  We envision the manifestation of this definition in the assurance that information, services, and environments can be used by disabled people in a way that is as equally effective, as integrated, and as easy as it is for non-disabled people.

Further, we defer to the Association of Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) best practice on the usage of identity first language to destigmatize negative connotations associated with disability and to support the reframing of how disability is considered through the acknowledgement and empowerment of one’s humanity.

Within ACPA, we are committed in our engagement and relationship with the ACPA Coalition on Disability to ensure that our collective efforts are making a difference in providing attention and maintaining awareness to the importance of access.This Statement of Values reinforces and aligns with the related ACPA statement on Disabilities and Higher Education.

Finally, we affirm that “Disability is a lived experience with far-reaching political, social, and economic implications” (AHEAD, 2019). ACPA – College Student Educators International views accessibility as an active, participatory process to minimize barriers and ensure disabled people can maintain their dignity throughout engagements and time in our association.

(1) We use equivalent in the context of the functional nature of intentional plans to consider disability in information delineation, programs, and services offered by the association