Saturday’s UBC Centennial closing event featured a talk by Rick Hansen of the “Man In Motion” World Tour about the future of accessibility and inclusivity.
The talk was part of UBC 100’s yearlong initiative to celebrate the university’s past and provide perspectives on topics of its future.
Hansen started his talk by describing his early experiences with paraplegia following an accident at age fifteen.
“Back then, people with disabilities were largely shut out," he said. "It was very difficult for someone to have a lot of opportunities in life, and — of course — the notion of cure for spinal cord injury was literally an impossibility.”
With the goal of becoming a teacher and coach, Hansen applied to the Physical Education program at UBC — but was at first rejected because nobody had completed the program in a wheelchair before. He saw this as an opportunity to “try to transform an institutional paradigm, and start to shift from exclusion to inclusion.” He later became the first person with a physical disability to graduate in P.E. at UBC.
Hansen stressed the importance of sharing information within communities to “build bridges into new forms of consciousness.” At UBC, he said he went through one of the “greatest transformations of [his] life” and was inspired by professors to commit himself fully to sport.
Later, when asked by moderator Brian Kwon to rate today’s level of accessibility from one to ten, Hansen answered “about a four, maybe five,” adding that “it’s accelerating rapidly." He explained that that the barriers facing those with disabilities are often hard to discern for those without similar challenges, commenting that the issue of disability is currently “fragmented” by body part and diagnosis.
Speaking to the future of accessibility at UBC and internationally, Hansen hopes we will see only one class of athletes in the Olympic games. He also envisions a “convergence” of accessibility information, with infrastructure ratings online and objective global metrics.
“We should be measuring communities, across the country and around the world,” he said.
Hansen pointed to opportunities for economic growth by commenting on the need for product and infrastructure innovation. While supportive of creative infrastructure development, he warned against inadvertently creating further barriers that would exclude certain populations of people.
Hansen also expressed his belief that UBC will become a global leader in accessibility in its next 100 years — nodding to on-campus services like Access and Diversity, which provides support and accommodations for those with disabilities.
At the end of the talk, audience members thanked Hansen for his leadership and inspirational words.
“It was my accident that gave me the millstone to be able to ask important questions,” Hansen said. “You can’t control the nasty things in life that happen to you, but you sure can control how you view it, and how you view yourself as a human being.”