A Beautiful Twist

As Conn celebrates the opening of its Disability Cultural Center, educator and activist John Sharon ’86 reflects on his own reckoning with disability identity.

By John Sharon ’86

was not the first physically disabled student at Connecticut College. That distinction apparently goes to a student who was on campus in the late 1960s, right before or around the time the school went co-ed. I was told that she had cerebral palsy and used a walker to get around. I don’t know her name or if she graduated, but before I tell my story, I think it’s important to acknowledge that she is someone whose shoulders we all stand on—even today.

It was August of 1982 when I arrived with a car full of too much stuff on the steps of Windham dorm. My head was full of too much stuff, too; I was excited to be away from home for the first time and anxious to get this college chapter started. At the time, I didn’t think much about disability or accessibility or who I was other than just an eager 18-year-old who wanted to fit in. In fact, I didn’t think about my identity much at all back then, to say nothing of my identity as a disabled college student. That would come in the next few years, as much to my own surprise as anybody else’s. Let me explain.

In 1964, I was born with a rare condition called arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, which causes stiff and fixed joints. And I was also born into a family who did everything they could to make me feel “normal” (although I dislike that word), just like everyone else. From my earliest memories, I knew I was 100% the same as everybody else because that’s the way my family treated me. But I also knew from my earliest memories that I was 100% different from everyone, too. I remember being 4 years old and my mom carrying me across the parking lot after a doctor’s appointment and yelling at someone. She got in the car, slammed the door, and said something about staring.

So I have lived in this duality all my life—the worlds of same and different. And when I got to Conn that fall, I wanted badly, so badly, to be in the world of same that I did not think about the world of different and what that meant.

But something odd happened almost right away. I noticed that people started recognizing me, saying hello to me by name. Yes, of course deep down I knew it was because I walked like a drunk penguin, but I didn’t acknowledge it—not then. So that fall, on a whim and because all these people seemed to know who I was, I decided to run for freshman class president. Mind you, I didn’t take it very seriously and did it as a bit of a joke. But the joke was on me, because I ended up winning that election, and suddenly I had to start acting, well, presidential. And suddenly I had to start thinking of policies and procedures and what we could do to make students’ lives better. But I still wasn’t thinking of myself as disabled, wasn’t thinking about accessibility.

That would come later, when one day after government class (on the fourth floor of Fanning Hall), I was walking down the stairs when a few friends stopped me and said, “Hey, what do you think about accessibility at Conn?” Accessibility at Conn? Was that even a thing? These friends had been taking an education class that term, and the topic of Conn’s accessibility (or lack thereof) had come up in the day’s discussion. These sweet friends were truly baffled by my reply: I had never really thought about it before. But over the next several months, I started to get curious, and the more I looked, the more I saw. And the more I saw, the more I realized that the campus was almost completely and thoroughly inaccessible for anyone who might use a wheelchair for transport, who might be deaf, who might be blind. And I started to get mad.

Disability is not just an integral part of the human condition; disability gives us an opportunity to connect with one another in deep, interdependent ways.

— John Sharon ’86

But I knew that anger wasn’t going to be the right approach, because that would just shut conversations down when just the opposite was what was needed. So I turned to activism. And I started asking lots of questions. Why wasn’t there an elevator going down to the squash courts in the new gym they were building? Why were there so few accessible parking spaces on campus? Why were there so many steps and no ramps? Now, this was before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, so nothing—not new construction, not renovation—was required to be made accessible back then. And because of that, I also knew something else: If I wanted to change the campus in even the tiniest of ways, I couldn’t do it by myself.

So about a year later, a group of friends and I held the first Disability Awareness Week in Conn’s history. We put up posters, we showed movies, we held discussions and we had about 10 students who volunteered to spend the entire week navigating the campus entirely by wheelchair. We got wheelchairs loaned for free from local pharmacies, and the rules for the students were strict but rather simple: During the school day, they could not get out of their wheelchairs to walk up stairs—even to a class on the fourth floor of Fanning. They had to be carried up those stairs by their friends. And yes, we deliberately chose students whose classes were in the far corners of inaccessibility on campus, because we knew the value and the power of seeing students needing to be carried up and down flights of stairs—it would hold up a mirror for the College that couldn’t be ignored. Finally, on the last day of the week, we had planned to have a big ole party. We’d have music and speeches and an amateur wheelchair race down the middle of Cro Boulevard. It was going to be like a “Disability Floralia,” only better, because this event had a broader purpose. And—this is crucial—we had notified local media about the day, and they had promised to send reporters out to cover it.

On the morning of the final day, I got a phone call from someone who worked in the Communications Office in Fanning, someone who was fully on board with what we were up to. She said one of the local radio stations had called her because someone from the College had called them that morning and told them not to come; that the planned event had been canceled. I told her to call them back to say the event had NOT been canceled and was proceeding as planned. So we held the day, the music played, the students spoke, the wheelchairs raced, and we all felt pretty good about what we had done, about the eyes we had opened, about the hearts that we had changed, even if just a little bit. This despite the fact that there was at least one person in the administration who did not want our plans to succeed.

As I reflect back on the birth of my activism, I am convinced that the College gave me the freedom to find my voice in no small measure because the school knew, deep down, that we were right—the College was not a place of belonging for all kinds of bodies. And later, after graduation, I started going into schools and other places to share my story and talk about accessibility and help others to see the barriers that society has erected. And despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, the work continues, because the need is greater than ever.

Accessibility at Conn? Was that even a thing? ... I had never really thought about it before.

— John Sharon ’86

My time at Conn also gave me the opportunity to see my disability as a part of my core identity, thanks to people like Marji Lipshez, our dean of Residential Life, who was the first person to ask me to tell my story at the start of my junior year as a part of a freshman orientation program. And some alumni reached out to me, including Ellen Hofheimer Bettmann ’66 P’91 and Danielle Strickman ’66, among others, who wanted to assist with a committee on accessibility—led by then-Writing Center Director Theresa Ammirati—that helped me see and embrace myself as the disabled human that I was. To be clear, it took years for me to fully embrace the disabled part of my identity, and some days even now I don’t do it perfectly. That world of same continues to woo me. Because all of us want to fit in.

Even so, over many years of speaking in schools, houses of worship and other organizations, I’ve come to the realization that disability is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. Everywhere I go, everyone I talk to—from Uber drivers to teachers, from TSA agents to cafeteria workers—everyone seems to have a story about disability; everyone has a family member, a friend, a co-worker who is disabled in one way or another. And everyone seems to want to tell their story because of a shared connection and a shared experience of being human. Indeed, it’s the world of same with a beautiful intertwining twist.

There is a post-script to my Disability Awareness Week story. Several years after I graduated, I got an out-of-the-blue phone call from the administrator I had suspected of being behind that call to the radio station telling them our big day had been canceled. (He had told me more than once before the event that he was worried about lawsuits.) This time, on the phone, his voice was faint. He said he’d retired a few years ago, and he went on to explain that he’d recently had a heart attack, that he was using a wheelchair to get around. And he was calling to apologize, because now he fully understood what it was we were trying to do.

You see, friends, disability is not just an integral part of the human condition; disability gives us an opportunity to connect with one another in deep, interdependent ways. Disability is real and is beautiful and is a true gift.

The Connecticut College Disability Cultural Center is a place that will give voice and agency and power and community and intersectionality and belonging to those who for too long have had to live on the outskirts of society. And it comes at a time in our nation’s history when some people’s identities and freedoms and senses of self are being threatened. Despite that (and maybe because of that), the Center offers an invitation to those on the margins to come to the very center of the page and live their lives and stories to the fullest. Because their stories are everyone’s story. Your story is my story is our story.

Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero is credited with saying, “We are prophets of a future not our own.” And nothing could be more apt for the opening of the Disability Cultural Center. Forty years ago, we began a move toward making Connecticut College more accessible for future students, faculty, staff, parents and alumni, and this Center is doing the same work—both for members of the community today and for those of a thousand tomorrows.

This essay was adapted from John Sharon’s speech at the grand opening event for Connecticut College’s Disability Cultural Center in Smith House on April 1, 2025. Learn more.