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“We're organized and we're taking over,” Ed Roberts announced triumphantly. A group of University of California at Berkeley (UCB) students, quadriplegics housed in the university's Cowell Hospital, had summoned Medical Director Henry Bruyn to an impromptu meeting. They conversed in a double-sized hospital room that served as Roberts's campus housing. It was the only billet on campus that had enough space for the enormous iron lung where he slept. But the room seemed small that day with almost a dozen students in electric wheelchairs crammed in for the urgent session. It was late September, 1969. The disabled students were angry because the California Department of Rehabilitation (DOR) had suddenly withdrawn the housing, medical, and academic assistance funding from two students for violating a stringent set of new rules. Confronted with a challenge the students experienced as personal and political, they rallied in solidarity to fight for greater control over services and support supplied by the DOR. As Roberts ambitiously declared, living in an era when most quadriplegics were assumed to be unable to attend college or hold a job, they wanted to take control of their own lives.1
Seven years earlier, in 1962, Roberts was the first UCB student housed on the third floor of Cowell Hospital. The campus medical facility had an empty floor that Bruyn offered to Roberts, a post-polio quadriplegic, as makeshift student housing. There was no way his wheelchair or iron lung could enter the campus dormitories. The following year, Roberts was joined by John Hessler, a tall, physically imposing figure who had suffered a broken neck in a swimming accident in the San Joaquin River Delta at age sixteen. Warehoused for over five years at the Martinez County Hospital, he enrolled in UCB in 1963.
Hessler's biography of escaping a dead-end existence in a hospital or nursing home was common among the disabled young people who inhabited Cowell Hospital in the intervening years. Cowell became the unofficial dormitory for a small number of physically disabled students, accommodating wheelchair-using men. Meals were brought up on trays from the hospital cafeteria. Financed by the DOR plus an uncoordinated patchwork of welfare funds, the disabled students hired, trained, and supervised their own personal care attendants. Nursing care, focusing on issues related...