As you know the campus is divided by a railroad line and so there are a couple of tunnels that go under it.
Other than that you'd have to go to major roadways on either end of the campus
to really go across from one side of the campus to another.
So accessibility in our era
was more geared toward general campus access than to individual buildings and that sort of thing.
I think there's been a lot more sensitivity to those things in recent years
but in those days it was really being able to get from the residential side of campus,
where the residence halls and dining halls are and the athletic facilities,
over to the academic side of campus.
This actually was brought home to me a few years later
when my girlfriend, now wife, had her ankle broken
and was on crutches for a period of time.
It became very obvious how hard it was to get across campus
in that situation because she suddenly was having to deal with accessibility herself,
so we talked about how it sort of brought home some of our issues.
and the student senate's response was that,
if you know much about the university's budgeting process, every university develops its own list of priorities
for the budget. Those priorities go to the University of North Carolina system office
which then prioritizes what it thinks should be taken forward to the legislature,
so an individual campus's priority list
is the first step but it doesn't mean all those things are going to make it onto the wish list that goes to the General Assembly.
Well, NC State would make its list, it would go to the UNC system, they would pare that list down,
combine it with all the other campuses, then go forward for funding,
and we never seemed to get funding to make the tunnels handicapped accessible,
or to build a handicapped accessible tunnel, which is one thing we were pushing for.
We kept being told, well, the legislature isn't giving us the money for it.
What we researched and raised was
that the university wasn't asking for it.
We looked at the documents of what the university was putting forward as its requests
and that was not part of their requests.
So we tried to elevate the issue publicly to get the university to begin making it part of their official request
so at least it had a chance of getting funded.
I don't know that a lot happened while we were here in terms of results
but we certainly raised the issue and it got some attention at that time.