ASU should live up to its charter by including people with intellectual disabilities. Like my daughter.
by Amy Silverman | illustration by Hannah Agosta
Do you think I can have a one-bedroom apartment?
I stared at my phone for a while. Typically, my daughter Sophie’s early morning texts chastise me for ordering the wrong kind of microwaveable rice, or she wants to know our plans for the evening. Often, she wants cash.
Cash is easy. What twentysomething kid doesn’t ask their mom for cash? A one-bedroom apartment is tougher, particularly for Sophie.
I knew where this was coming from. The previous evening, a family friend had picked Sophie up at our Tempe home a few blocks south of Arizona State University’s main campus. They drove to the friend’s apartment just north of campus. It’s a five-minute trip if you hit a stoplight – but worlds away for Sophie, who at 22 still lives with her parents.
Our friend, who’s around Sophie’s age, is a senior at ASU. She drives her own car, has a job and changes her major when she feels like it. In fact, our friend gets to make a lot of decisions – not just what she studies, but whether she goes to class or not. Who she dates. And she’s free to go to the grocery store anytime to buy whatever kind of microwavable rice she wants. Or even real rice she can cook herself on the stovetop.
This is all normal young-twentysomething stuff. But Sophie isn’t normal. She has Down syndrome. You might bristle at the word “normal.” I do. But 22 years in, it’s apparent that Sophie’s not. She’s not a normal “typical” person.
I know you’re thinking: Well, who is? But I’m not talking about your anxiety or my self-diagnosed ADHD. Sophie has a global disability that impacts her in just about every way. At 4 feet 5 inches, she can’t easily reach the kitchen sink. She’s an accomplished dancer but can’t ever quite keep up with her classmates. She tires easily and sometimes can’t get herself to budge on a decision. That cash? It really is easy. Legally, she’s not allowed to have more than $200 at a time or she’ll lose her government benefits.
No one, including Sophie, thinks it’s a good idea for her to use the gas stovetop to make rice.
She can’t do simple math, tie her shoes or tell time on an old-school clock. That’s OK. Calculator, slip-ons, iPhone – three problems solved.
But some problems can’t be solved. Not yet, anyway.
Aside from paid caregivers, Sophie doesn’t have much of a social life. The outing with our family friend was a big, big deal. And as I’ve written in this space before, Sophie wants to attend ASU. She has for as long as I can remember. Her father went there, along with most of her friends and high-school acquaintances.
Sophie graduated from high school in May 2022. She’s waited more than three years for her chance, for ASU to create a program specially designed for students with intellectual disabilities.
That sounds like an impossible lift, but there are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of programs at colleges and universities around the country designed to give a person with a disability like Down syndrome the chance to live as independently as possible in a dorm, attend classes and develop life skills.
By the time you read this, Sophie, her dad and I will have traveled across the country to Clemson, South Carolina, to check out one of the nation’s more established programs. Students have such great experiences at Clemson University that families routinely permanently relocate to the area to be close to their adult children who have finished the program with job skills (and jobs!), friendships, romance and a real sense of community.
I do not want to live in Clemson, South Carolina. Please do not make me live in Clemson, South Carolina. My home is here in Phoenix.
At this point, I’m not sure I’ll have much of a choice. I have been completely shameless in my attempts to get someone to listen.
I once stopped a member of the Arizona Board of Regents on an airplane (sorry, Fred) and made him listen to Sophie explain why she wants to go to college, and what ASU would need to do to make that happen.
Nothing.
I’ve had coffee with the former Arizona superintendent of public instruction who now works in education policy at ASU and begged her.
Nothing.
I bug people at parties. I post about this all the time on social media and my friends who work in the president’s office always hit like or post the power fist emoji.
Nothing.
Why ASU? It’s a good question. And the answer is not just about location, the fact it’s, almost literally, in Sophie’s backyard.
It’s that freaking charter. I see it every time I walk through campus, whenever I read a story about how ASU’s really bucking the anti-DEI trend (that’s a separate story for another time, but not really, actually). The charter. The charter. The charter.
“ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.”
Uh-huh. Whoever wrote that charter (President Michael Crow, we’re told) wasn’t talking about Sophie. That has been made clear in so many meetings, at so many social events, in every non-response or uncomfortable, sympathetic smile.
This all took place, by the way, before this Shit Year. After what’s happened to higher ed in 2025, I don’t expect much of it to be around by this time next year, let alone a new program that celebrates the strengths of people with intellectual disabilities. That opportunity – if it ever existed – is gone.
Clemson makes it look easy (on social media, anyway), but it’s expensive and time-consuming to find meaningful ways to include someone like Sophie on a college campus – to convince Greek leaders to pledge students with intellectual disabilities, to staff dorms with young people committed to creating a good college experience for a student who struggles with everyday living.
I get it. It’s tough. Resources have always been limited, and now more than ever. But don’t you think the Most Innovative University in The Universe could give it a shot? It would take nothing less than a serious commitment from President Crow. So far, there’s no evidence he really wants to live up to his own charter.
But now he’s got another chance.
In her three years since high-school graduation, Sophie has attended community college and earned herself a decent GPA. She’s become an accomplished public speaker and self-advocate. She teaches dance and choreographs for musical theater productions. She’s got a résumé that puts mine and probably yours to shame.
So, this summer, Sophie applied to ASU as a non-degree-seeking transfer student. I did my best to warn her that this was unlike any other school experience she’d had, that the high school had to take her and so did the community college. This is selective, I explained. She nodded. She was cool with it. She hit “apply.”
She had her answer in less than 24 hours. Sophie was accepted as a transfer student for spring 2026.
That night, Sophie texted every single person in her contacts. She was thrilled. I didn’t sleep. I’m not sure ASU will let Sophie take a single dance class, let alone include her as part of the Sun Devil community. It will be up to Sophie to change some minds, like it always is.
We’ll know more early next year.
Born and raised in Phoenix, Amy Silverman is a multiple winner of the Virg Hill Arizona Journalist of the Year award. She also penned the memoir My Heart Can’t Even Believe It.
