Harlan Hahn, a longtime USC professor of political science and champion of disability rights who successfully sued the university to improve access for disabled people campuswide, died April 23 at his Santa Monica home. He was 68.
The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter, Emily.
Hahn was already in the vanguard of the disability rights movement when he joined the USC faculty to teach political science in 1972. He pushed for the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibited discrimination against the disabled, and the more sweeping Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.
In 1998 he filed a lawsuit against USC to remove physical barriers that limited the mobility of disabled individuals. Hahn, who had polio as a child and used a wheelchair and crutches, brought the suit after having to miss a number of meetings held in buildings that he had difficulty entering. But instead of demanding that the university address only the architectural deficiencies that affected him, he insisted that it eliminate obstacles throughout the campus.
In 2001 the university settled the lawsuit, agreeing to set aside a substantial amount of money each year for barrier removal, eventually budgeting $1 million annually.
The campus is "quite a model now for accessibility," Sid Wolinsky, co-founder and legal director of Disability Rights Advocates, the Berkeley-based advocacy group that represented Hahn, said this week.
He remembered Hahn as "a thinker and a fighter" who tackled issues from a practical as well as a theoretical standpoint. "He was one of the early pioneers who really developed the notion of disability as a civil rights movement" rather than a charity issue, Wolinsky said.
Hahn was born in Osage, Iowa, on July 9, 1939. The only child of teachers, he had an identical twin who died at birth. At 5 he contracted polio and spent the next several years in and out of hospitals. He was 11 when he entered school and devoted himself to education.
"One of the things he believed in was knowledge being powerful and giving a voice. He always was learning," said Emily Hahn, a Costa Mesa resident who will enter a doctoral program this year.
Harlan Hahn earned a bachelor's degree in political science at St. Olaf College in Minnesota before going to Harvard for his master's and doctoral degrees. In 1982 he received a master's in rehabilitation counseling from Cal State L.A., and in 2004 he finished a master's in public health at UCLA. In 1994, he was given a joint appointment at USC's Keck School of Medicine as a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science.
