Born in South Africa his experience of apartheid, including being jailed as a political prisoner, influenced his thinking about how society treats disabled people.
Vic Finkelstein was disabled after a pole-vaulting accident as a teenager, later travelling to Britain for treatment and winning a swimming medal for South Africa at the Stoke Mandeville Games.
Back in South Africa and while at university he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement in 1964 supporting Bram Fischer, Nelson Mandela’s trial lawyer who had gone underground.
In 1966 Finkelstein was sentenced to 18 months hard labour, reduced to three months being ‘a cripple’.
In 1968 he fled to Britain and helped found with Paul Hunt the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) which argued that oppression by society was the biggest issue for disabled people.
UPIAS focussed on changing what it called ‘the disabling society’.
Through UPIAS and in the 1970s the television programme Link, Finkelstein helped change the way society thought about disability. In 1981 he campaigned for the exclusion of the South African team taking part in the Stoke Mandeville games for disabled people.
He also helped set up the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People and the London Disability Arts Forum leading to the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive.
He was an NHS psychologist before joining The Open University in the 1980s as course chair of The Handicapped Person in the Community the world’s first course in disability studies.
He retired from the OU in 1996 becoming a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Leeds University.
Joanna Bornat, Emeritus Professor of Oral History OU Faculty of Health and Social Care remembered his OU valedictory lecture.
“I don’t think many people at the OU now will know that we had a giant of the disability rights movement in our midst.
She said with other disabled people Vic developed the idea that disability might be the creation of the society in which disabled people lived rather than impairment. That led to a movement that brought changes all of us benefit from now including access into buildings and transport and disabled voices in media and arts changing society for the better.
“Many if not most disabled people would argue there is much left to be done, but without Vic’s theorising and his steadfast non-compromising position, those changes might never have happened,” she said.
Joanna said Vic spoke about being a prisoner in South Africa. In jail he was given a bed instead of a mat on the floor and had ‘helpers’ to get him round the prison.
“His conclusion was that when necessary the state could make things accessible.
“He was given a five year banning order but said that made no difference to him as he was unable to do any of the things he was banned from doing,” she said.
Another OU colleague, Jan Walmsley, Visiting Professor in the History of Learning Disabilities told the Disability Law Service website that Finkelstein had an enormously powerful influence on the way the OU taught and continues to teach in health and social care.
She said he put the OU at the forefront of teaching and thinking about disability.
“As a colleague he was enormously generous to me, encouraging me in every conceivable way to develop my ideas, writing and research,” she said.
Vic Finkelstein died at Stoke Mandeville on November 30. A funeral service was held last week.
