Chancellor’s Committee for Disabled Students created by undergraduate student Michael McManamon with the help of Ernest Mort, Dean of Revelle College and a Catholic priest. It consists of disabled students, allies, faculty and workers of the Central Library.

UCSD student affairs intern Michael Rappaport releases a study outlining the state of campus inaccessibility compared to other UCs requiring $200,000 to redesign UCSD. The Student Affirmative Action Committee led by the DSU demands the creation of the Disabled Student Services Program. 

Assistant Dean for Affirmative Action, Del Drago, agrees to SAAC demands to create the Disabled Student Services Program in the Fall of 1976, hiring Brad Graff as its coordinator. DSS paved the way for physical accessibility and awareness in the early years of disability activism.

The funding of Section 504 demands a full-time staff coordinator for Disabled Students at UCSD. Rob Clerisse, a former UCSC disability administrator, is poached for the position, pushing initiatives for accessible transportation solutions, more disability visibility, et cetera.

Delta Gamma, an undergraduate sorority, launches UCSD's first Disabled Awareness Day on April 29, 1987, alongside DSS and the Associated Students of UC San Diego. This was a major push to reawaken disability awareness by Randy Woodard, an advisor for ASUCSD and DSS.

DSS director Connie Wilbur Burton and Associated Students Outreach Assistant Robbie Gimblett organize UCSD's biggest disability awareness event yet, the Disability Awareness Week, with the help of the DSU involving Wheelchair Basketball competitions, celebrated disabled artists and other cultural/educational events. 

ASUCSD president John Edson leads calls by the undergraduate and graduate student governments to create a master plan for improving disabled student enrollment building off personal experience as a part of the Student Affirmative Action Plan Update Committee to develop a five-year plan for the university.

Samuel Kernell, chair of the Committee on Educational Policy at UCSD's Academic Senate (faculty government), pushes UCSD to improve accommodations for disabilities beyond physical citing the rise of students with learning disabilities at UCSD in the last 3 years.

DSS is renamed to the Office for Students with Disabilities or OSD and begins to withdraw from student-facing community development. The first casualty of this administrative change is the Disability Awareness Week that had been ongoing for the previous few years. The Employee Rehabilitation Program Manager Barry Niman still holds a Disability Awareness Fair in the academic year on May 15, 1995.

Community Advocates for Disabled Rights and Education (CADRE), a faculty association at UCSD is recognized for its efforts in recruiting and bringing diverse enrollment and faculty to the university.

In a major win for disabled students, the Center for Library and Instructional Computing Services (CLICS) opens in Galbraith Hall with state-of-the-art disability accommodation software that was key to building an accessible computing space amidst the tech boom.

After 26 years of advocacy, mutual aid and organizing, the Disabled Student Union hosts its final few events in 2000 and 2001, including a three-day celebration of Disability Awareness in October with the assistance of Employee Rehabilitation Program Manager Barry Niman and faculty group CADRE. This marked the start of a long hiatus in disabled student organizing at UCSD.

The Office for Students with Disabilities Outreach Assistant Meghan Anderson appeals to students join and become involved with the DSU in an attempt to restart the only established organization for disabled students at UCSD. This effort is ultimately short-lived and unsuccessful. Chancellor Robert Dynes forms the Disability Management Work Group to uncover whether disabled affiliates of UCSD are being treated fairly.

After 7 years of disorganization, a new organization finally emerged for disabled students: the Students with Disabilities Coalition. Founded by undergraduate student Jesse Dubler, the organization came out of the Students Affirmative Action Committee aiming to uplift disabled rights in the wake of renewed student activity to protect student spaces and free speech.

CLICS, after 11 years of operation is scheduled to be shut down due to "budgetary constraints". Frustrated students create an encampment to turn CLICS into an overnight study space by force, breaking in and creating roles to protect the space. This was temporarily accepted with Vice-Chancellors and administration unusually allowing the encampment to take place. Ultimately, CLICS was shut down and a similar space for disabled students was not developed.

5 years after inception, much of the work of SDC, now led by members such as Aiyana Bailin, is transmitted through largely underground/informal efforts. Despite continued coordination with SAAC, SDC remains hidden from most of campus in the future, if at all.

On November 25, 2013, Naomi Spellman, a department lecturer for the Interdisciplinary Computing Arts Major, writes a letter in the UCSD Guardian that discusses the total lack of support and assistance provided by the University toward its staff and faculty. She wrote about feeling isolated and subject to derogatory comments due to her disability, opening a conversation about disability justice at UCSD again.

A landmark campus climate survey undertaken by the UC system for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion identifies that 30% of disabled students had "seriously considered" leaving the university. 

Shahram Jazirian, a non-traditional undergraduate student and refugee from Iran, filed a lawsuit against the UC Regents and UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla alleging a disturbing depth of discrimination in the university's administrative mechanisms from counseling to financial aid to even OSD. Most harshly, Jazirian revealed that the university intentionally denied accommodations, using unprofessional and emotionally harmful language such as "Mike Myers" to refer to him.

Noting the lack of interdisciplinary communication and academic involvement in disability-related work at UCSD, Professors David Serlin and Brian Goldfarb launch a postgraduate research group supported by the Institute of Arts and Humanities called the Transdisciplinary Disability Studies group aiming to bring a broader academic interest in learning about the disabled community.

After decades of disorganized action, the third iteration of UCSD's disabled students' organization arrives in the form of the Disability Student Alliance, founded by Grace Ferber and Caroline Fogel. They announce a set of demands for structural change including the need for a Disability Resource Center, an ask which is reminiscent of the Disabled Student Services of the 1970s and 1980s. 

Shahram Jazirian has his lawsuit against UCSD ruled against his favor, a shocking loss that draws sharp criticism from the University of California Student Association and other disability activists.

After two years of its campaign to create a Disability Resource Center at UC San Diego, the Disability Student Alliance loses steam, with most active members transitioning out of the organization. Their petition to start a center remained unmet and denied by the UCSD administration.

Graduate researcher Marina Nakhla and Professor Adam Fields help launch UCSD's first honor society for disabled students, Delta Alpha Pi (DAPi). The same year, distinguished student activist Syreeta Nolan co-founds Disabled at UCSD, a second attempt at creating a Disability Cultural Center and advocating for a disability studies minor at UCSD.

After years of student complaints, outrage and advocacy, UCSD commissions an external review of the campus' services by the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD). The AHEAD Report, while deeply unsatisfactory highlighted how UCSD departments harbored resentment against disabled students, seen as "costly". The report also noted that a space for disabled students was "aspirational".

Disabled at UCSD, led by Syreeta Nolan, the Associated Students of UCSD launch the Disability Justice Commission in order to create a centralized conduit for disability justice at UCSD.

Building off of the Disability Justice Commission, the Associate Vice-President of Local Affairs (ASUCSD) Daniel Soria alongside colleagues including as Masaki Mendoza, Rhianen Callahan and Cassie Pina presented a novel Disability Justice campaign that would seek $17.5 million from the California Budget for building community spaces at universities for disabled students.

As the Disability Justice campaign continues through the University of California Student Association's ACQUIRE campaign, the campus-based effort morphs into the Disabled Students Alliance, spearheaded by graduate student Giulia Ramirez and undergraduate student Hannah Nguyen. ~$2 Million is secured for UC San Diego's implementation of disability services, but much of the funding goes toward increasing OSD staff salaries.

In an attempt to salvage the campaign for a resource center, the Disabled Students Alliance proposes a $1-$3 fee increase for students that would be matched by administrative funding to support such a resource center. Spearheaded by Revelle College Senator Hannah Nguyen, this fee increase is presented by Aryan Dixit to the Associated Students of UCSD. However, UCSD administration couples several hundreds of dollars in fee increases for unrelated construction expenses in their proposal that ultimately results in a denial of the proposal.

In February of 2025, SCLU launches their campaign for a Disabled Students' Resource Center (DSRC), built off of the work that Daniel Soria and Aryan Dixit, co-founders, had done in the past. They collect petitions and signatures aggressively for the DSRC. Aryan Dixit, Jasmine Lee and Matthew Diego Benny forge an alliance between SCLU and Blind Snakes, aiming to bring popular student support to the DSRC. Aryan Dixit, now Vice President of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for ASUCSD, pledges his office to work on the DSRC.

After a protracted but aggressive campaign leveraging administrative, public and official spaces to push the DSRC, the coalition of SCLU, Blind Snakes and the Office of EDI received a $14,000 grant for disability justice. In November of 2025, the coalition brought mass student involvement to pressure UCSD administration into providing a space for a Disability Resource Hub at UCSD.