Benny Dominish: uni2beyond allows adults with learning disabilities to go to uni

It is estimated that 10-16 percent of students are perceived by their teachers to have learning difficulties. These can be caused by internal factors (inherent, medical, physical, neurological), and/or external factors like family, communities, opportunities and experiences. And yet, many of these students have negative experiences with the educational system and feel like their needs fail to be addressed.

This is why Neurodiversity Celebration Week exists – to acknowledge and celebrate the strength and resilience of students who have special educational needs. By having a week like this, hopefully there will be fundamental changes in the ways students with special needs are perceived and treated throughout their experiences with the educational system.

To celebrate Neurodiversity Celebration Week, we chat with Benny Dominish from uni2beyond – a program from the Centre for Disability Studies (affiliated the University of Sydney) for people with a learning disability to experience university life.

Uni2beyond aims to provide their students with a fun and sociable environment whilst at the same time gaining knowledge from the subjects they wish to learn. Not only do the students get to attend classes, but of course, a part of being at university is to “meet a lot of people from all walks of life and join awesome and exciting clubs at university”, which Benny said he loved. Although he had never heard about uni2beyond until a few years ago when he met a lot of the students who were a part of a social networking group that he was in. Long story short, he decided to join… to go to university!

“I never thought it would be possible for me to go to university, but I did and I really enjoyed it,” Benny said when asked to sum up his two-year program with uni2beyond. 

Since being involved with uni2beyond, Benny has been featured in University of Sydney’s student newspaper, Honi Soit and other promotional materials for the program. When asked about his success, Benny remained humbled and went on to thank the uni2beyond team for these various features.

Other than being featured in many of the promotional materials, Benny’s university life was fruitful, to say the least. He joined multiple societies on campus and also loved to socialise with the members within them. 

But of course, his extraversion made it hard when COVID-19 hit.

“It affected me really badly and diminished my social skills and creativity,” Benny said. Thankfully for him, he had some recovery methods. “I listened to music and watched comedy shows and talked to my family and friends who made me happy”.

While university was an extremely positive experience for Benny, he acknowledges that he’s one of the few lucky ones. Unfortunately, uni2beyond is one of only two tertiary education programs for people with learning disabilities. He feels it’s because other universities are unaware of what a program like uni2beyond could do for them.

“It’s probably also because they are unaware that these programs exist,” he said.

Image credit: Ethan Shi via Unsplash

“To be honest, I feel like the people who made the [university] system need to meet people with learning disabilities and understand them, but unfortunately, some people are too ignorant or don’t care, or it’s all of the above”.

And in fact, Benny believes it’s important for everyone to get to know someone with a learning disability in a non-prejudiced and welcoming way – as if they were meeting anybody else. “The first step is to be around people with learning disabilities to truly understand it all. Otherwise, they will have no clue how to include or even figure out ways to include people with learning disabilities”.

While it’s important to be around people with learning disabilities, Benny also reminds us that they are not a monolith. Take his fellow uni2beyond cohort (2019-2020), for example:“We were all really different individuals who did our own subjects and everyone had their own ways of experiences with uni2beyond and uni”. This highlights how important it is to get to know people as individuals rather than reducing them to their disability.

We all have our own abilities one way or another. It doesn’t matter if we are low-functioning or high-functioning. If we can understand you in our own way, then you will understand us by how we respond.

Benny is still passionate about changing people’s attitudes towards those with learning disabilities since he completed his program with uni2beyond.

Every two hours, a child is diagnosed with an learning disability, and almost one in five people have a disability, so many of us might know someone who would love to be a part of this program and go to university. All they need to do is to contact the uni2beyond person-in-charge and speak about their interest - and it can go from there! Check out uni2beyond’s website here!

For further information please contact the Coordinator at

email: cds@cds.org.au

tel: 02 9036 3600

web: https://cds.org.au/uni-2-beyond/

Like and follow uni2beyond on Facebook: facebook.com/uni2beyond

Follow us on Twitter: @uni2beyond

WORDS: JESSIE WANG, BENNY DOMINISH
PHOTOGRAPHY: BENNY DOMINISH & UNSPLASH