Photo: Courtesy Of San Francisco State University/HANDOUT

Anita Silvers, who was disabled by polio as a child, was an unstoppable force, an inspiration and someone who usually got what she set her mind on, especially when it came to making life easier for people with disabilities.

For half a century, Silvers was a philosophy professor at San Francisco State University, where she inspired classrooms of students and, for a time, laid down her crutches and crawled up the school’s stairs to get to those same classrooms.

She specialized in fighting for equality for people with disabilities. She wrote three books and 125 scientific articles. She helped change the accessibility of the campus, pushing for ramps, elevators and automatic doors, and with her spirited determination, helped change the attitudes of the people who worked and studied there.

Silvers died in her sleep on March 14 of pneumonia in a San Francisco hospital. She was 78.

“She was a force of nature,” said philosophy professor Justin Tiwald. “She has touched and transformed the lives of countless students, scholars and activists. We must work to ensure that her memory and her inspiration outlives her, as she hoped and expected of us.”

To her students and colleagues, Silvers was beloved, strong-willed, kind and no-nonsense.

“She didn’t take B.S.,” said her friend, history Professor Catherine Kudlick. “She was most proud of being able to reach students. She was fierce for what she believed in. Inside she had a big heart. She would not want me to say that.”

A native of Long Island, N.Y., Silvers received a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1962 and a doctorate of philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1967.

She joined the San Francisco State faculty in 1967, during an era of campus strikes and antiwar protests. Her first classes involved the philosophy of art, but she changed her focus and her course specialty to medical ethics and bioethics, particularly as it applied to disabled people. She continued to teach until shortly before her death.

Five decades ago, before campus buildings were equipped and retrofitted with elevators, she was assigned to teach on the second floor of the old humanities building. She would arrive long before her classes were scheduled to start so students and colleagues would not see her pulling herself up the stairs.

Friends said Silvers was inspired by her own experience to advocate for others. Her work helped implement the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In 1998, she co-wrote the widely cited book “Disability, Difference and Discrimination” that examined public policy regarding disabled people.

As the former chair of the philosophy department, Silvers established and funded from her own savings a San Francisco State scholarship for philosophy students.

Her professional accolades were many. In 2017, she won the California State University Wang Family Excellence Award in the Visual and Performing Arts and Letters category. In 2013, she won the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa.

Throughout her career, she was not shy about telling campus architects, local restaurateurs and shop owners about inaccessible features of buildings and facilities that needed changing.

When she wasn’t working — which colleagues said was rare — Silvers enjoyed visiting the Asian Art Museum and collecting modern Asian and African art.

“It’s an enormous pleasure when people tell me I’ve nourished their confidence in themselves and inspired them to find innovative ways of dealing with the barriers they thought would always block them,” she told an interviewer three years ago.

She is survived by her brother, David Silvers of New York.

Her students and colleagues held a memorial service on March 20 in the San Francisco State Humanities Building.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF