If everyone is disabled, is anyone truly disabled?
That's the question that we apparently should be asking students currently attending the most elite colleges and universities in the country, including Stanford, Brown, and Harvard, where tuition alone can run upwards of $60,000 per year.
We all know college itself is a racket; parents pay unreal amounts of money to institutions to have their sons and daughters – not to mention their daughters who think they are sons and sons who think they are daughters – indoctrinated in the ways of leftist professors who haven't spent a day having to survive in the real world. Graduates leave school with an expensive piece of paper and not much else to launch them into the world.
Now we're learning about the racket that's increasingly happening within the racket. Huge swaths of college students are allegedly self-identifying as "disabled" in order to get in on some seriously good perks. And there are supposedly legions of "empathetic" white women ready to dole out the goodies on behalf of the colleges.
It's all laid bare in an article in The Telegraph, where Stanford undergrad Elsa Johnson blows the lid off the disability schemes overtaking many campuses. Johnson admits she, too, has taken part in the somewhat dubious claim of having a disability because, hey, everyone's doing it and it would be stupid not to join them.
SEE ALSO: Education Dept. Official Exposes the Scary Amount of Student Aid Fraud in MN... and CA
Tales From a Left-Wing Campus: Conservative Icon Gives the Disturbing Reason Why He Quit Teaching
Johnson, who's currently in her last semester at Stanford, recounts how, as a freshman, she was awed when a senior showed off her solo dorm room, a perk she had enjoyed her entire four years at the school. This impressed Johnson since the privilege of a private on-campus room was typically a right only enjoyed by seniors during their final year.
How had the older student pulled it off? It's ridiculously easy, Johnson learned; just tell the Office of Accessible Education that you need “a disability accommodation" and they'll give it to you!
She, of course, didn’t have a disability. She knew it. I knew it. But she had figured out early what most Stanford students eventually learn: the Office of Accessible Education will give students a single room, extra time on tests and even exemptions from academic requirements if they qualify as “disabled”.
Everyone was doing it. I could do it, too, if I just knew how to ask.
Johnson noted a recent article that detailed how shockingly large numbers of students at elite colleges like Harvard and Brown were enjoying a wide variety of school privileges – including getting copies of lecture notes, excused absences, and private testing areas – all because of their so-called "disabilities." She noted that those who claim to suffer from "social anxiety" are even excused from participating in class discussions.
The most prized benefit of all for the "disabled" is the private dorm room. Johnson felt no qualms at all for requesting – and getting – a solo room housing assignment because of her endometriosis diagnosis. When the condition get severe, she wrote, she could end up doubled over in pain, which could be disturbing to a roommate. All it took was a 30-minute Zoom call with the empathetic ladies at the Office of Accessible Education, and the single room was hers.
Johnson is just one of many.
Some diagnoses are real and serious, of course, such as epilepsy, anaphylactic allergies, sleep apnea or severe physical disabilities.
But most students, in my experience, claim less severe ailments, such as ADHD or anxiety. And some “disabilities” are just downright silly. Students claim “night terrors”; others say they “get easily distracted” or they “can’t live with others”. I know a guy who was granted a single room because he needs to wear contacts at night. I’ve heard of a girl who got a single because she was gluten intolerant.
The unapologetic Johnson concluded, "The truth is, the system is there to be gamed, and most students feel that if you’re not gaming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage."
You can't really blame the students for taking advantage of the liberal "empathy" that rewards the campus' weakest minds and the opportunists with the luxe life. The "system" has stopped rewarding merit in favor of babying the already-coddled students, but it's alarming to learn of the skyrocketing numbers of students who are willing to lie to get onto easy street. This does not bode well for American society.
