I found the London Times story “Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them” so annoying and rife with cultural and ethics rot that I decided not to post on it for the benefit of my own mental health. Now I see that it is getting a lot of attention all over the web and on social media, so I am ethically obligated to weigh in.
In the article, the poor, disabled student above reveals that she decided to claim endometriosis as a disability at Stanford, which would bump her to the head of the line for the best housing on campus. Her reasoning: a friend told her that Stanford had granted her “a disability accommodation. “She, of course, didn’t have a disability. She knew it. I knew it,” Elsa Johnson writes. “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,” she continues. “I could do it, too, if I just knew how to ask.”
That’s lying. It’s also cheating. At a college. “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,” she writes.
Elsa cites how much everybody does it to justify her embrace of corruption.
“The Atlantic reported that 38 percent of undergraduates at my college were registered as having a disability — that’s 2,850 students out of a class of 7,500 — and 24 per cent of undergrads received academic or housing accommodations in the fall quarter.
At the Ivy League colleges Brown and Harvard, more than 20 per cent of undergrads are registered as disabled. Contrast these numbers with America’s community colleges, where only 3 to 4 per cent of students receive disability accommodations. Bizarrely, the schools that boast the most academically successful students are the ones with the largest number who claim disabilities — disabilities that you’d think would deter academic success…at Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame. Rather, we openly discuss, strategise and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough. Another student told me that special “accommodations are so prevalent that they effectively only punish the honest”. Academic accommodations, they added, help “students get ahead … which puts a huge proportion of the class on an unfair playing ground.”
Conclusion here: Colleges and universities are not merely indoctrinating students in Leftist ideology, political theories and world view, they are also teaching students to accept cheating, lying and corruption as “the system” that they would be fools not to master.
This does not come as a surprise to me, as I saw this slippery slope coming when President Bush the First signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, saw it roll out of control, and watched it lead to lawsuits, employees who were impossible to fire, drags on organization budgets and productivity, and now students at colleges and graduate schools getting special privileges and advantages if they can make administrators feel sorry for them.
First, this trend is antithetical to individualism, one of the cornerstones of American values, and explains why the culture is becoming increasingly hostile to the idea that citizens are responsible for their own success, failures, advancement, and achievement. Second, it benefits the least ethical rather than the principled among us.
I had two epiphanal experiences with this ethical dilemma, and I’ve written about both on Ethics Alarms.
The first was as an administrator at Georgetown Law Center when a college applicant asked me whether she should note on her law school application that her grandfather was Japanese, making her a minority in the eyes of GULC’s (then and now) affirmative action obsessed admission process. She said she didn’t want to apply as a minority student, since she was from an affluent family, nobody knew she had Asian ancestry, and was not in any way “disadvantaged” by it.
I told her that the admission process was already arbitrary. Her grades and scores indicated that she was qualified for Georgetown Law, but borderline for a white female in the tough pool of applicants. As a minority, however, she would be guaranteed admission: her scores were in the top 20% of that pool. And by the school’s own rules, she was a minority. I told her I agreed with her, that applicants like her should not get any special advantages, but that the school’s policies were its policies. She wouldn’t be cheating or lying to take advantage of them, since her competition would be.
The other episode was when, as a law student, I had a lazy, jerk of a professor who gave us a Constitutional Law exam that was take-home, and self-timed.I followed the instructions and stopped writing when my alarm clock went off, failing to complete the last essay question. I then learned that almost nobody else in the class did. I complained to the professor, who didn’t care. My reward for not indulging in the “Everybody Does It” rationalization was a C+.
Our culture, of which educational institutions are a major and crucial part, increasingly send the wrong messages to our rising generations. We are seeing the results in the caliber of our elected leadership, in policies like DEI, and in the empathy being lavished on law breakers and illegal immigrants.
Elsa writes, “The students aren’t exactly cheating and if they are, can you blame them?” My answer: yes, I can and do blame them, because they are cheating. I also blame the parents, teachers and society that allowed them to reason they way they do.
Ethics Alarms 
While it seems that many students are lying about their conditions, the author at least claims she does have endometriosis, which for many women can cause incredibly painful periods and other complications. (There are some women who think every woman should get an allowance for one week a month to deal with their period, and that’s not even considering exacerbating effects like endometriosis.) If the author applied for disability assistance and cited her endometriosis as the disability, and the authorities accepted that as a disability, isn’t that just making use of the Standford policy? That seems similar to your example with the woman who had enough Japanese descent to qualify as a minority according to GULC policy.
This reminds me of the accusations that Hillary leveled against Trump regarding his income taxes, and he said straight out that he took advantage of what the laws allowed. It also reminds me when I was complaining to my father (an accountant) about the COVID stimulus checks that I received. I was furious, because my job hadn’t been furloughed, I was still actively working and getting paid, and sending out the money to people like me was a waste of federal dollars and adding to the debt. My father advised me to accept the money, and just remember that sometimes the government will favor you one day, and then disadvantage you the next.
It seems to me that Standford set up a stupid policy, and if upon interviewing a student who claims a disability like “I can’t live with other people” they accept that as a disability, that’s upon the administration. If they don’t have a list of acceptable disabilities, and if they don’t have a list of approved religious exemptions (and ways to verify one is of that particular religion), then they have opened the doors wide open. If there is nothing that details what qualifies a disability, and if you can convince the staff that any amount of suffering in your life qualifies, then that’s just playing by the rules the administration made.
Lying about one’s religion, though, should secure housing in the Eight Circle of Hell…
“That seems similar to your example with the woman who had enough Japanese descent to qualify as a minority according to GULC policy.”
The woman in the article argued that what she had done was right because “everybody did it.” That’s means she engaged in defensible conduct while taking the wrong lesson from it. She did not feel she deserved special privileges because of her condition, but stepped in front of other students anyway. The GULC applicant was going to be rejected from a school she was qualified to be admitted to because affirmative action applicants were going to jump in line ahead of her. I didn’t tell her to embroider the truth or exaggerate or lie because “everybody did it,” I told her to do nothing more than tell the truth on her application. Telling the truth isn’t “playing he game” or cheating. She was going to hide the truth because she didn’t want to benefit from it. She never asked for special accommodations, as the author did.
Jack,
Okay, I see the distinction you’re drawing.
On the “everybody does it” rationalization, though, the rationalization is effectively laziness, just emulating the actions of others without any deeper consideration of the ethical nature of the actions themselves. So of course it isn’t wrong to emulate ethical action if everybody does it, and while we might prefer that someone takes those actions because they are ethical, emulation at least sees the ethical action taken. So really, the fundamental question at hand here, at least in my mind, is whether taking advantage of a disabilities program that is so ham-handed that it essentially treats everyone as having a disability is really unethical.
To an extent, what Standford does with its resources is Standford’s choice. I might not think I have a disability, but if Standford says my struggle with, say, depression is a disability in its eyes and will give me special accommodations because of it, do my thoughts of not deserving this largess still disqualify me? Now, I could argue that resources are limited, that people with more severe disabilities should get preferential treatment in this program, and that I don’t need the additional time on tests, and so on. But if Standford disagrees and still is willing to dedicate these resources to me, is it unethical to accept?
Another aspect of this, I think, is that it does seem like there’s a difference between applying to this program and the program seeking me out. So if, for example, the program to distribute stimulus payments had been contingent on my applying for the stimulus payments, I would have a greater ethical obligation not to apply (given as I said I was employed and didn’t need the stimulus payments to make do) than to return the stimulus payments when the government just hands the payments to me without my asking. Still, is it unethical if I apply for the stimulus payments in this hypothetical scenario, should the government agree that my truthful responses on the application qualify my for stimulus payments even if I am employed and not in any financial distress?
And that is what really triggers me on the ethical nature of students taking advantage of Standford’s disabilities program. I think Stanford is acting unethically because of incompetence in this program, and specifically because it has not laid out what constitutes to a disability and disqualifiers that would inform those who need not apply. I can’t believe it would be sustainable if every student at Stanford received resources through the disabilities program. But absent good gatekeeping measures, if a student can truthfully report a condition that Standford will accept as a disability, then the student is merely playing by the rules that Standford established, and the application and reception of said aid cannot be deemed unethical.
Of course, I have a bit of a bias in this regard. I think as many students who can apply for this aid should, so that Standford is forced to realize how stupid it has been in handling the program, and will then either cancel the program or tighten up the process to restrict qualifications to something that isn’t so blatantly outrageous. In other words, Stanford should suffer the consequences of its actions, and the more students that help it reach the critical level of suffering, the better.
Shouldn’t the fact that 40% of their students are considered “disabled” be a sufficient clue to convey, “Gee, we’re doing something wrong here”?
I would certainly hope so! On the other hand, I enjoy the flippant comment that we just need a few more entries in the DSM for everyone to be considered mentally ill…
As do I.
I worked in a department several years ago in which four employees had some form of FMLA and could always be counted on to be absent during our busiest seasons/days, leaving the workload to be portioned out among those who showed up. They couldn’t be replaced because they were still on the payroll and being paid so our department was deemed full.
One day, one of the repeat offenders was overheard telling a caller that she wasn’t trained to helped him on some issue. A supervisor overheard her and reminded her that she was indeed trained on that job skill. The employee argued that she had missed a lot of work and had forgotten some of it so the supervisor advised he would put her in a training class the next day in order to get her back on track.
“Uh, uh”, she snapped back, “FMLA!” As you can imagine, all of us within earshot could only interpret that as her indicating that she would not be there the next day due to her FMLA option.
Getting rid of these people is ridiculously hard. She was finally fired when she called in one day, claiming jury duty. After she brought in a form from the court as proof, the supervisor realized that the previous day had been a federal holiday (not a major one) so he called the courts and verified that no juries had been called on that day. Upon a search of her desk, a valid jury duty form was found from a previous date and they determined that she had simply did a white-out/copy machine forgery of it to present for her most recent absence.
I overheard part of the conversation the supervisor had with the Unemployment Office after her dismissal. He had to go through all of her metrics, all the times she claimed she was having system issues which were far and above more often than any other person in the department and so on. The fact that someone like that could game a valuable benefit like FMLA on top of everything else she pulled and the company would have to defend firing her is mind-numbingly mad.
This mindset goes beyond the elite colelge campuses. Once I was interviewing a patient who was receiving all sorts of assistance for being “disabled.” My physical exam and clinical questions did not point to any disability of organic orign, Asking her what was her dsiability so that I could accomodate her, she repleid “i have depression!” what precipated the depression, I asked” she said “my boyfriend broke about with me!” when did this happen I inquired. “When I was 16” the now 42 year old responded.
Recent articles show pictures of dozens of people at airport gates sitting in wheelchairs awaiitng preferential boarding due to their “disability” And don’t forget the increased in support pets needed by the multitudes of “disabled”
The higher the ACT and SAT score, the more likely they are to have a serious learning disability.
As I was reading this piece, the lyrics to Steve Taylor’s song “Since I Gave up Hope I Feel a Lot Better” started rolling through my head. Taylor is a Christian satirist and wrote this song in 1987. Rather prophetic, wouldn’t you say?
Enter the young idealist
Chasing dragons to slay
Exit the hustler
Packing up his M.B.A.
Freshmen scream in a classroom
Was there a sound?
First degree in the vacuum
I’m on college ground
Took a class
Big fun
Modern ethics 101
First day learn why
Ethics really don’t apply
Prof says, “One trait
Takes us to a higher state
Drug free, pure bliss
Get your pencils, copy this:
“Life unwinds like a cheap sweater
But since I gave up hope I feel a lot better
And the truth gets blurred like a wet letter
But since I gave up hope I feel a lot better”
“Write it down…”
Top of the class sits Ernest
He was brightest and best
Till the professor lured him
To the hopeless nest
Now he lives for the shortcut
Like a citizen should
Tells the class with a wink
“Only the young die good”
He says, “Ideals? Uncouth
Fatalism needs youth
Eat well, floss right
Keep the hungry out of sight
Save face–nip and tuck
Praise yourself and pass the buck
Don’t forget the best advice
Everybody’s get a price
“Life unwinds like a cheap sweater
But since I gave up hope I feel a lot better
And the truth gets blurred like a wet letter
But since I gave up hope I feel a lot better
“While the world winds down to a final prayer
Nothing soothes quicker than complete despair
I predict by dinner I won’t even care
Since I gave up hope I feel a lot better”
Nazis plead in a courtroom
“Pardon me, boys”
Profits fall in a boardroom
Did they make a noise?
Someone spreads an affliction
Company’s nice
Someone sells an addiction
Puts your soul on ice
Half wits knocking heads
Candidates in double beds
Good guys defect
“I can’t precisely recollect”
Teacher’s pet theory’s fine
If you’re born without a spine
Can’t you spell wrong?
Sing it to him Papa John
Steve sure had a way with words, shining a light on the profound soul-searching topics. I regret saving the couple bucks by buying Squint on cassette instead of CD. I did get him to sign the fold-in at a music festival.
Cash Cow is a must listen.
“Squint” is my favorite Taylor release. “Smug” is my cut of choice, but “Cash Cow” is a close 2nd.
His stuff from the 80s is still gold.
100% Agreed. I have ALL of his albums on CD, including the Chagall Guevara album. My Squint CD is autographed.
Even today, I ask Amazon Music to play his songs from time to time.
–Dwayne
I was randomly picked for jury duty a few times while my kids were growing up, and always responded that I was the primary caregiver for 3 minor children, one of whom was autistic — all of which was absolutely true. The local circuit court evidently reckoned that it would be more trouble to provide a babysitter qualified to deal with a special needs kid than to just let me take care of my own kids, so the court never insisted that I serve on a jury. With the kids grown now (and the autistic son having passed away in 2013), I could more easily serve on a jury now, but haven’t been asked in many years. Likewise, the autistic son received accommodations for state-mandated tests required of all students, but in his case, he absolutely needed those accommodations to be able to complete the test at all.
I have zero respect, however, for people who claim “disabilities” which don’t truly affect their ability to do their jobs or live in the default type of housing, and which often seem to mask laziness and lack of work ethic.
It’s empathy poisoning.
“[W]e openly discuss, strategize and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough.”
She doesn’t look as if she’s Somali, but she sure thinks as if she is.
“Stanford University. A university of savvy optimisers.” That about covers it. They should use that in their recruiting and fundraising materials. They could put a big picture of Chelsea Clinton with her parents next to that quote!
I am just wondering about how such an unethical culture comes to pass at a university. It has a lot to do with affirmative action and DEI, and an admission process that reward essays with sob stories over grades and SAT results. As people react to incentives you typically get more of what is rewarded, and less of what is not rewarded or even punished. People who fall victim of discriminatory admission and grading practices grow cynical, and feel tempted to right the wrong by gaming the system. This requires rationalizations, such as “The only way to not loose in a system rigged against you is to game the system and cheat”.
In the fifties when Jim Crow was still in force with discrimination in hiring and housing, some people who were black according to the one drop rule engaged in “passing”, meaning that they pretended to be white. Technically this is cheating, however I have to admit that I am unwilling to condemn it due to the unfairness of Jim Crow. So I have some empathy (short of rationalization) for people who engage in gaming a system that is unfairly rigged against them.
She IS at Stanford. Stanford is one of the few universities that wipe a course off your transcript if you take it. At most schools, if you retake a class, they leave the first time and the original grade on the transcript. Some schools eliminate the first attempt grade form the GPA calculation, but they include it on the transcript for at least some transparency. When I was in college Stanford was notorious because the original class disappeared from the transcript completely. You could retake a ‘C’ class, get an ‘A’ on the retake, and boost your GPA and no one would see.
“(There are some women who think every woman should get an allowance for one week a month to deal with their period, and that’s not even considering exacerbating effects like endometriosis.)”
Some women are stupid. Many women experience discomfort, even pain for a few days every month. So what? Suck it up ladies. You’ve been telling men for decades that you’re equal and strong and even better in every way. Endometriosis and other serious medical issues aside …. put your head down and get to work. Why would anyone hire a woman under age 50 if monthly special allowances were required? Jeez … my head is going to explode. Special allowance for that?
My wife, who while she takes care of our five girls, who homeschools the eldest three, who organizes music for Mass at our Church, who takes care of house while I’m off at my job, still manages to find articles for discussion that are indeed mind-blowing. She tends to like to share “Am I the Asshole” submissions, women discussing the atrocious things their boyfriends/husbands do, and progressive ideas that simply make no sense to either of us. My comment on some women thinking that women deserve a week at work where they get to lie on the couch in the dark with a hot pack on the abdomen was one of those articles, but I can’t for the life of me remember the venue in which that article was published. My wife, who before we started having children worked hard to convince her department she wasn’t simply a diversity hire (a woman engineer!), was exceptionally critical of the article for essentially the reasons you describe.
I like your wife …
It is even worse than anyone has presented. My worst ADA case was a student ‘diagnosed’ with ADD and ADHD. She was given extra test time in a quiet environment. I asked her if she would just like to take the test with the class and I could give her extra time after the exam in a quiet area. That way, if a student found a mistake on the exam or asked for clarification, she would get that with the rest of the class. She agreed. She never took more than 20 minutes of the 50 minute class to finish the exam. She scored 10% higher than anyone else in the class.
After the semester was over, she asked me if I thought that she could go do medical school despite her ‘disability’. I answered her honestly. I said “You finished every test in half the time it took anyone else and got the highest scores. As far as I can tell, with the material you need for medical school, you have no disability. Quite the contrary, you are gifted.” Well, she was horrified and offended by this. She changed her major to one where people would honor her ‘disability’.
I believe her parents probably got her diagnosed with ADD and ADHD as a way to give her a leg up in school. She got extra time, even on the ACT, special privileges, etc. They just never told her it was all an act and she internalized it. Her ‘disability’ became her sense of self and she couldn’t accept that she wan’t disabled (and it gave her social status). I hope she got over it, but I suspect she will never live up to her potential because that would expose the lie of her ‘disability’.
Oh, realize that this same student wrote an article about how a Chinese agent tried to recruit her as a spy.