“This should be the real message of the story: Stanford must reform its disability accommodation system so it is fair, helping only those who need it most. At the same time, the university should encourage students to live up to the greatest human attributes: hard work, honesty, perseverance and excellence. As things stand, it’s teaching us the worst lesson of all: cheaters always prosper while the good get punished.”
—Elsa Johnson, the Stanford student who wrote about how students there contrive “disabilities” to gain advantageous accommodations from the school.
This was the conclusion of “I exposed Stanford’s disability racket. I was stunned by the reaction on campus.” Ethics Alarms discussed Johnson’s original essay here. In her follow-up, she claims that the reaction to her “whistle-blowing” article (my term, not hers) were generally positive, that her fellow students were glad she exposed a culture on campus that encouraged students to cheat. She wrote in part,
“I braced for the worst — but when the story broke, I was floored.The piece did go viral, but the response was overwhelmingly positive. I was flooded with messages of support. “Was that your article on disability at Stanford?” a recent grad from Stanford’s Business School texted me. “THANK YOU for writing it and the courage to include your own story among the examples. I came straight from the army to Stanford and was initially deeply uncomfortable with the ‘gaming’ of the system I saw, for disabilities and other issues. And by the time I graduated two years later, I found myself playing some of those games. I didn’t know if I had lost a part of myself and my integrity, or if this was simply the real world I had to navigate.”
I am considerably cheered by that response, if indeed it was the general response and not one cherry-picked to make an interesting follow-up. I confess that I have my doubts.
Ethics Alarms 
It must have been in the late 1980s Mrs. OB and I took our then early teen children and a friend of theirs to Palo Alto to watch Notre Dame play a football game against Stanford. During half time, the snotty Stanford band, famous for not wearing uniforms and not marching in any organized formation, were led around the field by a drum major wearing clerical garb and a papal mitre while keeping time by waving a papal ferula (the rod with a knob on top surmounted by a cross). It was probably the most crass, insulting thing I’d ever seen.
You would be amazed at the amount of babying that goes on in colleges now and how many people are pomoted far above their competence. Students come in and won’t read instructions or course material or textbooks and then claim they are confused and need help, expecting tutors to do all the extra work for them because they don’t come in even trying to be prepared.
Professors are not even allowed to fail students who are using AI to write papers even when the student admits they did so.
The whole culture on college campuses is far downward, and then they wonder why people want to cut funding to higher ed. The humanities are especially bad because measuring performance is much more difficult and seems to attract people who aren’t good at much else.
If a math professor teaches something incorrectly, it’s easy to see. When you get into the mushy subjective stuff, it’s much harder to evaluate, and I say this a strong believer in the arts and humanities. The area has become so overrun with progressivism that it is going to end up making itself irrelevant if something doesn’t change.
So, seeing this, I am not surprised at all. This has been my experience as well.