Why it’s a problem: As a rule, I generally don’t criticize or call out students’ work on this website. However, since this piece by a Stanford student was published in The Times, I think it should be open for critique. In her essay, and in a follow-up essay published in The Times yesterday, the student, Elsa Johnson, describes “a huge racket at Stanford University” concerning students misusing accessibility services. About 40% of Stanford students use accommodations, and while there is no reason to believe that a majority of those students are misusing accommodations, Johnson provides dramatic anecdotal evidence to suggest that they are.

I want to start by acknowledging, as I wrote in a response a few weeks ago to The Atlantic article that spawned this Stanford student’s essay, that it’s not surprising that students at the most competitive universities are “gaming the system.” I’m not saying it’s right, but considering that these are the same campuses that have produced people like Peter Thiel, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sam Bankman-Fried, I’m just saying, maybe we shouldn’t act so surprised that this is happening at Stanford.

This is a cultural problem at places like Stanford that goes far beyond just students misusing disability services. In my experience, as a former student at both UPenn and Columbia, it was not uncommon to find students using every opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. In this context, the peculiar focus on disability by conservatives as a line of attack against higher education is a red herring while causing significant harm to marginalized students that is likely equally intentional.

I would argue that the instances of accommodations misuse noted by Johnson are far less harmful than the cheating and fraud that are rampant throughout elite institutions. Johnson’s essay itself is far more damaging to the disability community than the harm caused by the relatively small proportion of students allegedly misusing accommodations.

There is a long history of disabled people being subject to disbelief, suspicion, and accusations of faking or exaggerating symptoms, which has led to disproportionate policing and surveillance of our communities, not to mention exclusion from mainstream spaces like university campuses. These forms of ableism have especially harmed Black people, even though most of the accommodations misuse appears to be committed by privileged white people. Part of this discrepancy arises from the ways that nondisabled white people have long used disability as a discursive object for their personal advantage, either as an opportunity for career advancement, or as an excuse for their moral transgressions.

The misconstruing and disconstruing of disability are also endemic to higher education, as described in detail by Jay Dolmage, and have historically been weaponized for racial oppression and exclusion. There are therefore very subtle racist undertones to Elsa Johnson’s essay in The Times, just as there were racist undertones to Johnson’s previous essay in The Times alleging that Chinese spies had infiltrated Stanford. A common element to both essays is the casting of suspicion on entire marginalized communities, and tellingly, in her follow-up essay in The Times, Johnson does some extreme logical gymnastics by tying the Stanford accommodations “scandal” to welfare fraud, a racist trope.

I do think it’s reasonable to suggest that there needs to be more discussion about how to recognize and best serve the diversity within the disability community. Each disabled person’s experience is unique across every diagnosis, and disabled people with the same diagnoses can have very different experiences and support needs. Universities are currently poorly designed to provide individualized supports to disabled students, and administrations often provide a fixed set of accommodations based on diagnosis, meaning that some students get more than they need, while many students with the same disabilities get much less.

However, these are not the conversations that Johnson is trying to broach in her essay. Instead, when Johnson puts quotes around “disability,” and when she writes that certain disabilities “are just downright silly,” she is using her large platform to unqualifiedly denigrate and discredit entire groups of disabled people. For example, Johnson claims that her disability, endometriosis, is a “legitimate illness,” while ADHD and anxiety are “less severe ailments.” While this statement is misguided, it goes largely uncontested, because it simultaneously reinforces ableist sentiments among nondisabled people and legitimizes the rampant lateral ableism and gatekeeping among certain parts of the disability community, which prioritize certain disabilities over others — a form of oppression that discounts and erases the lived experiences of disabled people who are invisibilized at the margins of society and the less privileged students with such diagnoses who are excluded from these elite campuses or are forced to leave when they don’t receive the supports they need.

In her follow-up essay in The Times, Johnson calls ADHD a “minor” disability, harmfully uses the term “perks” to describe accommodations, and calls on Stanford to challenge students “to overcome adversity rather [than] nurturing a system where cheating is rewarded,” thereby reinforcing harmful tropes about disabled people just needing to try harder to overcome their disabilities rather than expecting society to remove barriers.

Contrast Elsa Johnson’s erroneous claims about ADHD with this recent article in Psychology Today by Jennifer Cork, an autism and ADHD specialist, who cites research finding that “only 9% of individuals who were diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as children and 30% of individuals who were diagnosed as adults will graduate from college with a 4-year degree.” Cork continues, “It may not be possible to fully estimate the cost of not accommodating students with ADHD, but by not making sufficient accommodations in higher education, I suspect that our entire society is missing out on a potential workforce that would bring energy and new ideas to a number of industries.”

It also gets personal for me when Johnson writes, “Those who suffer from ‘social anxiety’ can even get out of participating in class discussions.” As someone who was first diagnosed with social phobia in high school, in my early undergraduate years I was one of those students who was petrified when being called upon in class. This made it difficult for me to attend seminars, which I often stopped attending or dropped late into the semester, which in turn made it difficult to finish my upper level major requirements and graduate. At Columbia, I never received a single accommodation that I requested, let alone was ever exempted from class participation, but I think it would have made a huge difference.

Anxiety has impacted other aspects of my life as well. As a student, walking to classes on campus often felt like walking through a minefield. Because of extreme sensory sensitivity, I would startle easily and my legs would often freeze up while I was walking, resulting in me embarrassingly tripping over my own feet. By the end of the day, I was often exhausted from the mental load of masking, and barely had the energy to focus on my studies. At one point, when I was living by myself in Binghamton, I would drive to the grocery store every week, but when I got to the parking lot, I would often spend over an hour sitting in the car trying to convince myself that it was safe to go inside. Just as often as not, I couldn’t get out of the car, and I would just drive back home without groceries. Decades later I would finally understand that much of my severe anxiety stemmed from experiences with racism.

These days I’m more comfortable speaking in groups though it took me years to learn how to manage my anxiety even with medications and therapy, and it took me over ten years to finish my undergraduate degree. This is not a journey I would wish on anyone.

It’s important to recognize that offering accommodations to students with seemingly “minor” challenges is not a perk, but rather a vital part of the holistic supports that help students from going down my path. Yet, too often, disabled students who are symptomatic at elite universities are told that they don’t belong, that this isn’t the place for them, or that they should take a leave of absence and come back when they are “cured.” It is not a reasonable demand to place on a young person, given the loss of career opportunities, productivity, and perhaps most painful of all, the lost connections with peers who have moved on without you. There is nothing wrong with taking time off, but anything we can do to help keep the doors open for young people, given an increasingly hostile and inhospitable world, is a worthwhile investment. Attacking accommodations is not it. And don’t ever say anxiety is not a real disability.

While I don’t disbelieve that there is a small and problematic subset of Stanford students who are misusing accessibility services, the attack on accommodations in higher education should be understood for the bad faith argument that it is, an attempt by privileged people to make higher education less inclusive by discrediting institutional programs designed to help “those who need it most.”

While privileged white students like Johnson may think they are “gaming the system” at Stanford by misusing accommodations, the truth is that places like Stanford will always bend over backwards to provide the resources to retain the most privileged students and keep them happy. When Johnson claims, with some arrogance, that she could have gotten by just fine without her accommodations at Stanford, that is a reflection of her privilege, not her disability. These are the students that elite universities have always been designed to include, while racialized students like myself are disbelieved and get pushed out, in large part because of the types of sentiments expressed in essays like Johnson’s that attack and delegitimize certain disabilities, not because, as Johnson and other conservatives claim, the system cannot accommodate everyone.