IVAR THE MIDWESTERNER writes:

I offer an anecdote about how, in liberal society, manipulative power masquerades as charitable concern. I teach at a state college somewhere in the United States. As in all such institutions the federal laws governing disability accommodations are in place. According to these laws, so many parking spaces must be allocated for “handicapped commuters,” buildings must be “wheelchair accessible,” hearing-augmentation devices and sign language interpreters must be available for deaf or hearing-impaired students, and so forth. These gestures are humane although they would carry more moral weight were they voluntary rather than mandatory. Nevertheless, who would object to them?

The accommodation rules also apply to students with “learning disabilities.” When psychiatric authorities certify a student as being afflicted by a “learning disability,” the law entitles that student to special treatment. For example, a student might be certified as a slow reader or a slow test-taker who is therefore entitled to extra time in completing a reading assignment or in writing a quiz or an examination. A year or two ago, a student of this category appeared in one of my classes, who, on the first day of the semester, handed me the official documentation of his or her “disabled” status. The rules entitled this particular student to fifty per cent more time in test taking than other, “non-disabled” students.

The course in question was one that required steady application throughout the term to moderately challenging primary texts. To put moral pressure on students to do the reading (most students nowadays read only with great reluctance), I instituted my habitual system of unannounced, content-oriented quizzes designed to be answerable swiftly by anyone who has kept up with the semester. A typical quiz might consist of ten or fifteen questions requiring one-word answers that identify obvious features of a given book or chapter or article. It is a common method. Long experience has taught me how to design quizzes that the typical college student can complete in five, six, or seven minutes. I explain this to students, always adding that I will, as a gesture of my good nature, give them twice as long as five, six, or seven minutes to produce the answers.

Let us say that a given quiz is really a five-minute quiz. Let us say that the rules entitle a special student to seven-and-a-half minutes. Let us say that everyone gets ten minutes to write the quiz. In a reasonable world this arrangement would have satisfied the time-extension requirement of the disability accommodation rules, as they applied to the particular student, who in fact would have gotten more than the rules demanded. Not incidentally the arrangement would also have satisfied the stringent legal requirement never to identify or to single out entitled students.

We have not lived in a reasonable world for many decades. The local campus disability accommodation officer sent me a memo to the effect that however much time I gave all students to complete in-class assignments, even if it were in excess of what they or the special student needed, I would have to give the special student proportional time-and-a-half. I courteously pointed out that the relevant regulation stipulated no more than that the student should have time supplemental to that normally required for finishing an in-class assignment, a mandate that my arrangement entirely satisfied. The officer insisted, however, on his or her own position, quite obtusely as I saw it. As arguments in these cases beyond a certain point threaten a person’s livelihood, I assented to separate arrangements for the student in question.

The college official’s position revealed, I believe, a lurking motive in accommodation law. The stated rationale of accommodation law is, dubiously, to equalize the playing field for all students. Dubiety aside, this is precisely what my arrangement accomplished. The official’s unstated objection, it seems to me, could only have been that my arrangement, while subtly granting a generous exception to the entitled student, made it appear as though no such exception was being made. There was therefore no noticeable deference, in the form of a visible concession, to the student. What the official really wanted, then, was visible deference, with a concession, even though those things made it certain that the special student, whose identity was supposed to remain secret, would be conspicuously exempt from rules that applied to everyone else and, by virtue of that conspicuousness, eminently identifiable by all.

                                                                         — Comments —

Ilion T. writes:

Ivar asks, “… Nevertheless, who would object to them?” 

I respond: I do. My late mother was “handicapped.” Or, to use honest language, as we did in my family, she was crippled, from birth. And I loathe and have always loathed “handicapped parking” and the whole mindset behind it. Also, I frequently notice that the persons making legal use of it appear in no wise to be “handicapped.” 

Ivar’s conclusion is surely on the mark — the point seems not to be to help the supposed beneficiaries of “equal accomodation” laws, but rather to create ever more, and ever expanding, classes of “protected persons” who will look first and foremost to government (and, really, to the bureaucracies of government) to bestow and expand their “due” perks.

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