Richard Hanania delivers a jarring thesis: the very laws designed to protect the vulnerable have been weaponized to distort the academic playing field, turning elite universities into institutions where the majority of students claim disability status. He argues that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and its 2008 Amendments have created a system where the definition of disability has expanded so broadly that it now encompasses common conditions like anxiety and ADHD, effectively eroding the concept of meritocracy in higher education.
The Elite Accommodation Paradox
Hanania begins by highlighting a stark contradiction at the heart of modern higher education. He points out that the institutions with the highest academic standards are simultaneously reporting the highest rates of disability registration. "At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent," he notes, observing that these schools enroll the most academically successful students while also claiming the largest share of students with disabilities that could prevent academic success. This statistical anomaly forces a difficult question: how can a population be simultaneously the most capable and the most impaired?
The author suggests that the nature of these claims has shifted away from physical limitations toward cognitive and emotional states. He quotes an anonymous professor at a selective university who bluntly states, "You hear 'students with disabilities' and it's not kids in wheelchairs... It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests." Hanania uses this to argue that the system has created a perverse incentive structure where elite students leverage the law to gain a competitive edge, while students at public two-year colleges, who often have histories of severe, lifelong impairment, struggle to get any provisions at all. "Instead of leveling the playing field, the system has put the entire idea of fairness at risk," he writes.
The Legal Engine of Expansion
The core of Hanania's argument traces this phenomenon back to specific legislative and judicial shifts. He explains that while the original ADA of 1990 required "reasonable accommodations," the Supreme Court initially tried to maintain a narrow definition of disability. He cites Sutton v. United Air Lines, Inc. (1999), where the Court ruled that individuals whose conditions could be corrected—such as twins needing glasses to see 20/100—were not disabled. Similarly, in Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. v. Williams (2002), the Court ruled that an impairment must interfere with central parts of life, not just specific job tasks.
However, Hanania argues that Congress intervened to override these judicial constraints. The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 explicitly rejected the Supreme Court's narrower interpretations. "Congress even struck from the record the finding of 43 million Americans being disabled in 1990, on the grounds that it was too limiting," Hanania writes. By removing numerical benchmarks and mandating that the definition of disability be "construed in favor of broad coverage," the legislature effectively opened the door for a maximalist interpretation of the law. The result, he contends, is a legal framework where "anything that substantially harms the ability to engage in 'sleeping,' 'learning,' 'reading,' 'thinking,' or 'working' counts!"
It is genuinely hard under this definition to imagine a person who doesn't have at least an arguable case for being disabled.
Hanania illustrates the absurdity of this expansion by referencing PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin (2001), where the Supreme Court allowed a golfer with a walking impairment to use a cart, a decision Justice Scalia famously dissented against. Scalia argued that the Court was overstepping by deciding what constitutes the "essential" nature of a game. Hanania suggests Scalia was right about the legal overreach but wrong about the outcome, noting, "Scalia was only wrong because he thought Americans might ruin sports on account of the Americans with Disabilities Act. But it turns out we take sports too seriously for that. We ruined academics instead."
The Unchecked Consequence
The author connects these legal changes directly to the explosion in accommodation requests. He notes that between 2012 and 2023, approved requests for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) jumped from 729 to over 15,000, with an approval rate of 98 percent. "When I went to law school, the beauty of the LSAT was that everyone was on equal footing, but a high score appears to be a much weaker predictor of ability than it used to be," he reflects. This data supports his claim that the law has shifted from protecting the severely disabled to facilitating a system where almost anyone can claim a disadvantage.
Hanania frames this as a failure of political courage, describing the 2008 Amendments as a product of a "moral panic" where politicians and the media were too afraid to oppose disability activists. "The only explanation is that disability activists had halos over their heads, and the media and politicians of both parties were rushing to give them whatever they demanded," he argues. He points out that the bill passed with almost no opposition, with only seventeen members of the House voting against it, suggesting a collective inability to question the logic of expanding the definition of disability to include common mental health struggles.
Critics might argue that Hanania underestimates the genuine rise in mental health crises among young people, which may warrant broader accommodations regardless of the legal framework. They might also contend that the disparity between elite and community college students reflects resource inequality and stigma rather than a legal loophole being exploited by the wealthy. However, Hanania maintains that the legal text itself, stripped of the original intent to protect the severely impaired, is the primary driver of this distortion.
Bottom Line
Hanania's most compelling contribution is his forensic dissection of how the 2008 Amendments dismantled the judicial guardrails that once kept the ADA focused on severe impairments. His argument is strongest when connecting the specific legal language of the Amendments to the statistical explosion of accommodations at elite institutions. The piece's vulnerability lies in its dismissal of the potential for genuine, widespread mental health struggles among the student population, which may exist independently of the legal incentives he describes. Readers should watch for whether the current system can sustain itself without a new legislative correction or a shift in judicial interpretation.