Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education

9. As Michael Hiltzik wrote of the American disability benefits program in the Los Angeles Times, “perhaps because it covers a relatively small number of Social Security recipients, the disability program has always been a prime victim of mythmakers. Its beneficiaries are portrayed as slackers gaming the system like the Coen brothers’ Jeff Lebowski, whiling away his life at the bowling alley and snarfing down White Russians” (n.p.). He goes on to contextualize: “these are all varieties of a fictional genre known as ‘the undeserving poor’ that encompasses Ronald Reagan’s folksy yarns about welfare queens living on six-­figure welfare handouts. The goal is to rationalize cuts in benefits by portraying their beneficiaries as morally depraved” (n.p.). There are similar logics on college campuses, as well as in the general public about what happens on college campuses.