Access Denied: Eugenics, Neoliberalism, and the Persistence of Ableism in North American University Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the historical eugenic influences that shape the values and operations of Canadian post-secondary institutions. Furthermore, I explore how the university’s physical structure itself is designed to bar disabled people from full participation, acting as a mirror opposite of an asylum. The modern-day university upholds these practices through limitations to accommodations and accessibility, influenced by deeply-rooted eugenic ideals. Additionally, this paper explores the gaps and lack of accommodation within the university structure. Currently, accommodation must be earned rather than given as a right, which creates not only gaps in quality but also places the burden on the disabled individual. The university continues to be an inaccessible environment that bars disabled people from full participation because of its eugenic histories, but also through the ongoing influence of neoliberalism. Neoliberal values award students based on perceived merit without consideration of external factors. These disabled and otherwise marginalized students who need additional resources to complete their post-secondary education are perceived as less “meritorious” despite facing greater barriers than students deemed more meritorious and “valuable” to the university. I conclude that universities are unlikely to provide accommodations or resources unless they create more value for the university.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".