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Comment by crowf | Hacker News Reader

Should it be Stanford's responsibility? At what point should it be the person's (health insurance) responsibility? Should Standford provide (free) helper dogs to blind students?

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It is Standford’s obligation under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. No US health insurance provides this coverage. People in the US can typically only get Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) coverage, which is similar, through Medicaid, which would be the closest to what you describe. In fact, there are some people who must be on Medicaid for life, even though they can work full time, because they may have quadriplegia (which cerebral palsy can occasionally be, on a functional level), for example, and need a care attendant. This is an extremely problematic issue for these people, due to always having to meet the requirements to stay on Medicaid. But, Medicaid does not cover scribes in school, nor does any US health insurance.

Personally, my heart was set on Stanford for graduate school for a masters in electrical engineering, in my early 20s. I have multiple disabilities, but specifically my most disabling impairments are two rare immune-mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system, which are in pharmaceutical remission. Even though my GPA was very competitive for admission, after reading Stanford’s “policies”, I knew I could be totally screwed from a disability standpoint, compared to many other US schools where I could be successful at. I personally think Stanford is the worst of the elite institutions when it comes to disability matters.

But, stuff like this is why I am in graduate school abroad in Europe (I have legal authorization to work in both the US and EU).

I mean I agree in principle, there does seem to an attitude in Gen Z that need implies entitlement, but Stanford has a taxpayer subsidized war-chest of $29 billion. It seems to be growing ever larger even in these supposedly difficult times for universities. If it doesn’t want to act charitably maybe it shouldn’t get the tax benefits of a charity.

Maybe it should get to decide how it acts charitably.

How long do we wait for them to start acting charitably before we conclude that they are in fact a partnership run for the benefit of senior employees exploiting the tax code?

>but Stanford has a taxpayer subsidized war-chest of $29 billion

Aren't endowments supposed to last forever? ie. the university can only spend $29B * 5% (or whatever the after inflation return is)

Supposed to according to whom? Perpetual organizations that face no market pressure, have governance structures where one board picks the next (and in practice where senior employees have a lot of influence on trustee selection), and which are given massive tax benefits with virtually no strings attached by governments seem like a really bad idea to me. That’s sounds like a petri dish for breeding pathological behavior.

Stanford already provides scribes in "limited situations" such as tests and labs (as stated in the tweet). So the university is already partially responsible for it, it's just the matter of "how much".

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