There is no proliferation of students in wheelchairs. The issue is the proliferation of students making disability claims largely based on mental health, largely in order to get extra time on tests. And taking tests is very much part of the core mission of undergraduate education.
Time pressure is either not an important part of the assessment, in which case nobody should be subjected to it, or else it is an important part of the assessment, in which case everybody should be subjected to it.
Maya Sen from the Kennedy School, who I generally think has good takes, reacted to this story by saying that abuse of accommodations is “far from a pressing national policy problem.” And I can see where she’s coming from there. But I think it’s just one manifestation of something that really is a pressing national policy problem, which is that the stakeholders in the American higher-education system can’t really articulate what it is they’re trying to do. So as various controversies pop up — about disability accommodations or viewpoint discrimination or admissions — there’s not a coherent response because there are no guiding principles to refer back to.
And that’s pretty important. These institutions play major roles in American society. They are nodes in our entire scientific-research enterprise and a major export industry. Employers rely on them to perform both screening and social capital functions. They are informal-but-significant authorities and sources of expertise and producers of knowledge.