The social model positions society as the disabling agent, rather than an individual’s impairment. Under the social model, an impairment is not automatically a disability. It is only a disability when society is not structured (physically, socially, or culturally) to include that impairment/variation. For example, in a society where glasses/corrective lenses are accessible and socially accepted, the impairment of having blurry vision without them is not necessarily disabling. The social model seeks to make changes in society, rather than focusing on disabled people to change.

Social Model of Disability

Enacting the social model of disability in higher education would require that disability be seen as a social identity and thus a component of institutional diversity. Seeing disability as a component of institutional diversity would possibly push academia to go beyond mere legal comp and instead look at creating more of a universal design for disability.

What Would the Social Model of Disability Look Like in Higher Education?

Framing poor performance as being caused by student's being lazy contributes to heightened internalized ableism for students and perpetuates academic ableism. Since conversations about disability are often siloed to disability service offices students can go their entire college career without knowing they could benefit from accommodations - this is especially pernicious when coupled with academic ableism's view that poor performance should be solely understood as the student's fault.

Disability Fluidity and Academic Ableism

Higher education has historically used the  medical model of disability - systems like accommodations place the blame or site of of disability in the individual student for whom the environment needs to be changed to accomodate rather than locating disability in the system. Accomodations require students to disclose their disability status to recieve accomodations in ways that force them to pathologize their own being.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

The authors contend that eugenics still lingers in academia ableism. For instance, there have been waves and multiple iterations of faculty perceiving disabled students as faking disability for accommodations or using rhetoric that accommodations give disabled students unfair advantages. Instead of treating disability as a form of diversity discussions in higher education around disability often lean back on eugenicist rhetoric about who should have access to higher education and assumptions that disabled students are diluting the credibility of academia due to an assumption that accommodations make academic work less rigorous. 

Echos of Eugenics in Academic Ableism

The medical model positions a disability as something that must be diagnosed and addressed with medical intervention. It views disabilities as something that reduces a person’s quality of life, curing the disability as the ultimate goal. Also, the medical model promotes the image of people with disabilities as needing health care or as “sick”. Many people with the philosophy of the medical model underestimate the human capacity to learn about the complexities of the human body, and thus to make safe decisions about one’s disability.

Medical Model of Disability

Abrams, E. J., Floyd, C. E., & Abes, E. S. (2024). Prioritizing Crip Futures: Applying Crip Theory to Create Accessible Academic Experiences in Higher Education. Disability Studies Quarterly, 43(4). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v43i4.8270

Prioritizing Crip Futures: Applying Crip Theory to Create Accessible Academic Experiences in Higher Education

While I agree with the authors that eugenics has had an outsized impact on ableism in academia, I would contend that due to how late in the relative history of academia eugenics was popularized - not until the life of Sir Francis Galton in the mid to late 1800s this analysis would also benefit from noting that classism and access to education paired with ableism created systems of academia ableism before the formal coining of eugenics or a move to the view of a "normalized body" by science and medicine. This hsitory would benefit from a look at academia and classism along with academia and misogyny.

Beginnings of Ableism in Academia

Models of Disability in Higher Education

Attitudes toward deafness can be divided into two groups: the clinical and the cultural model.

1) The Clinical Model: Deafness is viewed as a handicap, a medical condition, or a deficiency. Deafness is viewed as something needing to be fixed, through such means as hearing aids and cochlear implants.

2) The Cultural Model: People with hearing difficulties are viewed as a linguistic and cultural minority group within a hearing society, marked by difference rather than limitation.

Attitudes Toward Deafness/ Two Conflicting Models

- Important Books in the Medical View of Disabilities

Important Literature in the Medical Model of Disabilities

Individuals who view disability in terms of the medical model may disrupt the potential for the people with a disability to form a positive disability identity by placing too much emphasis on ability and other internal factors.  

Disability Identity Development In Terms of the Medical Model 

'Making up people' is the concept that by studying and categorizing types of people, those classifications change to better reflect the societal views of the characteristics of individuals within that classification. By studying people we create kinds of people - ways people can be embodied - that did not exist prior to classification.

In this article, Sparti proposes that we can use the model of making up people to understand the formation of disabilities.

Making Up People - On Some Looping Effects of the Human Kind - Institutional Reflexivity of Social Control?

Self-help groups did not work within the medical model of disability and instead centered individuals as experts in their own experiences, and emphasized the need to address internalized oppression and create systems of community support rather than emphasizing eliminating or relieving someone from disability.

NBWHP's Self-Help Groups and Models of Disability

Highlighting the role of essentialism and blame in disability stigma shows just how informed this stigma is by the medical model of disability.

Disability Stigma and the Medical Model of Disability

This refers to how human conditions and behaviors come to be defined and treated as medical illnesses requiring professional intervention. Medicalization leads to individualized diagnoses rather than social or cultural explanations for human differences. The process transforms social issues into medical problems amenable to clinical treatment. DP reveals how medicalization occurs through specific discursive practices in institutional settings.

Medicalization Process

When AI systems are designed through the lens of the medical model, disability is framed primarily as an individual deficit to be diagnosed, measured, or corrected. This drives the development of technologies such as diagnostic algorithms, assistive apps, or predictive screening tools that focus on “fixing” impairments rather than addressing the broader structural barriers that create disablement. While such tools can provide clinical benefits, they risk reinforcing a narrow view of disability as pathology and sidelining questions of justice, accessibility, and agency.

How Medical Model Shapes AI

Traditional special education roots itself in pathologization, intervention, and Eugenist philosophies. Students with disabilities are viewed through a deficit lens requiring them to be "fixed." The system demands students adapt to fit existing structures rather than questioning those structures. This approach perpetuates harm and dehumanization.

Special Education's Roots in the Medical Model

The group of assumptions that underlie these questions takes for granted the "metaphysical status" and "epistemological character" of the category of disability, casting disability as a self-evident (and thus philosophically uninteresting) designation that only science and medicine can accurately represent. 

Assumptions Underlying Questions in Mainstream Philosophy 

- By constructing the CI user as "abled" and the HA user as "disabled," the discourse reinforces the Medical Model of Disability.
- Disability is framed as a consumer choice between prostheses (choosing the "right" device) rather than a social or political issue.
- Ultimately, the formulation of CI satisfaction perpetuates audism by valuing human variation only as a deviation from "imagined perfection".

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