In theory, the G.I. Bill of Rights, or the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, made college accessible to any World War II veteran capable of fulfilling the admissions requirements. Congress provided up to four years of funding contingent only on satisfactory academic progress, and veterans were free to select a course of study and school tailored to their own interests. These equal-opportunity standards, however, did not hold true for all veterans. The roughly 1.6 million disabled veterans of the war fell under a different law, Public Law 16, whose provisions placed them in a separate category defined by dependence.Footnote ¹ Unlike the G.I. Bill, Public Law 16 emphasized vocational rehabilitation and a quick reentry into the labor market as the best means to restore disabled veterans’ “breadwinning” capacities and prevent them from becoming permanently dependent—or feminized—citizens. Indeed, disabled veterans who wanted to earn a college degree, rather than vocational training, faced significant obstacles. University administrators, often unfamiliar and fearful of people with disabilities, were convinced that disabled students—especially those with mobility impairments or who used wheelchairs—did not belong on college campuses.

At the University of Illinois, paraplegic veterans encountered officials who opposed their admission on the grounds that it might drive away “normal” students, would create administrative challenges, and was an unnecessary extravagance for people assumed to be lifelong dependents.Footnote ² Nevertheless, some disabled students gained access to the temporary campus at Galesburg for a few semesters starting in 1948, only to have the university suddenly announce in early 1949 that the campus was about to close. Administrators at the main Urbana-Champaign facility invited all of Galesburg’s students, except the paraplegic ones, to transfer to there. In an early instance of disability-rights activism, these veterans and the director of the disabled students program, Tim Nugent, fought back and won the right to attend the main University of Illinois campus—a victory that had dramatic ramifications for the place of disabled people in higher education.

In recent years, historians have reevaluated the impact of the G.I. Bill on American society. Margot Canaday, for instance, reconsidered the bill through the lens of heterosexuality, arguing that military discharge policies and the implementation of the G.I. Bill prevented gays and lesbians from taking full advantage of its benefits.Footnote ³ Other scholars have debated the impact of the G.I. bill on nonwhite veterans.Footnote ⁴ This article provides another angle to assess this key legislation. It draws on gendered notions of disability to reconsider the nature of educational policy for World War II veterans. Unlike able-bodied veterans, those with severe impairments found themselves excluded from higher education by gendered assumptions surrounding notions of breadwinning and dependence. Ultimately, the inequities in these assumptions led paraplegic veterans at the University of Illinois to fight for—and establish—disabled students’ right to attend college.

As scholars have shown, aggressive rehabilitation programs after World War II were intended to make disabled veterans appear “normal” and reestablish their disrupted masculinity. Such programs emphasized the necessity for people with disabilities to fit into society. In other words, disabled individuals, not society, needed to make accommodations.Footnote ⁵ At the University of Illinois, however, Nugent and the paraplegic students put forth a distinctive new view of disability that challenged those assumptions. Instead of arguing that individuals bore the burden of normalizing themselves to meet societal expectations, these activists focused on integrating people with disabilities by making the physical and attitudinal environment accessible.Footnote ⁶ By the 1950s, their groundbreaking disability-rights activism had not only demonstrated that students with significant mobility impairments could succeed at college but also made the University of Illinois the most accessible college campus in the country.Footnote ⁷ Gendered understandings of disability, independence, and dependency persisted, but these activists suggested new paths to living—and working—for people with disabilities.

GENDERED DEFINITIONS OF DISABILITY: PUBLIC LAW 16 VERSUS THE G.I. BILL

After World War II, disabled veterans faced a markedly different set of educational options than their able-bodied counterparts. Gendered understandings of disability, especially acquired impairments such as those incurred by veterans, led lawmakers to emphasize employability rather than education. The prevailing definition of disability, moreover, stressed the importance of overcoming one’s disability to regain the independent status of a male breadwinner—not by demanding special rights such as an accessible college campus.

Under the G.I. Bill, any veteran of World War II who had received an honorable discharge could receive up to four years of higher education or vocational training.Footnote ⁸ Title II of the bill permitted veterans to attend any accredited college or university as long as they met the entrance requirements and made satisfactory progress. Veterans could use their training to further vocational aims—and most did—but no agencies had to sign off on their choice of majors. Nor was vocational counseling required.Footnote ⁹

In theory, the 1.6 million disabled veterans of the war could also draw on the G.I. Bill, but many chose to rely on Public Law 16, enacted in March 1943. Rather than focusing on education, Public Law 16 emphasized rehabilitating disabled veterans into employability. Covering all veterans with compensable service-connected disabilities, Public Law 16 offered significantly more generous stipends than the G.I. Bill—an important incentive given the extra expenses often associated with having a disability.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1945, for instance, veterans training under Public Law 16 received monthly stipends between $92 and $103.50 depending on marital status, with extra for each child or dependent parent. In contrast, those drawing on the G.I. Bill garnered just $50 if single and $75 if married.Footnote ¹¹

Unlike the G.I. Bill, however, Public Law 16 sought to ensure that disabled veterans would return quickly to the status of self-supporting citizens and thereby regain their status as male breadwinners. Indeed, “rehabilitation” was “to restore employability.”Footnote ¹² Disabled veterans, unlike their able-bodied counterparts, could not embark on a course of study without first having their plans approved by a vocational counselor. The counselors were supposed to take veterans’ personal interests into account, but they could reject training plans and career goals that seemed unrealistic.Footnote ¹³

The vocational orientation of Public Law 16 reflected the understanding of disability that had emerged in the early twentieth century as synonymous with dependency and the inability to be self-sufficient. People with disabilities, in turn, were defined as unproductive citizens—a concept that fundamentally shaped twentieth-century disability policy. The newly unified concept of disability encompassed people with both acquired and congenital impairments ranging from blindness and shell-shock to amputations and “feeble-mindedness.”Footnote ¹⁴ Charity reformers, educators, and legislators attempted to reeducate—or rehabilitate—disabled people into independence—and productivity on the mainstream labor market.Footnote ¹⁵

The image of the disabled, dethroned male breadwinner fundamentally shaped how lawmakers and rehabilitators approached the problem of disabilities acquired at work and at war. In part, policymakers feared that male dependence on charity would undermine disabled men’s social status and “undo free labor’s distinction between home and work.”Footnote ¹⁶ At the first national conference on industrial accidents in 1922, George B. Mangold of the Missouri School of Social Work demonstrated the ways in which anxieties about the dependent male breadwinner infused understandings of disability:

The gender segregation of the labor force also seems to have led policymakers to view acquired disability as an exclusively male problem. Accordingly, workmen’s compensation and vocational rehabilitation focused on addressing challenges faced by newly disabled men; policymakers largely ignored the needs of women with acquired disabilities. Workmen’s compensation programs, for instance, relied on dismemberment schedules derived from the Civil War that privileged the amputations and other types of physical injuries typically suffered by men. Indeed, administrators rarely recognized women’s work-induced illnesses as compensable disabilities.Footnote ¹⁸

Policymakers’ fears of male dependence and their gendered understanding of acquired disabilities were especially evident in programs directed at disabled veterans. Veterans with disabilities have commonly been thought of as infantilized, feminized versions of the figure most closely connected with modern masculinity: the soldier. As a result, policymakers pushed exceptionally hard for disabled veterans to overcome their impairments and regain their prewar physical and financial independence—a dynamic evident in Public Law 16 and other rehabilitative programs.Footnote ¹⁹ After World War II, Army officials at the Old Farms Convalescent Hospital for blind veterans decided to bar canes and guide dogs from the premises as signs of “dependence.” Instead, rehabilitators tried—largely unsuccessfully—to teach blinded veterans to use “facial vision” (or echolocation). Veterans internalized this gendered ideology as well. Guadalcanal hero Al Schmid was so determined to avoid having neighbors identify him as blind that he routinely climbed up on the roof of his house to repair it.Footnote ²⁰

Public Law 16 and other vocational rehabilitation programs reflected these gendered ideologies of dependence and disability—ideologies that raised both attitudinal and practical barriers for people with disabilities who desired higher education. In stressing wage-based work and financial independence as critically important to the civic rehabilitation of disabled people, civilians and veterans alike, rehabilitators drew upon earlier efforts focused on work. Nineteenth-century producerist ideologies strongly influenced programs for civilians; Goodwill Industries, for instance, taught artisanal trades such as doll repair and semiskilled tasks often ill-suited to the industrial labor market.Footnote ²¹ Government-funded vocational rehabilitation, in turn, began during World War I as a cheaper alternative to the pensions previously used to support disabled veterans.Footnote ²² Legislators wanted to prevent disabled veterans of the Great War from becoming an “intolerable economic burden” on the government. If veterans could be trained to “compete successfully” with other workers, they would gain self-respect and financial stability; the nation would regain “useful citizens.”Footnote ²³ Government rehabilitation programs emphasized skilled trades such as automobile repair and motion-picture projection for white disabled veterans and agricultural labor for black ones; rehabilitators generally stymied veterans who sought to use training allowances for higher education.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, Public Law 16’s focus on employability over education reflected long-standing fears that disability would undermine male breadwinners—an anxiety that was particularly acute in the case of disabled veterans.

To make matters even more challenging for disabled World War II veterans who sought to attend college, the field of rehabilitation became actively hostile to the idea of disability rights during the 1930s and 1940s. Leading rehabilitators Howard Rusk and Henry Kessler put forth the “whole man theory” of rehabilitation, arguing that disabled people could undermine American society as a whole by protesting against discriminatory treatment or demanding an accessible environment. The only solution was for disabled people to hide their disabilities and adjust to social norms, just as many veterans did. Tellingly, leading rehabilitators and the Federal Security Administration stonewalled attempts to pass antidiscrimination laws during the 1950s.Footnote ²⁵

As we shall see, the paraplegic veterans at Galesburg—along with director Tim Nugent—were pioneers in challenging the normalizing and rights-denying aspects of such discourses. The disabled students and Nugent put forth a distinctive new view of disability. Rather than regaining masculine status by overcoming their disabilities and appearing “normal,” they proposed that an accessible environment allowed for the true integration of disabled people into society.

THE “REHAB PROGRAM”: GALESBURG

In December 1946, James Bond, the chief of vocational rehabilitation at the Veterans Administration hospital in Hines, Illinois, contacted the University of Illinois–Galesburg administration to see whether it would admit Harold Scharper, a paraplegic veteran, for the spring 1947 semester. Appealing to Assistant Dean G. E. Giesecke’s sense of patriotism, Bond labeled Scharper “one of the most seriously wounded men of this war” and stressed his masculinity and strength of personality. Giving Scharper—who had helped to found the Paralyzed Veterans of America—a chance to be a “pioneer among paraplegia patients in the education training field” would doubtless inspire other disabled veterans. Giesecke responded warmly, and immediately arranged a place in the highly sought after married student housing for Scharper, even offering to help Scharper’s wife find employment. Giesecke further noted that the Galesburg campus, a former military hospital built all on one level with corridors connecting the 115 buildings, was unusually accessible to people using wheelchairs. Indeed, Galesburg already had one civilian student who used a wheelchair.Footnote ²⁶ An illness delayed Scharper’s enrollment until fall 1947.

Giesecke’s unexpectedly enthusiastic response and the difficulties that disabled veterans had encountered in finding colleges willing to admit them inspired the American Legion to ask the president of the University of Illinois, George Stoddard, whether Galesburg might serve more disabled veterans. Although Stoddard acknowledged that the legion’s idea had “considerable merit” and hoped that “a practicable plan could be devised,” he stressed that the university might not be able to provide the necessary rehabilitative services.Footnote ²⁷

The central university administration at Urbana-Champaign was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of several hundred paraplegic and amputee veterans descending upon the Galesburg campus. While acknowledging Galesburg’s unique layout, Provost Coleman Griffith contended that admitting more disabled veterans would be economically wasteful. Galesburg’s enrollment would need to be cut by up to fifty percent—from two thousand to one thousand students—to accommodate just two hundred disabled veterans in the hallways.Footnote ²⁸ Given the institutional rivalries involved, Griffith’s concerns were not surprising. As soon as Galesburg’s enrollment began to drop, the Illinois Department of Public Welfare was scheduled to add the campus—a former military hospital—to its mental health system.Footnote ²⁹ As a result, the university had to operate Galesburg at capacity.Footnote ³⁰

Nevertheless, Provost Griffith asked the legion to research potential demand among disabled veterans, the kind of rehabilitation facilities needed, and how disabled students would cope with the fact that Galesburg provided only two years of schooling. Griffith was, however, careful to clearly state that the Urbana-Champaign campus was not accessible to most disabled veterans, nor would the administration address that situation.Footnote ³¹

THE UNFAMILIARITY OF DISABILITY

Institutional politics and economic considerations cannot fully explain why the Urbana-Champaign administrators responded in such a lukewarm fashion to the legion’s proposal to open the Galesburg campus to disabled veterans. Equally, if not more important, was administrators’ unfamiliarity with disabled people, especially students with disabilities and those with severe mobility impairments such as paraplegia. The widespread gendered assumption that disability and dependency were one and the same also helped account for administrators’ notable lack of enthusiasm.

In all likelihood, the very notion of students with disabilities was a foreign concept for administrators. Until the 1970s, public schools generally barred students with cognitive impairments outright and were only slightly more welcoming toward children with physical disabilities.Footnote ³² University of Illinois alumna Jan Little recalled that after she was paralyzed from the chest down by polio in 1952, the Janesville district superintendent told her mother that it would be inconvenient to move her classes to the first floor. Little explained, “He went on to express his belief that since her kid was always going to be crippled, it didn’t make any sense to waste time educating me. Besides, think of how depressing it would be for the other kids to have to look at me every day.”Footnote ³³

Upon graduation from high school, Little and other students with mobility impairments, especially those who used wheelchairs, discovered that they had virtually no options for higher education. Little recollected that in the mid-1950s, while her friends were celebrating their acceptances to the Ivy League and the University of Wisconsin, “the school counselor gently broke the news to me that no college or university would accept a person in a wheelchair as a full-time, residential student.”Footnote ³⁴ Universities routinely refused to accommodate disabled students, as Mary Lou Breslin discovered when she contacted Miami University in the early 1960s. “The access issue arose instantly,” she explained. “I got a letter back from the dean of students saying, ‘We’re really sorry. We’d love to have you, but . . . [t]here’s no way you could come here. We have no facilities for people like you.’” Like Little, Breslin eventually attended the University of Illinois.Footnote ³⁵

The difficulties that disabled students encountered when trying to obtain an education reflected the general social exclusion of people with disabilities during the first half of the twentieth century. Many people with cognitive and psychological impairments were institutionalized in state schools for the feebleminded, mental hospitals, or reformatories.Footnote ³⁶ Few could find work in the mainstream labor market—even the Works Progress Administration barred physically disabled workers—and the brief wartime call for disabled workers ended almost as soon as it began.Footnote ³⁷

Moreover, administrators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the general public, were especially unlikely to have interacted closely with people who had severe mobility impairments and used wheelchairs. At this time, wheelchairs were wood-and-wicker affairs weighing seventy to one hundred pounds and intended to be pushed by an attendant rather than being propelled by the user. The legal climate contributed as well; no laws required that architectural barriers be eliminated.Footnote ³⁸

People with severe mobility or physical disabilities also faced attitudinal barriers. Much of the general public viewed disabled people, especially those who used wheelchairs, as dependents best kept at home. When Little attended a Farm Bureau barn dance shortly after coming home from the hospital, for instance, some attendees attacked her parents for “taking a child like that out in public.”Footnote ³⁹ Parents often expressed these views to each other, their children, and educators.Footnote ⁴⁰

Furthermore, administrators at Urbana-Champaign were dealing with a new population of disabled people—paraplegics and quadriplegics—of whom they likely had little knowledge. Prior to the development of antibiotics in the 1930s and early 1940s, people with spinal-cord injuries faced almost immediate death from pneumonia, infections from bedsores or catheterizations, and kidney and bladder disorders. During World War I, 80 percent of American paraplegics or quadriplegics died within a few weeks.Footnote ⁴¹ But by the end of World War II, the introduction of antibiotics and physical-therapy innovations pioneered by Canadian doctor Harry Botterell dramatically altered survival rates among people with paraplegia and even quadriplegia; 80 percent of World War II veterans with spinal-cord injuries survived—in all, 2,500 in the United States—most for several decades.Footnote ⁴² These visionary treatments soon spread to the United States, along with a crucial piece of assistive technology: the Everest and Jennings automobile folding wheelchair, a lightweight self-propelled chair that could easily be collapsed and placed in a car for transport.Footnote ⁴³ Despite these revolutionary new possibilities for people with spinal-cord injuries, the combination of long-standing educational, physical, attitudinal, and medical barriers meant that University of Illinois administrators were unfamiliar with people with severe mobility disabilities or who used wheelchairs—especially as potential students.

THE TROUBLED BEGINNINGS OF THE PARAPLEGIA PROGRAM AT GALESBURG

Administrators’ lack of familiarity with disability and their outright discomfort with disabled students created considerable hurdles for disabled veterans who sought to attend the University of Illinois. Public Law 16’s intense focus on employability and restoring veterans’ male breadwinner status erected additional barriers. Administrators’ attitudes changed, however, once they began interacting regularly with disabled students and discovered that they just might hold the key to retaining the Galesburg campus.

During negotiations in the summer of 1947, the American Legion and Veterans Administration (VA) were able to put many, if not all, of the University of Illinois administration’s fears about the potential influx of paraplegic students to rest. The VA agreed to cover any extra expenses resulting from the admission of disabled veterans to the Galesburg campus. With the help of the legion, the VA proved Griffith’s argument that disabled students would force dramatic cuts in enrollment to be grossly inaccurate.Footnote ⁴⁴

Nonetheless, university administrators maintained a distinct hostility toward disabled students. The university insisted that no more than one hundred students with disabilities be allowed to enroll since they might create “traffic problems in corridors.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Because of a tight housing situation, it would admit only students who could “take care of their own needs” without assistance.Footnote ⁴⁶ More critically, the University of Illinois administration forced the VA to agree to a press blackout on the program. Administrators hoped to limit “superfluous inquir[ies]” from ineligible people (such as disabled civilians), but primarily feared that the Galesburg division might acquire a reputation as a school for disabled people, thereby damaging “normal enrollment.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The university further demanded control of all aspects of the application process. The VA and the American Legion were to provide it with a list of potential applicants who were “severely disabled” and had vocational plans that required a college education. The university would then contact each applicant privately.Footnote ⁴⁸ Moreover, the Galesburg college catalogue included no information about the “paraplegia program.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Administrators’ lack of knowledge about disabled people cannot fully explain this fear of publicity and point-blank refusal to admit veterans with mobility impairments to the flagship campus at Urbana-Champaign. Historians Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky suggest one possible cause: an “existential anxiety” often evoked by disabled people, who “embod[y] that which Americans fear most: loss of independence, of autonomy, of control; in other words, subjection to fate.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The University of Illinois administration seems to have felt that able-bodied students—and perhaps the administrators themselves—would find the prospect of having disabled classmates unbearable. Nugent recalled that administrators felt that “these people would be a distraction on campus, they would be demoralizing . . . an extra cost . . . an extra liability . . . and what would they do with a college education?”Footnote ⁵¹

The university’s attempts to limit publicity about the paraplegia program worked, perhaps too well. Scharper, who had already planned to attend, was the only paraplegic veteran to enter Galesburg for the 1947–48 academic year. Nor did any disabled veterans apply for the spring 1948 semester.Footnote ⁵² The university undoubtedly bore partial responsibility for the initial failure of the program—there is no evidence that the university corresponded with any potential applicants. Galesburg administrators, meanwhile, assumed disabled veterans were uninterested because the campus offered only two years of college.Footnote ⁵³

Playing a greater role was the vocational orientation of Public Law 16. Although the director of vocational rehabilitation and education at the Chicago VA office, C. E. Hostetler, strongly supported the paraplegia program, he was certain that the university would find few applicants. As he explained to Provost Griffith, the university’s liberal arts curriculum did not fit with the “specific vocational objectives” mandated by Public Law 16. Any students who wished to apply to Galesburg first had to receive permission from the Chicago office, unlike their able-bodied counterparts covered under the G.I. Bill.Footnote ⁵⁴ Financial concerns prevented veterans from avoiding a counselor’s interference by switching to the G.I. Bill.Footnote ⁵⁵

The Galesburg and Urbana-Champaign administrations ignored the struggling paraplegia program until the end of the 1947–48 school year, when Galesburg administrators realized that the division’s enrollment was dropping.Footnote ⁵⁶ This could well mean the end of the Galesburg campus. Ironically, administrators’ self-interest in the continued survival of the Galesburg division—plus the growing interest of a few administrators in addressing the problems disabled students faced—was one of the major reasons that the paraplegia program finally began to fulfill its initial promise to provide large numbers of disabled veterans with a college education.

Equally crucial was the hiring of Timothy J. Nugent, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in educational psychology and administration, as a consultant to the disabled student program in 1947 and, starting in summer 1948, as the program’s director.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nugent’s personal experiences with disability had convinced him that mainstream society routinely underestimated disabled people’s capabilities. As a teenager, he had defied doctors’ warnings to avoid all physical activity because of his “bad heart.” After teaching himself physiology, he discovered that the doctors had been overly cautious—he eventually developed a forty-four-inch chest and a twenty-eight-inch waist. Another formative experience was witnessing the “impact of hidden disabilities” on his talented youngest sister when doctors forced her to give up dancing and gymnastics for fear of exacerbating her progressive blindness.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nugent also recalled that while he was at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, he was baffled as to why the students at the orthopedic school nearby “were not in regular school.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The Galesburg administration could have hardly hired a person better suited to lead the fight to integrate disabled students into college.

The process of expanding disabled veterans’ access to education began in June 1948, when the Galesburg director of Student Welfare, M. J. Galbraith, proposed devoting the campus entirely to educating disabled veterans. Presumably inspired by discussions with Nugent, Galbraith suggested that a four-year program at Galesburg could draw on a nationwide population of nearly five hundred thousand disabled veterans, and perhaps even civilians. Galbraith argued that offering a full four years of college, rather than the current two years, would overcome the apparent lack of interest shown so far by disabled veterans and perhaps maintain the university’s claim on the Galesburg campus.Footnote ⁶⁰ Galesburg executive dean Chauncey Louttit agreed that Galbraith’s idea might help address the flagging enrollment and forwarded the proposal to University of Illinois’s President George Stoddard, who expressed some interest.Footnote ⁶¹ Louttit also began to research the potential demand for such a program; crucially, he countermanded university policy and began to publicize the program to civilian organizations for disabled people and state and federal rehabilitation programs.Footnote ⁶²

Despite Dean Louttit’s good intentions, he soon ran into the Urbana-Champaign administration’s continuing animus toward disabled students. Galesburg had received a few applications from disabled veterans who were eager to take advantage of the facilities at Galesburg but who fell just under the university’s heightened GPA requirements for out-of-state applicants. Louttit requested that Stoddard grant him the power to waive these standards. In response, Stoddard refused to “whittl[e] down the very reasonable requirements in our Progressive Admissions Plan.”Footnote ⁶³ Stoddard finally made his views clear: the University of Illinois would admit a few disabled veterans in order to avoid antagonizing the powerful American Legion and VA. He was uninterested, however, in aiding the broader population of veterans with mobility impairments.

During the summer of 1948, Nugent and Galesburg’s Veterans’ Benefits Counselor Ronald Graffouliere surreptitiously initiated their own publicity project. Without informing Louttit, Graffouliere visited the Chicago VA office to encourage it to give the Galesburg facilities nationwide promotion; Nugent, in turn, visited the veterans’ hospitals. The VA promptly sent a glowing write-up of the Galesburg program to its branches. Inquiries poured in to Galesburg from all over the country, and by the beginning of the fall 1948 semester the Galesburg registrar had mailed out nearly eight hundred information packets. Many disabled veterans were in fact very eager to attend college. The VA and the university had simply made it impossible for them to find out about or enter the paraplegia program. Only after potential applicants had safely received their information packets did Louttit inform the Urbana-Champaign administration about the VA’s publicity efforts and the massive response.Footnote ⁶⁴

Urbana-Champaign’s apparent inability to control publicity about the rehab program, along with administrators’ own self-interest, led officials to dramatically change their approach. Instead of suppressing publicity, Provost Griffith and President Stoddard decided to use the rehab program to help maintain the university’s claim on the Galesburg campus.Footnote ⁶⁵ Griffith arranged for the official newsletter of the Illinois Veterans’ Commission to feature the program. While administrators remained concerned that able-bodied students might be driven away by the publicity, they now felt that a “well-put . . . announcement” would minimize any fallout. The article emphasized that paraplegic veterans had “adapt[ed] [themselves] to the school environment without being a burden to anyone,” and highlighted Galbraith’s idea for a “paraplegic university” that would serve disabled people from all over the country.”Footnote ⁶⁶ University administrators, however, soon dropped Galbraith’s proposal because the state Department of Public Welfare was still scheduled to take over Galesburg in 1951.Footnote ⁶⁷

As a result of all this publicity, the Galesburg “rehab program,” as the students quickly dubbed it, began the fall semester of 1948 with seven paraplegic veterans, three paraplegic civilians (including one woman), and six veterans with amputations or cardiac problems. Two more were due to start in January 1949.Footnote ⁶⁸ These numbers were still small: Stoddard’s refusal to lower admissions standards for out-of-state students, the VA’s insistence that disabled veterans prove the direct vocational relevance of a college education, and the inability of disabled veterans to avoid the VA’s interference barred many applicants. Nugent recalled having to convince paraplegic veterans that they were capable of succeeding at college.Footnote ⁶⁹

Yet these twelve paraplegic students, along with the six other veterans, had a tremendous impact on the place of disabled students in higher education. Once on campus, the students quickly formed a tight community centered around a deep pride in their identity as disabled people. With Nugent’s help, twenty-two students established the Disabled Students Organization in December 1948, a rehabilitation service fraternity focused on educating the public about the capabilities of disabled people.

In the meantime, Nugent and the students continued to challenge the automatic linkage of disability with dependency. VA officials and doctors, for instance, thought that disabled veterans could handle only a fraction of a normal college course load. Nugent recalled that VA officials were “more concerned with what [paraplegic veterans] couldn’t do than what they could do.”Footnote ⁷⁰ With support from Dr. Homer Lawder, the director of health services at the Galesburg campus, Nugent decided that “these guys should participate in sports and they should take a full load,” not just the two hours a day decreed by the VA.Footnote ⁷¹ Building on the creativity of paraplegic veterans at VA hospitals, who had invented wheelchair basketball and other sports, Nugent organized the Gizz Kids basketball team in the winter of 1949. Although surgeons typically cautioned paralyzed patients against physical activity, fearing that any injuries would lead to pressure sores, Nugent and the Gizz Kids soon discovered that activity allowed them to “maintain better circulation even in paralyzed areas.” In mid-semester, they initiated the first national wheelchair basketball tournament.Footnote ⁷² By creating their own disability sports, these pioneers were, in effect, inventing a new form of masculinity—one that did not rely on absolute physical perfection or independence.

THE RIGHT TO ATTEND COLLEGE?

But in late March, just before the tournament opened, disaster struck when the newly inaugurated governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, announced that because Galesburg’s enrollment had dropped to 40 percent of capacity, the division would close at the end of the semester. A new state mental hospital would replace the eight hundred students left on campus.Footnote ⁷³ This decision helped Stevenson live up to his campaign promise of enforcing budgetary efficiency and address the public outcry over poor conditions in mental hospitals.Footnote ⁷⁴ The governor did not anticipate the ironic side effect of his decision: one population of disabled people was being pushed out by another.

The University of Illinois had little choice but to give in to Stevenson’s wishes, although Galesburg administrators expressed concern about what would happen to their “wheelchair cases.”Footnote ⁷⁵ President Stoddard offered to hire several instructors for them to complete their first two years through extension or correspondence courses. But he refused to allow the disabled students to transfer to Urbana-Champaign with the other Galesburg students to finish their third and fourth years and earn a degree, stating that it would be too difficult to rearrange the students’ classes to be either on the first floor of a building or in a building with an elevator.Footnote ⁷⁶

The disabled students at Galesburg refused to give up what might be their only chance to obtain a college education. On March 30, just a week after the closing was announced, more than thirty students (primarily paraplegic ones) traveled in a twenty-car convoy to the state capital.Footnote ⁷⁷ Nugent recalled: “We created quite a turmoil—the city police and the capitol police got into a fight with each other . . . a literal fight . . . one of them drew a gun,” when the capitol police barred the students from parking in an accessible location.Footnote ⁷⁸

Hoping to convince Stevenson to change his decision, Nugent and those students who could navigate the capitol’s steps met with the lieutenant governor and state senator Wallace Thompson, then waited for hours in the Governor’s Mansion and then at the State House without ever speaking to Stevenson. The governor refused to see them, claiming that they did not have an appointment, even though Thompson and their local state representative had spent several hours trying to secure them a spot on the governor’s schedule.Footnote ⁷⁹ Nor did protests outside by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and the Disabled American Veterans change the governor’s mind. Instead, Stevenson snuck out the back entrance of the mansion.Footnote ⁸⁰

Later that day, a few members of the delegation met with the director of the Department of Public Welfare, Fred Hoehler, and the vice president of the University of Illinois, Andrew Ivy—both of whom paid little attention to the students’ demands. Hoehler offered to establish an isolation ward for the students within the new Galesburg State Hospital, where they could finish their two years of coursework via correspondence. Both Hoehler and Ivy argued that the federal government was to blame, not the state or the university.Footnote ⁸¹

Despite this setback, the disabled students and their allies in the Galesburg administration continued to fight for the right to finish their college educations. Nugent recalled that the students were quite explicit about their rights: “They all recognized [that] they had become disabled in the service of their country and . . . ha[d] the right to expect” an education.Footnote ⁸² Administrators continued to believe that educating disabled veterans was merely charity, since such students would never become breadwinners. Nugent and Graffouliere contacted roughly 150 schools in an effort to find one that would let the paraplegic students finish their third and fourth years, hopefully as a group. Only fifteen schools agreed to take the students, and just four had accessible campuses—UCLA, Louisiana State University, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Miami. Like Urbana-Champaign, the other 130 schools refused to help, contending that it would be too complicated to move the paraplegic students’ classes to accessible locations.Footnote ⁸³

Harold Scharper—the most senior paraplegic student at Galesburg—garnered a similar response when he visited Urbana-Champaign in late April to personally plead the students’ case with Robert Bone, the director of the Division of Special Services for War Veterans.Footnote ⁸⁴ Bone was, in his own words, “unenthusiastic” about accepting the disabled students because of the “numerous administrative headaches” ahead.Footnote ⁸⁵ While Scharper spoke with Bone, Nugent and the Disabled Students Organization built mobile ramps from scaffolding to demonstrate how easy it would be to make the campus accessible; they also “wheeled around campus [so] people would see us.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The students’ protests—along with lobbying by Galesburg dean Chauncey Louttit, the American Legion, the Disabled American Veterans, and, eventually, the medical director of the local VA unit—finally made an impact. At the end of April, just as the Galesburg students began applying to the few universities willing to accommodate them, Provost Griffith suddenly announced that Urbana-Champaign would accept the disabled Galesburg students as an experiment.Footnote ⁸⁷ According to Nugent, the decision may have turned on a “technicality” in the university’s contract with the VA: the disabled students had been guaranteed two years of education and had not yet finished their programs.Footnote ⁸⁸

The paraplegic students’ fight for equal access paid off, although administrators continued to fret about the challenges posed by the rehab program. University officials felt that only a few buildings could easily be made accessible; as a result, students’ choices of classes and majors would be extremely constrained. The five Commerce students, for example, were told they could continue at Urbana-Champaign only if their classes could be “coordinated so that there is a minimum of room adjustment.” Joseph LoPresti would have to continue with commerce instead of transferring to art because administrators deemed the art building too expensive to alter, while a student interested in training as a high school physics teacher was told to transfer to another school because his classes would be impossible to arrange.Footnote ⁸⁹ Moreover, able-bodied veterans received priority; their overcrowding of the campus led the administration to limit the rehab program to only students from Galesburg. Nor would the university provide the rehab program with a budget.Footnote ⁹⁰

Nonetheless, the Urbana-Champaign administration formally announced the disabled students’ transfer in May 1949. Eleven paraplegic students took up Urbana’s offer, along with four other disabled but “ambulatory” students.Footnote ⁹¹ Once the Urbana-Champaign administrators began interacting with students in the rehab program, they, like their counterparts at Galesburg, found them pleasant, “easy to please and most appreciative.” The feelings of Bone, the head of veterans’ services, underwent the most dramatic alteration. Both Graffouliere and Scharper had found him uncooperative. But several months into the 1949–50 school year, Bone told Provost Griffith that he was “now whole-heartedly in favor of our helping them obtain an education” and began to actively participate in planning for additional applicants.Footnote ⁹²

In addition, Griffith, possibly inspired by Dean Louttit, who became associate provost on the main campus once Galesburg closed, quickly started lobbying Stoddard to admit more disabled students to Urbana-Champaign.Footnote ⁹³ Undoubtedly aided by publicity and pressure from the students themselves, Griffith’s campaign succeeded. By 1955, there were 150 students from twenty-five different states; even international students began applying.Footnote ⁹⁴ Personal contact once again enabled administrators to overcome “existential anxieties” about people with disabilities.

LEGACIES OF THE “REHAB PROGRAM”

Once at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nugent and his students developed the rehab program into the nation’s leading model for accessibility in higher education, pioneering crucial innovations that made college far more feasible for people with mobility impairments and severe disabilities. They convinced the administration to ramp dozens of buildings, developed the first accessible bus system in the country if not the world, and, in 1953, exacted a commitment from the administration to make all future buildings accessible for people who used wheelchairs.Footnote ⁹⁵ Rather than expecting disabled students to quietly normalize themselves and fit into a society that refused to accommodate them, Nugent focused on ensuring “complete social integration” by establishing an accessible environment.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nonetheless, the program did not entirely break the gendered links between disability and dependency.

By the mid-1950s, the University of Illinois had become the “premier accessible campus” in the country.Footnote ⁹⁷ The fact that the university admitted disabled students was not particularly unusual. Indeed, in the years after the war, many colleges accepted veterans with impairments such as hearing loss, arm amputations, or tuberculosis.Footnote ⁹⁸ Very few schools other than the University of Illinois, however, accepted students with severe disabilities, especially those with mobility impairments or who used wheelchairs.Footnote ⁹⁹

Two other aspects made the University of Illinois program unique: its dual commitments to making the campus accessible and fully integrating students with disabilities into campus life. The University of Minnesota, for instance, admitted students who used wheelchairs in the late 1950s. But since the campus had almost no ramps or elevators, disabled students had to rely on their classmates’ goodwill to navigate staircases.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Like Minnesota, most colleges followed the “whole man theory” of rehabilitation, expecting disabled students to overcome their impairments and fit into society instead of demanding rights. A 1950 study by the American Council on Education on the status of disabled veterans in college found that schools were nearly unanimous in discouraging “special provisions for disabled students.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

The popularity of the University of Illinois program bore witness to how unusual—and needed—it was by students with severe disabilities. “After we started getting a lot of applications, some cowardly administrators put a limit [of 90 students] on the number of students that we could have on campus,” recollected Nugent. “And there was a period of time that for every one I accepted, I had to refuse fifteen. And at that time I was getting letters from clergymen, medical doctors, school superintendents, congressmen . . . [they] were just raking me over the coals because one of their constituents couldn’t get in.”Footnote ¹⁰²

As the years wore on, Nugent and the disabled students at the University of Illinois continued to innovate. Among other developments, the university established the first study-abroad program for students with severe disabilities in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1976. With help from his staff and the students, Nugent developed the first set of architectural standards for accessibility in 1961—standards that formed the basis for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.Footnote ¹⁰³ The University of Illinois staff also advised at least a dozen other universities on how to establish their own programs.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

At the same time, his intense interest in proving disabled students’ capabilities—and, thereby, the worthiness of the program—led Nugent to emphasize the very gendered notions of disability that the students and he had sought to disprove. Unsure of whether the program would survive and how his students would fare against societal prejudice, Nugent replicated the mindset of Army rehabilitators who pressed blind veterans to reject canes and guide dogs as symbols of “dependence.” While interviewing potential applicants, he often derided them, claiming that they were pampered and privileged and would not be able to cut it at the university. He required every applicant to push his or her own wheelchair up the ramp leading to his office—often this was the first time civilian students had pushed themselves independently. While Nugent seems to have intentionally provoked students to overcome society’s expectations, or lack thereof, alumni often recalled their admissions interviews as scarring. Mary Lou Breslin reflected, “They should not have permitted this patriarch, this fanatical person to determine and direct so many people’s lives, that was a flawed process.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Once students arrived on campus, Nugent enforced physical independence. He later admitted that he “cherry-pick[ed]” the most capable students, partly because the “main campus did not want us.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He also barred power chairs from campus until at least the mid-1960s—a decision that often limited students’ class choices. Students who failed to push their own chairs faced expulsion. Breslin recalled, “You got yanked in [to the Rehab Center] by the scruff of your neck if they saw you doing something they didn’t approve of. . . . So if it’s four below zero, and the snow’s ten feet deep . . .”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ And in a decision that still sparks debate among alumni, Nugent barred students from receiving personal assistance in their dorm rooms until 1959, when he established the first-ever residential housing program for college students who required personal aid. This program, however, was open only to men, and a tiny number at that. Not until 1981 did the university open the gender-neutral Beckwith Living Center and begin admitting women who needed assistance with everyday living tasks.Footnote ¹⁰⁸