The Right to a College Education?: The G.I. Bill, Public Law 16, and Disabled Veterans

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.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.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.³ Other scholars have debated the impact of the G.I. bill on nonwhite veterans.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.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.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.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...