A place of deep group connection, Gallaudet is also these days a place of internal conflict, full of the sort of hushed, heated discussion kept strictly within the family. In recovery from the protests of 2006 and the threat to its accreditation that followed, the school is trying to determine the way forward. In a world where only 5 percent of deaf and hard-of-hearing children are born into Deaf culture by virtue of having deaf parents, demographics are not in its favor. It’s generally accepted that half of cochlear implant recipients are children. In 2009, it was estimated that of the nine to ten American children born deaf every day, 40 percent get at least one and quite possibly two cochlear implants before they turn three. In Australia, 80 percent of deaf children have implants. Current statistics are hard to find, but a statewide early-intervention organization in North Carolina called Beginnings, which offers remarkably evenhanded information about communication choices, has found that the percentage of families it serves who choose listening and speaking has hovered around 90 percent over the past few years, up from 69 percent in 2001. Correspondingly, the number choosing total communication has dropped from 21 percent to 8 percent, and ASL alone is less than that. As for adults, those who lose their hearing later in life are far less likely to ever become part of Deaf culture. I. King Jordan, the Gallaudet professor who became the university’s first deaf president, for instance, lost his hearing after a motorcycle accident at the age of nineteen. Someone like that would probably get a cochlear implant today.
Josh Swiller, who wrote a searing and beautiful book, The Unheard, on his experience growing up with hearing loss and serving in the Peace Corps in Africa, found Gallaudet an “uncomfortable” place when he first arrived as an instructor. Mostly appreciative of his hearing aids and then cochlear implant, he didn’t learn to sign until he was an adult. His view of the world was different from many of his students’. In one of the first courses he taught at the university, examining minority cultures at times of crisis through history, he challenged the class by telling them: “The world [is] changing and changing away from you. So what will you do? What will you offer? Why should the world care?” Painful though it is, there is truth there. Deaf culture is a small group really, and deaf of deaf—the deaf children of deaf parents—though most interesting to neuroscientists and social scientists, are least representative of deaf people as a whole. At Gallaudet, however, they are the elite. They set the tone.
In a magazine article recounting his first year on campus and specifically his role as a mentor to a brilliant but erratic deaf-of-deaf aspiring writer, Swiller described a place that is roiled in debate over whether survival requires emphasis on communal connection or on preparing students to find jobs. His own view is that economics trump emotion, yet he found Gallaudet’s ethos unexpectedly appealing. Despite the many achievements of deaf people as doctors, lawyers, professional athletes, Academy Award winners, he wrote, “the world hears and expects you to hear… . At some point, if you’re deaf, every accomplishment fades away and you’re sitting in the corner, lost. What I saw was that inside the gates of Gallaudet, everyone’s been in that corner. Some have raged against it, some have ignored it, some have found spiritual riches in the surrender to limitation, some have felt cheated by it. And from that shared disconnect there has stemmed a connection that is the essence of Gallaudet. It’s a gorgeous thing—many people with no hearing loss at all come to Gallaudet to be part of it.”
Few of the people who made up my summer ASL class had any hearing loss. Most were college students studying ASL as a second language. One wanted to be a disability rights attorney, another a speech pathologist, and two men were in seminary studying to be priests. I was the only one there because of my child.
Our teacher, Janis Cole, was a warm and funny woman in her fifties, tall and athletic. I liked her from the beginning. Early on, she held a hand to her mouth and turned a pretend key—TURN OFF YOUR VOICE. It wasn’t just that we were in an immersion program. There is a code of behavior on campus that requires that all communication be signed—by someone. If you can’t do it yourself, you make sure someone is interpreting for you. That was difficult for our class of beginners to pull off and made for limited conversation at lunch (until, to be frank, people gave up). I felt frustration at not being able to express myself fully, and also chagrin for flubbing it so badly in the first day or two, before I really understood the etiquette.
By the last day of class, with enough vocabulary and a smattering of fingerspelling under our belts, Janis thought we were ready for some entertainment. ASL requires expressiveness—some of its grammar is read on the face—but earlier in life, Janis had been an actor with the National Theatre of the Deaf and appeared in Children of a Lesser God on Broadway, so her signing was particularly theatrical.
Standing in the middle of the circle of desks, she rubbed one fist on top of the other twice with her forefingers half-crooked. JOKE. “A lumberjack goes into the woods,” she signed. “He sees a tree, chops at its trunk, yells ‘Timber!’ and the tree falls down. Then he chops another tree, yells ‘Timber!’ again, and the second tree falls down.” Janis placed her right arm upright on top of her left hand and wiggled her right fingers. TREE. Then her right hand fell to her left elbow as the tree fell. “The lumberjack tries to cut down a third tree, but this time the tree won’t fall. ‘Timber!’ he cries. ‘Timber!’ Nothing. So he goes to find a doctor. ‘Doctor, I chopped down a tree but it won’t fall. What’s wrong with it?’ The doctor joins the lumberjack by the tree and examines it. Then he looks up at the tree and fingerspells T-I-M-B-E-R. The tree falls. The doctor turns to the lumberjack and says, ‘The tree is deaf.’” We all laughed and I realized it was the first deaf joke I’d experienced as it was meant to be received—visually.
• • •
In my class, I was a parent. But on campus, I was also a journalist. Before arriving, I had written to several faculty and administrators asking to meet with them while I was there. For a variety of reasons I could mostly only guess at, many said no, including unfortunately the scientists heading up the Visual Language Visual Learning laboratory, known as VL2, who work with Rochester’s Peter Hauser and whose research on how the brain processes visual language was of great interest to me.
Stephen Weiner was different. Although he has held jobs elsewhere, Weiner has spent more of his adult life than not at Gallaudet since he first arrived in the 1970s. He has been a student, residential advisor, guidance counselor, professor, and dean. Today, he is the university’s provost, the chief academic officer. His brother, Fred Weiner, also works for Gallaudet and was one of the alumni leaders of the 1988 Deaf President Now protest. From his first e-mail, Steve Weiner was friendly and approachable, eager to fill me in on all that is going on at Gallaudet, such as VL2 and the push for Deaf Space, architecture designed with natural light and good sight lines in mind and exemplified by the new Sorenson Language and Communication Center. A self-described “Jewish kid from Flatbush,” he was happy to talk about his own experiences, too. He closed that first message: “Welcome to Kendall Green.”
In person, greeting me with a hearty handshake and a breathy “I’m Steve,” he ushers me into his office, with its view of the United States Capitol. We settle around the coffee table with an interpreter by my side, and we start at the beginning. It is clear that Weiner has seen the good and the bad of deaf education. His parents were the children of Orthodox Jewish immigrants. His grandmother became a powerful local politician in Brooklyn who was strenuously opposed to having her son, Weiner’s father, use sign language. Instead, the boy moved through various New York schools, such as Lexington and P.S. 47, a public school for the deaf, missing much of what was said. “My father’s education ended at third or fourth grade,” says Weiner. “He [also] went through his Bar Mitzvah knowing bubkes about what was going on.” Like so many deaf children, Weiner’s father learned to sign from deaf friends. “My father is not educated, but I thought he was one of the smartest men I knew. He can sign, b
ut he didn’t have the vocabulary to express things. He told me later how frustrating that was.”
When Stephen was born, his grandfather, having sat back and watched his son struggle, decided to do things differently this time. “My grandmother was a politician, my grandfather was pragmatic,” he says. “He did not want to make the same mistakes with me that he made with my father. He saw me communicating with my parents with some signs. He made a private decision to teach me Hebrew, which is easier than English. There aren’t so many rules and exceptions.” By five, Weiner says, he was using ASL, English, Yiddish, some German, and some Hebrew. He and his grandfather spent Wednesday and Thursday evenings going through the Talmud and “talking about philosophy, physics, math, everything.” Weiner wasn’t challenged in most of the deaf schools he attended and ended up at a public high school that had a resource classroom for deaf students. “During class time, I stuck comic books inside my textbooks. I got nothing from lectures; I succeeded by reading.” Until she saw him doing his calculus homework, his grandmother assumed he would learn a trade like most deaf men, says Weiner. “At her funeral, the rabbi said the proudest moment of her life was seeing me go to college.”
Originally an engineering student at Hofstra University, Weiner gave that up and moved to California, where what is now the California State University, Northridge, deaf education program was getting off the ground. There, he discovered the perils of poor interpreting. “One time, there was a word in a biology class: ‘phosphorylation.’ I remember because the interpreter didn’t spell the entire word, just P-P-T,” he says. “I stopped and said, ‘Wait, what’s the word?’ The professor was angry at me. Half of the next exam was on that word.” He routinely fell asleep in a class on Shakespeare until the usual interpreter fell sick and a substitute arrived who used to teach at Gallaudet. “I was, like, ‘Holy Day!’” he says. “I became a very important part of the class that week. I was able to express myself fully. I learned that the other students weren’t that hot. The teacher said, ‘Steve, you have comments?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’” The experience turned his sense of the world on its head. “My mother and father were taught that hearing people knew more, and they taught me that, too. It wasn’t until I could see for myself that I knew that’s not always true.” When his regular interpreter returned to the English class and things went right back to the way they had been, Weiner threw up his hands. “I said, ‘That’s it, I’m going to Gallaudet.’”
He came in 1974 as a sophomore, and the higher level of communication was eye-opening. “I was able to meet classmates who understood what I was thinking,” he says emphatically. But the professors were a different story. Predominantly hearing or late-deafened, many professors had low opinions of the students, he says. “They were very paternalistic.” A prejudice in favor of those with strong verbal skills coursed through the university, a situation Weiner likens to the light skin/dark skin divide in the black community in earlier times. Howard University, a historically black school, is only a few miles up the road from Gallaudet. “The lighter your skin at Howard, the better off you were,” says Weiner, noting that when he saw a photograph of Mordecai Johnson, who served as Howard’s first black president from 1926 through 1960, he thought he was white. In the deaf community, he maintains, “we still have that problem.”
Weiner found mentors in the handful of deaf professors who really inspired him, like a World War II refugee who earned a master’s in history at Georgetown University after arriving in the States. In her history class, he says, “she wasn’t interested in having us learn dates. We talked about cause and effect, about the abstract not the tangible. She can’t talk worth a damn, but she knew inside each one of us we could succeed if expectations were set high enough.”
Weiner has high expectations for Gallaudet. He locates the roots of the problems that led to the university’s probation in the conflicting messages students like him received there. It was at once a place of inspiration and community but also a somewhat limiting box where the bar of achievement was low. “The 1988 protest was a watershed event,” he says. It was also “the moment when we could have changed things.” By the early 2000s, however, it was clear that not much had changed beyond the fact that the school had a deaf president. “There were students who had no business being here—they couldn’t graduate—and there were professors with low standards,” says Weiner. “By the time the 2006 protests began, our dirty laundry was out for everyone to see.”
His first day as provost in July 2007 was the day that the Middle States Commission on Higher Education put the university on probation. Choosing to see it as an opportunity to do things differently, Weiner dedicated himself to changing the ethos. The current president of Gallaudet, T. Alan Hurwitz, came in 2010 from Rochester, where he was president of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. He is very highly regarded but was recovering from surgery when I was on campus, so we didn’t meet. Together, Weiner and Hurwitz and their colleagues have tightened standards by requiring higher scores on the ACT standardized admissions test; brought in new staff, including what Weiner calls “top-of-the-line” professors from places like MIT, Harvard, and Columbia; and instituted evidence-based metrics for measuring success. Much effort has been put into diversity, which at Gallaudet includes hearing status. “About fifteen years ago, during a panel discussion on cochlear implants, I raised this idea that in ten to fifteen years, Gallaudet is going to look different,” says Weiner. “There was a lot of resistance. Now, especially the new generation, they don’t care anymore.” Gallaudet does look different. In addition to more cochlear implants, there are more hearing students on campus, mostly enrolled in graduate programs for interpreting and audiology. Both of these new groups do best if they have or quickly acquire proficiency in ASL.
The hard decisions Weiner has had to make as provost have dented his popularity on campus, but he says, “At least I’m honest about the state we’re in.” On some fronts, that state is much improved. Before 2007, barely half the freshman class made it to sophomore year. In the past four years, the freshman retention rate has ranged from 70 to 75 percent. The latest strategic plan sets a goal of a 50-percent graduation rate. Enrollment is still lower than it was, but Weiner insists the quality of the student body is higher. One sign of Gallaudet’s improving status is that today Weiner sits on accreditation committees to evaluate other universities. “It shows they have trust in us,” he says.
“I want deaf students here to see everyone as their peers, whether they have a cochlear implant or are hard of hearing, can talk or can’t talk. I have friends who are oral. I have one rule: We’re not going to try to convert one another. We’re going to work together to improve the life of our people. The word ‘our’ is important. That’s what this place will be and must be. Otherwise, why bother?”
Not everyone on campus agrees with him. “We still have what you might call the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Libertarians,” he says. “Some faculty say we should all be deaf, others say we need a mix. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree, but I certainly enjoy the diversity of opinions. The day any university becomes groupthink is the day America ceases to function as a real community.”
At the end of our time together on my first visit, Weiner hopped up to shake my hand.
“I really want to thank you again for taking time to meet with me and making me feel so welcome,” I say.
“There are people here who were nervous about me talking to you,” he admits. “I think it’s important to talk.”
So I make a confession of my own. “I was nervous about coming to Gallaudet as the parent of a child with a cochlear implant,” I say. “I didn’t know how I’d be treated.”
He smiles, reaches up above his right ear, and flips the coil of a cochlear implant off his head. I hadn’t realized it was there, hidden in his brown hair. Our entire conversation had been through the interpreter. He seems pleased that he has managed to surprise me.
“I was one of the f
irst culturally Deaf people to get one.”
• • •
Perhaps it’s not surprising that most of the people who talk to me at Gallaudet turn out to have a relatively favorable view of cochlear implants. Irene Leigh doesn’t have one, but she is among the Gallaudet professors who have devoted the most time to thinking about them. When we met, she was about to retire as chair of the psychology department after more than twenty years there. A successful product of oral deaf and then mainstream education, Leigh’s ability to cope in the hearing world was evident at an early age. Her parents were German refugees who immigrated to the United States a few years after the end of World War II, and her mother made the mistake of mentioning to the immigration inspector on the ship that her daughter was deaf. After an anxious night in detention at Ellis Island, Leigh’s parents asked her to draw a tree and other childish subjects for the officials when their case was presented the next day. She followed her parents’ spoken instructions beautifully, even though her father’s German accent was so thick “you could cut it with a knife.” The immigration officer allegedly exclaimed: “My four-year-old grandson can’t do that!” And she was in. “I tell people my deafness got me into Ellis Island and it got me out.”
For years, Leigh worked at Lexington School for the Deaf as a teacher, then as a counselor and therapist, earning a master’s in counseling and a doctorate in clinical psychology along the way. She began signing in her twenties (and got her first interpreter in 1980, when she started her PhD program) and arrived at Gallaudet’s psychology department in 1991. Her interest in cochlear implants came early.
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