The Gallaudet of today scarcely resembles that fractured campus.
President T. Alan Hurwitz, recruited away from a rival deaf school within New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology, has raised standards and largely united Gallaudet around a new vision of bilingual deaf education.
“People are beginning to realize that American Sign Language is a value added,” said Hurwitz, who has been deaf since birth and is a fluent signer.
Hurwitz was so wary of Gallaudet’s history that he turned down the search committee several times before consenting to an interview. On the day he was introduced as president, Hurwitz said, “We didn’t know if everyone was going to stand up and protest.”
Twenty months into his administration, there is little to protest.
Gallaudet’s graduation rate has risen from 25 percent to 41 percent in four years. The share of graduates who continue their education has nearly doubled to 63 percent. The school has raised admission requirements, and average ACT reading scores for entering freshmen are at their highest point in recent history. Undergraduate enrollment has rebounded to 1,118.
Hurwitz has calmed the culture wars with a schoolwide policy that affirms the primacy of sign language but also posits Gallaudet as a bilingual school.
Professors now must prove mastery of sign language to get tenure. Students, too, are expected to sign. In a campuswide e-mail last fall, Hurwitz wrote: “Everyone on campus — no matter his or her signing level — should make every effort to communicate in sign language when in public areas on campus.”
But upholding that standard is increasingly difficult on a campus where nearly half of the freshmen now come from mainstream high schools and dozens arrive not knowing how to sign. To help them, university leaders last year created a six-week crash course for 46 new signers, an orientation to Gallaudet and to the deaf world.
An explosive opinion piece in the school newspaper last fall decried the rise of non-signers on campus and the potential demise of “the one deaf space we can have in this country.”
Some students agree. Others favor a more patient approach to new signers.
“They’ve been speaking for years, and then they come here and they’re expected to sign,” said Tony Tatum, a 23-year-old senior. “It’s a hard habit for them to break.”
Tatum sat with four other students in the campus dining hall on a recent day. Three of them, including Tatum, came from public schools and learned to sign at an advanced age.
“Before I came to Gallaudet, I thought I was the only person in the world who was hard of hearing,” Tatum said. Now, he plays on Gallaudet’s celebrated football team, a squad that invented the huddle in the 1890s as a way to hide signs from the other side.
Easter Faafiti, a 22-year-old junior, didn’t know about Gallaudet until she took a sign language course at a community college. Her hearing parents “knew nothing about deaf culture, not one thing.”
At the lunch table, Faafiti and Tatum communicated in sign, even though both are more comfortable with spoken English.
“I would prefer to speak,” Tatum said. “But if I’m going to speak to someone who can’t hear me, that makes no sense.”
Leila Hanaumi, a 21-year-old senior, attended a deaf school and knew Gallaudet and its history when she enrolled. She’s one of a few on campus who fully appreciate how much the school has improved; at an institution where the population turns over every few years, memories are short.
“In my class, we have the highest retention rate in I don’t know how long,” she said. Most of her class will graduate within five years, “and that’s pretty much unheard of.”
The university’s future may depend on reaching further into the mainstream of American education. Gallaudet recruiters have tripled the number of annual visits to public schools since 2006.
A trip might focus on one or two students who know nothing of Gallaudet. Charity Reedy-Hines, the chief recruiter, recalled a recent visit to a public high school in Mississippi where recruiters met with two deaf students.
“Both of them had never met another person like themselves,” she said. “They hadn’t even met each other.”
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