It was late afternoon, and snow was pelting down outside when Jenn Legg needed to speak some of her very first words of the day.
"There's nothing on the ground," Legg told Anthony Adamo, dismissing the snowfall with a shrug. "I'm from Iowa."
Jenn Legg, right, is one of a handful of students at Gallaudet University who can hear.
(Andrea Bruce Woodall -- The Washington Post)
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Already six hours into the college day, Legg had raised questions in her morning senior thesis class, taken a Spanish vocabulary quiz and shared lunch with several friends at the student union.
All of that, however, had been in sign language. She had virtually no use for the spoken word until she encountered Adamo. They are two among a handful of students who can hear among the hundreds who cannot at Gallaudet University. The students who have full hearing are a hidden minority on a campus where a minority -- the deaf and hard of hearing -- is dominant.
For Legg and the other hearing undergraduates -- HUGs, as they are known on campus -- the college experience at the nation's premier university for the deaf has unfolded almost as if she were in a foreign land.
She attends classes taught by deaf professors, eats dinner in a cafeteria with deaf classmates and lives with three deaf or hard-of-hearing roommates. The guys sitting next to her in Spanish, the girls on the basketball team, the college president -- all are deaf.
Legg and the other HUGs sleep in dorm rooms without telephones. They learn to live with deaf neighbors who turn up their stereos to wall-shaking volume to feel the beat, an ironic twist on a campus often mistaken as a silent place. They study the history of deaf culture, and many plan careers in deaf education.
Attending Gallaudet is more than an academic adventure for Legg. It feels like home. Raised by deaf parents, Legg learned how to sign before she learned how to speak. She was a shy girl from Cedar Rapids who grew up knowing only a handful of deaf children her age. At Gallaudet, she has blossomed, joining a deaf sorority and bonding with a wide circle of deaf friends.
"Everybody knows me as Jenn," said the 23-year-old senior, "not as the girl whose parents are deaf."
Some of her instructors had no idea she was able to hear. They thought she was just like everyone else.
Visual Reality
Legg awakens most mornings to the beeping of an alarm clock. Her deaf neighbors in the dorm are shaken from sleep by vibrating disks tucked under pillows or mattresses.
One recent morning inside Clerc Hall, the high-rise residential building at the edge of campus, the two sounds -- the buzzing of her clock and the distant throb of alarm vibrations -- made strange, off-beat music.
For Legg and the 21 other students with full hearing, life at Gallaudet is a kind of alternate reality. For 140 years, the red-brick campus in a gritty neighborhood in Northeast Washington off Florida Avenue has served as a kind of Harvard for the deaf, an academic and cultural center where 1,400 students go to research, understand and celebrate deafness.
It is the eye, not the ear, that dominates here. There is no doorbell outside Legg's white-painted two-bedroom suite; instead, there are large buttons that visitors push that make lights inside the room flicker. On a patch of grass near the main entrance to campus stands a five-foot granite sculpture not of a man, but of an eye.
