Gallaudet's Choice

Last month, Gallaudet University was put on probation by its accrediting agency. What the probation means is that Gallaudet -- the world's first university for the deaf, and the nucleus of the country's deaf culture -- is not working. If it were a student, it would be getting a failing grade.

Accreditation is crucial to a university's survival. Without it, students cannot take out federal loans. Their grades may not transfer to other schools.

Many see Gallaudet's probation as fallout from last year's student protests, which shut down the school and ended up forcing the resignation of Jane Fernandes, the university board's choice for president. Many students disapproved of her because she learned sign language only as an adult. In much of the signing community, her resignation was deemed a victory.

But that "victory" came at a price. The national academic community and the media declared that Gallaudet's student protesters, though they had the support of most faculty and alumni, had overstepped their bounds.

However, such condemnations will pale in comparison to the likely reactions from the accreditation issues. Probation is proof of a fact that the signing community seems to resist: Society has evolved and separatism is no longer viable. Resisting this change, the deaf community will find itself further and further marginalized and

powerless.

When I studied at Gallaudet in the early 1990s, the response of the National Association for the Deaf toward cochlear implants was to label them "cultural genocide." Back then, I agreed. With the successful Deaf President Now protests and the passage of the American With Disabilities Act, the deaf community had reached new heights of self-empowerment. Implants, which could turn deaf children and adults into mostly-hearing ones, were a threat to all that -- a way to "cure" deafness and reinforce the idea that deafness was intrinsically "bad."

As implant technology rapidly improved, its benefits became undeniable. It's not perfect by a long shot, but more than 50 percent of hearing-impaired children now have them, and most don't learn sign. Yet much of the signing deaf community still shuns implant wearers.

If it's not immediately dealt with, this attitude will doom Gallaudet. The school administration vowed to make changes to beat probation by making tougher admissions standards and more degree-focused classes, but this doesn't go far enough.

The gifted science writer Michael Chorost -- like myself, born deaf and now a cochlear implant wearer -- advances what I believe is the best solution for ensuring the university's future. Gallaudet, he writes, has the opportunity to position itself on the cutting edge of exciting new fields of technology. It can become a laboratory for new styles of communication, new kinds of learning -- a testing ground for medical therapies and technologies that could push the limits of how all people communicate.

Rather than protecting itself from change, Gallaudet should embrace it. It should move to the forefront of communication studies and technologies. Otherwise it risks becoming an irrelevant relic of a separatist culture.

-- Josh Swiller

Cold Spring, N.Y.