Gallaudet Is the Only Blank Arts University in the Nation for Deaf Students
For Deafened, Gallaudet Was Just a Start
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March 13, 1988
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Department one , Folio
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The protests at Gallaudet University, the nation'southward merely liberal arts higher for the deaf, represent the blossoming of a new civil rights movement, deliberately patterned on the black civil rights deportment of the 1960's, according to deafened people and advocates for the handicapped.
''Deaf people are becoming more involved in decisions that touch on them, both politically and educationally,'' said Anita Farb of the National Association for the Deaf. ''They no longer want to take a back seat. And with more deaf people being better educated, they are finding that they actually tin can make a difference.''
''In the 1960s we had the black ceremonious rights riots, and then in the 1970s and 1980s a lot of black people were able to motility up to supervisory and leadership positions,'' said Claude Stout, a 34-year-old deaf human from Washington, speaking through an interpreter. ''We have a lot of deafened people out there who take become engineers and chemists and figurer programmers, simply none of them are moving upwards to supervisory jobs. This is the just the beginning, simply in x years, maybe we'll see more deaf people moving upwardly.'' Educational Leadership
Mr. Stout said he and others who share his handicap want to run across more than deaf people leading education programs for the deaf. Mr. Stout said that, long before Gallaudet's newly appointed president, Elisabeth Ann Zinser, resigned Friday in the midst of a student protest, the Gallaudet alumni had been unhappy about the underrepresentation of deafened people in the schoolhouse'due south leadership.
Dr. Zinser, who volition return to her one-time post as vice president for bookish affairs at the University of N Carolina at Greensboro, is not deaf and does not know sign language.
Mr. Stout, who received both a available'south caste and a master'due south in business assistants at Gallaudet, said that, like blacks, deaf people have been looked downward on and discriminated against in schools, restaurants, movies and other public institutions.
''Gallaudet is just a few blocks from the scene of the ceremonious rights protest and riots of 1968,'' said a Gallaudet staff member, who asked non to be identified. ''In some existent way, this is an extension of that movement. It's 20 years late, just things ever come late to the deaf community.'' Cutting Off From Others
About 21.ii million Americans have impaired hearing, ranging from a hearing loss to deafness. Most of those people, including the roughly 8 1000000 with meaning hearing loss in both ears, are elderly. Less than a 1000000 are deaf.
Because deafness - even more than blindness or handicaps that restrict concrete mobility - makes it hard to communicate, the deaf accept traditionally had the hardest time making their way into the mainstream of gild, in the opinion of several people associated with Gallaudet.
Indeed, they notation that Helen Keller, who was both deaf and blind, maintained that deafness was the greater of her ii handicaps, because it cut her off from other people. And those who work with handicapped children notation that, while blind children without other handicaps tin can usually join mainstream classes successfuly, deaf children have a much harder time.
''Oftentimes, the general population equates a hearing impairment with a lack of intelligence, and looks upon people who are deaf as having subnormal intelligence,'' said Paul Medlin, senior vice president of the National Foundation for the Handicapped in Chicago. ''Many deafened children are wrongly put in classes for the developmentally disabled. The brunt should be on society to accommodate the hearing-impaired person.''
Exactly what kind of accommodations are required has been a subject of a skillful deal of litigation in recent years. In one important case, a deaf licensed applied nurse who wanted to go to school to become a registered nurse sued the schoolhouse that would not accommodate her. Merely in 1979, the United states of america Supreme Court ruled against her, declaring, according to i lawyer in the case, that she could not participate fully in the clinical portion of her training because of her deafness.
Since then, there has been an increment in other deaf-rights cases, generally involving education and employment. In the early 1980's, much of the litigation revolved around the obligation of state schools and state vocational-rehabilitation agencies to provide interpreters for deaf people - a right that is generally taken for granted now, in large part because of the Rehabilitation Human activity of 1973, which said the handicapped must be afforded ''meaningful access'' to federally financed programs. Aware of Their Rights
Current litigation involves a wide range of problems, said Marking Charmatz, who handles litigation on rights for the deaf for the National Association for the Deaf.
''What it all adds upward to is that deaf people are increasingly aware of their rights, that they want the same rights every bit anyone else, and that they won't stand for anything else,'' he said.
Employment discrimination against deaf people is widespread, civil rights lawyers say. Even those employers who have many hearing-dumb workers may treat them very differently from other workers.
Mr. Charmatz cites a case confronting the Postal Service, which had a special recruitment program for the deaf but paid hearing-impaired workers in the program $5 an 60 minutes during a 9-month probation catamenia while their co-workers with normal hearing earned $10 an hr and were simply kept on probation for xc days.
''Terminal year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that that pay organization was illegal bigotry, and the Post's response was to drop the recruitment program,'' Mr. Charmatz said. ''Just they got a lot of criticism nearly that, and they reinstated information technology.'' Hopes Rise as Barriers Autumn
In role, the growing activism of the deaf is part of a revolution of rising expectations: Generally, even the fiercest advocates for the deaf agree, the last 20 years accept brought important advances, not only in the constabulary but in technology and image.
Deaf and hearing-impaired people are now able to use telephones, thank you to increasingly sophisticated systems that permit messages to be typed into the telephone and received on a screen on the listener's phone. And captioning has made boob tube programming increasingly accessible to the deaf.
Meanwhile, many deaf students say they accept been been bolstered by the success of ''Children of a Lesser God,'' a play, and later a movie, starring the deafened actresses Phyllis Frelich and Marlee Matlin. A recent Canadian movie, ''Crazy Moon,'' stars a deaf actress, Vanessa Vaughan. And Linda Bove, some other deaf actress, has long been featured on ''Sesame Street.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/13/us/for-deaf-gallaudet-was-just-a-start.html
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