Students’ Victory Is Symbol for Deaf : School President’s Resignation Seen as Milestone in Cause

To deaf activists, the forced resignation Friday of a non-deaf educator as president of Gallaudet University represented much more than a tactical victory for rebellious students at the world’s only liberal arts college for the deaf.

For the 2 million Americans who are profoundly deaf--and the 19 million others with hearing problems--the Gallaudet students’ triumph signals a growing movement to boost self-esteem, break down employment barriers and set educational policies attuned to the unique language and culture of the deaf.

“It’s a tremendous leap,” Gallaudet administrator Howard Busby said of the resignation of Elisabeth Ann Zinser, whose appointment as president last Sunday ignited school-closing protests and widespread sympathy for demonstrators.

Gallaudet is a beacon for the deaf community, Busby noted, and the now-certain installation of the first deaf president in its 124-year history will “encourage more parents, public officials and employers all over the world to seriously consider a deaf person not because of their deafness but because of their skills and experience.”

Exits Gracefully

Zinser, a University of North Carolina administrator with no experience in deaf education or sign language, exited gracefully after never having set foot in her office at Gallaudet, whose pastoral 100-acre campus lies a mile northeast of the Capitol.

At a news conference, she acknowledged “this extraordinary social movement of deaf people.” Saying that she had learned much about the needs of those who sought her ouster, she declared: “We all celebrate with them in this, their day in the sun.”

Protest leaders, while continuing to press for a deaf majority on Gallaudet’s board of trustees and the removal of board Chairman Jane Bassett Spilman, termed Zinser’s resignation a major milestone in the drive to overcome what many deaf people call “oppression” by a hearing-dominated society.

“The crucial insight into the deaf problem in America,” said deaf-studies scholar Harlan Lane, is that the deaf should be recognized as a “cultural and linguistic minority that is proud of its heritage,” not as “a handicap model that we support with special services.”

“What this is about is much closer to what the black movement in America was about or, even closer, what the Hispanic movement was about,” Lane said.

Use Unique Language

For the deaf, as for Latinos, oppression is rooted in language, said Lane, a visiting Gallaudet professor whose two books on deafness in 1984 helped spark the drive for deaf rights. Deaf people, he observed, use a language--sign language--that is difficult to translate into English, and many of the deaf cannot speak English clearly or read the lips of those who do.

Congress gave Gallaudet the special mission in 1864 to provide education and outreach services to the deaf and federal funds still finance three-quarters of the $76-million budget.

Yet the institution itself, which serves not only 2,125 university students but also 400 high school students and 200 elementary school pupils, now stands accused of being a leading oppressor of deaf people.

Protest leaders charge that Gallaudet has relatively few faculty members (15%) who are deaf, bars extensive use of American Sign Language despite its proven effectiveness as a learning tool, has many more regular telephones than teletype-equipped phones for the deaf and arranges its classrooms so poorly that students have difficulty following the small number of interpreters who are provided.

Call Trustees ‘Paternalistic’

But the overarching problem, they contend, is a paternalistic group of trustees and administrators--most with normal hearing--who do not know or understand the values, group norms, artistic heritage or everyday experiences of the deaf.

“You can’t teach someone what it feels like to be deaf, and a hearing person can’t learn it,” Gallaudet student body president Greg Hlibok said as protesters sought to replace Zinser with one of two deaf educators bypassed in the final round of the presidential selection process.

Sounding a similar note was Gary W. Olsen, executive director of the National Assn. of the Deaf, one of many deaf advocacy groups that joined the campus demonstrations to vent frustrations of the wider deaf community.

Observing that Zinser has an extensive nursing background, Olsen commented: “She’s a nurse. Nice. We’re sick of being nursed. Let us be off the bottle so we can prove that we can do things on our own.”

Hlibok, a slender, crew-cut blond with deaf parents, said through an interpreter that “oppression is common” at Gallaudet.

‘Give Us a Dirty Look’

“Several deaf people have applied for higher administrative positions, but not many people are hired for those positions,” he said. “And often, hearing people on campus, like in the payroll department, don’t show a lot of sensitivity to us. If we ask for paper and pencil to communicate with them, they give us a dirty look like they don’t want to deal with that.”

A central assertion of critics is that the deaf should be prepared not only to cope better in the hearing world but also to live a richer life in the deaf world.

Barbara M. Kannapell, former chairman of the President’s Committee on Deafness and now an advocate with Deafpride Inc., asserted that Gallaudet’s policy of combining oral with sign language in the classroom is particularly harmful to these objectives.

“Students could sign and learn English,” she said. “But right now, they are continually emphasizing English and ignoring American Sign Language as the natural language for deaf people throughout the United States.”

Lane, who said his research shows that Gallaudet students did much better 100 years ago when they were taught with nothing but sign language, asserted that most Gallaudet professors today are ill-equipped to use “simultaneous communication”--signing while they speak.

Generally, Lane said, “the teacher will learn a list of signs but will try to do a sign only when she is using major English words. So, if she said, ‘Today, we are going to study history,’ the only thing students would get out of that is ‘history.’

Differences in Sign Language

“An American Sign Language sentence would be utterly unlike the English sentence--different word order, different grammatical system,” he continued. “So this is more like you and me listening to a lecture in French, with an occasional shouted translation.”

Lane called this practice “insane,” contending that “the most powerful weapon we have to reach these kids we absolutely refuse to use.”

Betty Colonomos, a former trainer of interpreters at Gallaudet who is now with the Bicultural Center, agreed that “students can barely understand the teachers.”