CSUN Deaf Program Falls on Hard Times : Education: Students and staff say once-lauded center has lost many of its most talented interpreters.

Amy Yu didn’t hesitate five years ago when she had the chance to leave her Bay Area home and attend Cal State Northridge.

Yu, who is deaf, knew CSUN’s reputation for running one of the largest and most respected university programs for deaf students in the country.

Now, as a graduating senior, Yu is disillusioned. Many of the most talented sign-language interpreters who once enabled her to fully participate in classes have been replaced by novices, she said.

“I’m lucky if I get enough information out of the classes to pass,” Yu said.

Indeed, students, staff members and union officials at CSUN’s once-lauded National Center on Deafness are complaining that the operation has fallen on hard times and has lost talented interpreters at an alarming rate amid complaints of low pay and difficult working conditions.

The attack is particularly tough for the Northridge campus, which in the mid-1960s became one of the first mainstream universities to accept deaf students. The center was founded in 1972 and today runs on a $1.8-million budget, about $1 million of it in federal funds.

With talks on a revised contract stalled, a delegation of interpreters, union representatives and deaf students traveled to Long Beach last week to air their complaints before the Cal State University system’s board of trustees.

Administrators at the center, which has about about 250 deaf students and 130 interpreters, were not present at the meeting. They later conceded the general decline while arguing about specific issues.

Director Herbert Larson blames the shortage of funds. “It’s hard to maintain the good quality if you’re not able to support it,” he said.

Interpreters are a lifeline to learning for deaf students, conveying class discussions and speaking for many who cannot talk. CSUN’s deaf population is one of the largest among American universities. By comparison, UCLA has only 10 deaf students, CSUN officials said.

CSUN has suffered a “mass exodus” of talented interpreters in recent years, the delegation charged, due to Cal State personnel practices that deny many of them health benefits and pay them hourly wages that are half what some earn elsewhere.

The total number of interpreters at the campus has not declined. But among the 80 or so who work full time, the portion at the highest skill levels has fallen from about 20 to just a handful, interpreters said.

Union officials represent the 350 interpreters in the 20-campus Cal State system, including the largest bloc of 130 at CSUN. After the Northridge group appeared before trustees, Cal State officials agreed to take another look at demands for better pay, health coverage and improved working conditions.

The interpreters joined the California State Employees Assn., which also represents other Cal State system employees, in 1992. When the union and the system signed a new two-year general contract in mid-1993, they agreed to hold separate talks for the interpreters.

But more than a year has passed with little progress reported. Noel Grogan, the Cal State system’s director of human resources, expressed sympathy for the complaints, but said money is tight. “If there is more money going to the interpreters, there is less going somewhere else,” he said.

Meanwhile, many of CSUN’s deaf students complain that the problems are depriving them of the full benefit of a university education, which federal law guarantees to the disabled.

“It’s deeply affected me because I have a lot of questions and I want to participate in class. But if I can’t have direct interaction with my instructors, I lose that,” said John Sherwood, a senior.

“When I need to give oral presentations and participate, the interpreters have a lot of problems,” said LisaAnn Tom, a graduate student who began studying at CSUN in 1985 as a freshman. “If the interpreter keeps asking me to repeat myself, I lose the flow of what I’m saying.”

Students said interpreters generally can translate the comments of instructors and other students in classes into sign language, which deaf students can understand. That is relatively easy for most interpreters because they are listening to their own language, spoken English.

The larger problem has been the tougher job of converting the sign language that many deaf students use into spoken words that others can understand. When those problems arise, students say they feel isolated and left out of their classes.

“I want a complete education. I don’t want to miss out on anything. I want good interpreters so I can get it all,” said Yu, who is majoring in deaf studies. “I feel like I’m behind my non-deaf peers.”

“Deaf students from all over the world come to CSUN for the services,” said Hope Simon, who began working at CSUN as an interpreter in the early 1980s and now serves on the interpreters’ bargaining team for the California State Employees Assn. “But the services are not what they seem to be.”

Despite its reputation, controversy is not new to the center. One director was removed in 1985. Another was asked to resign after the center almost ran out of money during the school year in 1990. And students were already demanding more interpreters and medical benefits for them then.

Afterward, a handful of full-time interpreter positions with salary and benefits were added at the campus, but those jobs became vacant shortly thereafter as employees left and the situation deteriorated, said Simon.

Major issues are pay and working conditions. All but a handful of the interpreters at CSUN are considered intermittent employees paid between about $7 and $21 an hour with no health benefits, according to the union. Other employers are paying up to $40 an hour for people with similar skills, according to a survey of companies in the field.

Professionals say interpreters generally cannot effectively work alone for more than 20 to 30 minutes in the physically and mentally demanding job without being relieved for a similar period. So a common strategy has been “team interpreting,” in which two people continuously take turns.

But because CSUN lacks the funds, team interpreting is rarely used, even in classes that run for two to three hours. CSUN has instead taken a modified approach, using partial work-sharing in some of the longest classes. Larson, the national center’s director, defends the practice, but the interpreters denounce it.

Gary Sanderson, a staff member, said about one-third of the center’s interpreters had filed workers’ compensation claims complaining of repetitive-motion injuries. But center officials said such problems could be due to interpreters overworking at other jobs.

One outside expert, meanwhile, sided with the interpreters.

CSUN interpreters are “woefully underpaid,” according to Jane Jarrow, executive director of the Assn. on Higher Education and Disability.

Two-person team interpreting is commonly used and is preferred, said Jarrow, who heads an 1,800-member group of educators who deal with disabilities.

“The answer is the budget’s got to go up. We’re talking about students’ basic civil rights here,” Jarrow said.

Larson expressed surprise at student complaints, saying such dissatisfaction had not surfaced before in student evaluations. He attributed it partly to the union.

However, he conceded that the pay and working-conditions issues have cost the center talented staff. But he said the center is caught in a squeeze. Its interpreting budget, about $238,000, has remained flat for years while its hours of service have risen 23% since 1990, he said.

“We’re now stretched beyond the limit,” said Evelyn Cederbaum, the center’s associate director.