No hearing need apply?

From: Chicago Tribune - United States - Dec 2, 2006

Campus life is calm again after months of noisy protests at Gallaudet University, the nation's only university for the deaf and hearing impaired. Still raging is a wider culture war, of sorts, that reaches far beyond the university's walls.

A student and faculty uproar erupted in May over the appointment of provost Jane Fernandes to be the next president at the Washington, D.C., institution whose charter was signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Fernandes' promotion was withdrawn in October by university trustees to placate the protesters.

She said her opponents believe she is "not deaf enough"--she speaks and can read lips, but she didn't learn American Sign Language until she was a young adult. Critics responded that she was too autocratic and had been installed by a selection process that didn't include students. Fernandes, protesters said, was "playing the deaf card" to win public sympathy.

Nearly two decades ago, vociferous protests by students and alumni led to the naming of I. King Jordan as the first deaf president of Gallaudet. Jordan, who is retiring, supported the appointment of Fernandes, but to no avail.

Underlying the protests is a widely studied and widely disputed set of customs, values and beliefs known as deaf culture. It unites a worldwide subcommunity of the deaf in the way other cultures are united by a shared history, values and language. In this case, the language is sign language. The usage, inflections, grammar and "accents" of one's signing can have special significance in deaf culture that is difficult for the hearing to comprehend.

But deaf culture finds itself threatened by technology that allows more people to hear. Some who are determined to preserve the culture go so far as to denounce cochlear implants, portable devices that carry sound impulses to the brain, as "cultural genocide."

Some of the movement's most passionate supporters embrace the world of silence to the point of insisting that deafness need not be "cured." A famous and poignant example is chronicled in the six-year-old documentary "Sound and Fury" by filmmaker Josh Aronson. The film follows a deaf family in which the parents are pleased when their children are born deaf, and they resist cochlear implants.

The hearing may never comprehend what could drive such a view. Why would one reject a medical advancement that allows someone to more easily communicate with the rest of the world? Why would someone argue that that is anything but an individual decision?

Proponents of deaf culture have made a great contribution to broader awareness of the deaf. They were important proponents of the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the ultimate rejection of Jane Fernandes at Gallaudet--largely because she wasn't "deaf enough"--is difficult to fathom.

© 2007, Chicago Tribune