Deaf ignored at Yale

Last Wednesday, I found myself sitting with 17 other students in the Pierson College seminar room at an organizational meeting for an American Sign Language (ASL) study group. We were there for various reasons. Some people attended because they had deaf family members or (as was the case with myself) deaf friends. Others were drawn by their interest in deaf culture or in ASL specifically. All of us also came to the meeting because we realized, as we flipped through our Blue Books trying to pick out classes, that there wasn't a single deaf-related course to be found in the entire volume.

Such an omission might be excusable in a school that did not rank as well as Yale did in the recent U.S. News and World Report poll. But the lack of even one course devoted to those among us without the ability to hear amounts to a serious affront to the culture of a unique people with a unique history and language. In the United States alone, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 21 million individuals described as having some degree of hearing loss. Like any other culture, the deaf deserve recognition in the curriculum of an institution of learning, such as Yale, that strives to instill in its members a respect and appreciation for diversity in society.

Contrary to popular belief, "the deaf" are not simply a group of similarly disabled individuals. The deaf view their deafness as a part of their unique culture, a culture rooted in their collective history and language. In strictly historical terms, references to the deaf can be traced back to the writings of Aristotle and the code of Roman law. What is interesting about this history is that the deaf have always been forced to grapple with the relationship between themselves and the dominant hearing world.

The same forces which in the past led to conceptions of the deaf as being non-persons not deserving of the same rights as "normal" individuals today fuel the ongoing debate within the deaf community which pits the mainstreaming of deaf culture against its maintenance. In this way, the history of the deaf mirrors the histories of several other cultural and racial groups which have faced centuries of discrimination and now face modern-day pressures and problems in their efforts to assimilate.

By far, the most critical aspect of the historical deaf culture is ASL. If language is understood to be primarily a form of interpersonal communication, there are no grounds for doubting ASL's validity in comparison to conventional languages.

ASL has its poets, and strictly deaf theaters can be found from Los Angeles to New York. If anything, ASL's uniqueness as a spatially-oriented manifestation of communication should make it a topic of special interest among linguistics scholars.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, it translates everyday concepts into a visual framework with uncontrived elegance, and the necessity of focusing one's attention on the physical person of the speaker in order to read hand, facial, and body signals can make the conversation much more intimate than one conducted orally.

While this article in no way does justice to the richness of deaf culture nor to the strength of the argument for the inclusion of a deaf studies program, it hopefully demonstrates that the topic of the deaf experience and its unique language would provide no shortage of issues for scholarly rumination.

Granted, every interesting segment of society cannot be given its own department at Yale. Nevertheless, to deny the deaf a spot in Yale's curriculum because of the notion that deaf culture is not valid and sign language is not the linguistic equal of its oral counterparts is to perpetuate the provincial thinking that has constrained the opportunities of deaf individuals for far too long. I know at least 18 undergraduates who have seen these stereotypes for what they truly are--the blindness of the hearing.