Somewhat Silent

I’m not sure the link in my previous posting works, Here’s the story itself from the Washington Post.

Sid

Gallaudet’s Choice
Rather Than Protect Itself From Change, The University Should Embrace It
Sunday, July 15, 2007; B08
Last month, Gallaudet University was put on probation by its accrediting agency. What the probation means is that Gallaudet — the world’s first university for the deaf, and the nucleus of the country’s deaf culture — is not working. If it were a student, it would be getting a failing grade.

Accreditation is crucial to a university’s survival. Without it, students cannot take out federal loans. Their grades may not transfer to other schools.

Many see Gallaudet’s probation as fallout from last year’s student protests, which shut down the school and ended up forcing the resignation of Jane Fernandes, the university board’s choice for president. Many students disapproved of her because she learned sign language only as an adult. In much of the signing community, her resignation was deemed a victory.

But that “victory” came at a price. The national academic community and the media declared that Gallaudet’s student protesters, though they had the support of most faculty and alumni, had overstepped their bounds.

However, such condemnations will pale in comparison to the likely reactions from the accreditation issues. Probation is proof of a fact that the signing community seems to resist: Society has evolved and separatism is no longer viable. Resisting this change, the deaf community will find itself further and further marginalized and

powerless.

When I studied at Gallaudet in the early 1990s, the response of the National Association for the Deaf toward cochlear implants was to label them “cultural genocide.” Back then, I agreed. With the successful Deaf President Now protests and the passage of the American With Disabilities Act, the deaf community had reached new heights of self-empowerment. Implants, which could turn deaf children and adults into mostly-hearing ones, were a threat to all that — a way to “cure” deafness and reinforce the idea that deafness was intrinsically “bad.”

As implant technology rapidly improved, its benefits became undeniable. It’s not perfect by a long shot, but more than 50 percent of hearing-impaired children now have them, and most don’t learn sign. Yet much of the signing deaf community still shuns implant wearers.

If it’s not immediately dealt with, this attitude will doom Gallaudet. The school administration vowed to make changes to beat probation by making tougher admissions standards and more degree-focused classes, but this doesn’t go far enough.

The gifted science writer Michael Chorost — like myself, born deaf and now a cochlear implant wearer — advances what I believe is the best solution for ensuring the university’s future. Gallaudet, he writes, has the opportunity to position itself on the cutting edge of exciting new fields of technology. It can become a laboratory for new styles of communication, new kinds of learning — a testing ground for medical therapies and technologies that could push the limits of how all people communicate.

Rather than protecting itself from change, Gallaudet should embrace it. It should move to the forefront of communication studies and technologies. Otherwise it risks becoming an irrelevant relic of a separatist culture.

– Josh Swiller

Cold Spring, N.Y.

Although as a seriously hard of hearing hearing aid user, I haven’t been part of the Gallaudet community, I’m sympathetic with it. Nevertheless, I’m in agreement with the writer of the letter that the Gallaudet’s administrator’s proposed changes are not enough (see link below).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/13/AR2007071301510.html

Sid

First, I want to express my gratitude to Simply Silent and its community, and to Sara and Donna who guided me here.

I’m a retiree with a hearing loss that began in childhood, and has become much worse with age. At age seven, I was struck with an illness that kept me out of school for a year. I have no memory of that year, although I can remember events before and after. Everything I know about it was told to me by my parents shortly thereafter. There are a lot of missing details, but I can no longer ask them, they are long gone.

I do remember a medical examination not long after the year of illness for a hearing deficit that had become apparent. My parents had previously told me that chorea was cause of my illness. On the occasion of the medical examination we were told that the hearing loss was caused by high dosages of aspirin given to me during my illness, not by the chorea itself.

Chorea is an abnormal voluntary movement disorder, one of a group of neurological disorders called dyskinesias, which are caused by overactivity of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the areas of the brain that control movement. Chorea is characterized by brief, irregular contractions that are not repetitive or rhythmic, but appear to flow from one muscle to the next.

The term chorea is derived from the Greek word for dancing and was applied initially to epidemics of dancing mania in the Middle Ages, in which large numbers of people danced together for days. Many such dances were described, but the most renowned was chorea Sancti Viti. Sydenham used this term in his Schedula Monitoria to describe rheumatic chorea in 1686.

My recent research indicates that my illness must have been a specific type of chorea, Sydenham chorea, also called St. Vitus Dance. It is considered to be a manifestation of rheumatic fever (streptococcal infection) with a typical onset between the ages of 5 and 15. This type of chorea is believed to result from an autoimmune mechanism that occurs when the streptococcal infection causes the body to make antibodies to specific brain regions.

Inasmuch as it manifests as a neurological disorder, I think that it is a suspect as a direct cause of the hearing loss, but this is a moot point.

While hearing aids were available at the time my hearing loss was noted, they were very clunky, and I felt that I could get by without them. My parents didn’t object. I did manage reasonably well during my school and college years. My coping strategies included asking my teachers to seat me at the front of the class, and using lip reading.

As I grew older my hearing functionality has become increasingly problematic, and I have been wearing a hearing aid in recent years. Note that I said this in the singular. The hearing in my left ear was never very useful. But, it has become a profound nerve deafness to the point that whatever little sound comes through is severely distorted. While my hearing aid does a good job of amplifying sound in my right ear with reasonably low levels of distortion, functionally I have monaural hearing. That is a major frustration, which will be the subject of a subsequent posting.