Mishka Zena

This article written by Charlotte Allen is one of the worst written articles I’ve seen on this subject. Not only is it one-side, it is also poorly researched, frequently stating erroneous facts. The personal bias of the Allen shines thorough the article, leaving the readers wondering why she is so bitter against the Deaf Community that she would damage her credibility as a writer.

Below is a critique of her comments, but since the list is so extensive, I need to take a break. This shows how flawed this article is.  To read the full article, click on this: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/458tonjc.asp  

To leave your opinion, click on the link below.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/SignIn.asp?idArticle=13458Letters to the Editor: editor@weeklystandard.com

 ”Finally, on October 13, there were mass arrests of gone-limp demonstrators–133 in all–that made presumed martyrs out of those who suffered minor injuries in the scuffles. ”
 
Minor injuries? They had to go to the ERs for treatment
 
“classes were effectively canceled for at least two weeks, partly because some protest-supporting Gallaudet professors refused to teach as a way of expressing solidarity with their students, and partly because the protesters themselves both barred non-protesting professors from their classrooms”
 
My understanding is that the classes were open with the exception of three days.
 
“[C]losing an institution through protest, preventing or intimidating students from attending class, or precluding the open exchange of ideas brings the institution out of compliance with Middle States’ accreditation standards,” the January 12 report stated. Gallaudet is already in serious trouble for other reasons”
 
It’s very unfortunate that the stakeholders were forced to undertake a protest. Had the BoT, IKJ and JKF done their jobs in the first place and practiced shared governance instead ignoring the stakeholders’s concerns for many years, this wouldn’t have happened. The full responsibility of the protest goes to BoT, IKJ, and JKF.

“A 2005 report from the U.S. Department of Education rated the university “ineffective,” citing declining enrollments, a chronically low graduation rate (signaling that many students who are admitted cannot handle college work and drop out), and the inability of more than 30 percent of Gallaudet graduates to find jobs within a year of graduation. In January the department raised Gallaudet’s rating to “adequate,” which is an improvement if not exactly a recommendation.”
 
As a provost from 2000 to 2006, Fernandes was responsible for the quality of Gallaudet Academic Programs.
 
“Another part of the problem, though, is the peculiar campus culture that flourishes at Gallaudet, a culture fostered by radical students and faculty members that has bred those 1960s-style confrontations and that–as both enrollment and application numbers at Gallaudet clearly show–turns off many young people who want only to obtain good educations and prepare for careers.”

The author is playing the deaf identity politics card perpetuated by IKJ and JKF, showing shoddy work. Had she done her job properly by listening to the other side, she will realize the protest is about a flawed presidential candidate search and poor leadership of JKF,  both which MSA acknowledged and criticized  Gallaudet BoT.
 
“And so it went at Gallaudet, where 50-year-old Jane K. Fernandes,……. had her contract summarily revoked by the trustees on October 29.
 
BoT saw for themselves the ineffectual leadership of Fernandes by her handling of the protest.
 
“The same went for Fernandes, whose precipitous removal after weeks of disruption that brought the Gallaudet campus to a standstill left many outside observers puzzled. She was supposed to be “not deaf enough” to satisfy her opponents because she had grown up using her voice and had not learned American Sign Language (ASL) until age 23–even though she had been deaf from birth, had a deaf mother and brother, and boasted a career devoted to deaf education, including the promotion of ASL.”
 
Because Not Deaf Enough was a lie. The writer is playing deaf identity card again
 
“Or maybe–as a new argument went after the “not deaf enough” argument seemed to fall on deaf ears among outsiders, so to speak, and was quickly shelved–”
 
Reviewing the media reports, only  the public relations spokeperson Mercy Coogan, IJK, and JKF were quoted repeatedly that Fernandes was rejected because she was “Not Deaf Enough”  The protesters themselves listed the real issues.
 
“Yet she had a solid scholarly publication record and a strong résumé as administrator of deaf primary and secondary schools in Hawaii and on the Gallaudet campus before becoming provost. She had beat out stiff competition for her job, and last May she had garnered the overwhelming support of the trustees who named her the next president. On most other university campuses, Fernandes would at least have been given a chance to prove herself.”
 
During her administration of both Clerc Center and Gallaudet, Fernandes have left them in ruins. Just read the countless letters expressing opposition of Fernandes as the president by Clerc Center and Gallaudet stakeholders.
 
“Those who participated in the protest composed a group that extended well beyond the Gallaudet student body to include faculty members, administrators, alumni who regularly visited the campus to join in, and the 127-year-old National Association of the Deaf”
 
Four no-confidence votes by Faculty members nor that 80% of the stakeholders, both hearing and deaf, were opposed to Fernandes’ appointment were mentioned.
 
A list of demands issued by the Gallaudet University Faculty, Staff, Students and Alumni (FSSA), an organization specifically formed to oppose Fernandes’s presidency, included not only a demand that Fernandes be fired but also that she be barred from ever setting foot on the Gallaudet campus again. Jordan was to be stripped of the title President Emeritus, and no campus building was ever to bear his name or that of his wife, Linda (that was a dig at a campus art gallery named after Linda Jordan, a potter who taught ceramics classes on campus).
 
Inaccurate facts.  It isn’t even  a FSSA official statement. Also the Nine Points never made the demand that Fernandes be blocked from stepping foot on campus

  
“Although Gallaudet’s academic reputation faltered, Jordan carried out his duties with energy and verve, building the university’s endowment from $5 million to more than $175 million during his 18-year tenure and adding numerous new buildings and programs to the once-sleepy Victorian-era campus, which, while park-like and meticulously manicured, has the misfortune of being located in a semi-industrial inner-city backwater of northeast Washington”
 
Yet he left the accreditation of Gallaudet in jeopardy.
 
This was an unspoken truth that was talked about within the inner confines of the Deaf community but not to the general public. For the past 18 years, the Deaf community has played a façade of accepting Dr. Jordan as one of their own, when in reality he was not
 
Really? Deaf Community looked at Jordan as an icon of the Deaf Community from the beginning. Again another incorrect fact
 
“The fact remains, however, that the mammalian brain is structured to perceive sound via the auditory nerve, and that people who cannot hear speech–or music or the honking of horns or the chirping of birds–lack something useful that most other people possess”.
 
Here we see the bigotry of the writer. Sufficiently said.
 
“Out of the approximately 1 million Americans who are functionally deaf, according to statistics cited at Gallaudet, well over half became deaf past the age of 65, use their voices fluently, and perceive no particular need for a sign language.”
 
How is this relevant to Gallaudet? These elderly people are late deafened and find digital hearing aids useful.
 
“Furthermore, after at least three decades of ASL ascendancy in deaf schools, the English literacy of deaf people–essential for success in the hearing job world–remains distressingly low, with half of deaf 17-year-olds still reading at the fourth-grade level or below”.
 
Yet another misstatement reflecting the ignorance of the writer.  ASL wasn’t used. Instead a bewildering  group of signed English codes (SEE, SEE2, TC, SC, and so forth) were utilized, confusing students by failing to separate two languages clearly. This confusion and the lack of exposure of a bona fide visible language during the criticial period of language acquisition are responsible for their poor English skills.
 
“Added to that is the fact that ASL is relatively difficult to learn as a latecomer, even for older deaf children and deaf adults (it typically takes two years to become proficient), so many hearing parents never bother, either cobbling together their own sign systems for their deaf children or using Cued Speech, an easy-to-learn mode of phonetic signing as one talks.”
 
And we see the detrimental effects on the children by lack of exposure to a visible language.
 
The fact that ASL use was officially discouraged for many decades in deaf schools has made it an ideal underdog “victim” issue around which deaf activists could build their vision of Deaf culture. It is now possible to major as an undergraduate and obtain a graduate degree in Deaf Studies, a field in which the courses, imbued these days with postmodernist denunciations of capitalism and patriarchy, teach the students that the deaf are a “colonized minority” (the language comes from the course catalogue at Fernandes’s alma mater, the University of Iowa).
 
The facts are accurate. Why is the writer critical of these facts?
 
“The most fluent ASL users of all, of course, are the fewer than 5 percent of deaf people who are children of deaf adults (CODAs, they call themselves) and thus have likely been exposed to ASL since birth, attended state deaf schools where they honed their skills, and gone to Gallaudet for college. ”
 
More false statements. Many deaf people of hearing parents are also fluent in ASL. CODA means Hearing Children of Deaf adults.  Again her research skills are sorely lacking.
 
“Later learners, the Muggles of Deafness who may use ASL more haltingly or with “accents” that betray their non-native status, or who (worst of all, in the eyes of many Deaf activists) combine signing with voiced speech, rank somewhat lower.”
 
The writer conveniently failed to mention the derisive word, ‘Muggles’  was coined by a hearing CODA highly critical of Deaf Community.  Voicing along with ASL is an impossibility. This writer confuses this with SimCom and Total Communication. Again she shows her extreme ignorance.
 
The role of bloodlines and pedigree in defining Deafness, along with the relatively small number of deaf people in the United States to begin with, helps explain the unusually active and even incestuous part that Gallaudet alumni, deaf parents, and even supposedly neutral organizations such as the National Association of the Deaf played in the battle against Fernandes.
 
Incestuous? Now this writer is slandering against the Deaf Community. The Deaf Community is very small, separated by only one or two degrees, which she conveniently overlooks again.
 
“Those who style themselves as Deaf can often seem obsessed with genealogy, and also with other deaf people’s (as well as hearing people’s) fluency in ASL. During the height of the Gallaudet protest last fall, Ridor Live, a blog operated by Gallaudet graduate Ricky Taylor, listed detailed analyses of the ASL abilities of every member of the university’s board of trustees, some of whom are hearing”
 
The writer generalizes the comments of one blogger who claims to be the most controversial deaf blogger to the whole Deaf Community?

Other recent Gallaudet alumni recall that in the student cafeteria, fluent ASL-users ate only with each other, relegating deaf and hard-of-hearing students with other communications styles to their own beta tables.
 
The nature of young people is to hang around with their peers whom they feel most comfortable with.  Hearing people do that, but yet deaf people are raked over the coals for doing the same thing? Get it straight. None of the students are relegated to beta status. Everybody choose the seating arrangement.  Again the writer’s prejudice against deaf people is transparent.

“One of the women in Liza Mundy’s Washington Post story delivered a resentful tongue-lashing in ASL to her hearing father for having given her a speech-based education as a child–right in front of reporter Mundy”
 
Obviously the writer hasn’t factored in that this oral method wasn’t an effective communication method for the deaf woman who may have missed a lot for one simple reason: For the best lipreaders, lipreading is only 30% accessible, with a lot of guesswork to fill in the gaps. The majority of deaf students cannot read lips proficiently, much to the detrimental of their education and social development.
 
Before returning to Gallaudet last fall, he (Ryan Commerson) went on an eight-day hunger strike to try to force the Michigan School for the Deaf, where he was teaching, to adopt an ASL-only policy.
 
The fact that MSD’s education was already very abysmal wasn’t mentioned in the article
 
“Indeed, the Gallaudet course catalogue, while enshrining ASL and encouraging all students to learn the language, promises at the same time to “respect the sign language style of every individual and use whatever is necessary to communicate in a given situation.”

The reality is that ASL is rarely used on campus. Many professors and staff don’t use ASL, but SimCom.  The quality of many professors’ signing skills, approximately 60%, is rated between fair and poor, making it difficult for students to follow the lectures, according to many students I spoke with. Unfortunately it’s not unusual to see staff who are not able to sign at all.

“Practically speaking also, the Pidgin Sign compromise allows both fluent and novice ASL-users among students to understand their professors and participate in class.”

Again this is incorrect. Pidgin Sign (PSE) permits novice ASL users to understand the professors. However, PSE  frequently leaves out fluent ASL users without lipreading skills, unable to understand their professors and participate in the classes.

In a letter to the Washington Post after Fernandes’s removal, Kathleen Wood, a hearing Gallaudet English professorwho participated in the protest, labeled those students who objected to an ASL-only policy as “resisters,”and stated that Gallaudet ought to be reserved for “users and seekers of Deaf culture and ASL skills.”
 
I was told by several sources that this letter was heavily edited by biased Washington Post editors, distorting the actual meaning of the letter.
 
The 2005 Education Department report that called Gallaudet “ineffective” noted that enrollment has been drifting downward, from more than 2,000 students in 1999 to today’s 1,800 or so (which means that every year it costs the U.S. government more per capita to educate a Gallaudet student), while the number of deaf and hard-of-hearing college students overall has remained stable.
 
Writer again omitted the fact Fernandes was the provost during these years 
  
In 2002, 758 high school seniors applied to Gallaudet; by 2006, that number had shrunk to 539. Fernandes says that she and other administrators had been working to improve the university’s appeal, tightening academic standards, setting up an honors program, and aggressively recruiting. Then the turmoil hit. The number of new Gallaudet students (freshmen and transfer students), which had reached a record 351 in the fall of 2005,
 
Again the omission of Fernandes’ role as a provost

email contact: mishkazena@aol.com

Copyright Mishkazena (TM) 2007

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Gallaudet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.