I Can Hear You Whisper (34 page)

He came in 1974 as a sophomore, and the higher level of communication was eye-opening. “I was able to meet classmates who understood what I was thinking,” he says emphatically. But the professors were a different story. Predominantly hearing or late-deafened, many professors had low opinions of the students, he says. “They were very paternalistic.” A prejudice in favor of those with strong verbal skills coursed through the university, a situation Weiner likens to the light skin/dark skin divide in the black community in earlier times. Howard University, a historically black school, is only a few miles up the road from Gallaudet. “The lighter your skin at Howard, the better off you were,” says Weiner, noting that when he saw a photograph of Mordecai Johnson, who served as Howard's first black president from 1926 through 1960, he thought he was white. In the deaf community, he maintains, “we still have that problem.”

Weiner found mentors in the handful of deaf professors who really inspired him, like a World War II refugee who earned a master's in history at Georgetown University after arriving in the States. In her history class, he says, “she wasn't interested in having us learn dates. We talked about cause and effect, about the abstract not the tangible. She can't talk worth a damn, but she knew inside each one of us we could succeed if expectations were set high enough.”

Weiner has high expectations for Gallaudet. He locates the roots of the problems that led to the university's probation in the conflicting messages students like him received there. It was at once a place of inspiration and community but also a somewhat limiting box where the bar of achievement was low. “The 1988 protest was a watershed event,” he says. It was also “the moment when we could have changed things.” By the early 2000s, however, it was clear that not much had changed beyond the fact that the school had a deaf president. “There were students who had no business being here—they couldn't graduate—and there were professors with low standards,” says Weiner. “By the time the 2006 protests began, our dirty laundry was out for everyone to see.”

His first day as provost in July 2007 was the day that the Middle States Commission on Higher Education put the university on probation. Choosing to see it as an opportunity to do things differently, Weiner dedicated himself to changing the ethos. The current president of Gallaudet, T. Alan Hurwitz, came in 2010 from Rochester, where he was president of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. He is very highly regarded but was recovering from surgery when I was on campus, so we didn't meet. Together, Weiner and Hurwitz and their colleagues have tightened standards by requiring higher scores on the ACT standardized admissions test; brought in new staff, including what Weiner calls “top-of-the-line” professors from places like MIT, Harvard, and Columbia; and instituted evidence-based metrics for measuring success. Much effort has been put into diversity, which at Gallaudet includes hearing status. “About fifteen years ago, during a panel discussion on cochlear implants, I raised this idea that in ten to fifteen years, Gallaudet is going to look different,” says Weiner. “There was a lot of resistance. Now, especially the new generation, they don't care anymore.”
Gallaudet does look different. In addition to more cochlear implants, there are more hearing students on campus, mostly enrolled in graduate programs for interpreting and audiology. Both of these new groups do best if they have or quickly acquire proficiency in ASL.

The hard decisions Weiner has had to make as provost have dented his popularity on campus, but he says, “At least I'm honest about the state we're in.” On some fronts, that state is much improved. Before 2007, barely half the freshman class made it to sophomore year. In the past four years, the freshman retention rate has ranged from 70 to 75 percent. The latest strategic plan sets a goal of a 50-percent graduation rate. Enrollment is still lower than it was, but Weiner insists the quality of the student body is higher. One sign of Gallaudet's improving status is that today Weiner sits on accreditation committees to evaluate other universities. “It shows they have trust in us,” he says.

“I want deaf students here to see everyone as their peers, whether they have a cochlear implant or are hard of hearing, can talk or can't talk. I have friends who are oral. I have one rule: We're not going to try to convert one another. We're going to work together to improve the life of our people. The word ‘our' is important. That's what this place will be and must be. Otherwise, why bother?”

Not everyone on campus agrees with him. “We still have what you might call the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Libertarians,” he says. “Some faculty say we should all be deaf, others say we need a mix. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree, but I certainly enjoy the diversity of opinions. The day any university becomes groupthink is the day America ceases to function as a real community.”

At the end of our time together on my first visit, Weiner hopped up to shake my hand.

“I really want to thank you again for taking time to meet with me and making me feel so welcome,” I say.

“There are people here who were nervous about me talking to you,” he admits. “I think it's important to talk.”

So I make a confession of my own. “I was nervous about coming to Gallaudet as the parent of a child with a cochlear implant,” I say. “I didn't know how I'd be treated.”

He smiles, reaches up above his right ear, and flips the coil of a cochlear implant off his head. I hadn't realized it was there, hidden in his brown hair. Our entire conversation had been through the interpreter. He seems pleased that he has managed to surprise me.

“I was one of the first culturally Deaf people to get one.”

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Perhaps it's not surprising that most of the people who talk to me at Gallaudet turn out to have a relatively favorable view of cochlear implants. Irene Leigh doesn't have one, but she is among the Gallaudet professors who have devoted the most time to thinking about them. When we met, she was about to retire as chair of the psychology department after more than twenty years there. A successful product of oral deaf and then mainstream education, Leigh's ability to cope in the hearing world was evident at an early age. Her parents were German refugees who immigrated to the United States a few years after the end of World War II, and her mother made the mistake of mentioning to the immigration inspector on the ship that her daughter was deaf. After an anxious night in detention at Ellis Island, Leigh's parents asked her to draw a tree and other childish subjects for the officials when their case was presented the next day. She followed her parents' spoken instructions beautifully, even though her father's German accent was so thick “you could cut it with a knife.” The immigration officer allegedly exclaimed: “My four-year-old grandson can't do that!” And she was in. “I tell people my deafness got me into Ellis Island and it got me out.”

For years, Leigh worked at Lexington School for the Deaf as a teacher, then as a counselor and therapist, earning a master's in counseling and a doctorate in clinical psychology along the way. She began signing in her twenties (and got her first interpreter in 1980, when she started her PhD program) and arrived at Gallaudet's psychology department in 1991. Her interest in cochlear implants came early.

“I tend to be a very modern, flexible person,” she tells me. “In New York after I got my doctorate, I became a consultant for a cochlear implant program in Manhattan. I got very interested in why people were so opposed.” At Gallaudet, she and sociology professor John Christiansen teamed up in the late 1990s to (gingerly) write a book about parent perspectives on cochlear implants for children; it was published in 2002. Immersed as they both were in Gallaudet's culture, they were sensitive to all the issues. At that time, she says, “A good number of the parents labeled the Deaf community as being misinformed about the merits of cochlear implants and not understanding or respecting the parents' perspective.” For their part, the Deaf community at Gallaudet was beginning to get used to the idea, but true supporters were few and far between. In 2011, Leigh served as an editor with Raylene Paludneviciene of a follow-up book examining how perspectives had evolved. By then, culturally Deaf adults who had received implants were no longer viewed as automatic traitors, they wrote. Opposition to pediatric implants was “
gradually giving way to a more nuanced view.” The new emphasis on bilingualism and biculturalism, says Leigh, is not so much a change as a continuing fight for validation. The goal of most in the community is to establish a path that allows implant users to still enjoy a Deaf identity. Leigh echoes the inclusive view of Steve Weiner when she says, “There are many ways of being deaf.”

 • • • 

When I knocked on the open door of Sam Swiller's office, he saw me rather than heard me. Engrossed in his computer and a pile of architectural plans, he looked up, said hello, and reached up to turn on his cochlear implant. Like his brother Josh, Swiller is not deaf in the expected Gallaudet way. He grew up speaking and listening with hearing aids and didn't get a cochlear implant until he was twenty-nine. “The absolute clarity of a windshield wiper blew my mind for days,” he says with a laugh. Born in 1975, he was already nearly a teenager when the clinical trials for cochlear implants began. His parents thought the technology crude and were suspicious because the strongest proponents seemed to be surgeons, who had something to gain from promoting a surgery.

Growing up with hearing loss made the normal teenage difficulties worse, says Swiller. “You lose your personality a little bit because you're so focused on making sense of what's being said to you. You have to work harder; it's stressful. The excitement of speaking to a cute girl, it gets magnified. Am I pronouncing my ‘s' right? Am I spitting on her?”

He finally got the implant after his residual hearing deteriorated dramatically. “With hearing aids, I was able to hear maybe a third of what was spoken, then fill in the blanks,” he says. “The implant boosted that to about 60 percent. Now I'm aware more than ever of the 60 percent I missed. It's given me a huge boost in confidence and a little bit more of a boost in hearing. The CI is what I'm doing for myself to help myself. Now I have it, I think it's amazing. Life is difficult and you need every type of weapon in your quiver, every resource possible. It's not a solution for everyone. I'm not trying to put my ideas on anyone else.”

Even with his cochlear implant, he has found a professional home at Gallaudet, and much-needed comfort and ease. Before he got there, Swiller went through a difficult period in both his professional and personal life. “I was questioning my strategy of trying to find work in a very competitive financial field where, whether or not they are real, I'm perceived to have strikes against me,” he says of his hearing loss. Following his older brother's example, he came to Gallaudet, initially as a visiting professor in the business department. It was challenging on many levels, and the “hardest part by far was becoming proficient in ASL: I had to have an interpreter.” Still, he found himself enjoying this new environment. “I felt the students were giving me a lot and I was gaining a new perspective on what deafness was. It was a celebration and it was beautiful. In the past, I felt proud of what I'd overcome. But coming here, I was really celebrating it and growing in that regard.” He even found that little quirks he'd thought grew out of his own anxiety—like looking over his shoulder all the time—were common in everyone around him.

Now working as a vice president managing real estate for the university, Swiller is helping to open up the school to the outside world. For decades, the surrounding neighborhood in northeast Washington was dangerous enough to keep students mostly within the gates. But it's an area in the midst of a rebirth, especially along what's known as the H Street corridor, and Gallaudet happens to own real estate there. “The wall between the hearing world and the deaf world is getting shorter. It's a more porous border,” says Swiller. He was speaking metaphorically, but it could have been literal, too. “The students of your son's generation are going to be able to [cross] that border.”

 • • • 

When I left Swiller, I went to see Matthew Bakke, who heads Gallaudet's Department of Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences. Unlike everyone else I met at the university, Bakke is hearing, but he has been involved with deaf people his whole life. Growing up in the 1950s, he had a younger brother who was deaf. “He ended up essentially being a marginalized person because of his education and experiences,” says Bakke. “He went away to residential school at the age of three. Monday morning to Friday evening, he was gone. His education was oral even though he is profoundly deaf. A hearing aid did him almost no good. That was what was available.” After stints in the seminary and the army, Bakke gravitated, like a lot of siblings of deaf people, to being a teacher of the deaf and then an audiologist. His teaching experiences taught him the importance of beginning very early with children. When the children didn't get language early, he says, “the education was essentially futile. By the time I got them, they had missed so much.”

Initially, he was deeply skeptical that cochlear implants could possibly work. When he saw the video of Bill House and Jack Urban activating an early implant for Karen, the deaf young woman who listened to Beethoven, Bakke's reaction was not wonder but disgust. “I thought, ‘This is just not reality.' I felt they were exploiting her and it made me sick.” Then he went to a conference where he met a group of children with cochlear implants. “I saw what they were doing,” he says. “It was a Road to Damascus conversion. I had worked on oral English speech development. I knew how difficult it was. These kids weren't doing that great compared to what we see now, but it was orders of magnitude better than at the time. I said, ‘These work.'”