CSUN Rally Echoes With Deaf Power : Students Salute Solidarity With Their Gallaudet Peers

Even the most uninformed person could have deciphered the gesture making the rounds among deaf students at Cal State Northridge last week. It was the deaf power salute--one hand held to an ear and the other raised as a fist in the air.

The salute symbolized the solidarity among students at CSUN’s National Center on Deafness with their counterparts at Gallaudet University in Washington, the nation’s only liberal arts college for the hearing-impaired.

Gallaudet students boycotted classes to protest the selection of a school president who was not deaf. They demanded that the president’s replacement be deaf. Faculty and staff quickly joined the protest, bringing the campus of 2,100 students to a standstill.

Last week, the CSUN deafness center became a Gallaudet annex of sorts. The center provides counselors and interpreters to CSUN’s 213 deaf students, many of whom filled a small lounge to talk about the demands made by demonstrators in Washington and to await word of the latest developments.

On Monday, the CSUN students were jubilant upon learning that the Gallaudet board of trustees had named I. King Jordan, formerly a dean at the university, to become its first deaf president. Equally important to them was the resignation of board Chairwoman Jane Bassett Spilman.

Their Washington counterparts at last had attained parity with the CSUN students. It is a point of pride at CSUN that the center’s top two administrators, Victor Galloway and Herbert Larson, are deaf, as are some counselors at the center and several CSUN teachers.

Deaf Opportunity

“It’s great for the deaf students because it shows there’s opportunity,” said Lori Hennessey, 22.

Both Galloway, director of the center, and Larson, administrator of support services, said they supported the protest at Gallaudet and expect it to lead to more activism among the deaf.

“We’ve always fought for our rights, but we’re much more united now,” Larson said.

A 1956 graduate of Gallaudet, Larson said a protest such as last week’s could not have taken place even in the 1960s, when the deaf pride movement began and radicalism was in vogue.

The reasons, he said, are twofold: Doors to responsible positions opened so slowly for the hearing-impaired that the Gallaudet demands would have been unthinkably strong, and it is only in the last decade that large numbers of the deaf have received the advanced degrees necessary for top jobs.

“In the 1960s I got a job teaching in the Anaheim school system,” Larson said. “It was the first time in California that someone deaf had taught in a mainstream setting, and you should have heard the reaction. ‘A deaf person working in a regular school; it’s impossible,’ people said.”

Galloway was chosen in 1986 to become the first hearing-impaired director of the CSUN deafness center. He said deaf administrators are under some pressure to demonstrate on the job that they weren’t hired because of their disability.

Of the six candidates for the CSUN post, “two of us were hearing-impaired,” he said. “When I was selected, they told me repeatedly that I was selected because of qualifications, not necessarily because I was hearing-impaired.”

Galloway said that injustices in hiring still exist in the Los Angeles area.

“It’s mostly in education,” he said. “In the Los Angeles Unified School District and the county school systems, I cannot think of a hearing-impaired person in a high administrative position.”

Representatives of the two school systems said they are unaware of any deaf people in top administrative positions.

Cheers Over Demands

At CSUN, cheers went up Friday when word came that the first two of the Gallaudet demands had been met. School President Elisabeth Ann Zinser had resigned, and the school’s trustees had agreed not to punish students, faculty or staff who played a role in closing the 124-year-old college.

But Sunday’s events--the naming of a deaf president and the resignation of trustee chairman Spilman--were an even larger victory.

Spilman was perceived as an archenemy by deaf students at CSUN and at Gallaudet. Her resignation had been one of the protesters’ demands.

“She’s been there nine years, and she hasn’t learned sign” language, said CSUN student Roxanne Clanin, 26. “What does that say about her involvement with deaf people?”

During last week’s controversy, Spilman said the deaf are not equipped to enter mainstream life. Although she later claimed she had meant to say just the opposite, few in the deaf community believed her. Two Gallaudet students visited CSUN last week, taking with them the popular signing gesture for Spilman’s name--a motion that translates as “throw-up man.”

The protesters’ fourth and last demand, that more than half the members of the Gallaudet board of trustees be deaf, remains unresolved.

Harvey Corson, who holds a master’s degree from CSUN and is one of four deaf people on the 20-member board, said a congressional commission has recommended that Congress insist on a hearing-impaired majority on the governing body of any federally funded institution for the deaf. No action has been taken on the recommendation.

Gallaudet receives 75% of its $76-million budget in federal funds.

Although deaf students at CSUN overwhelmingly backed the Gallaudet protest, its successful conclusion left some with reservations.

Pressure on Deaf

“I’m worried it’s going to put more pressure on a deaf president,” said Byron Bridges, 29. “It’s going to be a glass house at Gallaudet. Now, if the deaf president makes one mistake, people will say, ‘Well, there it is.’ ”

“I can see that President Zinser (who resigned) has high qualifications in PR and fund raising,” said Sandra Thrapp, 29. “That’s very important. Most deaf people don’t know how to do fund raising because hearing people have done that.”

Kerry Manol, 22, said such reasoning reflects paternalism, which sentences deaf people to second-class status.

“I was the only deaf person in elementary school through 10th grade, and I was limited all the time,” he said. “I was told, ‘You can’t do that, you’re deaf.’ Now they’re saying the same thing about a deaf person being president of Gallaudet.”

One who believes the hearing-impaired can raise funds is Gallaudet board member Corson. He is a 1970 graduate of the CSUN deafness center’s National Leadership Training Program and superintendent of the Louisiana School for the Deaf. Together with Zinser and her deaf replacement, Jordan, Corson was a finalist for the Gallaudet presidency.

“All my administrative jobs for the last 15 years did require me to be involved in fund raising,” he said, adding that he and others raised $35 million for new buildings and facilities at the Louisiana school.

Corson said that only one of the 16 non-deaf Gallaudet trustees can communicate in sign language. That fact was a sore point among students at both schools.

“It seems ridiculous that they don’t even know sign,” said Andy Anderson, 21, president of the Deaf CSUNians. “For knowing deaf culture, the depth of it, that takes five years or so. But how is a hearing person going to begin to relate to the students without knowing sign language?”