Program for Deaf at CSUN Under Fire : Education: Students say loss of skilled sign-language interpreters has hampered their ability to learn. Administrators blame shortage of funds.

Amy Yu didn’t hesitate five years ago when she had the chance to leave her Bay Area home and attend Cal State Northridge.

Yu, who is deaf, knew CSUN’s reputation for running one of the largest and most respected university programs for deaf students in the country.

Now, as a senior, Yu is disillusioned. Many of the most talented sign-language interpreters who enabled her to fully participate in classes have been replaced by novices, she said.

“I’m lucky if I get enough information out of the classes to pass,” Yu said.

Students, staff members and union officials at CSUN’s once-lauded National Center on Deafness are complaining the operation has fallen on hard times and has lost talented interpreters amid complaints of low pay and difficult working conditions.

In the mid-1960s, the Northridge campus became one of the first mainstream universities to accept deaf students. The center was founded in 1972 and today runs on a $1.8-million budget, about $1 million of it in federal funds.

With talks on a revised union contract stalled, a delegation of interpreters, union representatives and deaf students aired their complaints last week before the Cal State University system’s board of trustees.

Administrators at the center, which has about 250 deaf students and 130 interpreters, were not present at the meeting. They later conceded the general decline, although they disputed specific issues.

Director Herbert Larson blamed a shortage of funds for the loss of experienced interpreters. “It’s hard to maintain the good quality if you’re not able to support it,” he said.

Interpreters are a lifeline to learning for deaf students, conveying class discussions and speaking for many who cannot talk. CSUN’s deaf population is one of the largest among American universities. By comparison, UCLA has only 10 deaf students, CSUN officials said.

CSUN has suffered a mass exodus of talented interpreters in recent years, the delegation charged, due to Cal State personnel practices that deny many interpreters health benefits and pay them hourly wages that are half what some earn elsewhere.

The total number of interpreters at the campus has not declined. But among the 80 or so who work full time, the portion at the highest skill levels has fallen from about 20 to just a handful, interpreters said.

Interpreters joined the California State Employees Assn., which also represents other Cal State system employees, in 1992. When the union and the system signed a new two-year general contract in mid-1993, they agreed to hold separate talks for the interpreters.

But more than a year has passed with little progress reported. Noel Grogan, the Cal State system’s director of human resources, expressed sympathy for the complaints, but said money is tight. “If there is more money going to the interpreters, there is less going somewhere else,” he said.

Meanwhile, many of CSUN’s deaf students complain that the problems are depriving them of the full benefit of a university education, which federal law guarantees to the disabled.

“It’s deeply affected me because I have a lot of questions and I want to participate in class,” said John Sherwood, a senior. “But if I can’t have direct interaction with my instructors, I lose that.”

“When I need to give oral presentations and participate, the interpreters have a lot of problems,” said LisaAnn Tom, a graduate student who began studying at CSUN in 1985 as a freshman. “If the interpreter keeps asking me to repeat myself, I lose the flow of what I’m saying.”

Students said interpreters generally do well translating the comments of instructors and other students in classes into sign language, which deaf students can understand. That is relatively easy for most interpreters because they are listening to their own language, spoken English.

The larger problem has been the tougher job of converting the sign language that many deaf students use into spoken words that others can understand. When those problems arise, students say, they feel isolated and left out of their classes.

“I want a complete education. I don’t want to miss out on anything. I want good interpreters so I can get it all,” said Yu, who is majoring in deaf studies. “I feel like I’m behind my non-deaf peers.”

All but a handful of the interpreters at CSUN are considered intermittent employees paid between about $7 and $21 an hour with no health benefits, according to the union. Other employers are paying up to $40 an hour for people with similar skills, according to a survey of companies in the field.

Professionals say interpreters generally cannot effectively work alone for more than 20 to 30 minutes in the physically and mentally demanding job without being relieved for a similar period. So a common strategy has been “team interpreting,” in which two people continuously take turns.

But because CSUN lacks the funds, team interpreting is rarely used, even in classes that run for two to three hours. CSUN has instead taken a modified approach, using partial work-sharing in some of the longest classes. Larson, the center’s director, defends the practice, but the interpreters denounce it.

Gary Sanderson, a staff member, said that at one point about a third of the center’s interpreters had filed workers’ compensation claims complaining of repetitive-motion injuries. But center officials said such problems could be due to interpreters overworking at other jobs.

CSUN interpreters are “woefully underpaid,” according to Jane Jarrow, executive director of the Assn. on Higher Education and Disability.

Two-person team interpreting is commonly used and is preferred, said Jarrow, who heads an 1,800-member group of educators who deal with disabilities.

“The answer is the budget’s got to go up. We’re talking about students’ basic civil rights here,” Jarrow said.

Larson expressed surprise at students’ complaints, saying such dissatisfaction had not surfaced before in student evaluations. He attributed it partly to the union.

However, he conceded that the pay and working-conditions issues have cost the center talented staff. But he said the center is caught in a squeeze. Its interpreting budget, about $238,000, has remained flat for years while its hours of service have risen 23% since 1990, he said.