Word: asl
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...students hear it. Gallaudet is the country's foremost college for deaf people. When Jim Haynes, at work nearby, instructs his philosophy class that "Plato argued that the concept behind this desk is more real than the physical thing itself," he does so manually, in crisp American Sign Language (ASL). His 12 students watch his hands intently, with the exception of a girl who is deaf and almost blind. She focuses on an interpreter, who repeats Haynes' signs a foot from her face, providing a level of service that would be remarkable at most colleges but is commonplace here...
...human community is Eden. In addition to America's usual dividers--race, class, religion, sexual orientation--the students face lingering, debilitating fears of powerlessness and exclusion and wage often bitter linguistic debates over topics abstruse to the hearing world--ASL vs. cued speech; mainstreaming vs. specialized education; and the use of cochlear implants, surgically installed devices that counter some deafness. But until this year, Fernandes was convinced that the school's overriding bond of deaf solidarity would inevitably prevail...
...issue got nasty. A national gay-rights group announced that anti-gay activity on campus added up to a pattern of harassment. At an event called Enrichment Day, a Baptist participant sparked the ASL equivalent of a shouting match when she argued, within weeks of Plunkett's death, that God would not allow a homosexual into heaven. Gay students feared walking on campus alone. The university quickly took a hard line on anti-gay speech. Jordan wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post asserting, "If deaf people ought to know about one thing, it is the importance...
...campus' six dormitories. At each, students met her by the hundreds. "They were yelling. They were arguing. They were crying," she says. They hurled frantic questions. Was a murderer among them? Was she going to cancel any classes? Would the school close down? After each answer, interpreters shouted her ASL into speech for the hard-of-hearing who did not sign; others pressed her words tactilely into the hands of the deaf and blind. At one dorm the oversize crowd spilled outside, and Fernandes signed in the halo of a sidewalk light, her audience spread out into the darkness...
...great genius of deaf activism over the past half-century has been to develop the idea that rather than a disability, deafness--especially among ASL speakers--can constitute a separate culture as rich as any based on a spoken language. Nobody who spends more than a day or two at Gallaudet would debate that assertion. Nor would anybody doubt that the community enjoys a rare, fond solidarity, which may be traceable to the fact that many deaf people spend their first decade or two in an ocean of hearing people, isolated from others like themselves. Says freshman Stephen Farias: "When...