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| Bill (aka Mr. I Love the Sound of My Own Voice),
Here's a hypothetical situation:
Larry Bird's daughter turns out to be deaf. Larry himself calls you and tells you that his daughter is your biggest fan and desperately wants to enjoy your PodCasts. He asks you to have them transcribed.
The guess how fast you'd make sure that your PodCasts are transcribed AND have a team working on transcribing all past PodCasts for the archives? I say 2.7 minutes but thats only allowing time for you to call one of your friends with ridiculous nicknames like Toad or Cabin or whatever to tell him first before calling your boss at ESPN.
I've been emailing you about this for almost three years. So I'm not Larry Bird's effing daughter. What am I, dog food?
For once and for all, TRANSCRIBE YOUR PODCASTS.
That is all,
Jesse Thomas
Everybody, send your own message to Bill here or tweet him at @sportsguy33. | | |
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Dear Jesse,
Thank you for taking time to write to me.
I appreciate your thoughtful comments and for sharing the information and insights on ASL. I am going to look into the ASL issue further. Again, I appreciate you sharing your perspective and insights. I am going to do further research on the issue (believe it or not, your response is very informative and helpful to me) and I hope to re-visit the issue in a future column.
Sincerely,
Dom Giordano
Is he blowing smoke up my ass? Time will tell. | | |
| Hello, my name is Jesse Thomas and I am the Outreach and Technology specialist here at the Deaf-Hearing Communication Centre in Swarthmore, PA and a graduate with a degree in history from Gallaudet University, the only Deaf university in the world. I felt compelled to email you in regards to your badly informed article about why ASL is not a foreign language.
1) ASL is NOT easier to learn, as students quickly discover.
2) ASL IS a rich language and has been proven as such many times over. This leads me to my next point...
3) Deaf Culture IS a culture. There are many other criteria other than wearing specific kinds of clothes and eating specific kinds of cultural food. Our shared history, language, ASL literature and common experiences are among the things that bind us together as a culture.
4) While we are Americans, we are in many ways we are foreigners living in America and your ignorant article actually helped to illustrate this very phenomenon.
5) Did it even occur to you to consult with, you know, actual Deaf people, ASL teachers and Deaf scholars (such as the Deaf Studies and ASL department at Gallaudet University) for more information before writing your poorly researched article? Clearly you did not.
Again, it is ironic that by writing an article saying we are not foreigners, you are actually reinforcing the point - by way of your disconnect and lack of understanding and knowledge - that we ARE, in fact, in more ways than one, foreigners living in America.
I could go on and on but on a final note, the sheer cluelessness of hearing people as a whole continues to amuse, amaze and, yes, anger those of us in the Deaf community. All over the country, deaf people are forwarding, tweeting and posting on their facebook pages your article and not only laughing at you but also being extremely irked by your statements, which in our view are extremely dense and ill informed. Not to mention extremely presumptuous, audist (audism is to deaf people what racism is to people of color) and paternalistic.
We have suffered centuries of this type of attitude and paternalistic behavior by our hearing oppressors and you have just joined the party. I hope you're proud of yourself.
I hope you will actually process these words, however biting they may be.
Thank you,
Jesse Thomas
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| I had planned on a lengthy introduction but I realized that Ryan Commerson has pretty much covered it. In response to my blog last week, he emailed me requesting his thoughts to be posted on my blog, probably due to its fairly high readership (to date, 509 people have read my previous blog about the Gallaudet president search process). I am honoring his request; nobody cares more about Gallaudet than he. I'll never forget pitching my tent in that October morning - this time it was he, not David Day and I, that pitched the very first tent of Tent City. In any case, this introduction is quickly putting my words in my mouth and growing lengthy but there is one more thing. Please, I beseech you, those of you in DC and Kendall Green please send me (powhog@gmail.com) your observations of the whole Presidential search process. Have you seen the presentations? What is the vibe on campus? Give me something to blog about. Now, without further ado, please read what Mr. Commerson has to say:
Posted with permission from commerson.blogspot.com.
Dynamic President to Represent Paradigm Shift
Followers
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2009
Bittersweet nostalgia...
The recent announcement of the Presidential finalists brought back some great memories as well as some ugly ones. The great memories lie in the students' revolutionary resolve to follow through with their movement despite the odds stacked against them. How the community managed to harness their own internal fire to achieve something seemingly impossible is no small thing, and it has transformed many of us in positive ways, some of which are still being felt today. The ugly memories are of the blatant arrogance exhibited by the campus security officers, certain Board members, and of Irving K. Jordan's manipulation and distortion of the media spin on the real reasons of the protest. Also, probably the ugliest memory of all is the fraction on campus regarding racism, sexism, and audism that were evident and pervasive throughout the Presidential Search Process and the Protest from the beginning to the end. The administrators' cowardly unwillingness to allow the community members to engage in meaningful dialogue to hash out the attitudes, perceptions, as well as the misconceptions ended up bringing Gallaudet's morale to an all time low.
Much damage has been done and not a lot was done to allow healing to take place. The university’s accreditation was nearly revoked due to Jordan and Fernandes's failure to do their job. Thanks to Davila's fiscal conservativeness and solid old school principled leadership, he steered the ship out of Fernandes’s 'Perfect Storm' rhetoric. Let us extend our heartfelt thanks to Davila and the committed faculty, staff, students, and alumni's hard work in revamping the curriculum, as well as the creation of the new mission statement that was long overdue, and the development of the strategic goals with stronger teeth.
Now Gallaudet has been steered and aligned in place for a world of possibilities, we must ask: Where do we go from here?
Before we ponder this question, we need to think of a response to a question that Dr. Dirksen Bauman presented to his graduate students as part of a final exam for one of his classes in 2007: Is deafness worth preserving?
That very question was like a razor slicing through a thick shroud of naive hopefulness and superficiality that lay behind the "Deaf Culture Cherish Must!" rally cry that was oft seen for the past two or three decades.
"Deafness" is synonymous for 'calamity' in the eyes of the world's ideology. It's the worst thing that can happen to anybody, according to popular medical/audiological belief.
With the rise of cochlear implants and the increased popularity of AVT (auditory verbal therapy) which philosophy is to teach babies how to "listen" and "speak" using their CI’s without any visual 'assistance' including sign language, more and more deaf babies are being aggressively discouraged from learning sign language based on gross ideological misconceptions.
Now, another question we must ask is: Who will attend Gallaudet in 15 - 20 years?
Ok... the burning question: Who should be the next President of Gallaudet?
I don't have a clear preference. I believe that all the candidates have the potential to lead Gallaudet. However, who is the right one for NOW? Which one of them has a keen understanding of where we are now, and how we should 'define' what 'deaf' entails? Because of the current framework in asking what 'deaf' means, we continue to see low literacy rates among deaf children in both ASL and English, we continue to see Deaf Education programs being run without accountability, we continue to see attacks on American Sign Language for deaf babies (despite popularity among hearing babies), we continue to see low employment rates for deaf people, and perhaps most pressing of all is that deaf people have zero political clout.
What has Gallaudet done about all this? Historically, not a damn thing. Gallaudet resisted recognizing the bilingual nature of the university until 2007 in its mission statement despite William Stokoe's breakthrough research in 1965, in addition to a widely published acclaim by numerous researchers for multilingualism. Gallaudet resisted training teachers in Bilingual Education until after 2001. Gallaudet is a multi-million funded dollar institute and therefore in a position to have a significant influence on the ideological shift in the human consciousness regarding "D-E-A-F" and yet, does the university flex its muscles? No.
This is a proposition, or perhaps, a challenge to the Board to pick a President who has the guts to stand up to the world and sign "YAWP!!!" We need a visionary for a President, who will not resort to reactive and defensive decisions in responding to the future "demographics" as a result of the continuing onslaught brought on by ideological misconceptions. The resonance of Pierre Desloges, Agatha Tiegel Hanson, and Andrew Foster must be felt as the next President takes charge in leading Gallaudet into the realm of coming up with an innovative framework. If the next President of Gallaudet does not have what it takes to lead this potentially fine institute of higher education and create a paradigm shift on what it means to be human, then we should begin preparing for its vigil. It is up to the Board and the next President to either bow to the current ideology or grab it boldly and entice it to dance as if nobody's watching.
Respectfully yours,
Ryan Commerson
'01 and G '08 | | |
| Ladies, Germs, Tweeps and Facebook Fiends,
Much to my dismay nobody, as far as I can tell (someone gladden my heart by correcting me if I am wrong, please), is blogging about the Gallaudet Presidential Search process occurring at Kendall Green this week and next week. It brought me back to the days when we cried, sweated, bled, were traumatized and in Brian Morrison's case, lost a toenail, for the Protest because we did not want the status quo. Jane K. Fernandes, her personality and leadership flaws notwithstanding, represented the status quo. Our lack of confidence in the status quo, ironically, was validated when the MSCHE hammer came down on Gallaudet. Remarkable work by the faculty, students and Provost Dr. Steve Weiner has since mostly relieved the pressure of the MSCHE. Considering all that, the lack of attention to the current process, at least from my end as someone who is not on campus, is very odd to me.
That being said, I took it upon myself to take up the PSAC's invitation to email them at psac@gallaudet.edu with my thoughts. I have not seen any of the candidates' presentations and frankly, I don't have to. I saw the presentation by Dr. Ron Stern prior to Fernandes' selection. He floored me. He was inspiring, charismatic, remarkably intelligent, exuded confidence and humility at the same time and presented himself as a genuine visionary. This is more or less what I told the PSAC (the email I sent is copy and pasted below, fear not). I'd like to add that I have enormous respect for Dr. Steve Weiner and Dr. Roz Rosen, but I am confident that Ron Stern is the man for the job if Gallaudet truly wants to take the next step as an university, as a mecca for deaf people and as a stalwart we can all depend on and look on for inspiration worldwide. Today in an email a friend whose views I hold in high esteem remarked:
"I have been hearing more and more that the Gallaudet community wants a "college" person, but that is bs. I do know that Ron has wowed the community his first time around, and now he's not college enough? come on.
I remember reading somewhere and I am pretty sure it was Harvard (maybe not but one of them top ivy league schools). They hired a young (40-50 years old) man who did not have a PhD[Dr. Stern does have a PhD in Educational leadership] or collegiate managerial experience. He was not even in a college system but, you know - was hired because of his visionary leadership. And if they can do that and if they are happy with the hire, why not Gallaudet?"
I agree with my friend. Dr. Stern presents at Gallaudet tomorrow (Thursday, September 24) and I have a feeling he will "wow" everybody again, so to speak. Let's hope the Board of Trustees is more attuned to Gallaudet than it was a few years ago and I pray that the Board of Trustees will choose the visionary, the born leader unafraid to try new things. Because, my friends, that is what every University needs in this rapidly changing world and for Gallaudet this is even more - and urgently - so. Here is my email to the PSAC:
"Dear the PSAC and Board of Trustees,
I would like to express my sincere hope that the Board of Trustees will not immerse itself into the muck of evaluating each candidate's "paper achievements." It should be assumed, that since these 4 candidates reached this point, that they are all qualified in this sense.
What we should be looking for is a forward thinking visionary that will lead Gallaudet into the 20th century and claim its rightful place in the Deaf-World. The Board of Trustees may be tempted to make a "safe pick," such as the currently entrenched Steve Weiner, and this may be the correct decision. However, they should not limit themselves to this option. Steve Weiner might be best situated by continuing as the Provost, where he has done an excellent job. In addition, I have always felt that Gallaudet should exert more influence on improving the dismal state of Deaf education in America. In this instance, a wealth of precollege experience might be a huge plus.
Do not be afraid, dear Board of Trustees, to select someone with true leadership potential, a visionary leader with a creative intelligence capable of embracing and trying new ideas. Gallaudet would benefit greatly from a breath of fresh air and the inspirational, forward thinking leader that is Dr. Ronald Stern. That being said, I would like to assert that Dr. Steve Weiner and Dr. Roz Rosen would make interesting and intelligent choices as well. It would be nice if all three could end up at Gallaudet somehow - if one wins, the other two should be lured to Gallaudet to hold high posts. That, indeed, would be a "dream team." Shouldn't Gallaudet, after all, have the best that the Deaf community has to offer? And not just one of the three best, but all three?
Dr. Ronald Stern may not be viewed as a "safe pick," but I believe he is. He brings to the table the persona of the truly energetic, fresh and creative leadership that Gallaudet needs to stride confidently into the 21st century. Hopefully all the three people I mentioned above, and perhaps Dr. Hurwitz (whom I admittedly don't know enough about to make a judgement ), can form Gallaudet's first-ever "dream team." In this case, the dream team's mission would not be to merely win a gold medal but, to hammer this point home, to usher Gallaudet into the future and realize its full potential and place in not only the Deaf-World but in the world, period.
Thank you,
Jesse Thomas
Class of 2009"
For those of you in DC (Including those of you not blogging; too bad Elisa Abencuhan (now Vita, I believe) no longer lives in DC) observing the process, feel free to email me your tidbits and observations at powhog@aol.com and I will compile them in my blogs in an attempt to take up some of the slack in the blogging void that is Washington DC.
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