The History of Gallaudet University: 150 Years of a Deaf American Institution

Epilogue: A Sense of Place

179 Since the earliest days of deaf education in the United States, deaf people have described their arrival at school as finding a home, even though they were among strangers.1 For many of them, their school was the first place where they were not alone in a family of hearing people. Learning American Sign Language and living among other deaf people gave them a sense of place that led to the formation of the Deaf community. Now, almost two hundred years since the founding of the American School for the Deaf, societal and technological changes have resulted in the fragmentation of Deaf communities. Deaf people have moved out of their traditional occupations, such as printing, and into professions,including teaching,counseling, law, and computer programming. Changes in residential patterns have separated deaf people physically, and the technological revolution has allowed them to communicate with each other at a distance, rather than face-to-face.2 Communities and cultures are formed out of the innumerable encounters and the myriad negotiations and compromises that people engage in over time, measured in generations; and the construction of cultures has always relied upon physical proximity.We have already encountered anxiety about the future of Deaf communities and their sign languages in this book, and this raises the question,“If our sense of ‘place’is not derived from a physical space, how can our community be maintained?”3 Carol Padden and Jennifer Rayman have given this considerable thought, and they assert that greater importance will accrue to Gallaudet University as a physical meeting place for deaf people in the face of all the new challenges that the future will certainly bring. [There is] a photograph on the wall of the president’s residence at Gallaudet University. It was taken most likely in the late 1880s or early 1890s, a panoramic wide shot of the main grounds of the campus, from the President’s House to Faculty Row and includes the old Gymnasium and College Hall. A party of young men are standing, scattered around the lawn, nattily attired with walking canes and dark suits. As we look at their profiles and haughty arrangement across the lawn, we are struck by a sense of ownership that these men had of the land. The space of Gallaudet University is extraordinary indeed, 100 acres of land where deaf people have congregated since the founding of the university in 1864. Their confidence in place is palpable. But this stiffly proud collection of white men seems an anomaly, for now Gallaudet admits women and students of color. The old buildings in the photograph EPILOGUE A Sense of Place  College Hall. 180 the history of gallaudet university The 1889–1890 baseball team on the lawn in front of College Hall. The concept drawing for the Innovation Lab and other new buildings that will form the campus in future years. Courtesy of Dangermond Keane Architecture. 181 epilogue still exist, but interspersed among them are high-rise dormitories and modern brick structures. The pastoral campus of the waning years of the nineteenth century is gone as is segregation by race and gender. What we have to look forward to in the future is not that communities become fluid, but that as communities change and shift, they need to exist in the face of durable and stable places like Gallaudet. As communities become more fluid, the stability of places like this campus becomes even more significant. As we face the challenges of maintaining cultural identity in the face of technological innovation, population diversity, and migration, we need to write a new description of the community that recognizes forces of regeneration and renewal and, at the same time, recognize the need for stability of place in different forms. As we continue to describe sign languages, especially those newly created and those existing for longer times, we will see that the human dimensions of language . . . depend deeply on cultural institutions such as the school and the deaf associations, whose crucial role is to make possible durability and complexity.4 If the passions that have been aroused in the Gallaudet community during recent years are an indication of the level of commitment deaf people have to the Institution, then it should have a long and successful future. Gallaudet University has always been and will continue to be both a physical reality and a cultural and educational ideal. ...