Editorial

EDI TO RIA L Members of the Gallaudet College faculty, board, and administration are reviewing, some with favor, a proposal to build a psychiatric hospital on the campus. This facility, to be built with appropriated (tax) money, would be leased when completed "at a minimal rate" as the proposers phrase it, to the same Hospital Operating Group (HOG) that wrote the proposal. While parents of prospective students may question the benefit of such an addition to the cost of their children's education, the proposal does make crystal clear the goals that the Director of the Gallaudet Research Institute stated some years ago: first to seek cures for deafness, second to find ways to prevent deafness, and third, to explore accommodations to deafness -education we presume being somewhere among these last. The medical view of deafness and of deaf people so strongly implied by this trisection of the research money pie is frankly confessed in the new proposal. Its message is that Deaf people are sick and need to be cured; they are mentally sick too; and they need nothing more urgently right now than a special center run for profit by a professional HOG. We trust that the older view of the deaf as people to be afforded opportunity and not as sick people is still held by Deaf people themselves, by educators who know that deafness is no bar to human growth, by members of the public who understand what happens "when the mind hears," and by the U.S. Congress, which after all chartered the College as a place where deaf persons could pursue a higher education of quality, and certainly not as a HOG trough. ...