Remembering and Debating Harlan Lane

Our scholarly world lost another giant on July 13, 2019, with the passing of Harlan Lane. A range of tributes to Lane can be found in several online sources, such as the websites of

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Lane), the New York Times obituary section (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/obituaries/harlan-lane-dead.html), Gallaudet University (https://my.gallaudet.edu/intranet/announcements-archive/passing-of-dr-harlan-lane), The Hearing Review (http://www.hearingreview.com/2019/07/passingsharlan-lane-psychologist-linguist-advocate-deaf/), and The Deaf Report (https://thedeafreport.com/home/2019/7/14/harlan-lane-dies-at-83). The Gallaudet website opened its tribute with this line: "Today, we mourn the passing of Dr. Harlan Lane, a prolific author and a visionary in the evolution of the worldwide Deaf community."

Harlan Lane and I crossed paths in the mid-1990s. I cannot remember the event that we both attended, but I do recall some tidbits from that first and only face-to-face meeting. It was actually quite awkward. He signed to me, but he did not appear comfortable—for some reason. I responded by speaking hesitantly, but I had to ask initially if he needed me to sign. Lane knew that I had a bilateral profound hearing loss and he was aware of some of my writings. On the other hand, I did not know much about the personal side of Lane. I was only vaguely aware of his professional works; I was somewhat familiar with The Wild Boy of Aveyron (1976) and When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (1984). Later, honored by an invitation prior to its publication, I would write a few words of praise for his book A Journey Into the DEAF-WORLD (Lane, Hoffmeister, & Bahan, 1996). This was a provocative piece of work, certainly worthy of the encomium "visionary in the evolution of the worldwide Deaf community."

Cognizant that Lane seemed to relish his controversial status—he had a few volatile academic debates with a few other giants in our field—I mustered the courage to inquire if he would be willing to engage in a debate with me on the topic of psychology of deafness. I had just digested his debate-generating article in Exceptional Children (Lane, 1988). I suspected that Lane would be irked by the phrase psychology of deafness, which was related to his anathema: psychology of the deaf. In fact, I had coauthored a book titled Toward a Psychology of Deafness (Paul & Jackson, 1993). Little did I know what I was getting into.

Before highlighting the salient points of our debate, I should provide some background on this remarkable scholar (also see any of the online sources presented previously, especially the New York Times obituary). Lane was a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston. He received bachelor's and master of science degrees in psychology from Columbia University and a PhD in psychology from Harvard. To add to the impressive list of his achievements, which includes several awards, Lane was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship—and donated his prize money to a deaf school in the Republic of Burundi (https://my.gallau-det.edu/intranet/announcements-archive/passing-of-dr-harlan-lane).

Lane was a staunch defender of Deaf culture and its signed language and was an extremely vocal critic of cochlear implants. He certainly highlighted one of the most controversial phrases in disability studies or in the philosophy of disability (Paul, 2018): the social construction of disability. As stated in Gallaudet University's website tribute,

He was concerned about the impact of cochlear implants, arguing in H-Dirksen Bauman's Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking (2007) that "unless Deaf people challenge the culturally determined meanings of deaf and disability with at least as much vigor as the technologies of normalization seek to institutionalize those meanings, the day will continue to recede in which Deaf children and adults live the fullest lives and make the fullest contribution to our diverse society."

Specifically, Lane railed against what can be labeled as the clinical or medical...