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Institutionalized Just Like You
- Gallaudet University Press
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B U G 135 Institutionalized Just LikeYou People are always taken aback when I tell them that I was institutionalized. In their minds, institution equals asylum. Hence their discomfort. What I mean is that I was enrolled in the Wisconsin School for the Deaf (WSD) from 1984 to 1986. “You mean you were placed in a residential school,” they tell me, chuckling lightly. “A residential school is an institution,” I reply. In fact, pretty much everything built by humankind is an institution. A church, for example, is an institution in both the physical and abstract sense (i.e., the Church). You don’t technically even need an institution (a building) to put your institution (an organization) in, just to have an institution (an abstract concept). You can place the abstract institution of Deaf education in any number of concrete school buildings, residential or mainstream . But is an unemployed graduate student writing a paper on literacy rates among deaf children any less a part of that institution simply because he’s writing on a laptop in Starbucks? No. In what physical building would you place the institution of marriage? My wife and I got married seven years ago. Did I stop being married to her the second we left the actual, physical church we were married in? Of course not. And how would we even begin to discuss the abstract institution of marriage, the challenges of growing together over the course of time, 136 C H R I S T O P H E R J O N H E U E R raising kids, and saving for retirement, if we first had to gather all married people into the same building? If there’s anything at all odd about telling people I was institutionalized , it’s in the fact that I confine my definition of the term to the two years I attended WSD. The truth is that I’ve been institutionalized my whole life, over and over, and so have you. Chances are you were born in a hospital, an institution. If you came to believe that a hospital was the place to go when you became sick, then you’re a firm believer in the institution of medicine. You were (hopefully) born into a family, yet another institution. If you’ve ever voted: Congratulations! You’re an integral part of the great, grand institution of democracy! “Yes Chris,” people say, “but it still sounds like you mean you were tossed in a nut house.” “Name one institution that, over time, didn’t become a nut house?” I ask. “ . . . good point.” Dishes Done, Institution-Style! My wife at times accuses me of not doing the dishes often enough. I defend myself by responding that any job worth doing deserves to be done carefully and properly. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years from working in various institutions for deaf people, it’s this: Anything that you want done carefully and properly requires the learned deliberations of at least one committee, and quite possibly several. [18.209.209.28] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:28 GMT) B U G 137 I’ll explain. Amy wants the dishes done. Check. Being an institutional man, my first move is to gather the remaining members of the Heuer Clan (in this case, our cats Joe and Raj) to form a Dishwashing Committee. From there, a Chair must be elected (such an action preserves within our internal daily endeavors the foundations of democracy upon which this noble country rests). Usually the elected Chair turns out to be the person who thought up the idea of forming the committee in the first place, unless the question of qualification arises. Such issues are then usually resolved by a motion calling for the submission (by all nominees) of a vita outlining one’s qualifications for the position . At this point, a subcommittee must be formed to review the vitae submitted, and the subsequent analysis usually eats up about a week’s worth of manpower hours. Once a Chair is elected to run the Dishwashing Committee, it is standard practice to dissolve the Vitae Analysis Committee in order to free up those members for further duties. Thus having been elected Chair, I pull Raj and Joe out of the paperwork and assign them Vice Chairmanships on the Water and Soap Committees, respectively. The purpose of these subcommittees is to gather data on the feasibility of the project we...