A DEAF OASIS
It is summer session at Gallaudet University. A few lazy clouds threaten to water the already green campus and bathe a modest statue of founder Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Off the main quad, an orange steam shovel dips, lifts and pivots, grumbling to itself. Few students hear it. Gallaudet is the country's foremost college for deaf people. When Jim Haynes, at work nearby, instructs his philosophy class that "Plato argued that the concept behind this desk is more real than the physical thing itself," he does so manually, in crisp American Sign Language (ASL). His 12 students watch his hands intently, with the exception of a girl who is deaf and almost blind. She focuses on an interpreter, who repeats Haynes' signs a foot from her face, providing a level of service that would be remarkable at most colleges but is commonplace here.
The philosophy class ends, and several young men offer an impromptu campus tour: This lot is where the new high-tech center will be built. This circular driveway is the main outdoor hangout. And in this otherwise empty dormitory, a lone television set is playing. The TV, visible through a window, glows on, always tuned to the same channel, day and night. "After the second murder, they evacuated the building," says one of the students through an interpreter. "And they forgot to turn it off. Kind of eerie."
This is the story of a kind of paradise and how, over a six-month period starting last fall, it was almost consumed from within. Chartered in 1864 by Abraham Lincoln, Gallaudet is host to only 2,000 students each year. But to America's estimated 2 million deaf people, the university's symbolic heft outstrips that of the U.S. Capitol, five minutes south by car. The deaf Harvard, Wharton and Brookings rolled into one, it has produced generations of leaders, activists and entrepreneurs. Whether in classrooms where teachers lecture in sign language, on playing fields where athletes key into the vibrations of huge drums rather than audible signals or in the cafeteria where gossip and flirtation are no less hot for being silent--Gallaudet embodies a heady ideal: an oasis where the deaf person can shed the role of handicapped outsider and step into a cultural majority, where the tyranny of spoken speech is stripped away and, in the words of Provost Jane Fernandes, "the dreams open up."
No human community is Eden. In addition to America's usual dividers--race, class, religion, sexual orientation--the students face lingering, debilitating fears of powerlessness and exclusion and wage often bitter linguistic debates over topics abstruse to the hearing world--ASL vs. cued speech; mainstreaming vs. specialized education; and the use of cochlear implants, surgically installed devices that counter some deafness. But until this year, Fernandes was convinced that the school's overriding bond of deaf solidarity would inevitably prevail.
Of course, up until this year she shared an assumption described by school psychologist Alan Marcus. "That a deaf person would kill another deaf person," says Marcus, "is a foreign idea. Fight with. Argue with. Cheat on. Steal from. Embezzle, maybe. But not kill."
It is a premise that requires revisiting in light of the indictment this month of one of Fernandes' students in the brutal murder of two others.
MURDER