Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page an honorary degree to Helmer Myklebust, the psychologist whose textbook The Psychology of Deafness had contributed so greatly to the perception among educators that deaf students were deficient.
In many cases, the students' signs were perceived as a kind of pantomime, accompanied by sounds and gestures, especially facial gestures, to which hearing people were unaccustomed and which they often found repugnant. Edward T. Hall, the anthropologist, recalls an example of these attitudes during the 1950s:
At Gallaudet . . . I was asked to consult with psychologists who were attempting to solve a problem among the faculty.
Hearing people there were disturbed by the fact that when the deaf signed, they also grimaced, which took the place of tone of voice. Hearing people found this distracting and tried to stop the deaf from this natural grimacing. It was an attempt to eliminate one of the basic building blocks of what is now known as deaf culture, but which hearing people saw as behavior which was chaotic and lacking in order. Arden Neisser, in The Other Side of Silence, describes Gallaudet in the early s as "a sleepy educational backwater that was considered just about right fora handicapped population . . . Gallaudet College, without attracting much attention, continued to do its job of teaching the seven or eight percent of deaf students who made it to college. Few faculty members had advanced degrees there was no tradition of scholarship."10
Neisser was not exaggerating. In 1952 Dr. Leonard Elstad became Gallaudet's third president, and at that time he decided that the college should apply for accreditation to the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. The report of the association's evaluation committee, a page indictment of the college, describes an institution straight out of Dickens, a Bleak
House of higher education. While the report stresses that the faculty did its best to serve the students with an "eager and exuberant spirit" with "devotion to duty and zealous dedication in evidence" the rest of its findings were negative. It describes the purposes indicated in the Gallaudet catalogue as "hopes and promises, not goals which are susceptible of achievement at the present time, or ever for that matter, unless

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