Contexts for Mission and Strategic Planning

A Unique Heritage. Gallaudet University is the only institution of its type in the world. It has received Federal funding since 1858, after having been established as a school for deaf and blind children in legislation signed by President Franklin Pierce in 1857. It was authorized to confer collegiate degrees in 1864 in legislation signed by Abraham Lincoln, and has been granting bachelor's degrees to deaf students since the late 1860's. From the beginning, the undergraduate program was designed to be like that of other American colleges, including within its organizational structure an independent faculty providing an essentially liberal arts curriculum, as well as student organizations, including some of the oldest inter-collegiate athletic teams in the United States. This combination of a broad spectrum of instructional programs and opportunities for leadership of student organizations has been integral to Gallaudet's role in preparing an educated leadership group for the American deaf community, a linguistically distinct subpopulation within the United States. In this regard, Gallaudet has had a role similar to those of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU's), but Gallaudet has been unique in providing this sort of environment for deaf students, while there have been many HBCU's.

Gallaudet continues to be the only higher education institution in the world where, after entering the University's gate, a deaf student finds him or herself in an environment that is designed to be completely free of communication barriers. It is important to note that the University's gate opens onto a campus of immense historical and architectural significance, where the original Victorian buildings surround a green designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Deaf students have always had the opportunity to attend colleges and universities other than Gallaudet, increasingly with a broad array of support services, but Gallaudet continues to be the only university that offers this environment, and it is highly unlikely that such an environment could be created elsewhere. It is in institutions such as this that America has traditionally trained its leaders, and, in creating Gallaudet, Congress was making a commitment to its deaf citizens that such an institution would be open to them also.

Through the years, Gallaudet's role, with the support of Congress, expanded beyond the provision of bachelor's level programs. Graduate programs designed to train teachers of the deaf and other professionals who serve deaf people were introduced in the 1890's, and since that time these programs have been world leaders in their fields. Association with the undergraduate program for deaf students and immersion in a signing environment make these programs unique in their effectiveness at training professionals to work with deaf people.

Research programs related to the deaf population and the education of deaf students also have a long history at Gallaudet, and, again they have flourished in Gallaudet's unique signing environment. The discovery and demonstration that American Sign Language is a complete and complex human language was due to research conducted at Gallaudet in the 1950's, and much of the subsequent work on the linguistics of ASL has been done here. This research has broadened and deepened our understanding not only of how deaf people communicate but of how linguistic communication in general is structured. Work in this area has led to therapies for individuals with language deficits who are not deaf and has stimulated the introduction of sign language into early interaction between hearing parents and their infants, both hearing and deaf. ASL is now taught as a regular academic subject at schools and universities throughout the United States. Gallaudet also maintains extensive data on the deaf student population in the United States from pre-Kindergarten through the University level, and it operates outreach programs that annually reach thousands of deaf people and those who work with them throughout the United States.

In the 1960's Congress added to Gallaudet's bachelor's and graduate programs responsibility to operate demonstration schools for deaf elementary and secondary students to develop, evaluate, and disseminate innovative curricula, instructional techniques and strategies, and materials. In placing these programs at Gallaudet, Congress situated them within an environment in which researchers and school personnel could collaborate to improve the education of deaf and hard of hearing students from birth through high school and university levels.

The Gallaudet of today is a unique, comprehensive university with programs for deaf students from pre-Kindergarten through the Ph.D, and it is home to scholars and researchers. But it is also a repository for and preserver of the art, literature, and cultural history of the deaf community of the United States and much of the world. It houses priceless archives of deaf history that attract scholars from around the world, and it operates a successful university press that publishes books and other materials of interest to deaf people and educators of the deaf. In the words of the Middle States Association visiting team that recommended renewing Gallaudet's accreditation in 2001: "Many American universities these days spend a great deal of time fabricating reasons to declare themselves unique. Gallaudet University, the MSA team is convinced, truly is unique."

21st Century Challenges and Opportunities. The principal challenges facing Gallaudet University at the beginning of the new century are both new and old. The old challenge is to teach students who became deaf before acquiring a spoken language to master the written English language. Because the University has always seen its role as that of providing opportunity to students who were at risk of not succeeding, it has historically had high attrition and low graduation rates in its bachelor's degree program. The University has recognized that this lack of apparent success is no longer accepted in American higher education and that it has essentially two fundamental choices-raise its admissions standards for its bachelor's level program, thereby excluding some students who would have been admitted in the past, or develop "honorable exit" options for students who could not succeed at the bachelor's level. This issue has been much discussed and debated by the faculty, and the sense of the faculty is to adopt the former option. This will have at least short-term consequences for the size of the undergraduate population and the nature of the curriculum. These consequences will be discussed further as we develop more specific objectives under the strategic goals stated below, and as stated quantitatively in our detailed action and assessment plans.

The principal new challenges have to do with the exponential development of communication and prosthetic technologies, and changes in the basic demographics of the deaf student population. Most fundamental to this discussion is the recent development of the cochlear implant, a powerful new prosthetic that has the potential to provide useable hearing to many otherwise deaf infants and children. The implantation of young deaf children has been controversial but shows signs of becoming less so, as it is done more frequently. There has, in addition, been a long term trend away from educational placement of deaf students in residential schools for the deaf and into programs where they are more or less integrated with hearing children, and Gallaudet has in the past drawn most heavily from the residential and other special programs for deaf students as it recruited and enrolled its undergraduates.

The information that follows is summarized from an analysis of trends over the past 20 years compiled by Ross Mitchell and Michael Karchmer of the Gallaudet Research Institute: 1) the total number of deaf and hard of hearing students in the United States receiving special education has been relatively stable during the past decade; 2) the percentage of that population receiving special education in separate programs and facilities has declined steadily during the past two decades; 3) the numbers of these students who are classified as white has declined modestly, while the numbers who are people of color have increased; and 4) the percentage of these students who have cochlear implants has increased rapidly, and this increased rate shows no sign of abating.

Many of these trends are seen as threats to the traditional signing deaf community in the United States and to special institutions for the deaf, as Gallaudet has been. At the same time there are trends that demonstrate a new awareness of and interest in deaf people and American Sign Language, most particularly the geometric growth of ASL instruction for hearing students, especially in American colleges and universities. There is also expanding interest in the nature of visual learning, not just with respect to ASL and deafness, but also relating to the explosion of visual based technologies. With regard to visual learning, Gallaudet can leverage its recent reception of a major grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF has awarded Gallaudet $3.5 million over two years to establish the Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2). The purpose of VL2 is to gain greater understanding of the biological, cognitive, linguistic, socio-cultural, and pedagogical conditions that influence the acquisition of language and knowledge through the visual modality. If this initial effort is successful, NSF will fund an additional three years of VL2 at a level of $4 million per year. At the end of the five-year cycle, VL2 could receive another five-year grant at the level of $4 million per year. In addition to drawing on the expertise of Gallaudet researchers and the University's unique linguistic environment, VL2 will collaborate with researchers from Georgetown and Rutgers Universities, the University of California-Davis, the University of New Mexico, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Boston University. Gallaudet recognizes and will also leverage its geographic location in the heart of the nation's capital--a major, cosmopolitan metropolitan area with opportunities for engagement in government, educational, and business activities. Within this environment, Gallaudet participates in a consortium of other colleges and universities in the Washington Metro area, and it maintains contact with various offices in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. The University will provide opportunities for all students to participate in educational programs off the Gallaudet campus, and in employment in government or business while they are enrolled at Gallaudet, as a substantial component of their intellectual and professional development. The foregoing discussion leads to suggestions for the future focus of Gallaudet's strategic planning in the direction of renewal of its traditional role as the center of development and preservation of the language and culture of the signing deaf community. With regard to this focus, Gallaudet may see increased interest on the part of hearing students, in addition to deaf students and students with cochlear implants who are interested in learning about deaf identity. This should not be interpreted as a suggestion that Gallaudet become either a museum or a laboratory. By embracing its heritage, it looks forward to a vibrant future in which liberal learning and professional training are provided at a very high intellectual level to students of all kinds who are interested in and can benefit from visual based learning. Gallaudet's goal is to reinvigorate its traditional niche as the "hot" school for deaf undergraduates-the place of choice for high achieving deaf students from all educational and ethnic backgrounds.