Gallaudet University

Deaf students, faculty, and alumni use Gallaudet University, the world's only university that designs all programs and services for Deaf and hard of hearing students, to learn, teach, and research in American Sign Language without the compensations that hearing institutions impose, after spending 124 years fighting to lead the institution that hearing people built for them.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Design Accessible Experiences
• Builder-side Interventions → Create Accessible Content
• Builder-side Interventions → Develop Accessible Implementations
• Builder-side Interventions → Iterate to Address Shortcomings
• Navigator-side Compensations → Stage a Protest

What it is

Gallaudet University, a private, federally chartered university in Washington, D.C., is the only university in the world where all programs and services are designed for Deaf and hard of hearing students. In 1856, Amos Kendall, a hearing former postmaster general who had become guardian to several deaf children, donated land to establish a school for deaf and blind children. He hired Edward Miner Gallaudet (hearing, though his mother Sophia was Deaf) to run it.¹ In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the act authorizing it to grant college degrees, making it the first institution of higher education for deaf people anywhere.

For the next 124 years, every president was hearing, but the institution that hearing people built for Deaf people became, through sustained protest and advocacy, an institution increasingly shaped by Deaf people themselves. Today, Deaf faculty and researchers set the requirements (ASL as the language of instruction), contribute to the design of the spaces (DeafSpace architecture, developed in collaboration with hearing architect Hansel Bauman and his brother Dirksen Bauman, who chairs the ASL and Deaf Studies department), create the content (bilingual ASL-English literacy materials), and develop the research (VL2, the Technology Access Program, the AI and Sign Language Center). The result is an environment where communication, navigation, and learning do not require compensation, but the path to that result required Deaf people to fight for control of the institution that claimed to serve them. I. King Jordan, who in 1988 became Gallaudet's first Deaf president after students shut the campus down, described what Deaf-led education makes possible: "Understanding your professor? That's not supposed to be hard. So here, we make easy all of the things that should be easy."²

DeafSpace: In 2006, hearing architect Hansel Bauman, whose brother Dirksen chairs Gallaudet's Department of ASL and Deaf Studies, established the DeafSpace Project. Bauman and Dirksen co-taught a class with professor Ben Bahan that produced over 150 architectural design patterns derived from Deaf people's ways of inhabiting space.^{3 4} DeafSpace does not start with a hearing building and retrofit it for Deaf users. It starts from Deaf experience and designs outward. The designer translating that experience into architecture was himself hearing, working alongside Deaf collaborators who shaped the principles. Wide hallways allow signers room to gesture while walking. Automatic doors eliminate mid-conversation interruptions. Horseshoe-shaped seating preserves sightlines for group conversation. Blue-toned walls make hands visible against skin tones. Soft, diffused lighting reduces the eye strain that comes from reading signed language all day. Sloping walkways replace stairs so two people signing can maintain eye contact as they move between floors.⁵ Sara Hendren, an Olin College professor, described the difference: "We tend to think it's about ramps and elevators. But it isn't ticking off compliance-based rules to avoid being sued," it's asking what architecture could do if it started from disabled people's experience rather than ending with their checklist.⁵ DeafSpace received the International Association of Universal Design Gold Award in 2015.³

Research and content: Gallaudet's Visual Language and Visual Learning Center (VL2) and its Motion Light Lab produce bilingual ASL-English storybook apps, literacy research, and authoring tools that embed signed language into children's media.⁶ The Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center operates K-12 demonstration schools and national training resources for deaf education.⁷ These function as builder-side content and development interventions, creating accessible materials at the source rather than leaving families to find or improvise them.

Why it matters

Alexander Graham Bell set the arrangement that made Gallaudet's federal charter necessary. Bell considered his oralism campaign, not his telephone, his greatest contribution. In his 1883 "Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race," Bell warned that signing residential schools, deaf newspapers, and deaf community associations encouraged deaf people to marry each other, threatening to produce a permanent signing minority.⁸ He organized the educational infrastructure that spread oralism through American schools. In 1880, the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf, held in Milan, formally banned sign language from schools, declaring oral methods superior. Deaf educators were excluded from voting.⁹ American oral programs multiplied. By the early twentieth century, sign language had been effectively banished from most U.S. deaf classrooms. Gallaudet College, protected by its federal charter and the Gallaudet family's commitment to signed instruction, held out as the sole institution of higher education in the country where Deaf students could work in their language without compensating. In 2010, the 21st International Congress on Education of the Deaf formally apologized for the Milan resolutions, acknowledging them as discrimination and a violation of human rights.⁹

The oralist consensus that Bell accelerated shaped professional training, curricula, and credentialing systems for the better part of a century, concentrating the cost in Deaf students and their families. Teachers of the deaf trained in oral programs passed those methods to the next generation. Audiologists learned to measure hearing loss, not language access. Pediatricians received no training in signed language development and referred families to speech-language pathologists who advocated for speech-first approaches. Gallaudet became the site where Deaf sociologists, linguists, and educators built an alternative institution: Deaf faculty hiring Deaf faculty, Deaf researchers publishing on Deaf experience, Deaf administrators setting policy. But the structural position of that institution remained singular. One university, one set of K-12 demonstration schools, and a country of Deaf children born mostly to hearing families who did not know sign language. When the 1988 Deaf President Now protest forced the Board to accept Deaf leadership, it demonstrated that requirement-setting authority determines whether an institution delivers care or imposes compensation.¹⁰ The 2006 Unity for Gallaudet protest reprised that demand: students blocked campus gates and presented a no-confidence vote (93-47 faculty) after the Board selected Jane Fernandes, who had not learned ASL until graduate school, arguing that Deaf leadership requires not just deafness but commitment to Deaf language and culture.¹¹

Bell's oralist framing also created the structural conditions for a medical market. Once deafness was categorized as a deficit to correct rather than a language community to build for, cochlear implant manufacturers found an institutional opening. The global cochlear implant market reached $1.9 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to nearly $4.7 billion by 2030.¹² Three manufacturers, Cochlear Limited (approximately 48% market share), MED-EL, and Advanced Bionics, dominate that market.¹² The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing partnered with Cochlear Corporation and Advanced Bionics to campaign for expanded Medicaid coverage for cochlear implants in children, and the American Cochlear Implant Alliance Foundation received seed funding from manufacturers.¹³ The clinical infrastructure that evaluates, recommends, and follows up on cochlear implants operates under guidelines developed in collaboration with the industry those guidelines favor. Families who receive implant recommendations rarely receive simultaneous referrals to ASL instruction, even though fewer than 40% of implanted children without sign language achieve linguistic benefit from the device.¹⁴ Gallaudet's requirement-setting function counters this arrangement not by rejecting medical intervention but by insisting that signed language access must accompany it. The Clerc Center trains educators in bilingual approaches. VL2 produces research on simultaneous ASL-English literacy. Neither the cochlear implant market nor most clinical guidance funds or requires this work.

Harlan Lane's "When the Mind Hears" (1984) documented what Bell's century of oralism had suppressed: a Deaf community with its own language, history, institutions, and political consciousness.¹⁵ Lane framed Deaf people not as disabled individuals requiring medical intervention but as a linguistic minority, and his account of the 1880 Milan Congress named the mechanism: hearing educators with economic and professional stakes in oral instruction voted to ban sign language from schools. Tom Humphries coined the term "audism" in his 1977 doctoral project, defining it as "the notion that one is superior based on one's ability to hear or behave in the manner of one who hears," naming the ideology that oralism expressed and that cochlear implant promotion extended.¹⁶ Dirksen Bauman and Joseph Murray's "Deaf Gain" (2014), published while Bauman chaired Gallaudet's ASL and Deaf Studies department, reframed the diagnostic category.¹⁷ Deafness, Bauman and Murray argued, produces specific contributions to human cognitive and sensory diversity: spatial awareness, peripheral processing, facial recognition, and a visual-spatial language biologically equivalent to spoken language. The 1988 DPN protest became, by multiple accounts from both sponsors of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a catalyst for what followed. Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Tony Coelho both stated that without Deaf President Now, the ADA probably never would have happened.¹⁸ Two years after DPN, activists crawled up the Capitol steps to demand the law that DPN had helped make politically possible. Gallaudet institutionally demonstrates that Deaf-led education supplants audism. DeafSpace, VL2, and the 1988 protest that catalyzed the ADA all emerged from that position.

Language deprivation during the critical acquisition period, approximately the first five years of life, produces permanent neurological harm in deaf children who do not receive sign language access. Matthew Hall, Wyatte Hall, and Naomi Caselli established that the sensitive window for language acquisition applies equally to signed and spoken language: deaf children exposed to ASL by six months of age, even from hearing parents learning it alongside them, show age-expected vocabulary outcomes.¹⁹ Children who miss this window show altered microstructure in the left arcuate fasciculus, the white matter pathway central to language processing, and deficits in complex morpho-syntactic structures that persist even after decades of later sign language use.¹⁹ Research published in Maternal and Child Health Journal confirmed that language deprivation increases risk for cognitive delays, mental health difficulties, lower quality of life, higher trauma exposure, and limited health literacy.²⁰ More than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents who typically do not know sign language.²¹ Fewer than 6% of deaf children in the United States receive access to a signed language in early childhood. No single clinician caused that gap. Medical schools that train without signed language development, clinical guidelines that prioritize speech over sign, and cochlear implant manufacturers that market hearing as the solution constructed the arrangement. VL2's bilingual storybook apps and the Clerc Center's educator training represent upstream builder-side content interventions designed to reach families before the deprivation window closes.

Gallaudet holds a position unlike any other institution in the accessibility landscape: the only university where Deaf students do not carry the burden of compensating for what hearing institutions fail to provide. Deaf faculty set curricular requirements in ASL, Deaf architects shaped the campus through DeafSpace, and Deaf researchers built the evidence base that counters oralist clinical defaults. That position was opened by the 1988 DPN protest and held by the 2006 Unity for Gallaudet protest, but it rests on a federal charter and federal appropriations that composed 67% of operating revenue in FY2022, making the institution's survival contingent on congressional goodwill in a political environment where disability funding faces ongoing pressure.²² Enrollment declined 13% between 2019 and 2022, which narrows the financial base that funds VL2, the Clerc Center, and the research that reaches hearing institutions. The Clerc Center trains educators nationally, but those educators return to state systems that do not require bilingual ASL-English preparation. VL2's bilingual storybook apps reach families who find them, but the cochlear implant industry's clinical infrastructure reaches families whether or not they look. Federal investment, state credentialing reform, and clinical guideline revision mandating signed language access alongside cochlear implant evaluation would need to move in the same direction as Gallaudet before the arrangement Bell constructed in 1883 stops concentrating its costs in deaf children and their families.

Real-world examples

In the news

Gallaudet University's Brilliant, Surprising Architecture for the Deaf (January 2016)
-- Amanda Kolson Hurley, Washingtonian

• The Washingtonian profiled DeafSpace as architecture that starts from Deaf experience rather than compliance codes. The Sorenson Language and Communication Center (2008), the first DeafSpace building, features automatic doors, horseshoe seating, glass walls flooding the lobby with natural light, and wide hallways enabling cross-level visibility. MJ Bienvenu, a Gallaudet faculty member, described the early design process: "We knew what we didn't want, but we weren't sure what we wanted." DeafSpace gave architectural form to what Deaf people had always known but never had designed for them.⁵

A Look at DeafSpace Design at DC's Gallaudet University (2018)
-- Clara Davison, National Endowment for the Arts

• The NEA documented DeafSpace's five design principles, sensory reach, space and proximity, mobility, light and color, and acoustics, and how they shaped specific buildings. Living and Learning Residence Hall 6 (2012), designed by LTL Architects, features sloping walkways replacing stairs, blue walls that contrast with skin tones for gesture visibility, and kitchen islands positioned so residents can monitor appliances while signing. The design evolved through iteration: early rounded hallway corners increased collisions, leading to frosted glass solutions that balance visibility with safety.³

The Gallaudet Four Demanded a Deaf President. Their Legacy Transformed Disability Rights
-- Michael Natale, Biography.com

• Biography.com profiled the four student leaders of DPN, Greg Hlibok, Tim Rarus, Jerry Covell, and Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, as a cohesive leadership team. Hlibok, elected student body president one day before the protest began, appeared on ABC's Nightline opposite Elisabeth Zinser and Marlee Matlin and was named ABC's Person of the Week. Covell served as the "spiritual leader," while Bourne-Firl channeled her organizing skills to transform chaotic gatherings into disciplined demonstrations.²³

I. King Jordan: Reflections on a Changing Culture (April 2006)
-- Joseph Shapiro and Vikki Valentine, NPR

• NPR interviewed Jordan near the end of his 19-year presidency. He described what Gallaudet makes possible: "Understanding your professor? That's not supposed to be hard. So here, we make easy all of the things that should be easy." He also noted the ADA's incomplete promise: "The employment of people who are disabled is just as bad today as when the ADA was passed."²

• After Jordan's retirement, the Board selected Jane Fernandes as his successor in 2006. Though born deaf, Fernandes had not learned ASL until adulthood. The faculty voted no confidence (93-47). Students blockaded campus again, and on "Black Friday" (October 13, 2006), 133 protesters were arrested when police were called in. The Board ultimately rescinded Fernandes' appointment.¹¹ The 2006 protest reprised DPN's central demand: that Deaf leadership is not optional.
• Jordan's "Deaf people can do anything except hear" became internationally famous, displayed as a sign at London's Royal National Institute for Deaf People and shortened colloquially to "Deaf can!"¹⁸
• VL2's Motion Light Lab released its first bilingual storybook app, The Baobab, in 2013 and continues to develop titles and an authoring portal for developers to build bilingual storybook apps.⁶
• In 2010, the 21st International Congress on Education of the Deaf formally apologized for the 1880 Milan resolutions that banned sign language from schools, calling them discrimination and a violation of human rights.⁹

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at Gallaudet involves Deaf people building systems where accessibility is built into the structure:

• "Deaf people can do anything except hear." -- I. King Jordan¹⁸
• "Understanding your professor? That's not supposed to be hard. So here, we make easy all of the things that should be easy." -- I. King Jordan²
• "What DeafSpace does is it actually reverses [universal design] and is about particularity. It's really good thoughtful design that influences process and engagement." -- Hansel Bauman³
• "We embed ASL storytelling and interactive vocabulary so families get early visual language exposure, at release, not as an afterthought."
• "All faculty, staff, and students are expected to communicate in ASL. ASL is the language of this institution."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect is what the hearing world provides when it treats deafness as a problem to manage rather than a language community to build for:

• "We'll add captions later if there's demand." *1
• "The interpreter can translate, so the deaf student doesn't need the professor to change anything." *2
• "Families can find sign content on social media; we don't need to provide it." *3
• "We'll add signed versions later." *4

*1: There are 48 million deaf and hard of hearing people in the United States.
*2: The interpreter is a navigator-side compensation. The professor's inaccessible lecture is the builder-side failure.
*3: Fewer than 6% of deaf children receive early access to signed language. The content does not exist unless builders create it.
*4: By then, the critical language acquisition window has closed.

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor Deaf people and their families carry when hearing institutions fail to build with them:

• "I had to search months for a signed version of that children's story."
• "Our classroom volunteers record their own signing of stories so our students can access books."
• "I had to learn to sign parts of the story to make the picture book meaningful for my child."
• "The interpreter missed half of what the professor said, but I couldn't ask the professor to repeat it, that would slow down the whole class."
• "I spent more time arranging accommodations than studying."
• "There are many ways to be deaf and many ways to communicate. All of them should be respected." -- I. King Jordan¹⁸

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All observations occur within the context of Deaf higher education in the United States, where Gallaudet University traces the arc from an institution built by hearing people for Deaf people to one increasingly led by Deaf people themselves, an arc that required 124 years, two campus protests, and the ongoing negotiation of who sets the requirements for whom.

Footnotes

1. Britannica: Gallaudet University ↩

2. NPR: I. King Jordan: Reflections on a Changing Culture ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. National Endowment for the Arts: A Look at DeafSpace Design at DC's Gallaudet University ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Washingtonian: Gallaudet University's Brilliant, Surprising Architecture for the Deaf (Bauman profile) ↩

5. Washingtonian: Gallaudet University's Brilliant, Surprising Architecture for the Deaf ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Gallaudet University: VL2 / Motion Light Lab -- Bilingual ASL/English Storybook Apps ↩ ↩²

7. Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center ↩

8. Disability Museum: Alexander Graham Bell and His Role in Oral Education ↩

9. Rochester Institute of Technology: Milan Convention and the Apology ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Swarthmore College Global Nonviolent Action Database: Deaf President Now, 1988 ↩

11. NPR: Leader: Gallaudet Protest Sought Equal Treatment ↩ ↩²

12. MarketsandMarkets: Cochlear Implants Market, 2025 ↩ ↩²

13. Gallaudet University Museum: The Influence of Alexander Graham Bell ↩

14. National Association of the Deaf: Position Statement on Early Cognitive and Language Development ↩

15. Harlan Lane: When the Mind Hears (1984) ↩

16. Wikipedia: Audism (Tom Humphries, 1977) ↩

17. University of Minnesota Press: Deaf Gain (Bauman and Murray, 2014) ↩

18. Johnson Scholarship Foundation: An Interview with I. King Jordan ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

19. Matthew L. Hall, Wyatte C. Hall, and Naomi K. Caselli: Deaf children need language, not (just) speech (2019) ↩ ↩²

20. NIH/PMC: What you don't know can hurt you: The risk of language deprivation ↩

21. National Association of the Deaf: Language Deprivation ↩

22. Gallaudet University Standard and Poor's Rating, June 2023 ↩

23. Biography.com: The Gallaudet Four Demanded a Deaf President ↩