21 September 2013
Dr. T. Alan Hurwitz, President
Gallaudet University
800 Florida Ave NE
Washington, DC 20002
Dear Dr. Hurwitz,
We are contacting you because it has come to our attention that the
National Geographic Society’s play, BELL! has been promoted by Gallaudet
University and students have been informed of discounted tickets for this
event. Perhaps in celebrating Gallaudet’s sesquicentennial there has been a
lapse in institutional memory.
In 1891 during a Congressional
committee hearing concerning appropriation for a request to establish a teacher
training program at your college, AG Bell said: “The employment of deaf teachers is absolutely detrimental
to oral instruction, and the training school proposed by President Gallaudet
should therefore not be supported by the United States….we cannot trust it to
train teachers…”
When AG Bell addressed the
Literary Society at the college he said, “…I
am sure there is no one among the deaf who desires to have his affliction
handed down to his children.” These
words of such an influential person certainly impacted how Deaf college
students and organizations viewed their own future and community.
The world of the play BELL! ignores these and other grave injustices
that Alexander Graham Bell has fostered upon Deaf people. It ignores his systematic attempts to
deny Deaf children sign language and efforts to “teach” Deaf people “to forget
they are Deaf.” It ignores his
work to abolish Deaf publications, organizations, conventions and schools. It is a tragic legacy of the
father of audism which still “shapes the world we live in today” and which many
of your students still experience.
It is appalling to imagine that Deaf
college students today are expected to passively accept the sanitized version
of “AG Bell the genius inventor” (and what of the plagiarism and forgery
charges?) celebrated by the play, BELL!
This appears to be a shameless attempt to eradicate the true history of
AG Bell and to minimize the detrimental role he has played in the education of Deaf
people.
As an educational institution of higher learning, it is your
responsibility to educate your students. Promoting the play without first
hosting a forum to educate students about AG Bell sends the wrong message—both to your students and people beyond
Gallaudet.
Unfortunately,
the deadlock between your venerable President of 50 years, Dr. Edward Miner
Gallaudet and AG Bell did not end with their fight over the establishment of a teacher-training
program. It simply went national,
and reverberates even today as your students sit and watch BELL! ignorant of
how this man impacted their college, their history, and their lives.
Let freedom
roll!
Ruthie
Jordan, Patti Durr and Karen Christie for Audism Free America
Cc:
Genie Gertz, PhD, Dean
College of Arts and Sciences
Catherine Murphy
Stephanie Johnston
