Letter: URI senior says university disregards sign language by not allowing expansion

To the Cigar,Consider this an open letter -a plea rather- to all Rhode Islanders. We are living in a state that was founded by righteous rebels who believed in equality, who recognized our shared humanity and acted on their belief that people of all creeds, religions, and ways of life. They stood on equal ground in the budding "New World."

Roger Williams, the man who - with his free-conscience followers - founded Providence, was one of the few settlers in America who noted that the Native Americans were not "savages," and so he took the time to learn their language. Most settlers believed that these "savages," with their strange grunts and guttural sounds had a lesser form of communication, hardly worthy of the word language.

We would like to believe that in the almost 400 years since Providence's founding, we have progressed far enough mentally to recognize that there are many languages in the world - verbal and non-verbal - that are more than capable of expressing and communicating a full range of emotions. There are languages that have their own history, development and adaptation to the needs of modernization. But Rhode Island's largest state university - the University of Rhode Island - not only fails to recognize American Sign Language as a language in the fullest sense of the word, but resentfully and knowingly refuses to do so.

Unsympathetically blocking the study of American Sign Language from expanding at URI, the university has kept ASL out of the language department - instead adding it as a non-required professional elective in the communicative disorders major. As if this was not insulting or backwards enough, the university slaps the title "Gestural Communication" on the class debasing a language that traces its roots back almost 200 years when the first signing schools and first deaf communities began sprouting up throughout the budding young nation.

Gestural Communication is a term thrown on inferior, non-verbal modes of communication - such as those used by untamed, "savage" primates in the wilderness. As a native Rhode Islander finishing my time at URI, I am able to look back fondly on almost every aspect of my college experience. But this insult - this black mark on my and the university's records - leaves a sour taste in my mouth and a sense of shame in my heart.

As a graduating senior who has experienced the ego-laden, bureaucratic red-tape that has a strangle-hold on nearly every aspect of URI, I am extremely afraid of retribution in the form of withheld graduation honors and being black-listed when I ask for any letter of recommendation to attach my real name to this opinion piece, but since the Cigar does not take submissions without a name I'm willing to bite the bullet.

I can assure you all, my fellow Rhode Islanders, that every Communicative Disorders student and every other student with any sense of right and wrong feels deeply ashamed by the embarrassing stubbornness of a would-be progressive school in a supposedly righteous state.

By not allowing the study of ASL to blossom into a curriculum that seeks fluency - as is done with most other foreign languages - the university has put a sanctioned road block in the way of allowing its students to learn a language that will enable them to communicate with their fellow Americans. Deaf history in this country has been plagued by misinformation, stubbornness and boldfaced attempts to deny those in the deaf community the equality they deserve as American citizens.

For URI to continue on that path rather than forging a new path of understanding, is an insult to the deaf community as a whole, and every student who has ever studied American Sign Language.

L. Newton Hoenikker