San Diego State closes ASL/deaf studies program due to budget woes

From The Daily Aztec at SDSU:

Repercussions from the state budget crisis and the CSU system budget cuts are still affecting San Diego State students.

The School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences has suspended the American Sign Language / deaf studies concentration as of last fall semester after the College of Health and Human Services took a cut of $1.5 million last year, according to Beverly Wulfeck, director of the School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences.

The decision to suspend the ASL / deaf studies concentration was strictly a budgetary decision and only one of many difficult decisions it has had to make concerning all undergraduate and graduate programs, Wulfeck said. This particular concentration was selected for suspension because it is the smallest program in the school, with 24 students compared to 170 undergraduate students in the other two concentrations including speech-language pathology and audiology, she said.

The 24 students, including eight seniors, were notified via e-mail and through announcements on the school’s website that enrollment in the ASL / deaf studies undergraduate concentration was being suspended for an “indefinite period of time.”

According to Wulfeck, the eight seniors were assured they would have classes to graduate and were required to complete their courses by this semester, but the other 16 students have to consider alternative routes.

Vicenta Summers, who relocated her family from Santa Cruz to San Diego two years ago to enroll into SDSU’s ASL / deaf studies concentration, had to change her major to psychology as a result of the suspension of the concentration.

“I took a year of courses to meet the requirement so I could be in the major last year, but I got an e-mail last summer to inform me that the major has been suspended indefinitely,” Summers said. “I basically lost a year of my time and a year of fees.”

Summers said the suspension of the concentration is “horrible” and “frustrating.”

“I feel like the deaf community is getting screwed all the way around,” she said. “They’re not allowing people to get the education.”

Summers has two deaf sons, a 17 and a 20-year-old. She said she wanted to get the education required in order to be able to work with deaf people.

“It’s affecting my family and it’s affecting the people I want to help,” Summers said. “The reason I want to get into this is because there’s such a scarcity in people who work with deaf people.”

“I know it (the budget issue) exists, but I think it’s an excuse to cut things … I just don’t understand why the people that are in need the most are the ones being cut out. They’re part of our world; they’re part of our nation,” Summers said.

Although Isidore Niyongabo, president of the ASL Club at SDSU, is not directly affected by the suspension of the ASL / deaf studies concentration, he said he is worried about his future as a deaf person and the future of deaf people in a society that won’t have anyone fluent in ASL.

“There are too many effects on deaf people who are studying in an environment where our language is not present and the suspension of the ASL program will reduce a number of people who know ASL which is disabling for deaf and hard of hearing people,” he stated in an e-mail. “You could imagine yourself being in an environment where no one understands your language.”

Niyongabo said he understands that there are budget limitations but he thinks this action will affect the diversity of SDSU.

Karen Emmorey, professor of speech language, agreed with Niyongabo that SDSU will lose students and some of its diversity by suspending the ASL / deaf studies concentration.

“Because you no longer can offer something that a lot of state universities are offering as well as UCs,” she said. “It’s a language that is not really just a great language like French or Spanish, but also has these other implications — that is the more hearing people know how to sign the better it is going to be for deaf people so that you may go out and do something completely different but you have that skill of communicating with a deaf person. So we lose ability to offer that to our students.”

ASL and deaf studies students wrote a resolution petitioning the suspension of the concentration, and the A.S. Council approved the resolution unanimously on March 24.
“I’m glad that students are voicing their unhappiness with having this program being cut so that the university can see how important it is not just to speech, language, and hearing majors, but to really the whole university,” Emmorey said.

Natalie Colli, VP of university affairs, encouraged ASL and deaf studies students to lobby the College of Health and Human Services dean in order to prioritize the hire of new faculty to teach the ASL / deaf studies courses or for the University Senate to consider shifting ASL into the Linguistics department. It’s a big “ordeal,” but it can happen, she said.

Wulfeck said that the administration is committed to bringing the ASL / deaf studies concentration back as soon as the budget allows it.