Oral History InterviewMorgan Barclay, InterviewerLeonard Ernst, IntervieweeEast Carolina University CampusJuly 21, 1983MB: 0:07 So interview with Leonard Ernst, director of the hearing impaired program at East Carolina University. The interview is being conducted at East Carolina University on July 21, 1983. Interviewer, Morgan Barclay, from the East Carolina University Archives. I'd like to start with a few general questions. First one comes to my mind from reading the material that you gave to the archives. Looks like the program started at least with some initiation by the North Carolina School for the Deaf, trying to explore opportunities for education. Can you give me some of that background?LE: 1:06 Back about 1976 the North Carolina School for the Deaf woke up to the fact that there were no post secondary programs in North Carolina which accepted deaf students, and I really don't mean serve deaf students, they simply would not admit them at that time, that was before the Rehab Act of 504 really was clarified. And at that time, deaf students could go only to Gallaudet College and NTID so they did an informal survey through the board of directors of the schools for the deaf, and contacted about five colleges in North Carolina just to see if they were willing to accept and work with deaf students.MB: 1:51 Obviously, from that some interest was generated here on campus. How did that come about?LE: 1:57 At that time, I was working with Vocational Rehabilitation here in Greenville, and I had been working closely with the speech and hearing clinic at East Carolina. Garrett Hume was at that time, the chairman. I think the initial contact either went directly to Dr Hume or perhaps to Dr Jenkins at that time, and then they got in touch with one another and gave a positive response that they would be willing to investigate it, I believe that time, that's where I came in. Dr Hume asked a number of people to serve on an advisory panel to discuss the problem. And because I was directly in the field of deafness at that time, and was working with post secondary deaf students. He and I put down most of the information, and really mapped out the proposal that was submitted to the schools for the deaf, and they did accept that proposal, and felt that East Carolina, at least East Carolina's proposal, showed a better awareness of what would be involved in developing a program. So they then went to the state legislature, and I think the first appropriation was about $17,000 that was used for seed money to begin the program.MB: 3:16 In reading all the materials, I gather that there seems to be a fair amount of verbal commitment at the state level, at the at the UNC level, and yet money come forward came forth in the initial $17,000 and then again, I don't have all the records in front of me, but then I gather that they kind of left ECU sitting here? Is that a correct evaluation?LE: 3:43 Well, to be honest, I was trying to be very positive about that initial $17,000 it was really never given to East Carolina. It was committed out of some funds that for curriculum improvement through the UNC General Administration, but I really don't think that about $2,000 were directly used in the first year of the program, and that was for office furniture. Just to establish the program, we had to go back about three years later to remind them that the other seven, the other portion of the $17,000 had never been given to East Carolina, so we went back to the general administration, reminded them, because they had overlooked it in the last three years. And then we got the remaining part of that $17,000 since then, though, because of lobbying from myself and C.C. Roe here on campus, the general administration has made an attempt to provide funding for campuses which have special programs for the handicapped. So since we got that money in 1980 I believe '79 or '80 that was outstanding from the original $17,000 and in '81, '82, and '83 the general administration has provided some additional funds to East Carolina to provide services, and they've also done that for other campuses across the state, so the reminder to the UNC General Administration that they still had some responsibility in the matter seems to have generated some continuing money, and that's been a real, very good benefit.MB: 5:38 In percentage basis, what percentage of the program would be carried by, carried by this state funding that you're talking about, and also ECU, obviously, from its own internal budget, it has, looks like it's borne the brunt of the expense for the program, LE: 5:58 It has.MB: 5:59 And yet the program is really serving statewide. It doesn't seem to me that there's a complete fairness there, I don't know.LE: 6:06 Well in terms of revenue, though, East Carolina still does get the tuition and fees, you know, from all the students who do attend. But yes, I think your perception's right, East Carolina really has borne the bulk of the program itself, especially as new positions have been required. East Carolina has come up with the money. The percentage of the funding that comes from the general administration is small. The last three years that we've received the money, a lot of it's been for equipment, and we've put into it, put that into some good technical support services, but they also provide about $15,000 a year for payroll purposes, for tutors, note takers and interpreters to support our students. We also receive some monies from the division of vocational rehabilitation, but they're limited because not all of our deaf students meet the guidelines for vocational rehabilitation, and we are not able to bill all of them. If I had to give you a breakdown, it would probably be East Carolina has borne at least 75-80% of the cost. UNC General Administration, perhaps 10-15% of the cost, and then vocational rehabilitation, perhaps another 5%MB: 7:24 Before we leave funding, has there been any success in, in raising federal funds for either special projects or operational?LE: 7:35 No, unfortunately, not. We've had, we've submitted a number of grants, but about 1978 so many campuses were beginning programs for handicapped students that they literally began to just almost smother the federal agencies with requests for funding. At that time, the US Department of Education decided that they would provide continuing support for what they call the seven federally funded programs, which are the California State University at Northridge, Delgado College, Seattle Community College, St Paul Technical Institute, Gallaudet and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, I believe that's the seven. And they have continued to fund these programs at the same levels, but they've generally frozen all all funding for other campuses. That has changed, and as of 1983 they've reopened that but many programs like ours, we don't need $400,000 and the the funding is written in such a way you've really got to ask for a complete program. You can't ask for one or two positions or money for special projects. We've tried to do that, and we will see probably the next two or three months if we've been successful.MB: 9:06 Well, let's, let's turn our way back from money and go back to the original program a bit. LE: 9:11 Okay. MB: 9:14 I noticed in some materials it looks like the program was was modeled after the California State program at Northridge. And what, can you give me a little background into, one, what that program is about, and why, why it was chosen to model after that particular program.LE: 9:36 The California State program started about 1969 and it was a very innovative program at the time, the only college in the United States which provided mainstream services to deaf students, Gallaudet, of course, was was there and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and it was the model that we looked to when we started developing a program here. There was also some direct contact in that some of the board members of the North Carolina School for the Deaf visited California State's program before bids were invited from colleges in North Carolina, and so they had an idea of what California state provided, and I think they were looking for something like that here in North Carolina. That was lucky for us, because I had information, and had known some of the people who had been at Cal State. And so I used a lot of that information in writing the original proposal when the program was established here, and when I started working April 1, 1977 I traveled out to California and spent five days at the CSUN program. And I think the report of that is also in the archives, MB: 10:58 Yes, it is.LE: 10:59 But I really enjoyed the five days out there. They had a fantastic program. They had unlimited funding, and so their staffing was just excellent. They had specialists in every area. We've never been able to approach that, but our service delivery system and our range of services are modeled after their program.MB: 11:23 Let's move along in that direction. I think it'd be good to just have a little summary on, on tape of the of the basic services that the program has developed over the years. Maybe, maybe you could take them in order as they, as they develop, beginning down to the present.LE: 11:44 I'd like to do that because they have changed for a number of reasons. I think when we first started the program, we were looking at the three basic services that all mainstream programs must provide, and that's basically interpreter services. And at that time, we were talking only about sign language interpreter services and in addition to that, note taker and tutorial services. So that's really what the goal was at the beginning. We knew that counseling was very important too, but we also knew that there were no there were no people on the East Carolina Campus who were skilled in counseling with deaf persons, and we knew that the program staff would have to accept that as a secondary responsibility. Those were basically, then the four that had developed at the end of our first year, sign language interpreters, note taking, tutorial, and counseling services, and that's on the letter head of our office stationary as matter of fact, since then, we've developed a number of other services. About our third year into the program, we started getting our first oral deaf students. These are students who do not know sign language and have generally been mainstreamed in public schools for their entire educational life. They are dependent on speech reading, and it's a new breed of Deaf student. They've been around for a long time, but they've been mostly invisible in that they've sort of fit in. They've been assimilated into the into the educational programs, but these students are now coming to special service programs like ours, excuse me, so we had to provide oral interpreting services. This would mean that our interpreters would sit near the front of the classroom, and they would mouth the lecture as presented by the instructor. If the instructor moved around a lot or had an accent or a mustache, then we would provide the interpreter at the front of the classroom as a stable visual model of the lecture. And oral interpreting is a very new field, still a lot of questions about it, but we were doing it really before anyone else. I'd say, at the time we we were oral interpreting here, there were probably not more than six other universities in the United States who were providing that service. A lot of other changes have come from technology. At the time we started, there were some old loop systems in use. These would be FM amplification systems that would require that a college classroom or a public school classroom be looped with an FM antenna. And we have been able since then to purchase individual units where the students have their own individual loop and they're not tied to one classroom. That was an excellent purchase, and that has really helped a lot of our students. We've also been able to purchase some captioning decoders for television sets here at the university, we're just installing a theater amplification system in all of the campus theaters, and those technological advances are going to are going to help a lot of our students further down the road. One other change that's really been been important is that we've developed another position for an educational specialist for the hearing impaired. That marked a real change in direction for our program, because before then, we were basically support services, and as of the time that position was developed, we were looking more individually at the academic strengths of each student, and the educational specialist is responsible for working with the students, similar to what they do in public schools with the IEP, the individual educational plan or program, and they assess each student, then compare that student with the services we have available to come up with a service program. I think that was again, a giant step forward in individualizing our services, and that has that summarized most of our growth.MB: 16:07 I like to go back, from my ignorance, would you go in a little more detail here on the FM and loop system for the layman who might pick up this this tape and LE: 16:17 Alright.MB: 16:18 How it works? Okay,LE: 16:19 I'll be glad to. It's it's as though the instructor would wear a lapel microphone that were attached to an FM radio station, and they wear a small transmitter, which is about the size of a pack of cigarettes, which is actually a miniature FM transmitter that transmits the signal of the teacher's voice to a receiver unit, which is worn by the student, and then that electronically, magnetically couples with the student's own hearing aid. It's all completely wireless, except for the connection between the microphone and the receiver, and it's a it's an excellent system. It allows complete portability. It's very lightweight, and we've had excellent response from the professors on campus. All they wear is a lapel microphone, and it's something they can slip in their pocket or over their belt. Has a lot of advantages over hearing aid, in that the range is 150 to 200 feet, and with a normal hearing aid, after about four to five feet, the the strength of the signal decreases sharply. This also means that the student can sit in class and the instructor can pace, move around, even turn to the blackboard, and the student will be able to hear their voice as best they can. The clarity of it is excellent, and we have 10 such units here on campus, and we hope that more and more of our students will take advantage of them. I'll add one other thing. The strangest use we've had is one of our students who used it for a biology field trip. So even though he was in the back of the pack and the instructor was up at the front, because of the range of the FM unit, he was able to hear everything the instructor said. Sometimes you overhear things perhaps you shouldn't. I was in a class one day, and the instructor was wearing one and her her husband came to the door, and she stepped outside for a private conversation, and the deaf student in the class just looked at me and grinned the whole time they were talking in the hall.MB: 18:35 Something you said just prompted me to come up with another question, and that is, there seems to be rather widespread and well founded support to the program within the most of the academic units on campus. Can you explain how that came about? I know it was result of hard work and no accident.LE: 19:00 It was no accident. It's taken a long time. I think it took about two years, or even three years, before we turned the corner, in a sense, and felt like we had really good awareness on campus. And I'm not sure really good awareness is an honest statement to make. We have always worked individually with instructors, and we've tried to work through departments to provide information to the instructors. We've taken the trouble to write out, write up handouts, letters of introduction, with information, and we're presently working on a handbook, which I hope will be added to the archives, but that's a hard way to educate people, and I think what we've had here on campus is a great deal of support from the students, the non handicapped students, which has produced a positive attitude from many instructors. I think there's a difference in acceptance and having a positive attitude than real awareness. The problems of deafness are very complex for someone with an early hearing loss, severe in nature, the educational problems are very, very complicated, and you really have to be schooled in neurology and deaf education and language to understand it completely. But in terms of having an acceptance and a positive attitude towards a disability group, I think we've developed that here on campus. A lot of it has come from the fact that early on, we offered sign language classes for instructors on campus, and we have a number of key people here on campus who became involved. And so their attitude, I think, influenced others. They had positive attitudes in sign language classes. The one other thing that's been a great public relations influence has been our musical interpreting groups and Fantasy, and some of the materials and programs you know, are again in the archives file. Fantasy started about 1979 and it began with a group of five of us who were full time employees for the most part, and one one student, I think Kathy Beetham, who's now on our staff, worked with us then. But these shows where we interpret popular music into sign language and mime and add a lot of facial expression and tell the story with our signs has just really become a focus of campus fascination, and the students and the faculty have all been touched by that, one way or another, and that too has helped to generate a lot of positive feelings towards hearing impaired students that there's not simply, you know, poor little things who have tremendous language problems and have vocabulary problems, and for them, life is a struggle, and God, it's so awful that they're deaf. I think the fantasy performance have shown some of the beauty of sign language and through facial expression and just involvement in it, and having our hearing impaired students in the shows themselves, ; it's shown that there are some positive things you know, in a deaf person's life, that it's not all pain and tragedy. And I think that's helped a lot to again, develop a positive attitude on campus.MB: 22:37 As a newcomer to this campus, I guess I sensed it right away, and I was obviously not involved in the program, just attending events, I noticed right away that there was an attempt there to have events signed and things like that. That was long before I was aware of the program.LE: 22:59 Visibility, visibility is an important part of it. We have interpreted all the graduations since the first year. We have interpreted, we interpreted the installation of Dr. Brewer. We did not interpret the installation of Dr. Howell. I don't mean that as a critical remark towards Dr. Howell, but there seemed to be a feeling it wasn't necessary. I'm sorry that that feeling might have existed and it may simply have been overlooked in all the preparations. But we weren't invited, and when we made efforts to contact them, we really didn't get much of a response. So we decided that that would be, that was fine, but visibility has been important. Getting back to Fantasy again too, that has really helped us in a number of ways, because of the fantasy performances, we have been able to recruit some really motivated people into our sign language classes, and a number of those have gone on to develop very good sign language skills and become student interpreters. So Fantasy has helped a, it served a recruiting purpose as well, to get people involved with our program. And again, it's it has served as a visible sign of the fact that there are hearing impaired students on campus. So it served us in a number of ways. The last two years or three years, I suppose, we have been very involved with the public schools in Greenville and Pitt County. And in fact, last year, I think we presented over 35 different presentations to public school classes. So we hope that we're planting some seeds there too, and we may develop some future sign language students and interpreters. Think all together, last year, we counted 57 different presentations off campus and on. So we're reaching a lot of people through our public awareness presentations, and we're providing a lot of education to the community.MB: 25:06 The Fantasy programs as such, no longer exist, do they as the organization? At least, that's what I thought I understood.LE: 25:15 It's, that's a good question. The original group which founded Fantasy is no longer here at East Carolina, there were five of us, and three of them left for other job opportunities. The field of interpreting is, interpreters are in short supply, and job opportunities are, come up pretty often, and if the money is good, some people leave. So three of the five members of the group did leave and went to Texas to a new developing program down there. Two of us were left here, no, three of us actually were left here, because even though we began with five, we added a sixth member soon after. So three of us were still here, and of course, there was a lot of pressure for the musical interpreting programs to continue. We tried to change our name, but it just didn't work, we were so well known as Fantasy that people wouldn't accept it any other way. The emphasis has changed tremendously, though, from the original Fantasy group, which was a group of people who some of the people actually wanted to go professional with it, they wanted to tour, they wanted to to use it as something like a night club act, and make a lot of money off of it. That interfered with their job responsibilities quite a bit, and it interfered with their attitude towards the students they become they became star struck. That's one of the reasons they left and went to Texas. Since their departure, the Fantasy group has been more student oriented. We have included hearing impaired students in almost all of our performances, and we encourage anyone who has sign language skills to come and practice, try out, and then be involved in the show. So it's, it's opened up tremendously now, the original shows used to have, say, five members. We have as many as 25 people performing in in our more recent shows. And so I think that has helped a lot, too, to encourage people to, hey, I can be in that if I just, you know, take a course and practice a song and can do it well enough so that I don't make everyone else look bad. And I like that. I think that's a very positive change. There's no place on a college campus for an elitist group of people who think their skills are so much better than anyone else. I'm a strong believer in student involvement, and that has, in turn, made our program stronger.MB: 27:46 I'd like to go back to student, the interpreting program, which is part of the core of the program. I know part of the goals were to train as many student interpreters, as well as your own full time staff. How has that changed over the years?LE: 28:13 It's changed and then changed again, and probably will change again as our needs change. Sorry about that. The, there are several different philosophies about that. There are programs in the United States that really do not employ any part time interpreters, but employ full time professional staff who have the highest possible levels of certification in interpreting that's great if you've got a lot of money and a lot of positions, because a good interpreter will cost you easily $14,000-$15,000 a year. And if they have advanced degrees, it can easily go up to $17,000 or $18,000. And one interpreter at the most, can interpret, say, 25 to 30 hours a week. So that would be 10 classes per week that they would be able to interpret. When we first started the program here, we didn't have a whole lot of money. We didn't have the positions for more than one full time staff interpreter, so we looked to student interpreters, and we try to train our own. We don't have a formal Interpreter Training Program, which has hurt us in some ways, but what we have used is a fairly good, common sense approach and an experience based training program. We recruit good students from our sign language classes and discuss with them the possibility of taking additional courses and perhaps going on for interpreting status. We now offer five sign language courses at East Carolina, which is one of the very best programs of instruction in the entire country. I'm very proud of that. We've worked hard to develop that. But we have a beginning, intermediate and advanced series, and then we have an introduction to interpreting course, and then we have a new course that was established two years ago in deaf culture in the deaf community. What we typically do is take a good student from a beginning or intermediate class, and encourage them to take the advanced class and then the introduction to interpreting. By the time they've generally finished their third class, they will have some basic skills in interpreting from oral English into sign language, and we'll start putting them in lab courses, physical education courses, tutorial sessions, where speed is not a problem, and then gradually, with more and more experience and observation by our staff and critique from our staff, these people will develop the skills to handle lecture classes. It's very informal system, and it needs to be more structured, but it has worked. Just the other week, my secretary and I were counting up names, and we have employed over 50 interpreters in our program in the last five years, student interpreters, and a large number of those have gone on to get levels of interpreter assessment and higher levels of certification. So it's working. Something's going right. The problems with that are that you can't depend on the student population from year to year, they graduate, they drop out, they get married, and this past year, we were caught somewhat short, because, through coincidence, three of our very best student interpreters either graduated or left school last year. I would like to see us have a healthy combination of both. Student interpreters are excellent and are a resource that should continue to be developed, but there are inherent problems with graduation and attrition, and there's also the problem that they have to schedule their interpreting around their own class schedule. That means that sometimes our most difficult times to fill are, say, 9, 10, 11 o'clock, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the most popular times for courses to be taught at the university. So we need a healthy mix. We need full time professional staff who don't have to work around a course schedule, and who can handle any, any classes. And then we need student interpreters to fill out our interpreting schedule. Last year, I believe we spent about, it'll, can't remember all together I think we spent about $16,000 in in payroll costs for student interpreters. I think it's unbelievable to think that we were able to pay $16,000 for probably 100 hours a week of interpreting services, whereas one full time professional interpreter paid the approximately the same salary would only be able to interpret about 25 hours per week. So we're getting excellent use out of our student interpreters, but we still need more professional staff, and with the financial situation the way it's been, the last few years, I have requested a full, another full time interpreter position, but since things have been frozen, we haven't gotten that in the last three years, that would help a lot to have that balance.MB: 33:38 Maybe you could take a minute and talk, just kind of expand upon some things you've said already, maybe mention some of the highlights that you've seen over the last couple, last five years, as far as outreach, public relations efforts, I'm thinking of such things as Deaf Awareness Week and Deaf Awareness Day and the workshop, February 80 things like that, if you just expand upon mainly a few of the highlights outside of Fantasy that have obviously increased awareness in the program on campus,LE: 34:33 the Deaf Awareness Day, and I can't remember what year we did that, I think it was about '78 when we had our first one. Out of our Deaf Awareness Week, which our department sponsored, came the Handicapped Awareness Week that has now grown campus wide and includes all disability groups on campus. We were very proud of that, and we're proud of the part that we have always played in Handicapped Awareness Week. The students and staff of our office have been involved in the present in booths and providing information. And for the last three years, our Fantasy group has performed during Handicapped Awareness Week, so we've contributed I think a great deal to that, but we had another, few things that have really helped a lot. Outside of just the musical interpreting, we have done some theatrical interpreting. I think one of the highlights that I can remember was back about 1978 we worked very closely with the drama department, and we interpreted Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. We worked very hard. It was the first major theatrical interpreting any of us had ever done, and the hours of practice and rehearsal that went into it were staggering. I have a great deal more respect for acting majors and drama majors as a result of that, but the School for the Deaf and Wilson sent almost their entire student body, I think, about 300 deaf students from the School for the Deaf in Wilson came over to watch the interpreted version of Midsummer Night's Dream. For almost all of them it was the first play they had ever seen interpreted and it sounds a little bit high and mighty, but bringing Shakespeare to the School for the Deaf is a is a good goal for a university, and I'm glad we were able to do that. I think one of the other real high points I can remember was about '78 or '79 when our first deaf student graduated. We had a student who had transferred in from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in New York, Fred Mangrumang. And Fred majored in science education, and I believe, graduated in '79 and that was a really nice moment. It was when he completed his degree. He was the he was probably not the first deaf student to ever graduate from East Carolina, because I have met a few other older deaf people who did attend East Carolina back in even the '20s, '30s and '40s. Very few of them graduated, however. Some of them attended, but as they got into their higher level courses, it just really became too difficult without any support services. So Fred may not, may or may not, have been the first deaf person to graduate, but he was certainly the first deaf student to graduate having received support services from the university, and it's fairly obvious he would not have been able to graduate if he had not had those support services to back him up. That was a good a good time. One of the other excellent things I think, that happened was for a period of about four years now, we didn't do it last year, the National Tech, no excuse me, the National Theater of the Deaf has sent a troop of their actors down to the Lost Colony each summer for workshops for the Lost Colony acting staff, and for three or four years in a row, we were able to send a group of our interpreters and our student interpreters down there to participate in that workshop. That was really great, because they they combined sign language and mime and acting, and it sort of gave our student interpreters a completely new idea of what heights interpreting could reach. And that was an excellent relationship. And we would basically go down there and teach the crew some sign language before the the National Theater of the Deaf arrived to improve their communication skills. Then they would invite us to the workshop. That was good. Getting back to Fantasy for just a moment, one of the things I think that was outstanding is that the Fantasy group in 1980 was invited to perform at the 100th, the centennial anniversary of the founding of the National Association of the Deaf, and the National Association of the Deaf is a very powerful lobbying group and education group among deaf people in the United States, I think they have something like 100,000 members, but very few people outside of deafness know it exists. But we performed at their centennial convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, in July of 1980 and we not only performed at the convention as one of the entertainment groups, but they enjoyed our performance so much, they asked us to stay for a few extra days and we interpreted for the Miss Deaf America Pageant. Again, not too many people are even knowledgeable, they don't even know there is a Miss Deaf America Pageant, but there is, every two years, it coincides with the annual the biannual convention. That certainly gave East Carolina a lot of exposure. Certainly gave Fantasy a lot of exposure. And I can remember now, still standing on that stage at the Miss Deaf America Pageant, interpreting music before an audience of 5,000 deaf people. And that was quite an experience.MB: 40:32 I can imagine. I'd like to go back over a couple things that I've noticed in reading it, then, everything hasn't been a success. There's obviously been some problems. LE: 40:45 It's been trial and error, that's for sure.MB: 40:47 Frustrations. One thing that I picked up on in reading annual reports, seems to me one of the most difficult things is having a student adjust to their freshman year, whether they be handicapped or not. How have you come to obviously, you've learned some things in the last five years, how have you learned to cope with that situation and, in effect, try to overcome some of the disparity in grade point averages I noticed between the public school students versus those that have been in special schools, seem to be quite a disparity in grade point average.LE: 41:26 There is. Let me start by saying that I think one of the first things I learned was that there is less difference between deaf students and hearing students than there is more difference. I came to this position with no college administration experience, and all my experience was in the field of deafness. I think a lot of people make a mistake when they work with one particular population, they they tend to think that all the problems begin and end with that population. And it didn't take me long to figure out that our deaf students weren't having adjustment problems to their first year of college because they were deaf, they were having adjustments problems because they were freshmen students, most of them from very small schools, many from rural areas, they were coming to a university with 13,000 students, if I can sidetrack for one moment, East Carolina does not do a good enough job of providing adjustment services for its first year students. Our attrition rate is not good at all compared to other universities, although it's a problem with all other universities. And so we found ourselves in a on a campus which was really not geared to help the first year student adjust to being away from home, to developing new study skills, new reading skills, new test taking skills, coping with dormitory life and and other things. I'll give a plug for the dormitory people, by the way, the residence hall people do a better job of helping students adjust to college than the the academic and the administrative area of East Carolina. So in a nutshell, what we learned was that our students were facing all of the problems that any freshman student would face, plus they had the problem of communication, and that was that was very serious. We have since learned that you have to ride with that a little bit. You have to expect those kinds of first year adjustment problems, and we have to use our communication skills and use the information we've prepared the in the best way possible to help the students make that transition. It is tough. There is some talk now about East Carolina establishing a tutorial or a learning center for all students, and our department has supported that for the last three years. We see it as a real need for students on campus, and it would certainly be a great help for our hearing impaired students. We have worked closely with all of the campus departments, and my own philosophy has been that you should not set up one office on campus which meets all the needs, tries to meet all the needs of handicapped students. And so we have always tried to share information and work with the infirmary, with the counseling center, with the admissions office, with Mendenhall Student Center, with all the campus agencies to help develop their awareness of deafness and to help them develop on their own, the communication skills to deal with our students. It's worked in a great many cases. We have provided sign language courses, information, gone over and given presentations, and so we've reached the point where if a deaf student walks into the infirmary, they don't pick up the phone and call our office and say, there's a deaf student here. What should I do? They try to communicate with the student, realizing that this student is probably there not because he or she is deaf, but because they're sick. And that's been that's it's interesting, though, that's a level of awareness that takes time to develop, it really is. Now getting back to the students, though, and the difference, the residential schools for the deaf do protect deaf students quite a bit. They operate on the principle of in loco parentis, and they they try to assume responsibilities of mother and father and try to protect the students from injuring themselves in any way, many times that serves to over protect the students. So yes, our residential school students do have a more difficult adjustment. They are, they're accustomed, in a sense, to being spoon fed, and that's not a very good way to say it, but that is the honest truth. Our students who've gone to public schools and who have lived at home have had a more normal lifestyle, and they, too, have, quote, "normal adjustment problems" to being away from home and in a new situation. But they're more emotionally mature, they're more psychologically ready to adjust to a new environment than many of our deaf students. When you get to the problem of grade point averages again, here, residential schools for the deaf are not always as demanding as public school programs the, they have required study hall, and in some ways, students don't develop independent study skills that are required for college. Students from public schools do tend to develop better independent study skills, and so they are better prepared to make that adjustment. There's a big jump from senior year of high school to college, and again, our residential school students find it much more difficult to make that jump, and as a result, their social life is generally, they flounder a bit more. Their study skills are not well developed. Their educational background may not be as rigorous, and I think that accounts for the for the grade point average, one point that I made in my annual reports where I discussed that is that hearing loss is not the factor. We have profoundly deaf students from public schools who do better than hard of hearing students from the residential schools for the deaf. So it's the educational background and training and independent study skills that makes the difference. It's not the hearing loss itself.MB: 48:06 I'm assuming then that there's probably a much higher dropout rate among students from from the specialized schools versus the public education?LE: 48:25 Yes, there is. Our population has changed a lot over the last four to five years, and of the original six students who began in East Carolina from the residential schools, none of them have graduated. That's a very sad fact. Our program was established to serve deaf students from North Carolina, and what we have found is that the residential school students really didn't have the educational background, and in many cases, it was a very difficult problem to serve.MB: 49:14 I'm assuming that through tutorial services and heightened awareness, LE: 49:24 Small earthquake here [commenting on background noise].MB: 49:27 A heightened awareness of the need for study skills that some of these problems, adjustments, have at least been tackled and coped with.LE: 49:42 Yes, they really have. We've, again, we've developed an awful lot of individualized services. The educational specialist really coordinates most of that, and it involves more evaluation of the student before they ever arrive at East Carolina, and a great deal of evaluation once they're here. We have worked very closely with the reading program through the Elementary Education Department, and Mabel Lauder and her graduate students have provided a lot of study skills training, vocabulary training, reading and context training. These are the areas where our students from the residential schools are weakest, and that's been a real shot in the arm, and that has helped.MB: 50:27 It seems to be that the English skills seem to be the ones that, at least you've cited, as being the most difficult to cope with.LE: 50:33 It really is. It's really language skills, and since the students are trying to operate in the English language, that's the way it comes out. You know, again, I can't really emphasize enough that the severe educational problems of deafness are are not well understood outside of the field itself, and we've had some problems on campus with that. Our students generally attend 15 years of public education, whether it's in public schools or in the schools for the deaf and the acquiring of English for a student with a hearing loss from early onset that's severe in nature, is a painstaking method. They have to learn English artificially. We are lucky, you know, we learn it from well, we learn it really from birth and that we're aware of sounds, and we begin to connect voices with people standing over us. For deaf students. That kind of learning usually doesn't begin until age five, and you've missed a lot of critical years, and it has to be artificially learned. It's comparable to going to school to learn all of your English and having to learn only from what's written on the blackboard, and that's tough. We're surrounded by English every day, it's reinforced every hour, and with deaf students in public, in schools for the deaf, it's really only reinforced on the blackboard. And what they can read, and the development of reading skills is also something that Mabel Lauder and her people have taught me a lot about. It is the very unusual deaf student who can who can develop near native English skills. And I have thought many times that our program probably serves the top 2% to 3% of the deaf population, and that's a rather staggering thought that we probably work with only the top 2% to 3% and still they face all these difficulties. The problem of deafness is certainly not just the inability to hear, it's really the language problem that arises from that, and it's, it's a very, very severe obstacle to gaining a good degree. More and more deaf people are doing that. And this, I'd like to make this important point too, one of the reasons, I think our program is so important, there are not many deaf leaders. There are not enough deaf scientists or deaf teachers, primarily because college educations have been denied to deaf people all these years. And so as a group, deaf persons have not been able to acquire the education necessary to assume leadership roles. I think that is one of the most important things that our program is doing. Any student who graduates from our program, and we've had 10 graduate so far, there's almost a guarantee that they develop some interpersonal skills in coping with the hearing world, and that they're going to go out and they're probably going to assume a leadership position in the deaf community, and they will go on to become professional in their own right, in whatever field they enter. They may even begin a program for hearing impaired students at some other college. And I think that's the goal of of all of this. It's a nice cycle to think that the students that we educate at East Carolina will become the educated leadership of the deaf community, and thereby just bring everybody up along the way.MB: 54:39 I was going to follow up on on something you just said I was thinking of, actually, before you got off on it, tangent. What then, what kind of fields have some of your graduates gone into? I think it'd be an interesting, maybe an interesting point to end on.LE: 54:58 It really is, and it's an interesting show, a demonstration of the growth of our program. When our first deaf students arrived on campus from the residential school for the deaf, they had pretty stereotyped career objectives. The only successful deaf people they had ever really come in contact were, for the most part, their teachers at the school for the deaf. Most of them wanted to go into education, and others wanted to go into professional fields. Fred Mangrumang, our first graduate, went into basically, when he came from medical technology and then came back to college and got a degree in science education, and he, too, went into education. So for the most part, they went into professional fields that they could basically work at alone without communication demands, or they went into education so that they could, in a sense, return to the schools for the deaf and teach in that environment. But that has changed tremendously with the advent of more public school educated, hearing impaired students, they arrive here with no stereotype career objectives. We now have students in the fields of psychology, English, political science, history. We even have a deaf archeologist coming along, still special education, health and physical education, foods and nutrition, clothing and textiles, you name it, art too. We have a couple of students in art now who are very talented, and I hope that they're able to succeed and go into commercial art. So it's really just completely exploded. And a major reason for that big change is, again, the public school students, who come in here with very positive feelings about themselves, that they can do anything they want to do. That has led to some problems in that some of them, I think we discussed before, some of them want to go into BA programs that require foreign languages now, and we've had some difficulty with that, because whenever you're talking about foreign languages, you're still talking about language, and that's a severe learning problem, but they're going to make it one way or another. And Gallaudet College offers very limited degree programs, they only have about seven or eight majors. The National Technical Institute for the Deaf is a technical college, and so I think that mainstream programs like East Carolina are going to provide, you know, the opportunities for deaf people to go into archeology. One of our majors graduated in geography and works with the Department of Defense. To our knowledge, he was the first geography, the first deaf geography graduate in the entire United States, because the program is simply not offered anywhere. And that's a very important thing to me, to think that students who've had an interest in a field since they were, perhaps 12, 13, or 14 years old, can look to East Carolina or to other mainstream colleges and say, hey, they have the degree program that I've always wanted, and now they will accept me even though I'm deaf. So that is going to make a big change in the future. We are now seeing deaf people in medical schools, in dental schools, and we will have deaf physicians before long. We already have deaf lawyers, because the law schools, about eight or nine years ago, started opening up, and so we now have a group of lawyers who passed their bar examinations in the United States who, themselves are deaf, and they've been a big reason for a lot of social change and a lot of the enforcement of the Rehabilitation Act and Public Law 94 and 42, and they'll continue to make those kinds of changes. IMB: 59:13 I want to thank you for taking time out of a busy morning and kind of summarizing the five years from what '77 to '83 as you leave, leave the campus here, and I think you can obviously leave feeling very good about what you've done the last five years. We'll certainly expect the program to continue in providing its leadership role. Thank you. [END OF TAPE]