CSUN’s Deaf Program Has a Dilemma

I commend The Times and reporter John Chandler for a solid piece of reporting about the shortage of funds to hire interpreters for deaf and hard-of-hearing students at Cal State Northridge.

Even though we have supplemented this service with more than $150,000 in recent weeks and exempted this area from cuts that other departments will experience because of the state’s fiscal problems, we are still faced with a dilemma: Do we use these funds to hire more interpreters, to meet the students’ bona-fide need for more service, or do we pay the interpreters we have more money to meet their reasonable expectation for greater compensation?

This is not an uncommon dilemma for the state’s public institutions. How do we serve the greatest need with the limited resources available?

The understandable protests of the students and interpreters illustrate the consequences of fiscal recession.

We at Cal State Northridge are very proud of our pioneering role in serving deaf and hard-of-hearing students. We are proud that we have the largest population of such students among mainstream universities; only Gallaudet and the National Technical Institute of the Deaf in Rochester, N.Y., have larger enrollments of deaf and hard-of-hearing students.

We are proud of our new deaf studies department, one of only two in the nation. (The other is at Boston University.)

The program will serve about 250 majors, 90% of them hearing students, taught by a faculty that is largely deaf or hard of hearing themselves, and produce well-trained and educated graduates to serve a nation sorely in need of their services.

BRUCE ERICKSON

Northridge

Erickson is director of public relations for Cal State Northridge.