As a student in New York University's College of Arts and Science, I took the American Sign Language courses given at NYU's School of Education, and was surprised to find that the courses could not be used to fill CAS' foreign-language requirement. I decided to try to get that policy changed. I was a member of CAS Student Council, and happened to be on the Curriculum Committee, which meets approximately monthly with faculty and a dean to decide on issues of curriculum. I asked, and found that that would probably be the right place to bring up the subject of having ASL count as a foreign language.
After some research, I wrote a proposal. It was submitted in the Spring term of 1999 and discussed at the April 15 meeting. The outcome was, well, interesting. It was submitted to the Curriculum Committee (as it indicates). The Curriculum Committee, if it approves something, then takes that approval to the entire faculty and asks them to vote on it; the faculty will generally approve anythign the committee had approved. In this case, I was at the Curriculum meeting, and my understanding was that ASL was approved as a foreign language, no questions asked. The chairman of the committee then asked the faculty to approve a modified version of that (which I'll explain in bit). The faculty approved that modified version. But ASL still isn't on a par with other languages.
The modified version is: Anyone wishing to take ASL to meet the foreign-language requirement must request special permission to do so, from the Academic Standards Comittee (which handles all academic petitions). (This is much like a few Slavic languages, which are taught at Columbia University and can be taken at NYU in fulfillment of the foreign-language requirement after receiving permission from Academic Standards.) Academic Standards will grant such permission when it's requested.
Although this is not what I understood the Curriculum Committee to have passed, I didn't argue that point.
I would then expect that in publication listing the languages usable toward the foreign-language requirement, ASL would be listed (albeit with a note, as Ukrainian, which is taught at Columbia, is listed). However, ASL is not in any such publication.
Incidentally, besides points brought up in the proposal, the following points were brought up at the committee meeting:
garbage canin ASL, one [made with the dominant hand at the non-dominant elbow] for clean garbage and the other [with the sign for
dirtyin it] for dirty garbage. No such distinction is made in English. They really are different languages.
Regarding the crusade
, I'd like to thank Dr. Randolph Mowry of NYU's Deafness Rehabilitation Program for his assistance and support. Also, I'd like to thank my fellow CASSC members, Dr. Ray Dougherty (Director of Undergraduate Studies in Linguistics at NYU), everyone listed in the text of the proposal, and whoever else helped me by sending me e-mail in response to my call therefor.
As to the proposal, it was originally submitted on paper after having been typed into WordPerfect. So the format was somewhat different from the one on the World-Wide Web, and it lacked HTML tags (e.g., hyperlinks). But the content was essentially the same as the one on the World-Wide Web. A few comments on the text of the proposal, including errata, are included in comment tags in the WWW version.
The proposal is copyright 1999 Michael Hamm, but licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.