Gallaudet launches “On The Green”

Welcome to the first monthly e-newsletter, “On The Green,” as part of an effort to update our on- and off-campus community, donors and stakeholders about recent news and events happening at Gallaudet.

The name “On The Green” is a reference to the Gallaudet campus, affectionately referred to as “Kendall Green.” In 1856, Amos Kendall, the former U.S Postmaster General under Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, donated the original two acres of land on which Gallaudet is now located to establish a school for the deaf. Kendall hired Edward Miner Gallaudet to run the school. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed an Act of Congress to allow the school to confer college degrees. Since that time, Gallaudet University has come to serve as a beacon for deaf and hard of hearing students throughout the world that there are no limits to what one can achieve.

Today, “Kendall Green” covers 99 acres and serves 1,850 students undergraduate, graduate and K-12 students. The University provides a fully accessible bilingual learning environment in both American Sign Language and English, the only one of its kind; offers 40 academic majors and minors; and is known throughout the world as the only liberal arts university at which all the programs and services are designed specifically for deaf students. In addition to on-campus studies, students also participate in internships, including those on Capitol Hill, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Volkswagon Group of America, Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and AmeriCorps, among others.

Gallaudet is also home to several research centers, including one of only six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation, the Visual Language and Visual Learning Center; the Brain and Language laboratory which examines the acquisition and neural processing of American Sign Language, and the effects of early bilingual language exposure on the developing brain; the Technology Access Program, which conducts research related to communication technologies and services; and the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Hearing Enhancement, a partnership between Gallaudet’s Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences department and New York University of Medicine.

Finally, Gallaudet competes in the North Eastern Athletic Conferences and hosts athletic competitions on its campus throughout the year. It also has a vibrant theater production department which this year staged “Hamlet” at Washington, D.C.’s prestigious Folger Theater.

• Learn more about Gallaudet’s history
• Visit and tour the Gallaudet campus