Gallaudet University

The world’s only liberal arts university for the hearing-impaired. Founded in 1856 as a school for the deaf and blind, the Washington, D.C., institution has nearly 1,700 students enrolled in its four-year college, which offers B.A. and B.S. degrees in the full range of liberal arts, fine arts, business, engineering, sciences and education. The graduate school offers master’s degrees in audiology and education and doctoral degrees in special education to about 400 students. Subsidized a $400 million annual grant from the federal government, Gallaudet is named for pioneer educator Thomas H. Gallaudet, whose youngest son, Edward M. Gallaudet (1837–1917), helped found the school and served as the institution’s first president. The young Gallaudet was teaching in his father’s school for deaf children in Hartford, Connecticut, when a group in Washington, D.C., asked him to help organize and run a school for the deaf. In 1857, he organized the Columbia Institution for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind and served as principal, pioneering the combined system of speech and lip reading to educate the deaf. He then established the world’s first college curriculum for the handicapped, and in 1864 he obtained financial support from Congress and the right to grant college degrees. In that year, the college was renamed Gallaudet, with Edward Gallaudet as president, a post he held until 1911.