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NTID Celebrates 40 Years After "The Grand Experiment"

NTID News - June 27, 2008

Members of NTID's first class of 1968 gather for their 40th anniversary reunion.

Plenty of hugs, smiles and comments about hair (or lack of it) filled the halls of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Building as the 40th Anniversary of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf began Thursday.

More than 700 people attended the three-day reunion, including Ultimate Fighting Champion Matt Hamill and comic C.J. Jones, who was named NTID Outstanding Alumnus.

"It's like culture shock coming back and seeing all the new additions, the technology, the expanded programs," said Kevin Nolan, one of the 70 students from the first NTID class of 1968. "It's very exciting."

Nolan, a Massachusetts native, had attended college without interpreters when he heard about the new college for deaf students opening up in New York.

"It should be fun," he said, thinking the school was near New York City. He eventually learned Rochester was closer to Niagara Falls and Toronto.

At RIT, he took classes with hearing students and had the use of interpreters.

"My mind exploded with all of the excellent interpreting service," he said.

NTID's first director, D. Robert Frisina, who still works on campus as director of the National Center for Hearing and Speech Research, called the founding of NTID "an epic development for deaf people." He said such a college was needed at the time because only 1 percent of college-aged deaf persons attended a college (nearly all of those students attended Gallaudet University in Washington). And 85 percent of deaf employees in the U.S. at the time worked in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs.

Nolan said students in 1968 were very aware they were part of an experiment to see whether deaf students could get a good college education in technical fields with their hearing peers. There were no buildings dedicated to NTID - actually RIT had just moved to its Henrietta campus from downtown Rochester. Nolan said four students had to share a two-bedroom dorm.

"We were in a fishbowl," Nolan said. "Today, 40 years later, you look at NTID - we've got to thank the directors of NTID for building up the programs."

He said the deaf students on campus were a new experience for the hearing RIT students, so the NTID students often had to break the ice. And the deaf students, faculty members and interpreters were very close.

"We were like a family. There were only 70 of us," he said.

Nolan said his time spent at NTID "really changed me for the better. It was a great challenge for me to come here. It helped me to build my confidence."

Frisina, who greeted many of his former students this week, reflected on what he called "The Grand Experiment" - educating deaf students in a college setting with their hearing peers.

"Looking back after all these years, NTID has achieved exactly what we wanted," he said.

Nolan, who made history by being elected to City Council in Northampton, Mass. in 1985, now works as an actor in Chatsworth, Calif. He said his proudest achievement from college is helping establish the drama program with his mentor, Robert F. Panara.

"It's exciting to be back, it's my second home," Nolan said. "I'm so proud to say I'm one of the pioneers."