College Bowl : CSUN Wins Competition for Deaf

Deaf students from Cal State Northridge have proved that bigger is not always better by defeating the nation’s two largest schools for the deaf in a national college bowl tournament.

CSUN’s three-member team, chosen from among 220 students enrolled at its National Center on Deafness, trounced teams selected from among Gallaudet University’s 2,000 students and the National Technical Institute’s 1,300 students.

The victory earlier this month in Charleston, S.C., at the biennial convention of the National Assn. of the Deaf, will help CSUN gain national prominence and enable the center to meet its goal of enrolling 500 students, said Victor H. Galloway, director of CSUN’s National Center on Deafness.

“It’s making a difference already,” Galloway said, through a sign-language interpreter. “The deaf son of a Gallaudet professor came up to me after we won and said the bowl helped him decide to come to CSUN.”

Out of a possible 180 points, CSUN won 118, with the National Institute of Rochester, N.Y., coming in second with 65 points, and Gallaudet of Washington trailing with 42 points.

The competition, the first ever held for deaf students, was conceived by CSUN administrators as a way to demonstrate that the deaf can excel in intellectual pursuits, Galloway said. It attracted an audience of more than 300 people and was one of the most popular events at the convention, he said.

Competitors viewed questions on a large screen and were given 20 seconds to write their answers on transparencies, which were shown on overhead projectors. Team members communicated among themselves by using sign language, said Mark Sommer, a member of CSUN’s team who wielded the wax pencil.

Sommer, 19, a self-proclaimed trivia buff who lost his hearing when he contracted spinal meningitis as an infant, said deaf students are able to better retain details because they are less distracted by noise.

“It’s not that we’re smarter,” Sommer said. “College bowl isn’t an intellectual game--it’s just that we might be more knowledgeable.”

The CSUN team--made up of Sommer, Lisa Herberger, 18, and Joshua Mendelsohn, 19--had no trouble with the majority of the questions, which probed students’ knowledge of deaf culture, as well as the arts and sciences.

Sommer said he was able to answer one question by recalling a comic book advertisement. The question: Who proclaimed himself to be the world’s most perfect strongman? The answer: Charles Atlas, not Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the other teams guessed.

Another question asked what the “c” stood for in the equation, “E=mc2.”

The answer is the speed of light--which is a bit faster, Sommer said, than teammates drank a full trophy of whiskey to celebrate their victory.