The new law professor uses big gestures and an animated face. His background as an actor enlivens his lecture at Syracuse University’s College of Law. You almost don’t need to hear him to understand his
message.
Michael Schwartz is discussing the Americans With Disabilities Act, and he’s telling a story about a young deaf boy growing up in the 1960s in Washington, D.C. One day on a walk with his mother, the youngster sees two deaf people signing to one another. He asks his mother what they are doing. She explains they are talking with their hands.
"The deaf boy says, "Eeewww, I’m not like that. I’m different. I’m better,"’ he says.
"What that deaf boy didn’t realize was that he was responding to a stigma, that deafness is ugly, that it’s wrong, that it’s bad.
"By the way," Schwartz says, standing still behind the lectern, "that young deaf boy was me."
Schwartz, 51, is the first deaf faculty member hired at SU’s law school, and he’s a rarity in the legal world. Josh Mendelsohn of the Internet resource www.deaflawyers.org estimates 120 to 180 deaf or hard-of-hearing lawyers practice in America, but he can name only two working as professors in law schools.
His supervisor, Arlene Kanter, says Schwartz emerged from a national search for a director of the school’s Civil Rights Clinic. His work in the area of disability rights and his legal experience were impressive,
and she says disability accommodations never entered the equation. "I’ve found Michael to be really a creative thinker. His ideas really, I think, challenge all of us to think beyond what’s required and into what
can be."
This semester the assistant professor is teaching a seminar course titled Public Interest Law Firm.
He reads lips and speaks in a somewhat muffled voice and also has a sign language interpreter in class with him. Zenna Preli sits in the front row, vocalizing the signs Schwartz makes as he speaks at the same time.
He gives students a quick history lesson on the treatment of the disabled:
Disabled infants were tossed over cliffs or left to die in ancient times.
The Protestant reformer Martin Luther viewed retarded children as morally different and advocated killing them to eliminate the evil they possessed in 16th-century Germany.
"Chicago Ugly Laws," from 1911 until their repeal in 1974, kept "diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed" people from being seen in public.
The American eugenics movement in the 1920s argued that the disabled should not be allowed to procreate, and sterilization laws were passed in more than half of the United States..
Before Institutional Review Boards were established at universities, scientists used disabled children in experiments, feeding them radioactive oatmeal without divulging the risks.
Schwartz tells the students that violence continues, particularly against women with disabilities, and that serial killers who murder the disabled get proportionally lesser sentences than those who kill those not disabled.
"So, I’ve brightened your morning, haven’t I?" he quips, grinning.
The students dutifully scribble notes.
"It’s pretty easy to understand him," says student Heather Kemper, of Oregon. In office meetings, says student Richard Grant, of Tully, Schwartz keeps a white legal pad handy for writing words for clarification. If student or professor has trouble understanding, Grant says, "It usually comes down to one word."
In Schwartz’s office a video camera is attached to his computer for a service that connects him to a sign language interpreter in Sacramento who can place phone calls for him. A special telephone allows for
printed conversations, and a computer screen and keyboard allow visitors to send text messages. A Virginia license plate hanging over his desk reads "NYC ESQ." Schwartz is licensed to practice law in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Background
Schwartz has a bachelor’s degree in English from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., a master’s degree in theater from Northwestern University in Illinois, a law degree from New York University, and a master’s in law from Columbia University. Schwartz is also finishing his doctoral dissertation in education, with a concentration on disability studies. The title: "Deaf Patients in the Medical Setting."
He also has had extensive practical experience - in courts in Manhattan, at the U.S. Department of Justice, in the state Attorney General’s office - and an interesting life.
Gregory Mansfield, a Manhattan assistant district attorney who went to law school with Schwartz, remembers his friend as a great communicator, "but he’s such a well-rounded individual, too.
"He’s someone who has always challenged himself, whether it be in his career or in his life outside the courtroom."
Schwartz stays busy swimming, reading and working on his dissertation. He recently learned scuba diving. Ask him about the 8-by-10 picture of the 5-year-old girl on his office door, and he folds his hands into his lap. He quietly tells how he and his wife, Patricia, traveled to Vietnam in 1999 to adopt Brianna when she was 3 months old.
"That," says the professor, "was the biggest highlight of my life."
His life has included a variety of highlights and successes, but Schwartz experienced some unique struggles to get where he is today.
He came of age in the 1960s, rejecting the deaf culture and attending public schools in Evanston, Ill., and New Rochelle. He did not learn American sign language until he was an adult. He had no deaf friends or acquaintances while he was growing up.
His older brother, Gil, has what Schwartz calls "an enormous reservoir of love," and never, even in the heat of sibling rivalry, made fun of his deafness.
His late father, a college professor, "had a zest for life, and he was not willing to let me settle for anything less," Schwartz recalls. "My mother felt the same way, and as I was growing up, they took me everywhere: the theater, museums, movies, bookstores and Europe." His mother was a school social worker.
<va-5> "Raised oral’
Schwartz was "raised oral," which means he learned to speak, read and write without ever hearing the language. He picked up the idioms, rules, commonly used phrases and other nuances of the English language, and he learned to read lips.
"There was a difficult discontinuity within myself where I did not feel like a whole person," he says now. "I felt something was missing, and something indeed was missing: myself. You cannot reject a part of yourself and be whole."
Schwartz grew up watching French mime Marcel Marceau, and he loved Charlie Chaplin. He says he has seen Marceau perform 75 times. Whenever the mime would perform in a city near to Schwartz, he would buy front-row seats for every performance. He first saw Marceau in 1962 and followed his career for the next 30 years.
Schwartz became a mime while studying at Brandeis, from 1971-’75. Each semester, he would rent a theater and perform as a solo mime. During that time, he also participated in anti-war protests and demonstrations in support of civil rights.
|
When he attended the play "My Third Eye" by the National Theatre of the Deaf, Schwartz remembers he was astounded by the actors signing onstage.
"I realized that I was in a state of limbo," he says. "As a deaf person who could not sign, I couldn’t hear the voices of the interpreters onstage, and I couldn’t understand the signs. That was a very powerful moment for me."
Soon after, he read the biography of Bernard Bragg, one of the performers, and wrote to him about his desire to join the theater.
Today, they remain friends, and Bragg’s picture hangs above Schwartz’s desk.
Realization
Bragg says Schwartz’s mother "once confessed to me that she had prevented Michael from being deaf, thus leaving a big hole in his chest. It was not until he related himself to me that he realized his own true self."
Schwartz pursued a master’s degree in theater at Northwestern in 1976 and took a job as a teacher at a school for the deaf in Morganton, N.C. It was a public school, yet the students were required to attend church. It outraged Schwartz.
"I had fought for years in the movement against the American war in Vietnam and in the civil rights movement; discovering how oppressed these children, many of whom were kids of color, were, stoked my indignation," he says. "Expelling children without due process of law, forcing them to attend church on campus, and punishing them willy-nilly all raised my hackles, and I simply had to act."
Afraid of physical retaliation, he contacted the North Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and sought anonymity in filing his complaint. He watched the ACLU fight to get rid of the church
requirements.
"I saw the power of the law," he says.
Ultimately, school officials learned his identity, but by then, Schwartz had moved on to the world of theater.
He joined the National Theatre of the Deaf in 1977 at age 23. He fit in with the other actors immediately, got comfortable with the language of sign, and the hole in his chest was filled, Bragg says. "That helped him to open up a lot more as an actor, as well as a person.
"He has grown tremendously, all because he finally accepted his own deafness as a way of life for him, instead of denying or fighting against it."
It was after he developed a circle of deaf friends through the theater that Schwartz says, "It dawned on me that deaf people are marginalized just like women, black people, gays and lesbians."
That realization paved a new career path, and a year after joining the troupe, he headed to New York University for law school in 1978. He graduated in 1981.
Meeting Trish
He was working for the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., in January 1991 when he went to a party in New York City. Patricia "Trish" Moloney, a teacher of the deaf, recognized Schwartz, who by then was well-known in the deaf community.
"He was always very attractive," she recalls.
He was there with another woman but wound up talking with Moloney most of the night. He asked whether he could pour her some wine. He dropped the bottle, and it crashed on the floor. Instead of breaking the ice, he joked, he had broken the glass.
They laughed and cleaned up the mess together.
The couple started a long-distance relationship, communicating by text telephone. Their conversations became love letters, which they treasure today.
By April they were engaged. They married in August. He was 37, and she was 35.
"Thirteen years later, we’re still cleaning up and working as a team," she says..
Job hunting
As Schwartz prepared to move to New York City from Washington, D.C., he applied to 135 law firms, some large and some not so large. He got 135 rejection letters. "In my cover letter, I told them I was deaf," he says.
For three years he managed his own firm, representing "marginalized" people. Then he joined the Civil Rights Bureau in the state Attorney General’s office. His assignment was to put New York on the map with the enforcement of the new Americans With Disabilities Act - and Schwartz did. The office successfully sued a medical clinic in East Fishkill that denied interpreting services to a deaf patient.
In his lifetime, Schwartz has seen changes in some of the laws and in the social stigma toward various marginalized groups of people. He watched feminism become cool, hip-hop become cool. "I’m hoping that some day, having a disability will be cool."
He also has noticed some things haven’t changed.
In 1990, when the Americans With Disabilities Act took effect, he tells his class, the unemployment rate for the disabled was 66 percent.
Today, 14 years later, it’s 66 percent.
"What does that tell you?" he asks the students. Then he answers: "People with disabilities have not been able to break through the floor, never mind the ceiling."
Schwartz had the good fortune of a supportive family, money for tutors and special help, parents who instilled a thirst for books and education, a desire and an opportunity to travel.
"The building blocks were all there for my use," he says.
That’s how he broke through the floor.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO Dick Blume/Staff photographer MICHAEL SCHWARTZ is a
professor at Syracuse University’s College of Law. This semester he is
teaching a seminar course titled Public Interest Law Firm. Color Stephen
D. Cannerelli/Staff photographer MICHAEL SCHWARTZ, 51, is the first deaf
faculty member hired at SU’s law school. He reads lips and speaks in a
somewhat muffled voice and also has a sign language interpreter in class
with him. Color Mike Greenlar/Staff photographer SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY law professor Michael Schwartz hugs his 5-year-old daughter, Brianna, at
their home in Syracuse. He his wife, Patricia, traveled to Vietnam in
1999 to adopt Brianna when she was 3 months old. Color GRAPHIC: More
about Michael Schwartz. The Post-Standard. Note: For text see microfilm.
Color
|