Edwin S. Grosvenor, approves of the use of the “AGBAD” acronym

Press Release

Friday, August 3, 2007

The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf currently does not appear to use the acronym “AGBAD,” but now uses the abbreviation “AGBell”.

However, the Alexander Graham Bell’s great-grandson, Edwin S. Grosvenor, approves of the use of the “AGBAD” acronym.

Here is a quote from a Web site that was created by Edwin S. Grosvenor showing that he uses the acronym “AGBAD”:

QUOTE:

Founded by Bell in 1890, AGBAD is one of the world’s largest membership organizations and information centers for pediatric hearing loss, and helps promote the auditory approach that Bell advocated.

<http://web.archive.org/web/20030211162850/www.alecbell.org/BellWebSites.html

UNQUOTE

This Web page created by the Library of Congress shows that Edwin S. Grosvenor is the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell:

http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0012/father_phone.html

Here is Edwin S. Grosvenor’s résumé:

<http://egrosvenor.com/index.html

Culturally Deaf people object to the name “Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf,” because it contains the word “for,” indicating the paternalistic premise of its mission, whereas the the name “National Association of the Deaf” contains the word “of.”

Culturally Deaf people also point out that AGBAD’s mission goes far beyond that of paternalism, to the extent of being destructive of Deaf culture by design, according to Alexander Graham Bell’s original intention for the organization. Thus, the organization today follows the destructive policy of promoting a particular mode of language, i.e. speech, instead of actually promoting language and cognition itself.

Culturally Deaf people promote the use of natural, visual (i.e. signed) languages due to the fact that they are visual beings. AGBAD’s mission violates basic principles of ethics and human decency by ignoring this fact, while attempting to treat deaf people as if they were all handicapped, hard-of-hearing people. This is an immoral, inhumane, and destructive policy and is to be emphatically condemned.

John F. Egbert