The Birth of Our Professional Home

By James Jerger and Brad Stach

This article is a part of the September/October 2019, Volume 31, Number 5, Audiology Today issue.

As our Academy reached its 30th birthday in 2018 and our 30th annual conference just this past March (2019), it may be instructive to the younger members to recount the events leading to the founding of our professional home. It all began at the 1987 convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in New Orleans. Before this event, the professional home of all audiologists in the United States was ASHA. But there was growing discontent among audiologists throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a feeling that since speech pathologists far outnumbered audiologists in the ASHA membership, the wants and needs of audiologists would always be subordinate to the wants and needs of the much larger group.

In reality, the two professions already had split from a single discipline of communication disorders into distinctly different practices. Audiology had branched into a diagnostic and treatment profession in health-care settings and private practices, while speech pathology remained a therapy practice primarily in the schools. Some of us had, for years, urged ASHA to form special interest groups in the hope that audiology might, in such an atmosphere, exercise at least some separate autonomy. ASHA steadfastly opposed all such concepts. This led to increasing frustration among audiologists, who came to the growing realization that they would always be junior members, forever existing under the domination of the larger body. How strong and widespread this feeling was would soon become apparent to all who attended the 1987 ASHA convention.

Rick Talbott, a member of the ASHA program committee, had organized a session on future trends in audiology. There were five participants; George Osborne, Lucille Beck, James Hall III, Charles Berlin, and James Jerger. FIGURE 1 shows this group of speakers. Of the five, I (Jerger) was last to speak. I simply said that I thought it was time to declare the independence of audiology from speech-language pathology and to form our own separate professional home. The roar of approval from the audience was deafening. I was frankly astounded: I had not expected such an overwhelming response. I had supposed that there might be a few other dissidents like myself lurking in the background, but this was a fairly large audience, and their virtually unanimous support for the idea of separating ourselves from ASHA quite surprised me.