[added 4/21/04]   

  "I was really excited about taking ASL this quarter, but because too many people signed up, I actually couldn’t get in,” freshman Lia Carpeneti said."

ASL as a foreign language at Brown University: "Foreign language study increasingly popular; on par with other Ivies," Brown Daily Herald (October 2003)

  "American Sign Language is currently the seventh most popular foreign language studied at Brown..."

ASL was recently approved to fulfill the foreign language requirement at the University of Virginia.

      PROPOSAL that was approved by an overwhelming margin (with only 2 of the more than 40 faculty members present voting against it)

ASL as a foreign language at the Ohio State University: The Lantern (February 2003)

  Students this year may choose to learn more about deaf culture, thanks to six new American Sign Language courses which have been offered since autumn quarter.
  The official announcement of the course offerings came on Feb. 7 at the Ohio State Board of Trustees meeting...
 "The collaborative effort of the three colleges involved reflects the richness of the ASL program," said L. Scott Lissner, OSU's Americans with Disabilities Act Coordinator.
 "This program may become a model for other universities," he said.
  The ASL courses couånt as a GEC language requirement for undergraduate students.
  "The course sequence is similar to corresponding sequences in French, Spanish, German or Japanese," Lissner said.

ASL as a foreign language at the University of Chicago: Chicago Chronicle (November 2001)

  According to linguist, John Goldsmith:
“Studying ASL means learning about a culture that exists everywhere, but which is invisible to us until we learn sign. You know that there are Chinese people in Chicago, and you can go to Chinatown to eat Chinese food. You probably wouldn’t know who the deaf people are in Hyde Park, or where to go to meet them or learn about their poetry. ASL is an introduction to a cultural world that was there all along but that students didn't know about.
  But even as ASL is becoming more widespread, misconceptions about sign language remain––such as the idea that it is “English with gestures ” or that hearing people invented signing. “ASL is not an artificial language,” Goldsmith said. “It is a member of a language family that includes French Sign Language, Irish Sign Language and Spanish Sign Language, but does not include, for example, British Sign Language or Chinese Sign Language.” Linguists have traced ASL ’s roots back to 18th-century Paris, where a community of deaf people developed one of the earliest-known true sign languages.
  ASL ’s grammar is very different from English grammar, with a rich linguistic structure that parallels spoken languages, Goldsmith explained. “From a linguist's point of view, it shares some grammatical features with Chinese, others with African languages and so on. Not because it inherited those features, it ’s just a result of the wide range of grammatical possibilities that languages can take advantage of. ”
  Peter Patrikis, Executive Director of the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning [which includes the Ivy League universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago], said, “Interest in ASL is increasing significantly throughout the consortium...

  [Michael Albert] was actively involved this past quarter in convincing the college's Faculty Senate to accept ASL as a foreign language.

  Albert sees this acceptance as a hopeful sign. "The deaf and hard-of-hearing community has had to struggle to get respect," he says. "Acceptance of ASL as a language is a validation of the deaf community and its culture."

New: 4/26/04 University of South Carolina to offer ASL courses in the fall: Student newspaper