The thousands of silent protesters in front of the Capitol building last Saturday must have appeared to tourists to be the most polite agitators ever to stand on that lawn. Not a word could be heard amongst the observers as one lone voice echoed from the speaker’s platform, but the crowd rippled with constant, soundless motion. The students, faculty, staff and alumni of Gallaudet University were there to protest the Board of Trustees’ choice of Dr. Jane K. Fernandes as the next president of the world’s top university for the deaf. The hushed atmosphere at the Capitol masked the uproar which in the last few weeks has plunged the University community into raging debate, hunger strikes, a lockdown of campus and hundreds of arrests.
“It’s the deaf equivalent of civil war,” government professor Mairin Veith said. Misunderstandings and personal attacks have clouded the debate, and many onlookers within the University and without are no longer sure what the protests are about. But as the conflict gains greater attention across America and the deaf community worldwide, the protesters want to clarify that whatever greater significance their cause may hold, their demands are simple: they want Fernandes removed and the search process reopened and to suffer no reprisals for their actions.
“Our demands are very, very clear,” two-time Student Body Government president David Simmons (Gallaudet ‘07) said. “We have those two, and we’re keeping it to those two.” He and eight others have been on a hunger strike for 13 days and plan to stay “as long as it takes until the president-designate resigns.” The hunger strikers estimate they are joined by two to three hundred supporters camping out on the lawn each night. They oppose Fernandes on the grounds of her ostensible failures of leadership as Gallaudet’s provost in the past six years and because of a presidential selection process that ignored the opinions of the professors and student body.
“I’m here because I don’t like Jane Fernandes’ track record,” hunger striker Kat Roberts said. “I don’t like the way she’s handled things; I don’t like the way she’s alienated faculty and students.” The sentiment is shared by alumni as well.
“The interview procedure was not proper,” Grace Walker (undergraduate ‘85, graduate ‘92) said at last Saturday’s rally. “What happened to the other people? My hope is that they go through the right procedure.”
Walker joined an estimated crowd of 2,000 to 4,000 faculty, staff, students and fellow alumni in marching from the University gates down 8th Street to Maryland Ave. and Constitution Ave. at 9 a.m. The march ended at the foot of the Capitol building, where a series of figures from parents of students to the hunger strikers called unanimously for Fernandes’ immediate resignation.
“I would die for Gallaudet—for you,” Simmons proclaimed, drawing a vast wave of the deaf sign for applause from the crowd. He led the crowd’s repeated statement of their demands not by chanting but by signing in unison.
Those at the rally condemned current President I. King Jordan, who will step down at the end of this year, nearly as much as Fernandes, a telling sign of how deep the rift runs between the administration and the community. Jordan rode into power in 1988 on the back of the Deaf President Now movement and, with the great support and admiration of the community behind him, became the world’s first deaf, university president. His support of Fernandes, though, has eroded much of the near-filial affection many students felt towards him.
“The protest is really about the lack of leadership,” undergraduate government and history major Jonathan Slone said. “In her past six years as Provost, she hasn’t had good relationships with faculty, she’s refused to attend meetings. It’s about her personality.” Among other failures in her record as provost, protesters point to the school’s abysmal graduation rates, which have not broken 50 percent since 1999.
Whatever the protesters’ reasons, the administration has steadfastly refused to renegotiate Fernandes’ selection.
“The administration continues to support the appointment by the Board of Trustees of Dr. Jane Fernandes as Gallaudet University’s ninth president, and continues to believe that the search process was above board in every way,” administration spokeswoman Mercy Coogan said.
But the protesters dispute the vigor of that search process, saying that Fernandes appeared to have been the administration’s choice long ago despite repeated surveys of faculty and students indicating that she was unacceptable. Slone said that four years ago in an honorary degree ceremony, it was stated that Fernandes would be the next president of Gallaudet, and that current President I. King Jordan called her President Fernandes when announcing his retirement.
“It was like she was already decided before we even began,” he said. “One thing we really wish is that King hadn’t been involved in the search process. They’re godparents for each others’ kids, for goodness’ sake.”
The University’s tenacity has forced the protesters to take drastic measures. Just yesterday, the administration brought in an earth-mover to raze the tent city at the school’s Brentwood Ave. entrance and cut the chains protestors used to lock the gates, according to the Washington Times. Four students were injured. 50 demonstrators briefly occupied College Hall, the main administration building, on Tuesday night but had left by yesterday morning.
On the week of Oct. 9, the gates to campus were blockaded and the University was forced to close. As negotiations failed, President Jordan called in the help of the Metropolitan Police Department on the night of Friday, Oct. 13, and officers arrested 133 protesters at the University’s main entrance. All were taken to MPD’s processing center in Southwest D.C. and released on $50 bail. The school was finally able to reopen on that Monday, Oct. 16, but class attendance suffered as protesters urged students to skip, and the hunger strike began on the intervening Saturday.
Gallaudet’s professors overwhelmingly sympathize with the protesters. After Fernandes’ initial selection in May, the Washington Post reported that the faculty voted no confidence in Fernandes, 93 to 47, and no confidence in the Board’s decision, 80 to 57. At a faculty meeting just last week, those numbers changed to 138 to 30 calling for Fernandes’ immediate resignation, and a vote of 106 to 10 of no confidence in the Board itself, according to Inside Higher Education. One hundred and thirty-one of the 168 professors present called for the Board of Trustees to return to campus and reach a resolution immediately.
“Dr. Fernandes and Dr. Jordan know that the vote is a serious concern,” Coogan said. “They want to work with the faculty to address some of the issues. The atmosphere we have now is very volatile, very emotional, and taking a vote in that atmosphere is difficult.”
But not all believe that those numbers accurately reflect faculty sentiment.
“Some of those faculty just voted no confidence because they want this protest to be over with,” Professor Veith said. “They want to get back to the job of education.”
Veith represents a growing faction on campus for whom the biggest issue at hand is the interference of the conflict with Gallaudet’s operation and the students’ educations. “I support the students’ right to express their opinion, and their right to protest, but I have a big problem with the shutdown of the University,” she said, a position echoed by Coogan.
Although Veith doesn’t feel that she as a teacher can take a public position, fearing it might hurt the free dialogue taking place in her classes, she is working with a new group of students, faculty and staff called the Reconcilers. Their goal is to bring the administration and protesters together to discuss the shared concerns that have made both sides of the debate so emotionally charged, foremost among which is the problem of audist discrimination (against the deaf) in the one place it shouldn’t be a worry.
“I’m pretty positive that a lot of people have gone through experiences like that we’re going through,” Roberts said. “People out there have experienced issues like racism, sexism and all the other ‘isms,’ and that’s what we’re going through: we’re experiencing audism on campus.” The administration has publicly acknowledged this problem and is also trying to open dialogue on the issue.
“The appointment of Dr. Fernandes and reopening the search process are non-negotiable, but there are other issues that they would like to discuss,” Coogan said. “Other issues that have come up are racism, audism, issues of leadership style, governance issues. These are serious issues that the administration has already begun to look at and is willing to look at with the protesters.” Though these are not the central demands of the protesters, they do still play into their motivations, reflecting the turmoil that has been simmering for years in the larger deaf community as new technologies change what it means to be deaf.
Recent innovations have brought about widespread good for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, as the ubiquity of Blackberry and Sidekick mobile e-mail devices on the Capitol lawn attested. Nearly everyone present appeared to be typing at some point or another, while not a single conventional cell phone could be seen.
But with the advent of better hearing aids and cochlear implants—devices which bypass the damaged part of the ear to transmit sound straight to the auditory nerve and which are becoming increasingly common—the deaf community is in the midst of an identity crisis. According to the FDA’s 2005 figures, about 22,000 adults and 15,000 children have received implants to date. There is an ever-growing number of deaf and hard-of-hearing people who have not grown up with American Sign Language as their first language, and who have learned to speak and attended mainstream schools. As more people embrace these developments, more come to Gallaudet looking for an education that can serve their needs as well. Veith compared the situation to Europe’s vast influx of immigrants in recent years.
“There is a division between the big-D culturally deaf and those that have been mainstreamed, that grew up oral.” She believes that this division is characterizing the Gallaudet protests.
“There’s been an oppressive system in place here at the University,” Simmons said. “Jane Fernandes is seen as the fruit of the poisonous tree. Her concept of a new deaf order is to water down deaf culture.” That new deaf order is Fernandes’ oft-espoused vision of equipping Gallaudet to deal with the increasing diversity of types of deafness represented, as she wrote in an Oct. 14 Washington Post op-ed titled “Many Ways of Being Deaf.”
“Deaf people of color and others from diverse groups must be included and are just as central to Gallaudet’s mission and character as are our commitments to American Sign Language and Deaf culture,” she wrote. “Currently, they are not.”
For Simmons and many other deaf people, the very core of being deaf is using ASL. The traditional deaf identity is wrapped up in the language, but now, for the first time, being deaf has become a choice.
While the decision to enter the hearing world may seem obvious to outsiders, a large number of deaf oppose the use of implants in favor of staying true to one’s deaf roots, much like any other minority subculture. Many at Gallaudet and in the deaf community worldwide fear, as Simmons does, the potential for vast cultural loss.
To that end both sides feel the need to define sign language’s appropriate place at Gallaudet, which has requirements for English and foreign language classes, but none for ASL. Most hearing people fail to realize that ASL and English are not equivalent; each has a distinct linguistic structure and grammatical order.
“We need to clarify that they are two different languages, and that the primary language of the University must be ASL,” Simmons said. “It’s like trying to use English and Spanish with your right hand and use a different language with your other hand. We need to clarify and define appropriate use of sign language in the classroom.”
“Right now we are a bilingual community,” said Veith, citing the University’s communication policy adopted in 1995, which emphasizes respect for different modes of visual communication, the importance of understanding over any specific mode and signing fluency for all. The school formerly espoused simultaneous communication (English and signing at once), which doesn’t work well because the said words don’t follow the order of ASL grammar. At the Capitol rally, four interpreters stood on along the wall at the foot of the main steps, translating on the spot so that speakers wouldn’t have to try to sign at the same time. In Veith’s classes, her use of language varies according to the audience.
“Especially in my intro class, I have a lot of new signers. The way that I sign changes, so that they have access.” Many believe that this is not enough: that the University must declare ASL an official language and require its use in the classroom. But as Veith points out, this amounts to discrimination in the opposite direction for those not immersed in Deaf culture. She recalled her own experience as a student in the mid-’90s.
“I had one month of ASL classes, and I was expected to go to a university class, and to understand a university level lecture in ASL,” she said. “That’s impossible. It’s like taking one month of French and being expected to understand a university class in French. That’s impossible.” The problem of accommodating so many languages in a lecture seems intractable, and both sides of the protests are racking their brains for an answer to the question Veith asks: “How do we encourage and support ASL, and at the same time recognize that there are more students who are mainstream, who didn’t grow up with ASL as their first language?”
The language wars at the heart of the technological sea change in the deaf community have spilled over into the protest on a very emotional level, with personal attacks and misrepresentation running rampant on both sides. During the smaller initial protests against Fernandes’ appointment in May, the phrase “not deaf enough” entered the public conversation. The idea has since dominated nearly all mainstream media coverage.
“We’re really angry about that comment about her not being deaf enough,” Slone said. “A small group of protesters in May assumed that it should be about Deaf culture. The protest is not about Jane not being deaf enough. The point is that her politics don’t support the University.”
“When President-designate Jane K. Fernandes claimed that we’re protesting her appointment just because she didn’t sign while growing up, she effectively pressed the red button and nuked the credibility and reputation of the very constituents she was selected to lead,” Ben Moore (Gallaudet ‘07) wrote on the blog DeafDC.com last Thursday. “She conveniently left out that the mostly hearing faculty have repeatedly expressed no confidence in her in the past and a majority of the current student body graduated from mainstream high schools. I don’t think many outsiders realize how diverse we are now.” Kat Roberts emphasized that the current protests are not about Fernandes’ signing ability or the formal place of ASL at Gallaudet.
“I don’t necessarily care so much about the official language of the University as long as teachers can sign to the students,” she said. Simmons said that while bigger problems like audism and the status of ASL are included in 23 resolutions drafted by protesters for discussion and action, these are not the protesters’ demands.
“I think this whole protest is against the selection process of Dr. Fernandes,” he said.
Nevertheless, the fact is that students who are not culturally Deaf are feeling pressure from the protests to the point of alienation from the school.
“I have several hard-of-hearing students who are talking about withdrawing,” Veith said. “They’re afraid they won’t be welcome here. They’re afraid they’re going to have to become ‘deaf like me,’ or you’re not going to be welcome.” Fernandes herself has felt a great amount of personal pressure, as she described in a washingtonpost.com online conversation on Monday.
“Students who do not support the protest, of which there are plenty, are being threatened,” she wrote. “Terms negotiated in good faith are being revoked. An image of me has been burned in effigy. My family has been stalked. There have been threats on myself and my family. From my position, there is nothing peaceful about this protest.” Negative images of Fernandes’ face dominated the “Resign Now!” signs carried by or taped to the backs of nearly every protester at the Capitol rally, and a 10 foot tall banner depicting her as a despotic queen sits at the University’s main Florida Ave. entrance, at the head of the protesters’ tent city that lies scattered across the lawn. Professor Shirley Myers of the English Department said that some professors feel silenced by the opposition as well.
“Deaf faculty have said to me that they just can’t afford to speak out,” she said, adding that in such a small community, burning bridges is dangerous. “We have to be able to suspend distrust and deep anger.”
A major step towards suspending such negative emotions took place at a faculty meeting on Monday. According to Veith, motions were passed for a neutral, external investigation into the presidential search process, semesterly presidential performance reviews by the Board and uniform assessment of signing ability. Most importantly, the faculty and Dr. Fernandes all agreed to bring in an outside mediator at once.
“This was an incredible achievement, because there was a sense that talking was done, this wasn’t going anywhere,” Myers said of the entrance into mediation. “A lot of the issues are long-term, earth-shaking, so I’m happy people are willing to sit down at a table.”
Simmons said that the protesters are similarly hopeful, but for a different reason. Last Friday, he said that seven of the 20 members of the Board of Trustees had begun to wane in support for Fernandes. Three of them are Congresspeople, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). As of Tuesday, that number was up to nine. If two more trustees change their minds, the protesters will be able to satisfy their demands. Simmons said their current goal is that the Board of Trustees will make a decision; the agitation has already provoked the board into calling a special meeting this coming weekend.
“They’re meeting on Sunday at Dulles Airport,” he said. “They’re scared to come onto their own campus.”
Whatever action the Board of Trustees may take, a growing proportion of the campus community believes the conflict is dragging on far too long. The opposition’s two-week peak is now slowly settling down into a return to normalcy, fueled in part by a long-time weapon against American student protesters: bad grades.
“Midterm grades just came in,” Veith said. “That did a lot to bring students back to class.”
A great deal hinges on the Board’s decision this Sunday, but regardless of their actions or choice of Gallaudet’s next president, the process of negotiating the greater issues of deafness faced by both factions at Gallaudet has begun.
“We’re in a very precarious position right now,” Myers said. “It’s fragile, but possible, as opposed to what I saw last week.”
“Deaf people in general are very proud of Deaf culture, and they have every reason to be, but every time you have cultural change, you have change in a society, you have conflict,” Veith said. Gallaudet’s performance in the face of such vast, inevitable changes in Deaf culture today will be a powerful indicator of the future of what it means to be deaf anywhere in the world. Fernandes and the protesters are defining the shape of an argument whose resolution will change forever the way deaf people and Deaf culture interact with the rest of the world, and as they stand at the front lines, all are feeling the conflict take its toll.
“It’s not a pain-free experience,” Myers said. “Everybody pays a price for this.”
Please see the Gallyprotest.org website for more information about the 2006 Unity for Gallaudet protest.