Deaf President Now!: The 1988 Revolution at Gallaudet University

Preface

Preface When people win together, the joy is more intense than when any of us wins alone, because part of any true pleasure is sharing that pleasure, just as part of the alleviation ofpain is sharing the burden ofpain. -A. Bartlett Giamatti, former Commissioner of Baseball, Take Time for Paradise, 1989. The old order changeth, yielding place to new. - Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur During one week in March 1988, protesters at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., captured the attention and imagination of millions of people in the United States and, indeed, throughout the world. It is quite likely that most of those people had never heard of Gallaudet before and were perhaps unaware that there even was a college geared toward meeting the special needs of deafstudents. But after a week of protest, which came to be called "Deaf President Now" (or DPN) and which culminated in the selection of I. King Jordan as the first deafpresident ofthe then 124-year-old university, the name Gallaudet, if not yet a household word, attained recognition undreamed of only a few weeks earlier. The Deaf President Now protest successfully challenged the decision by vii Gallaudet's board of trustees to appoint Elisabeth A. Zinser, a hearing person, as Gallaudet's president. In just one week the protesters succeeded in achieving all of their goals. Among other things, Zinser resigned her position after serving as president for only two days, the chairperson ofthe board of trustees also resigned, and the board appointed a deaf person as president ofthe university. Moreover, judging from hundreds of favorable editorials and newspaper and magazine articles published both during and shortly after DPN, the successful protest was seen by many as having been completely justified. In the first five chapters ofthis book we present a detailed description of what happened between late August 1987 and mid-March 1988, the period from when Jerry C. Lee, Gallaudet's sixth president, announced his resignation on August 24, 1987, to March 13, 1988, when the board of trustees announced that Jordan had been selected as Gallaudet's eighth, and first deaf, president. Lee's resignation led to a good deal of activity, both on Gallaudet's campus and in the deaf community in general, designed to ensure that qualified deaf candidates were seriously considered for the position. Some of this activity has not been publicly discussed before, and we are discussing it as part of our own presentation of a somewhat different picture ofthe events than has been portrayed in most media accounts. We will argue that to call DPN a "student protest," as most accounts have done, presents too simple a picture of a set of complicated actions. The final two chapters present some analysis ofthe protest. Chapter six deals with the question of why DPN was so successful in attaining its demands when most protests in which substantial numbers ofstudents are involved are not successful. In the final chapter we discuss some of the sequelae to DPN and examine questions such as the following: What has the selection of the first deaf president of the university meant for Gallaudet ? How has the protest been used by the university during the past few years? What has DPN meant for deaf people in general, as well as for persons with disabilities? A NOTE ON SOURCES Fortunately for those interested in describing the events of DPN in detail, the Department of Television, Film, and Photography at Gallaudet University was out in force during the week of the protest (as well as the viii: PREFACE week before), videotaping and taking photographs of virtually everything of significance that occurred during the first two weeks of March 1988. In addition, archivists at the Edward C. Merrill Learning Center at Gallaudet have collected hundreds of documents related to the protest. These documents include internal memoranda, position papers, newspaper articles, and other print material written during and after DPN as well as during the weeks and months before it occurred. And finally, the Office of Public Relations at Gallaudet has compiled a 418-page book entitled Gallaudet in the News (1988), which includes hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles about the protest, gathered from around the world. These materials have presented us with an unusually complete account, both visual and written, of the Deaf President Now protest. Although the videotapes and other documents provided valuable sources of data, much of our information came...