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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY, located on Kendall Green in the northeast quadrant of Washington, D.C., is a long-standing, complex, and diverse institution. Simultaneously a world cultural center, a locus of research on deaf culture, history, and language, an experimental elementary and secondary school, and the primary higher education home of nearly every American deaf leader for well over one hundred years, Gallaudet’s importance to deaf history cannot be overestimated. Yet surprisingly little has been written about the institution’s history, its long domination by hearing presidents, its struggles to find a place within higher education , its easy acquiescence to racism, its relationship with the federal government, or its role in creating, shaping, and nurturing the deaf community . The articles collected in this volume, most based on new research in the Gallaudet University Archives, an unsurpassed repository of primary sources for deaf history, address some of these issues. The following essays do more that just illuminate Gallaudet’s past, however. They confront broad issues, such as the American struggle between social conformity and cultural distinctiveness, the nation’s history of racial oppression, and conflicts between minority cohesiveness and gender discrimination, that are important to all students of American history. More specifically “deaf” themes, such as the role of English in deaf education, audism, and the paternalism of hearing educators, have their place as well. Most of the articles that follow are critical of Gallaudet’s past and its past leadership. Michael J. Olson, for example, suggests that the school’s first president, Edward Miner Gallaudet, was duplicitous in his dealings with deaf leaders. Lindsey M. Parker finds that both Edward Miner Gallaudet and his deaf male colleagues at Gallaudet were more interested in maintaining gender boundaries than in liberating deaf females. Sandra Jowers-Barber and Marieta Joyner detail the institution’s painful history xi xii Editors’ Introduction of oppressing deaf African Americans. Ronald E. Sutcliffe accuses Gallaudet ’s leadership, before the 1950s, of collaborating in the oppression of deaf people and limiting their academic achievement, and Benjamin Bahan and Hansel Bauman argue that Gallaudet administrators have designed and constructed physical spaces on Kendall Green that ignore deaf people’s needs. A few articles are not critical. James M. McPherson, for instance, brilliantly situates Gallaudet’s institutional history and nineteenth-century deaf history within the framework of American political and social beliefs and events. Christopher A. N. Kurz and Noah D. Drezner present narratives about the role and value of sign language and English in the curriculum and the school’s complicated financial situation, respectively, without drawing conclusions that criticize the institution. David de Lorenzo applauds Edward Miner Gallaudet’s accomplishments, recognizing the difficulty of planting the seeds that would grow into today’s campus. Christopher Krentz addresses the issue of deaf self-consciousness , and I. King Jordan provides a brief memoir of his presidency, a period that changed Gallaudet forever. Finally, we believe that criticism and praise, when grounded in historical fact and presented coherently, as they are in all of these studies, are both useful as Gallaudet University moves forward and as the deaf community continues to evaluate, redefine, and reconstruct itself. ...

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