• U.S.

When Silence Isn’t Golden

4 minute read
John Cloud

In 1988 a student at Gallaudet University in Washington called that year’s protests demanding a deaf president of the school the “Selma of the deaf.” Founded in 1864, Gallaudet is the deaf world’s premier institution, and yet it had never been led by a deaf person. The protests carried the same moral clarity as the legendary civil rights march, and they succeeded. The hearing president resigned, and I. King Jordan became Gallaudet’s first deaf leader. But now Jordan is leaving, and the appointment of his replacement has ignited a new round of protests that lack all the moral clarity of 1988. That’s because Jane Fernandes, the incoming president, has been deaf since birth. The question is, How deaf is she?

This time around, the protesters say–and this is a crucial complaint in a world in which people grow up excluded from many conversations–that she is a poor communicator. By that they mean several things. Some say she makes top-down decisions. Others say she lacks vision for a job that isn’t just a university presidency but almost a secretary-generalship of the deaf world. “It’s like in Islam, people go to their Mecca for a holy religious cleansing,” Lawrence Fleischer, dean of deaf studies at California State University, Northridge, says through an interpreter. “In our world, we see Gallaudet as the Mecca.”

But an impassioned contingent means something more troubling when it says Fernandes doesn’t communicate well. Many who identify culturally as “big-D Deaf” learned American Sign Language before English. Fernandes did not. She grew up speaking English and says she didn’t find her “path into the deaf culture” until she was 23. That’s too late for some opponents. “People like [Fernandes] who entered the deaf world later in life can become culturally deaf, but some don’t … They sign stiffly. The eye contact, the body movements–all the cultural stuff is slightly off. They’re like second-language learners,” says Fleischer, who knows Fernandes and opposes her appointment.

All social movements seem to endure that kind of lurching debate over ideological purity. Selma in 1965 gave way to armed Black Panthers marching on the California capitol two years later. The Stonewall riots of 1969–a reaction against years of police brutality–seem quaintly simple compared with the 1989 storming of St. Patrick’s Cathedral by AIDS activists. Gallaudet’s current protests, which began months ago and have involved blockades and arrests and charges of violence on both sides, aren’t Selma; they’re Chicago in 1969, the deaf community’s Days of Rage.

In the deaf world, the fight over radicalism was forced on a fragile, just emerging sense of identity by technology and the law. Since 1988, the definition of who is “deaf enough” has been ratcheted up as barriers to the deaf have fallen away. Many parents have their deaf infants surgically equipped with cochlear implants; depending on how much hearing they gain, those kids will grow up with little or no connection to the deaf world. Federal law requires schools to accommodate deaf students, meaning more deaf kids can go to any high school and college they want, not just oases like Gallaudet. Those kids use Sidekicks and IMs to communicate–the same way their hearing friends prefer to. Consequently, Fernandes says, some deaf people see this moment as one of potential “genocide” for deaf culture.

That’s overstating the case, but Kierkegaard’s description of the “dizziness of freedom”–and the agony of choice–does seem relevant. “It’s the temptation of assimilation,” says a Gallaudet trustee. “There’s a lure, you know: Don’t be deaf. Get an implant. Don’t learn sign language. Lip-read. Become one of us.”

If Fernandes, who is open to alternate ways of interacting with the hearing world, is forced out–and even she sounds uncertain sometimes whether she will prevail–she will be a victim of her culture’s collective fears. But whether Fernandes leads it or not, Gallaudet will have to change with the times, become less a refuge from the outside world and more a competitor within it. “That’s very tough for a place that has welcomed so many students of varying abilities over the years,” says the trustee, who notes that historically black colleges had to endure a similar reconceptualization in the 1970s, after the Ivy League began poaching their most talented black students. Sooner or later, Gallaudet too will have to be just a college, not a cocoon.

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