worldwide, and the deaf were flourishing. By 1869, there were 550 teachers of the deaf around the globe and 41 percent of them were themselves deaf.
But then tragedy struck. One hundred years of advancements shriveled into nothing.
A trend toward Victorian oppressiveness and intolerances of all minorities took its toll on us, focusing particularly on our sign language. For two centuries, there had been a counteraction from teachers and parents of deaf children that the goal of education should be teaching the deaf how to speak. Questions continued being asked well into the late twentieth century as to what good the use of sign is without speech. Wouldn’t it restrict deaf people to communicating only with other deaf people? Shouldn’t speech and lipreading be taught, so that the deaf can integrate with the general population? Shouldn’t signing be banned so that it doesn’t interfere with speech?
From his travels to other deaf schools, Edward Gallaudet found (as did other experts on the deaf) that articulation skills, although very desirable, could not be the basis of primary teaching; this had to be achieved, and achieved early, by sign. Yet, the “oralists” worked hard to overthrow the old-fashioned sign language schools for the new progressive oralist schools, leading to the opening of the Clark School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1867 (a hundred years later, Eric’s father would be its president).
The most prominent oralist figure was Alexander Graham Bell, a genius whose weird family dynamics included teaching diction and correcting speech impediments (as did his father and grandfather), while at the same time denying deafness (both his mother and wife were deaf but never acknowledged this). Sickened by the idea of “a Deaf variety of the human race,” he created the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, which aimed at preventing deaf people from marrying one another, and to keep deaf students from mingling with each other. He advocated that deaf adults endure sterilization and even convinced some hearing parents to sterilize their own deaf children. Thomas Edison soon joined the cause. With Bell’s power and influence behind the advocacy of oralism, the tipping point was finally reached.
In 1880, at the infamous International Congress of Education of the Deaf held in Milan, where deaf teachers were themselves excluded from the vote, the use of signing in schools was officially prohibited. To the deaf, the Milan conference’s edict was like the “Jim Crow” laws to African Americans and like the ghettos to Eastern European Jews. It was a sad, sad time in Deaf History, and the anger and resentment smoldered beneath the surface until it erupted a hundred years later. Even though I had no idea at the time of my learning about it, I would soon be riding the wave of that emancipation.
The truth is that deaf people show no disposition to speak at all (except those like me who have acquired speech before becoming deaf), but they show an immediate and powerful disposition to sign—a visual language that is completely accessible to them. However, after the Milan Conference, deaf pupils could no longer use their own natural language and were forced to learn the unnatural (for them) language of speech. The proportion of deaf teachers for the deaf, which was 50 percent in 1850, fell to 25 percent by 1900 and to 12 percent by 1960. In the United States, English became the language taught to deaf students by hearing teachers, and fewer and fewer of those teachers knew sign language.
It wasn’t until seventy-five years after the International Congress that things began to reverse themselves. The change was catapulted in 1955 when a linguist named William Stokoe came to Gallaudet University. He came to teach but soon realized he had so much more to accomplish. Four years later, he wrote an earth-shattering paper on sign language structure, which was the first-ever serious and scientific look at the visual language of ASL. He asserted what had always been denied: that linguistically ASL is a complete language; its syntax, grammar, and semantics are complete, although it is very different from any spoken or written language. His conclusions butted up against the long- and hard-held belief that sign language was just pantomime, namby-pamby—a pictorial language. Even Britannica had defined sign as “a species of picture writing in the air, more pictorial and less symbolic.”
Stokoe’s work was also the first to recognize the fact that deaf people had their own community, including their own language (ASL), and a history and culture that bound them together, making them different from other people (something I inherently knew but couldn’t express to my family and friends). However, in its distrust of hearing people, who in the past had dictated its fate, the Deaf community took years to embrace Stokoe’s work. It wasn’t until the 1970s (when I became deaf) that oralism was finally being reversed, and “total communication” became accepted. Total communication is the use of both signed and spoken language, which is used at most schools today.
Still, the official sign language at that time—even at Gallaudet—was Signed Exact English (SEE) and not ASL, so deaf students were forced to learn signs for phonetic English sounds they couldn’t hear. (Again this was different for me, having already learned how to speak before becoming deaf.) SEE is an exact replication of spoken English in signs and uses an English sentence structure. Actually, SEE is not considered a language in itself but rather an encoding for the English language, and it was designed with little to no input from the Deaf community. Linguists, however, consider ASL a complete language, and it is a much more intuitive way of communicating for deaf people.
Given these decades of the hearing world’s deafness to the needs of the Deaf community, it isn’t surprising that Gallaudet University had never had a deaf president. The only university specifically for deaf students and chartered by Congress hadn’t had a deaf president since its inception 125 years earlier. In late 1987, when the university’s sixth president, Jerry Lee, announced his resignation, the setting was ripe for the perfect storm.
Many factors were in play, including Stokoe’s work, the formation of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) in 1880 and other deaf advocacy organizations, and the fact that deaf people had already been running schools and had lobbying, fund-raising, and legislative experience. These factors, along with it being another progressive time in history, had the inner circles of the Deaf community thinking that the timing was right for Gallaudet University to have a deaf president. The past reticence of deaf people to advocate for themselves (tied to years of being cast aside by the hearing world) was the impetus for us to seize the moment. It was time. The university’s board of directors would be making their selection in March of 1988. At the time, I was doing my stint as Miss Deaf Illinois, studying and playing hard, and I had decided to enter the Miss Deaf America Pageant.
The Deaf community as a whole wasn’t quite aware of what was happening but soon would be. Behind the scenes, a few members of the Gallaudet University Alumni Association (GUAA), known as the “ducks” because they had met for the first time in a duckpin bowling alley, got to work planning a big student rally to take place a week before the election. They sent telegrams to the board of directors letting them know their position, and they joined forces with the NAD and other deaf advocacy organizations and community leaders to work together to identify, endorse, and support a deaf president. The NAD sent letters to Congress for support.
In mid-February, the presidential search committee had narrowed the candidates down to three, one hearing and two deaf, which was a victory in itself. On March 1, the student rally made it clear to the board that the Gallaudet community was insisting on the selection of a deaf president and kicked off the student’s involvement. On March 5, the night before the election, the students held a candlelight vigil outside the board of director’s sleeping quarters. Excitement was in the air. The students felt that a victory was at hand.
However, on Sunday, March 6, the board chose the hearing candidate, Elisabeth Ann Zinser, the vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina. The students closed down the school in protest. “How could this be?” the Gallaudet community exclaimed. Yeshiva University has a Jewish president; Howard University has an African American president. What’s wrong with this picture? At this point, all over the country, the Deaf community was in an outrage. News
