reports on the nightly news. Because NTID was located in Rochester, the media there was always extra sensitive to deaf-related issues, so the papers covered the story very carefully. (It’s hard to imagine now how we kept up with what was happening without email or smartphones.) I remember reading about the four deaf student leaders. One of them was Tim Rarus.
On the Sunday evening the board had elected Elisabeth Zinser, Tim had been doing his homework in his dorm and through his window spotted people milling about outside the university’s main entrance. He went outside and saw yellow and green flyers being passed around. Everyone seemed angry and upset, and their hands were flailing a mile a minute. It was quiet pandemonium. Soon someone came over to Tim and signed, “Holy fuck,” then shoved a flyer in his hand. Tim read it and then tore it into shreds. The flyer read, “The Gallaudet Board of Directors announces the election of Gallaudet University’s first woman president”—as if putting such a positive spin on the news would somehow hide the abomination. The students had been expecting the board to formally announce their decision in person a few hours later on campus, but instead the board had issued the flyer at the last minute, only adding insult to injury.
To Tim, the announcement was like a slap in the face; it was like going back to 355 BC, when Aristotle said that deaf people were incapable of reason. Along with the rest of the students, he had been so optimistic at first because two out of the three finalists were deaf. He stood there thinking, After all this time, nothing has changed. The board doesn’t have confidence in us. They’re missing the entire point. Out of three candidates—two were deaf. It was too good to be true. But they chose the hearing candidate.
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