Postscript: Gallaudet Protests of 2006 and the Myths of In/Exclusion

Abstract

ON OCTOBER 13, 2006, the Washington, D. C, Metropolitan Police Department arrested 133 Gallaudet University students, staff, and alumni, the largest number of university arrests in the United States since the 1960s. The arrests occurred amid weeks of building and campus lockdowns, hunger strikes, a sprawling tent city, rallies, and a two thousand-person march to the Capitol. At a time when many university faculty across the nation lament apathy on campus, Gallaudet University students orchestrated a massive protest that garnered national media attention and forced the Board of Trustees to meet their demand that the president-designate be removed before taking office. What could possibly have sparked such widespread activism? The very causes of the protest were themselves a principle site of vigorous debate. Unlike the 1988 President Now (DPN) movement, which rallied behind the well-defined issue of selecting a deaf president for a deaf university, the 2006 protests were far more complicated and overdetermined. The Gallaudet Protest of 2006 could only be fully explained through a feature-length documentary film or booklength analysis with writers from all perspectives engaged in a critical collaboration with the issues. Such a volume would be able to lay out the escalation of events from the initial protests in May to the campus lockdown in October and the Board's capitulation. Such a volume would also describe the relevance of the protest in this particular historical moment. What do the protests say about political fife in 2006 and beyond? While it is still early to define the legacy of the 2006 protests, they do clearly dramatize issues simmering throughout the pages of Open Your Eyes. In fact, many of the contributors to this volume were deeply involved in the protest - on both sides. Some were members (and even president) of the Board of Trustees, while others were Gallaudet faculty members who played significant roles in the coalition of protesters, the Faculty Student Staff and Alumni (FSSA) coalition. What's more, the figure at the center of the controversy, then-Provost Jane Fernandes, provided financial support for, and participated in, the Studies Think Tank that gave rise to this volume. Given that many of the debates and issues in this volume were dramatized before a national authence when the manuscript had already been delivered to the publisher, it seems only fitting that a postscript be added - not to advocate for one side or the other, not to delve into the minutiae of this or that event, but to take a wide-angle lens on the protest, to place it in a historical, cultural, and political context. One of the most striking and relevant issues is the widespread disagreement on the very reasons for protest in the first place. The University administration asserted that the protest erupted out of a deep cultural anxiety about radical changes wrought by medical and technological advances, such as cochlear implants, that offer deaf people opportunities to become immersed into the hearing world rather than in the separate culture revolving around American Sign Language (ASL). Dr. Jane Fernandes, who is deaf though she grew up speaking and did not learn ASL until the age of twenty-three, symbolized a future that her critics were resisting. According to this fine of reasoning she was not culturally Deaf enough to be the public face of Gallaudet University. Protesters denied these claims, citing the fact that 82 percent of the faculty asked for the president-designate 's resignation or removal from office, which is especially significant given the fact that only 3 8 percent of the faculty are deaf, out of which only a small portion are native users of ASL. Instead, the protesters' grievances included a long list of concerns: the lack of diversity among the finalists, the Board of Trustees' lack of responsiveness to students of color, the persistence of audism on campus, and the appearance of an unfair search process that led to the appointment of a widely unpopular, internal candidate. …