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Fallout at Gallaudet
The Gallaudet Board of Trustees voted last week not only to dismiss incoming president Jane K. Fernandes but also to overlook the legal infractions of student protesters who had disrupted the University's daily operations multiple times. At the news of the Board's decision, some celebrated what they saw as the end of a long battle to compel the Board to comply with their wishes--but others recognized that the Board's compliance simply marked a deepening of the problems that plague Gallaudet, and deplored the Board's misguided efforts at appeasement.
Now, right on cue, the fallout from that decision is beginning. It takes the form of two resignations from the Board itself--one on the part of acting chair Brenda Jo Brueggemann and the other on the part of Senator John McCain. Both attributed their resignations to the Board's decision to revoke Fernandes' appointment; "I cannot in good conscience continue to serve the board after its decision to terminate her appointment," McCain wrote, noting that the decision "was unfair and not in the best interests of the university." While McCain's resignation appears to have been a matter of principle--Brueggemann says that in five years on the Board she never saw him at a meeting--Brueggemann's was helped along by good old-fashioned harassment. "My personal life, and my professional work as a scholar, teacher, and administrator at my own university, have suffered considerably," she wrote in a statement; after protesters published her home phone number, she was inundated by calls; her office was occupied by protesters who had to be removed by the police; she was even the target of a bomb threat.
ACTA deplored the Board's decision in a press release issued last week. Noting that the Board had "allowed the institution to be governed by the heckler's veto," ACTA observed that the Board must "take time to learn from this pathetic episode, and reestablish credibility in and outside the institution--most particularly with Congress, which appropriates 70 percent of Gallaudet's budget. The board needs to remember that it is in charge, not the loudest students or faculty." The resignations of McCain and Brueggemann--which may be read as votes of no confidence from within the Board itself--suggest just how far Gallaudet has to go to restore its credibility.
Margaret Soltan has more.
Posted by acta online on November 09, 2006 at November 9, 2006 07:11 AM
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Comments
When the news of the Gallaudet demonstrations first appeared, my wife, who worked for more than five years as a nurse in a state (K-12) school for the deaf and blind, told me there are some teachers who are “deaf ethnic nationalists.” It sounds bad and it is bad. For example, these zealots, some of whom are not deaf themselves, view medical advances, such as surgery that can allow a person to hear, as the equivalent of forced castration. To them it is better that a deaf person not hear and thus remain a pure member of the deaf race.
Your paraphrasing of the NYT editorial tells us all we need to know about this story -- “the protesters were never able to articulate a coherent rationale for their protesting.” It is obvious that the protesters were sent into a frenzy over the issue of Fernandes’ deaf purity. And you know that if deaf students are getting this message from some teachers in high school, they’re probably getting a lot more of it at a place like Gallaudet. It is pernicious nonsense, and it is truly sad that the school has caved in to its proponents and their naive minions.
Posted by: Tom at November 10, 2006 07:29 PM