Let’s Educate Time! Time Article, Contact Info, & Facts

Let’s educate Time! Use the information from the factual sheet.

Time
Time & Life Bldg., Rockefeller Center, New York, NY 10020
Phone: 212-522-1212
Fax: 212-522-0323 Letters to the Editor letters@time.com

__________________________________________________________________________ -The deaf culture and deaf identity issues are red herrings to distract the media and the public away from the  real  issues.

REAL ISSUES:

A flawed presidential candidate search and ineffectual leadership of Dr Fernandes the last eleven years.

-88% of faculty members, Clerc Center, Student Congress, Student Body Government, Gallaudet Alumni Association and National Association of the Deaf calling for resignations.

-Three no-confidence votes given to Fernandes as provost the last six years by the faculty senate.

-Tenure of Fernandes illegally awarded without the permission of the faculty senate.

-Letter from Clerc Center explaining the damages Fernandes have created during her years as Vice President prior to her appointment as a Provost. http://news.gufssa.com/category/fssa/staff/clerc-center/

-7 out of 20 Board of Trustees  are opposed to Fernandes’s appointment, contradicting Gallaudet’s statement that the Bot are unanimous in the appointment of Fernandes.

Poor reviews of the academic programs by Dept of Education the last five years, accumulating with a failing grade last year.  PART: (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/expectmore/summary.10003306.2005.html )-Controversial policy restricting the students’ expressions (Controversy over Gallaudet’s new policy) last June

 -Gallaudet always have students with diverse communication modes from the first year of its establishment. Many wear hearing aids, some are hard of hearings, many from mainstreamed programs, some wearing cochlear implants.

_________________________________________________________________________

Time Magazine

Sunday, Oct. 22, 2006
When Silence Isn’t Golden
At all-deaf Gallaudet University, protesters say the
new president isn’t part of their cherished culture
By BY 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.
Time
Time & Life Bldg., Rockefeller Center, New York, NY 10020
Phone: 212-522-1212
Fax: 212-522-0323

Letters to the Editor letters@time.com
Time Magazine: “When Silence Isn’t Golden”

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.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1549303,00.html