Excellent Article by New York Times: Signs of Revolution

The New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Signs of Revolution

By LEAH HAGER COHEN
Published: October 31, 2006
Belmont, Mass.

NEARLY a month of astonishingly passionate protest ended on Sunday when
the Gallaudet University board voted to revoke the appointment of Dr.
Jane Fernandes as the institution’s next president.

This was a just and commendable decision, which many are likely to
misinterpret as an act of unconscionable capitulation to an angry mob.

The protest was never really about deafness – a fact that the news
media had trouble grasping. Gallaudet, the nation’s only liberal arts
university for the deaf, is no stranger to protest on its campus in
Washington. Eighteen years ago, it was the site of the Deaf President
Now movement, which resulted in the appointment of the first deaf
university president. In that case the issue was clear, the cause easy
to champion. It was about deaf civil rights; the victory was
everyone’s.

This time the cause is harder to parse, the administration as well as
the protesters themselves having offered varying and inconsistent
accounts. The strangest was that the protesters objected to the
president-designate because she was “not deaf enough.” That this
could be a complaint at all is unfathomable to most hearing people, and
the university officials who kept stressing the point showed political
savvy of the most cynical sort by casting the protesters as a bunch of
headstrong deaf students having a temper tantrum.

The fact is that the students – along with many of the faculty,
alumni and members of the deaf community – were angry. But this anger
was used to discredit the protesters and to deflect attention from a
legitimate grievance: that the presidential search process was
seriously flawed.

Strong evidence exists for this claim. The inexplicable omission of a
few highly qualified candidates from the list of finalists, and the
relatively low merits of some of those who did make it onto the list
(one didn’t even possess a doctoral degree, a requirement for the
job), made it virtually impossible for the position not to go to Dr.
Fernandes, the university provost. But she was the subject of two votes
of no confidence by the faculty in the past six years, and faculty and
students have questioned the manner in which the university appointed
her provost. They have asserted that a proper search was never
conducted, that Dr. Fernandes received tenure without undergoing the
regular seven-year review, and that she has proven an ineffective
leader who was unlikely to improve Gallaudet’s shaky academic record.

Still, most of the hearing world can’t understand why the protest was
so extreme. Students and faculty at most universities don’t expect to
play more than a token role in the selection of a new president. Hunger
strikes? Bulldozers razing tent cities? More than a hundred arrests?
Two thousand people marching on the Capitol? And in the last few days
things were escalating: there were reports of injuries, vandalism and
threats against those who didn’t join the protest.

Understanding this requires understanding that Gallaudet is much more
than a university. Sometimes called “the deaf mecca,” it functions
as the symbolic capitol of a minority culture long disenfranchised. In
years past, deaf people were denied the right to inherit land, to bear
children, to receive an education. Today, all too often they continue
to be denied the right to access information and to speak for
themselves.

Gallaudet is supposed to be the one place where deaf people can expect
those rights in full. What really lies at the heart of the crisis is
the protesters’ refusal to relinquish these basic, hard-won rights.
The message was: don’t dismiss us, and don’t obfuscate.

Their cause would have been strengthened by better leadership and a
more cogent platform, minus the personal attacks. But one way to look
at the events of this month at Gallaudet is as an extraordinary
demonstration of commitment, by a community of stakeholders, to
maintaining the integrity of their cultural center.

That’s why the decision on Sunday was a courageous one. If the board
had insisted on holding fast to its earlier decision, its members might
have saved face. Instead, by showing a willingness to examine honestly
what brought things to this point, they have hastened the possibility
of restoring faith – and they modeled for us an example of leadership
far greater than simply upholding one’s authority, no matter the
cost.

Leah Hager Cohen is the author of “Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf
World.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/opinion/31cohen.html

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