McCain and B.B Resign in Protest

This is a big victory for Gallaudet Community as it had been reported that the acting chairperson Brueggemann held  the board in ‘hostage’ preventing them from resolving the issues during the summer. Hopefully, with these new changes, we will have a board conductive to the whole Gallaudet Community and the road toward healing will start. Elizabeth

Gallaudet Trustees Chair Resigns

By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 8, 2006; B01

The chair of the Gallaudet University board of trustees resigned last
night [Tuesday], the day after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) stepped down
from the board because he disagreed with the decision to end the
appointment of incoming president Jane K. Fernandes.

“I cannot in good conscience continue to serve the board after its
decision to terminate her appointment, which I believe was unfair and
not in the best interests of the University,” McCain wrote to outgoing
President I. King Jordan on Monday night. The letter, which was
distributed to board members, was obtained by The Washington Post.

Brenda Jo Brueggemann, the board chair, said in an e-mail last night
that she had been thinking about stepping down since the meeting last
week, when the board voted to terminate Fernandes’s appointment.

In a written statement last night, she wrote that her personal life and
work as a professor at Ohio State University had suffered considerably
in the months since May, when she took over from the interim board
chair, Celia May Baldwin. Baldwin had resigned amid protests that began
when Fernandes was named incoming president May 1, saying she had
received threats.

The campus in Northeast Washington was shaken last month by
increasingly intense protests, as students, faculty and alumni
continued to demand that a new president be named at the school for the
deaf. The protesters said Fernandes, who had been provost, was an
ineffective leader and was chosen in an unfair search. Fernandes said
the debate was over the importance of sign language and other issues in
deaf culture; she grew up speaking and learned to sign in her 20s.

Both Jordan and Brueggemann strongly supported Fernandes, who they said
was a strong leader.

McCain was unable to attend the meeting last week and did not
participate in the decision, he wrote. He said that he deeply respected
and admired Jordan’s leadership over the past 18 years but that he had
to resign from the board effective immediately.

The board’s 20 members — now 18 — have included three from Congress.
Reps. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) and Lynn C. Woolsey (D-Calif.) will remain on
the board, according to aides. The bulk of Gallaudet’s budget is
provided by the federal government every year.

Some trustees reacted with shock last night when asked about
Brueggemann’s decision. And in an e-mail last night, Fernandes called
Brueggemann “a model of respectful and inclusive leadership.”

The board is scheduled to meet Saturday on campus to discuss the
process of choosing an interim president.

“I continue to believe in the mission and vision of Gallaudet
University as it is currently expressed,” Brueggemann’s statement said,
“and will continue to work, as best I can as a scholar of Deaf studies
and a hard-of-hearing person, to insure that the 8 strategic goals that
currently guide Gallaudet University are being further developed and
implemented. . . .

“I do not believe I can be the most effective member of the board to
lead Gallaudet through the next steps,” Brueggemann said in her
statement.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/07/AR2006110701402.html

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