Finding Zoe. Gail Harris
way of communicating for deaf people.
Given these decades of the hearing world’s deafness to the needs of the Deaf community, it isn’t surprising that Gallaudet University had never had a deaf president. The only university specifically for deaf students and chartered by Congress hadn’t had a deaf president since its inception 125 years earlier. In late 1987, when the university’s sixth president, Jerry Lee, announced his resignation, the setting was ripe for the perfect storm.
Many factors were in play, including Stokoe’s work, the formation of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) in 1880 and other deaf advocacy organizations, and the fact that deaf people had already been running schools and had lobbying, fund-raising, and legislative experience. These factors, along with it being another progressive time in history, had the inner circles of the Deaf community thinking that the timing was right for Gallaudet University to have a deaf president. The past reticence of deaf people to advocate for themselves (tied to years of being cast aside by the hearing world) was the impetus for us to seize the moment. It was time. The university’s board of directors would be making their selection in March of 1988. At the time, I was doing my stint as Miss Deaf Illinois, studying and playing hard, and I had decided to enter the Miss Deaf America Pageant.
The Deaf community as a whole wasn’t quite aware of what was happening but soon would be. Behind the scenes, a few members of the Gallaudet University Alumni Association (GUAA), known as the “ducks” because they had met for the first time in a duckpin bowling alley, got to work planning a big student rally to take place a week before the election. They sent telegrams to the board of directors letting them know their position, and they joined forces with the NAD and other deaf advocacy organizations and community leaders to work together to identify, endorse, and support a deaf president. The NAD sent letters to Congress for support.
In mid-February, the presidential search committee had narrowed the candidates down to three, one hearing and two deaf, which was a victory in itself. On March 1, the student rally made it clear to the board that the Gallaudet community was insisting on the selection of a deaf president and kicked off the student’s involvement. On March 5, the night before the election, the students held a candlelight vigil outside the board of director’s sleeping quarters. Excitement was in the air. The students felt that a victory was at hand.
However, on Sunday, March 6, the board chose the hearing candidate, Elisabeth Ann Zinser, the vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina. The students closed down the school in protest. “How could this be?” the Gallaudet community exclaimed. Yeshiva University has a Jewish president; Howard University has an African American president. What’s wrong with this picture? At this point, all over the country, the Deaf community was in an outrage. News of the protest was reported all week long on the six o’clock news and was on the front page of the New York Times.
I remember being in my dorm and reading an article in the Rochester newspaper about it on Monday, March 7, and seeing the reports on the nightly news. Because NTID was located in Rochester, the media there was always extra sensitive to deaf-related issues, so the papers covered the story very carefully. (It’s hard to imagine now how we kept up with what was happening without email or smartphones.) I remember reading about the four deaf student leaders. One of them was Tim Rarus.
On the Sunday evening the board had elected Elisabeth Zinser, Tim had been doing his homework in his dorm and through his window spotted people milling about outside the university’s main entrance. He went outside and saw yellow and green flyers being passed around. Everyone seemed angry and upset, and their hands were flailing a mile a minute. It was quiet pandemonium. Soon someone came over to Tim and signed, “Holy fuck,” then shoved a flyer in his hand. Tim read it and then tore it into shreds. The flyer read, “The Gallaudet Board of Directors announces the election of Gallaudet University’s first woman president”—as if putting such a positive spin on the news would somehow hide the abomination. The students had been expecting the board to formally announce their decision in person a few hours later on campus, but instead the board had issued the flyer at the last minute, only adding insult to injury.
To Tim, the announcement was like a slap in the face; it was like going back to 355 BC, when Aristotle said that deaf people were incapable of reason. Along with the rest of the students, he had been so optimistic at first because two out of the three finalists were deaf. He stood there thinking, After all this time, nothing has changed. The board doesn’t have confidence in us. They’re missing the entire point. Out of three candidates—two were deaf. It was too good to be true. But they chose the hearing candidate.
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