SYMHC Classics: Deaf President Now

A revisit to an episode on fairly recent history: In 1988, the appointment of a hearing president at Gallaudet University sparked a protest that changed the course of both the school and deaf culture in America.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everyone back. In the listener mail segment of
our podcast on the Anglo Zulu War, we mentioned a
previous episode from the archive on Death President Now, which
originally came out on MA We said perhaps we would
release that episode soon ish as a Saturday classic, and
we didn't exactly do it super soon, but here it

(00:24):
is not too late in the game. I hope you enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:45):
I'm Tracy Wilson. So just really a couple of weeks ago,
we mentioned our rule of thumb about the sort of
the most recent history we normally talk about, so like
that's the late sixties, early seventies. Naturally, having just said that,
just now, we're going to do something today that breaks
that rule just a little bit um because I've been

(01:08):
looking for a while for a podcast subject that was
in some way related to a disabled person or disability rights.
And the trouble is a lot of these stories have
this distinctly inspirational overtone, and there's this whole thread of
like overcoming hardship, and it's very presented in a way
that ultimately comes off as being like an heartwarming, up

(01:31):
uplifting tail told too non disabled people about a disabled person. Right.
It seems like a very positive take on things initially,
but when you stop and think about it, you kind
of realize that it sets up people with disabilities as
other and having to overcome things to be equal. Yeah,

(01:52):
it's not really how it should be. Yeah, And it's
not that we never tell inspirational stories. I mean we
do that pretty off and on the show, like when
we talked about Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first woman
to earn an empty in the United States. That was
a hugely inspirational story and event it especially inspired other women.
But if you told a story today about a woman

(02:15):
going to medical school, that would be just a story
about a woman going to medical school. Yes, However, if
we told not we necessarily, but like the American media,
if the American media told the story of a blind
doctor in eighteen forty nine, the tone would be pretty
similar to the story of a blind doctor. In drives
me a little bit nuts, yeah, um, and I know

(02:39):
it drives other people nuts also, So I was really
I've been on the lookout for a while for a
story that would not fit that mold, because I kind
of don't want the you know, the podcast to contribute
to that pattern of setting people up as being inspirations
for other people rather than you know, actual human beings
with agency and you of the ability to do things

(03:01):
on their own. Um. Which is why when we did
that threat on Facebook a couple of weeks ago that
said please tell us events to talk about and someone
said deaf president, now please, And I looked into what
that was about. I said, Okay, we're going to break
our rule. This happened in some of you may remember it.
I don't personally remember it. I do not either. It
was national news at the time, though, uh. And this

(03:23):
is essentially a student protest that changed the course of
both Galadet University. I have also heard it pronounced Galudet
with like the U sound. I've heard people pronounce it
both ways. And also deaf culture in America. That makes
it sort of exciting and new. It's very exciting and new.
I'm definitely lake outside kind of our stuff because it

(03:44):
is a little more modern, and researching it was a
very different process because of that. It's well documented and
so for background, Galatt University is a United States school
that's dedicated to the education of deaf and Heart of
Hearing students. It's also a bilingual university WHI has classes
taught in both American Sign language and in English, and

(04:06):
it's funding comes from both federal sources and non government sources.
There are also a few hearing students who enroll every year,
and usually these are people who want to have a
career that's in some way closely related to the deaf
and Heart of Hearing community. So if someone wants to
teach at a school for the deaf, or to work
with organizations for the deaf, things like that, a lot

(04:28):
of times those people will decide to go to college
at Caladet. And in addition to all of that, Galladet
is also really viewed as the heart of the deaf
community and of deaf culture in the United States. And
the school started in eighteen fifty six, so fairly recent
when compared to some other universities, and that was when
former Postmaster General Amos Kendall donated some of his land

(04:50):
outside of Washington, d C. To start a school for
blind and deaf children. And at that point, schools for
the deaf had really only existed in the United States
for less than forty years, so the concept was still
very new, and twelve of the first students at Kendall
School were deaf, and the other six of the students
that were enrolled that first go around were blind. A

(05:10):
year later, the school was incorporated as Columbia Institution for
the Instruction of the Deaf and dum and Blind, and
the school's superintendent was Edward Minor Gallaudet, whose father, Thomas
Hopkins Gallaudet, had founded the first permanent school for the
deaf in the United States, and that was in Hartford, Connecticut.
The elder Gallaudet had traveled around Europe to learn about

(05:32):
teaching methods for deaf children after he had met a
young deaf girl who really did not have any access
to education at all. Edwards mother, Sophia Fowler Galladet, was
deaf and also served as the Columbia Institution's matron. In
eighteen sixty three, Congress passed a bill to quote authorize
the Columbia Institution for the Deaf anddom and the Blind

(05:55):
to confer degrees, and President Abraham Lincoln signed this into
law in April eighteen sixty four, and so with this
the Columbia institution became the National College for the Deaf,
anddom President Lyndon Johnson signed an act creating the Model
Secondary School for the Deaf at Galladet in nineteen sixty nine,
and Richard Nixon signed a similar bill the year after

(06:18):
that creating an elementary school for the deaf, and these
two schools are actually part of Galladet today. Acts of
Congress have also continued to shape the university, changing the
name to Galadet College in honor of Thomas Hopkins Gaaladet
and also granting at university status in nineteen eighty six.
Diplomas for graduates of the school are also signed by

(06:39):
the current president, so it's easy to see all of
this governmental involvement in the establishment and development of the
school as a hearing nation attempting to see to the
best interests of its deaf citizens, and that was one
of the sentiments that actually sparked the Deaf president Now
protest in nine. Another piece of this was a schism
that end of starts with two different schools of thought

(07:02):
about the best way to provide education for deaf people,
and this goes all the way back to the earliest
days of schools for the deaf on one end, where
the oralists who thought that deaf people should learn to
speak and to read lips to better fit into a
hearing world. And then on the other end of the
spectrum are manualists who thought that deaf people should learn
sign language to communicate with each other. Edward Minor Galladet

(07:27):
supported the use of sign language. He knew when you
sign language because of his mother. On the other hand,
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, whose mother was
also deaf, was completely in favor of the oral method.
So in the earliest days of education for deaf people
in the United States, educators really fiercely debated which method

(07:48):
was better, and the idea of signing versus speaking really
extended into every aspect of of people's lives. It affected
how doctors worked with deaf families, and how parents raised
their deaf children, and in some cases it even created
a schism within the deaf community itself between the deaf
people who could sign and consider themselves to be what's

(08:10):
now called culturally deaf and the deaf people who could not.
And to add to all of this context, every president
of Galadet University had been a man who could hear,
and we'll talk more about that after a quick word
from our sponsor. So in the earliest years after Galadet

(08:36):
was founded, it was a legitimate claim that there weren't
really any deaf people in the United States who were
qualified to be president of the school, because before that
point there had been really almost no way for a
deaf person to get a college education. They're just was
no educational system for deaf people in the United States.
At Galadet and at other schools for the deaf, whether

(08:58):
they taught manualist or oralist methods, were overwhelmingly people who
could hear. Some schools for the deaf did not allow
deaf teachers at all, believing them to be unqualified to
teach deaf students. And even as we were approaching the
part of history where this protest took place, Gallaudet continued
to be taught and run mostly by hearing people. This

(09:20):
went on for many years of its history. By the
nineteen eighties, only about twenty percent of the faculty and
administrative staff were deaf. In nineteen eighty three, Galladet's fourth president, Dr.
Edward C. Merrill, retired. He and all the presidents before
him had all been able to hear. As we mentioned,
he and others actually started to advocate for a deaf

(09:42):
president to lead the university, but that idea really did
not gain much traction. Then between nineteen eighty three and
nineteen eighty seven, Gallaudetts saw this series of presidents come
through in quick succession, and the resignation of the seventh president,
Jerry Lee, was really sudden and kind of caught a
lot of people by surprise. And that point the Board
of Trustees brought on a consultant to try to get

(10:03):
the best candidate for his replacement, and it put together
the search committee of faculty, staff, alumni, and students. At
this point, the argument that there weren't any qualified deaf
people that could be president of the university was really
completely invalid. That was gone. Uh. There were more than
one hundred deaf people in the United States who had
doctoral degrees, and many of them were Galada alumni, as

(10:26):
were some of the past hearing presidents, and had experience
in school administrations. So there were some options. There were
lots of options, and a pool of eighty seven applicants
was narrowed down to six finalists. Three of them could hear,
and three of them were deaf. Those six finalists were
then narrowed down to three. Dr Harvey Corson was a
deaf man who was superintendent of the Louisiana School for

(10:48):
the Deaf. Dr. I. King Jordan was a deaf man
who was at the time serving as Galadet's dean of
the College of Arts and Sciences. And Elizabeth Zenzer was
a hearing woman who was a stint chancellor of the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro. So at this point
we had two of the three final candidates who were deaf.
The student body, the faculty, and alumni, along with many

(11:11):
deaf advocacy groups, had been lobbying for quite some time
for the university to have a deaf president. They had
also been getting letters of support from people like then
Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, then Senators Bob Dole
of Kansas and Bob Graham of Florida, and other politicians
supporting the idea of putting a deaf person into the presidency.

(11:33):
Here's part of George Bush's letter on the matter. I've
become aware of the two basic principles that underlie the
disability rights movement. The right of disabled people to control
their own lives, and the right to integration and involvement
in society. Galladant University has a critical role to play
in advancing these principles. It is held in the highest
regard by deaf people throughout the United States and the world.

(11:56):
It provides an excellent education and a meaningful future for
thousand sens of deaf persons. More importantly, Galada University is
a symbol of leadership and opportunity, not only for deaf people,
but for all of us. His letter also points out that,
considering how Galadat is funded by the federal government, it
has an obligation to set an example in this matter.

(12:17):
Um the sentiment he's kind of expressing here a lot
of times you will hear today expressed as nothing about
us without us, which is basically, don't you go making
laws for people without consulting those people about those laws.
You may be well intentioned, but not well informed. Well,
and I feel like we should say, uh, everyone involved

(12:38):
in this story had good intentions, Like there was nobody
who was setting out to just make the make the
deaf community suffer. That's not what anybody had in mind. No,
And I'm sure everyone making decisions. They weren't just you know,
throwaway decisions. They were considering them thoughtfully, but sometimes not
always with all of the best information at hand. Write

(13:01):
a letter from the student body government informing the faculty
of a rally being planned to support the selection of
a deaf president began. The idea of a deaf person
being named president of this university is exceptionally important to
us and to the entire community of people concerned with
deafness and education, and in our view, now demands our action.
So the students had been rallying for a week in

(13:23):
advance of the announcement of who the next president would be.
They had been distributing flyers, even camping out on the
president's lawn. The student body president, Greg Libak, wrote to
Zenzer and asked her to withdraw her candidacy, which would
have guaranteed that the next president would be deaf. The
text of a flyer for a rally that was held
on March first reads as It's time. In eighteen forty two,

(13:46):
a Roman Catholic became president of the University of Notre Dame.
In eighteen seventy five, a woman became president of Wellesley College,
in eighteen seventy five, a Jew became president of Yeshiva University.
In ninety six, a black person became president of Howard University.
And in the Galludet University, presidency belongs to a deaf person.

(14:08):
To show our solidarity behind our mandate for a deaf
person of our university, you are invited to participate in
a historical all caps rally. Yeah. So basically, everyone, seemingly
everyone involved, was really behind the idea of a deaf
person being named president. And with all of these factors combined,

(14:29):
like with such a huge outpouring of advocacy on the
part of the student body and the alumni and everyone else,
and you know, the Vice President of the United States
and senators and all of these other people saying that
we really think this is what's time. People pretty much
thought that what was going to happen was that either
Dr Corson or Dr Jordan, the two deaf candidates, one

(14:51):
of them would be selected as president. However, on March
the six the Board of Trustees announced that the next
president of Gallaudet would be Dr Elizabeth Senser. So basically
everyone had been expecting the Board of Trustees to announce
a deaf president, and what everyone was also expecting and
had been planning for, was for the Board of trustees

(15:13):
to come to the campus to announce the new president.
But instead, what they did is they sent out press
releases at six thirty in the morning, which was about
an hour and a half before anybody thought the announcement
was going to come. Does not perhaps surprising to find
out that the reaction was immediate and it was huge.
People were furious. A crowd had already been forming to

(15:34):
wait for the announcement, and at the encouragement of Gary
Olsen from the National Association of the Deaf, they spontaneously
marched to the hotel where the board had been meeting
to demand an explanation. When they got there, there was
basically a press conference going on. The chair of the board,
James Spillman, and Phil Braven, who was one of the
deaf trustees, were answering questions from reporters, and the protesters

(15:56):
interrupted and demanded to speak to the board. Eventually, some
of the protesters were allowed to meet with the board,
and during that meeting, Spilman allegedly said that deaf people
could not function in the hearing world. She denied, ever
having said this, claiming that it was a misunderstanding by
her interpreter. Regardless, it really solidified opinion against her, and

(16:18):
many people cited it in letters and speeches afterwards. So
she actually said it or not, it still really was
a big black became hugely associated with her, And there
are lots and lots of letters that were sent to
the board or to newspapers or things like that that
or like anyone who would say this should not be
running the school death. So as protesters talked to the board,

(16:39):
they didn't reach any kind of agreement, and eventually the
crowd dispersed, but by the morning a full scale civil
rights protest was in the works. That galled it. Students
were holding sit ins, they boycotted, they held rallies and marches,
They wrote letters in support of their objectives UM, and
in their letters and their speeches and their addresses that
they gave people aimed this as a civil rights issue. UH.

(17:03):
And additionally to all of that, they blocked access to
the campus by forming a human chain to keep the
faculty and administrators out, effectively shutting things down. And as
the news spread UH civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson
wrote a letter of support to the students of the university.
This is a portion of it. The Board of Trustees
has an obligation to respond to student concerns with sensitivity.

(17:25):
There is no time to resolve this dispute equitably. The
problem is not that the students do not hear. The
problem is that the hearing world does not listen. The
entire nation owes the students of Galadat its gratitude for
reminding us once again that each of us has the
ability and the right to achieve I urged the Board
of the university to move forward and recognize the justice

(17:46):
of its students demands. By the day after the announcement,
the protesters had created a list of these four demands
to present to the board. They were Number one, Elizabeth
Senser must resign and a deaf person be elected president.
Number two, Jane Spillman must step down as chairperson of
the Board of Trustees. Number three, deaf people must constitute

(18:09):
a fifty one majority on the board. And number four,
there would be no reprisals against any student or employee
involved in the protest. These demands were presented to the
board in a three hour long meeting. However, the board
did not yield. So following that meeting, UH the board
had planned to make an announcement in the university auditorium

(18:30):
basically saying that they were not yielding their position. But
before Spellman could begin, a deaf faculty member named Harvey
Goodstein came on stage and announced it himself, and he
encouraged everyone to leave, which they did and spontaneously marched
to the Capitol Building and held an impromptu rally there.
I'm not sure if we have said that the school

(18:51):
is basically in Washington, d C. So a lot of
the rallying and protesting happened sort of in the context
of these huge important government billings for the government of
the United States. And the next day was Tuesday, March eight,
and while the campus was open, most of the students
boycotted their classes. It was about this time that the
protests formed the Deaf president Now Council, which included representatives

(19:14):
from the student body, the faculty, the staff, alumni, as
well as people who worked as interpreters, fundraisers, and legal liaisons.
Greg Libak, president of the student body, became one of
the protests prominent leaders. Also among the students leading the
protests were Jerry Covell and Brigitta Bourne, who had been
running mates to lead the student government, and Tim Raris

(19:36):
who was majoring in government, and together they were all
known as the Galadet four cited frequently is like the
foremost prominent student leaders of the protest. And the protest
was really ongoing, it became national news. And as these
meetings and protests and rallies went on, with both sides
becoming just more and more entrenched in their stances. Greg Libak,

(19:59):
Elizabeth Zensa, and actress Marley Matlin appeared on ABC's Nightline
on Wednesday, March ninth, talk about the protest. Nightline closed
captioned the broadcast for all viewers, with anchor Ted Copple
saying it was because the network had learned that many
deaf people did not actually have access to close captioning.
You can see this on YouTube today. It's pretty cool.

(20:19):
Which is also kind of one of the weird things
about working on this episode is like footage that still
exists of the events easy to find. It looks easy
to find and watch at your desk. So after several
days of protests and boycotts and sit ins and marches

(20:43):
and rallies and letters. Elizabeth Senser announced her resignation on
the night of March tenth, and so for a sort
of a brief moment, all of these rallies of protest
briefly turned to celebration. But the students also recognize that
they still had a long way to go. A lot
of them started wearing buttons that said three and a half,
since at this point only half of one of their

(21:04):
four demands had actually been met. And at this point
it was Friday and spring break was scheduled to start,
but many students decided to stay on campus. The start
of the weekend was fairly quiet, and then the board
reconvened on Sunday. That night, the board held one last
press conference. In this event in which they made a
number of announcements. The first was that James Spellman had

(21:27):
resigned as the board chair. The second was that Phil Braven,
who was deaf, had been named as her replacement. The
third was that a task force was going to be established,
and that task forces job would be to figure out
the best way to get of the Board of Directors
to be comprised of deaf people. They also announced that
there would be no reprisals for the people who had

(21:49):
been participating in the protest, and their last announcement was
that I King Jordan's would be the next president. And
in the words of Greg Libak, quote, now we have
re act, we have everything. It's just the beginning for
all of us. And in the words of Jerry Koble,
he said, dp N has profoundly and significantly affected my life.

(22:10):
It made me more committed to serve my people. It
made me more determined to have America and the public
accept and respect deaf people. Allow deaf people to control
their destiny, and preserve the beauty, tradition, and values of
our culture and language. The ultimate goal is to see
deaf people empower themselves and know their rights, resulting in
necessary changes in all walks of life. So, in addition

(22:33):
to serving as President, I King Jordan actually became a
huge advocate for deaf people and for the disabled community
in general. He was a lead witness in support of
the Americans with Disabilities Act. Kind of interesting side note
about his story is that he was able to hear
when he was born, and he became deaf as a
result of an accident when he was in his early twenties.

(22:56):
He was a young man uh, and he enrolled at
Gallantet as a deaf person, but he did not yet
know how to sign, so he sort of had to
learn how to do sign language and everything else at
the same time as he was studying at university. I
would think that would be extremely stressful, and I think

(23:17):
that was extremely stressful. He actually did this talk at
my alma mater, which I found on the internet, which
I'll just makes it a weird circle of events where
he talks about the story and talks about how there
were some people who were very patient with him and
some people who were not, in part because of the
schism that we've talked about before between manual and oral instruction.
There were people who um really firmly believed that being

(23:38):
taught sign language was the only way to do it.
And we're not really patient with someone who knew how
to speak and not sign. So anyway, Uh. Following DPN,
a number of other laws were passed that gave the
deaf community better access to jobs and schools and technology,
as well as legal protection. And the five years after

(23:58):
the protest was over, there were more laws and bills
passed related to the rights of the deaf community and
access to resources and education than had been passed in
the entire previous history of the United States as a nation,
and the protests also united the deaf community in many ways.
So the schism between oralists and manualists has continued until today,

(24:20):
with deaf people who know sign language sometimes considering themselves
quote culturally deaf while people who speak and read lips
are not. Tim Raris, who was one of the galladet
for described it this way quote Before d p N,
I was not one to interact with deaf people who
were not culturally deaf, like myself. Deaf people have a
history of fighting among themselves. Yet during dp N we

(24:42):
all work together for that common goal a deaf president.
Never mind the mode of communication our president would choose
or his background, as long as he was deaf, and
together we accomplished that goal. So today, most children who
are deaf UH learned sign language. There's there's much less
debate on the front of UH, do I teach a

(25:02):
child sign sign language or do I not? A much
bigger debate now is about cochlear implants, and that is
a whole other issue that we're not going to talk
about on this podcast. That like a can of worms,
both medical and cultural. They beyond the scope of today's way,
outside of the scope I King Jordan was president of
Galadet until December thirty one, two thousand and six, and

(25:25):
in a weird twist of events, after having been this,
you know, this historic person put into this role, the
end of his tenure as president was also marked with protests,
as the student body objected to the way the search
um for his replacement was handled and for the candidate
that was selected for that as well. Um, that story

(25:46):
does not have quite the civil rights implications as this
one did, but uh, it was kind of an odd
thing to have his entire time as president kind of
book ended by these two massive student protests. Yeah, part
of it. I mean, having worked in the university, I
can imagine that since he served for roughly eighteen years,
they haven't had to put together one of those committees.

(26:09):
So it becomes kind of a starting from scratch every time.
Even if you have guidelines, it's still most of the
people that are in those positions have never done that
job before searching for somebody. He did have a long tenure,
so I haven't imagined there would be some what do
we do and students feel strongly about their universities, which

(26:29):
is good. I remember being just all angry about various
administrative decisions when I was in college. I know, it's okay, Yeah,
I was busy with other things. Thank you so much

(26:53):
for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
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History Podcasts, at how stuff works dot com, and then
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(27:13):
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