Dear Folks,

the Board of Trustees is confused. Celia Baldwin was misled. BoT members are arriving to the campus and they experience the power of the protest. Celia and Tom Humphries were not allowed to show sign of weakness or even flexibility last week. Why? Because they are just two members who were dispatched to calm the protest. But they could not succeed because of the determination of the protesters.

As soon as the full Board is here, there will be more flexibility shown It it because the real power is not in stubbornness but in flexibiliy that is being able to change! The Board will want a change and they need to find a reason to make the change. They already have zillion reasons, starting with the protests, the resolutions, the non-confidence votes, etc. Now they’ll need a chance for graceful exit from the situation.

And it is the point now: we need to provide them a graceful exit. We need to find an obligatory reason, beyond all the above, that gives them excuse to change their minds. Tom Humphries told me that he has never heard about the problem of international faculty before. Many of the Board members might be in the same shoe. So why don’t we tell them about it, so that they’ll all know the truth?! If we are able to convince them that equity was deliberately hurt by the Fernandes administration regarding labor certification for international faculty, then we’ll hit two flies with one hand:

1. we found an example of serious mistreatment of a group of Gallaudet faculty during the Fernandes years

2. we found a contradiction between the preaching of JK and the reality showing her double standards, double speaking and hypocrisy.

These should suffice to make the Board to take action, while maintaining the respectability of its members by providing a graceful exit from this unfortunate situation that is becoming more and more a quagmire.

Dr. Zoltan

there,on the 2nd or 3rd page you ll find the fac senate resolutions.

i think that Deaf militants are just a small but vocal percentage of the population and perhaps the media are finding this slant somewhat more interesting, even if they detract from the whole point of this protest.

hey, palestine had (has) hamas, islam has osama bin laden, black america has the ghetto stereotype, white america has branch davidians… hey, this social phenomena is not strictly limited to us deaf people! grins… the important thing is that we continue to be consistent with getting the right message across. if militants like ridor continue to hold center stage then this can only get farcial, no question about it.
in the meantime we can only appeal to reasonable folk who are willing to go read the faculty senate resolutions, voted on by what might arguably be the most sensible, intelligent, mature and balanced group on campus, to get the real idea behind the meaning of this protest. thanks

Exactly. Gallaudet is not a “gift” to anybody in particular. It was established as a college when nobody thought deaf people could go to college.

Today, I know deaf people who have gone to Harvard, U of PA, Boston U, and many other excellent colleges. Without Gallaudet, that would have been harder.

I travel to other countries and I see how fragmented and diverse the sign languages are. There is NO way for interpreters to be trained and reliably certified for the instruction of deaf children in mainstreaming situations, let alone college. Heck, it’s hard for deaf to understand each other if they’re from 100 miles away.

Again, Gallaudet helped set up an uniform sign language across America (with many dialects), through gallaudet graduates teaching at deaf schools and people coming together from all over to teach each other sign language.

So I look at other countries where deaf people can barely get in college even with top test scores, and there do without interpreters and a bare provision that they can only show up for exams, period… and I say “they need their own Gallaudet.”

Not just for the brightest, but for the others who can disseminate information into their deaf communities.

Nothing else to help deaf people progress into the mainstream of culture as educated professionals can possibly start without a Gallaudet available for people in such countries.

anyway, we don’t need to beat this down to a nub, so lets just agree to disagree and go about our own ways. =)

all the best from your delightful audist J -

Ridor can take care of himself JUST fine.
I’ve known him since I was 15, when we attended Youth Leadership Camp together.

You seem to mistake me for somebody “fighting for a cause”. O-kay. I’m just nosy, actually.

I know too many of the people involved NOT to be curious about this. This controversy affects the careers of a lot of people I know, and the education of other people. It’s not abstract to them. That much is clear. This is a very poisoned workplace right now.

Um…children never say “I love you no matter what you do.” They are more apt to say “I hate you!” when you have to say NO.

You may love them no matter what they do, that’s up to you. Just don’t count on your kids returning the favor in full.