Finding Zoe

by Brandi Rarus

To everyone’s surprise, by associating signs with pictures and words and using an interpreter, de l’Épée taught the deaf to read and write, and they were able to acquire an education. His school, founded in 1755, was the first school for the deaf to achieve public support. In 1791, the school became known as the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, headed by a brilliant grammarian, the Abbé Sicard. By the time of de l’Épée’s death, Sicard had established twenty-one schools for the deaf in France and Europe. Deaf schools with deaf teachers blossomed, allowing the deaf to rise from darkness and disdain to positions of eminence and responsibility—deaf philosophers, deaf writers, deaf intellectuals, deaf engineers.

  This amazing change reached the United States in 1816 when Laurent Clerc (a student of one of Sicard’s students), a brilliant and educated deaf man, showed American teachers the capacity for deaf people to learn when given the opportunity. With Thomas Gallaudet, Clerc set up the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817, and its spectacular success led to the opening of even more schools. All of the teachers of the deaf in the United States (nearly all of whom were fluent signers and many of whom were deaf) went to Hartford. Eventually, the French sign system brought over by Clerc morphed with the natal sign languages here—the deaf generate sign language wherever there are communities of deaf people—and American Sign Language (ASL) was born.

  In 1864, Congress passed a law authorizing the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Washington, DC—now Gallaudet University—to become the first institution of higher learning specifically for the deaf. Its first principal was Edward Gallaudet, the son of Thomas Gallaudet, who had come to the United States with Clerc. The thrust of deaf advancements continued worldwide, and the deaf were flourishing. By 1869, there were 550 teachers of the deaf around the globe and 41 percent of them were themselves deaf.

  But then tragedy struck. One hundred years of advancements shriveled into nothing.

  A trend toward Victorian oppressiveness and intolerances of all minorities took its toll on us, focusing particularly on our sign language. For two centuries, there had been a counteraction from teachers and parents of deaf children that the goal of education should be teaching the deaf how to speak. Questions continued being asked well into the late twentieth century as to what good the use of sign is without speech. Wouldn’t it restrict deaf people to communicating only with other deaf people? Shouldn’t speech and lipreading be taught, so that the deaf can integrate with the general population? Shouldn’t signing be banned so that it doesn’t interfere with speech?

  From his travels to other deaf schools, Edward Gallaudet found (as did other experts on the deaf) that articulation skills, although very desirable, could not be the basis of primary teaching; this had to be achieved, and achieved early, by sign. Yet, the “oralists” worked hard to overthrow the old-fashioned sign language schools for the new progressive oralist schools, leading to the opening of the Clark School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1867 (a hundred years later, Eric’s father would be its president).

  The most prominent oralist figure was Alexander Graham Bell, a genius whose weird family dynamics included teaching diction and correcting speech impediments (as did his father and grandfather), while at the same time denying deafness (both his mother and wife were deaf but never acknowledged this). Sickened by the idea of “a Deaf variety of the human race,” he created the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, which aimed at preventing deaf people from marrying one another, and to keep deaf students from mingling with each other. He advocated that deaf adults endure sterilization and even convinced some hearing parents to sterilize their own deaf children. Thomas Edison soon joined the cause. With Bell’s power and influence behind the advocacy of oralism, the tipping point was finally reached.

  In 1880, at the infamous International Congress of Education of the Deaf held in Milan, where deaf teachers were themselves excluded from the vote, the use of signing in schools was officially prohibited. To the deaf, the Milan conference’s edict was like the “Jim Crow” laws to African Americans and like the ghettos to Eastern European Jews. It was a sad, sad time in Deaf History, and the anger and resentment smoldered beneath the surface until it erupted a hundred years later. Even though I had no idea at the time of my learning about it, I would soon be riding the wave of that emancipation.

  The truth is that deaf people show no disposition to speak at all (except those like me who have acquired speech before becoming deaf), but they show an immediate and powerful disposition to sign—a visual language that is completely accessible to them. However, after the Milan Conference, deaf pupils could no longer use their own natural language and were forced to learn the unnatural (for them) language of speech. The proportion of deaf teachers for the deaf, which was 50 percent in 1850, fell to 25 percent by 1900 and to 12 percent by 1960. In the United States, English became the language taught to deaf students by hearing teachers, and fewer and fewer of those teachers knew sign language.

  It wasn’t until seventy-five years after the International Congress that things began to reverse themselves. The change was catapulted in 1955 when a linguist named William Stokoe came to Gallaudet University. He came to teach but soon realized he had so much more to accomplish. Four years later, he wrote an earth-shattering paper on sign language structure, which was the first-ever serious and scientific look at the visual language of ASL. He asserted what had always been denied: that linguistically ASL is a complete language; its syntax, grammar, and semantics are complete, although it is very different from any spoken or written language. His conclusions butted up against the long- and hard-held belief that sign language was just pantomime, namby-pamby—a pictorial language. Even Britannica had defined sign as “a species of picture writing in the air, more pictorial and less symbolic.”

  Stokoe’s work was also the first to recognize the fact that deaf people had their own community, including their own language (ASL), and a history and culture that bound them together, making them different from other people (something I inherently knew but couldn’t express to my family and friends). However, in its distrust of hearing people, who in the past had dictated its fate, the Deaf community took years to embrace Stokoe’s work. It wasn’t until the 1970s (when I became deaf) that oralism was finally being reversed, and “total communication” became accepted. Total communication is the use of both signed and spoken language, which is used at most schools today.

  Still, the official sign language at that time—even at Gallaudet—was Signed Exact English (SEE) and not ASL, so deaf students were forced to learn signs for phonetic English sounds they couldn’t hear. (Again this was different for me, having already learned how to speak before becoming deaf.) SEE is an exact replication of spoken English in signs and uses an English sentence structure. Actually, SEE is not considered a language in itself but rather an encoding for the English language, and it was designed with little to no input from the Deaf community. Linguists, however, consider ASL a complete language, and it is a much more intuitive 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.

  By now, faculty, staff members, and other concerned people had joined the crowd, but no one was in charge, and no one knew what to do. Gary Olsen, president of the NAD, took charge at that moment, saying that it was the board that was deaf because they hadn’t listened. He told everyone to march to the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, DC, where the board had been meeting, to demand an explanation. When they reached the Mayflower Hotel, word had trickled down that Jane Bassett Spilman, the chairwoman of the Gallaudet Board, had agreed to speak with three representatives inside the hotel. Someone said that the board had heard that the students were starting an uprising, and they wanted to stop it.

  Tim wasn’t looking to be one of the representatives—he wasn’t looking for anything. However, because he was the outgoing student body government president (by one week), he was chosen, along with the new student body government president, Greg Hlibok, and a civil rights attorney (and alumnus) Jeff Rosen. The three of them went into the hotel and into one of the upstairs rooms, where Chairwoman Spilman and several other members of the Gallaudet Board—all well-respected judges, attorneys, and other professionals—along with a sign-language interpreter, were seated at a table. The three of them just stood there looking at the board members. Then Jeff Rosen blurted out, “It’s bullshit,” while Tim did all he could to restrain himself, and Greg Hlibok just signed, “Why?”

  “The board has made their decision,” the interpreter signed for the board member speaking. “Elisabeth Zinser is wonderful. She has lots of connections for fund-raising.”

  Although the press later reported the scandal as a possible misinterpretation, it was at that moment that Jane Spilman said: “The timing is not right for deaf people to be functioning in the hearing world,” looking at no one in particular.

  Their jaws dropping, Tim and his cohorts looked at each other in utter disbelief. His insides felt like they had been flipped upside down. What have we been doing all these years, then? he was thinking. What has she been doing as our chairwoman if she doesn’t think that deaf people are capable of functioning in the hearing world? The fact that she would even say that—isn’t it her job to see that we are capable—and at Gallaudet!’ His mind was churning. Congress has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Gallaudet to prepare us to function in the hearing world. Obviously, the board is failing if they still have an attitude like that.

  Tim believed himself to be a reasonable guy, but God knows, something is just wrong, he thought. Perhaps God also believes that it’s wrong and is depending on us to make it right. Perhaps the reason the board has chosen the hearing candidate is so that deaf people finally can take their destiny into their own hands, he pondered.

  At that point, the three of them had seen just about enough; they were done. Without issuing another word, they just turned around and left, going back outside the hotel where the crowd by that point had practically doubled. Everyone was hoping that they’d talked some sense into the board. However, after hearing what had happened, the students knew that they had to just take over the situation. Their response, which in the end changed history, was a beautiful coming together process that began with the crowd leaving the Mayflower Hotel and marching to the Capitol.

  The next day Tim called his grandfather—via TTY (the old teletype machines allowing deaf people to communicate from a distance)—with whom he was very close, to tell him what had happened. His grandfather didn’t want him to march. Come on! You’re deaf, too, Tim thought. When are you going to get it? His grandfather, like most of the elder people at the time, was afraid that Tim would be arrested and that they would lose everything they’d gained. The older people of our community were thrilled just to have jobs, TTYs, interpreting services, and captioning. They were overjoyed just to be able to drive. These things weren’t possible when they were Tim’s age. They treasured that there was a Gallaudet University for the deaf and that there were deaf students; they didn’t want to rock the boat.

  However, while Tim’s generation had access to information, attended deaf schools, and drove cars, they also asked, “Why can’t we have it all—equal access for everybody. Yes, we have a deaf university, and we need a Deaf President Now.” It was time to move onward. They believed th
at education has its place, but sometimes it just doesn’t get through to people, and sometimes you have to take action. Equality for deaf people had been so long in coming that the younger generation wasn’t holding back any longer.

  Until Elisabeth Zinser was elected, Tim had been walking a fine line between remaining neutral (as a member of the presidential search committee—part of his job as the student body government president) and taking a stand for a deaf president. He’d been aware of all the behind-the-scenes activities and the demands that had been made on the board. Although he couldn’t attend the student rally, he’d heard the buzz around campus.

  “You kidding me?” people were saying. Two deaf candidates had made it to the final round. That was the big deal.

  At the presidential search committee meetings, Tim had felt that some of the hearing committee members just weren’t in tune with all of the efforts put forth by the students and alumni, such as the student rally, all the letters of support that were garnered, and their appeals to Congress. He believed that they just didn’t understand the depths of what was at stake—that deaf people everywhere were insisting that Gallaudet University have a deaf president. He’d seen how awkward the dynamics in the room had been during the deaf candidate’s interviews. He’d felt it. Even the few hearing members who were good signers seemed uncomfortable, standoffish, and even cold.

  The truth is that the deaf candidates came in with a huge disadvantage, facing a board with seventeen hearing members and only four deaf members. Tim understood that. He understood that after centuries of misunderstandings, deaf people felt that they had to use extreme caution when talking with hearing people, especially in a situation like this. The two deaf candidates had been given the career opportunity of a lifetime—to lead Gallaudet University, with students who were deaf like them. Yet not everyone on the interview panel used ASL, so the candidates had to use a sign language interpreter instead of communicating directly in their own native language. During their interviews, not only did they have to focus on answering the questions to the best of their ability, but they also had to make sure that the interpreter both understood and then interpreted for them correctly.