ASL Opera

On the evening of Sunday, March 6, 1988, sixteen years after Willowbrook's film first aired and seven years into the Reagan retrenchment, the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University announced its choice for the school's seventh president, and it did the announcing by press release, handed out at a hotel away from campus, as if the news were a routine appointment rather than a verdict on a people. Gallaudet is the world's only university conducted for and in the language of the Deaf, chartered in 1864 under Abraham Lincoln's signature in the middle of the war, a wartime Congress finding time to establish higher education for a people most of the world's universities would not seat, one of the republic's stranger and better hours, and in the one hundred twenty-four years since that charter, through six presidencies, every president had been Hearing. Edward Miner Gallaudet, the founder's son, had run the college in its first decades; a century later the campus on Florida Avenue had become the capital of Deaf America, the place the language's poetry and theater and scholarship concentrated, the campus where William Stokoe had proven ASL a language in full, and the proof had changed linguistics without yet changing the boardroom above the proof. In 1988 the search had produced three finalists, and for the first time two of them were Deaf: I. King Jordan, dean of the college of arts and sciences at Gallaudet itself, and Harvey Corson, superintendent of the Louisiana School for the Deaf, two candidates whose résumés ran through the community's own institutions, the professoriate and the residential schools, the two engines the record has been describing since Council Bluffs. The third, Elisabeth Zinser, a university administrator from North Carolina, was Hearing, held no sign language, and had spent her career outside Deaf education entirely. On paper the three were comparable executives. Off paper, one of them would need an interpreter to talk with the student body she proposed to lead, and the search had ranked that fact as incidental, a preference rather than a qualification, the way a century of searches had ranked it before. The community had spent the winter saying, in rallies and letters and editorials in the Deaf press, that the time for a Deaf president had arrived; a campaign had organized under the plain name Deaf President Now, buttons and banners already printed, alumni and faculty and the national Deaf organizations already on record, and the name was a demand with a deadline built into its own grammar. The Board heard all of it and chose Zinser, and by some accounts the choice was cast as prudence, administrative experience weighed against community symbolism, which mistook the entire question, because after one hundred twenty-four years the symbolism was the administration: an institution that exists to certify Deaf capability had been asked to certify it in the one office that governs all the others, and had declined again. Students had marched from campus to the Mayflower Hotel that night, more than a thousand of them behind banners, expecting to be told to their faces which future had been chosen, and they got a piece of paper handed around in the dark, the news arriving fingertip to fingertip through the crowd, the worst possible answer delivered in the worst possible medium, to the one audience on earth guaranteed to understand what a refusal to face them meant. The paper did not even arrive with an interpreter. The university for the Deaf announced the governance of the Deaf in a press release the Deaf were left to pass hand to hand under the streetlights. Read in that crowd, the paper might as well have been a diagnosis. It said that after a century and a quarter, the institution built to prove Deaf capability still did not believe a Deaf person could run it. The crowd's answer began that night, in the intersection outside the hotel, students blocking Florida Avenue in the dark while trustees' cars idled, and it did not stop for seven days.

What the Board thought it was managing, and what it was actually standing on, were two different things, and the difference is the subject of this chapter. The Board thought it was managing a personnel decision with a public-relations dimension. It was standing on a century of deferred refusal, pressurized by a decade of civil rights law the community had helped win, the 504 regulations forced out of a reluctant administration in 1977, and then watched the government spend the eighties unwinding. Board leadership expected the students to bend and obey as they always had; the possibility of revolt, of a shutdown, of a march, sat nowhere in the Board's planning, because a century of paternal governance had taught the governors that Deaf protest was a weather that passed. Paternalism is a self-sealing instrument: it reads obedience as contentment, reads contentment as incapacity for anything else, and then cites the incapacity as the reason obedience must continue. The ugly laws ran on the circle, the wards ran on the circle, and a university boardroom in 1988 ran on it in parliamentary procedure and good conscience. The Board was standing on that circle when it broke. A remark attributed in the press to the Board's chair, Jane Bassett Spilman, that deaf people were not ready to function in a Hearing world, ran through the campus like current through a wire; she disputed the phrasing, and the dispute changed nothing, because the appointment itself had already said the sentence in institutional form. The students read the decision correctly, as the ordinance readers of a century earlier would have recognized: a body had been evaluated by people who did not share it and found unready. Its structure was familiar, the structure of the Omaha booking sheet and the Willowbrook evaluation and the Milan resolution, competence assessed by a panel with no stake in being wrong. The difference in 1988 was that the evaluated had a campus, a language, a television age, and one another, and eight decades of accumulated refusals had taught the community what its parents' generation had learned at the mimeograph and the courthouse: institutions concede structure only to structure.

By Monday morning, March 7, the students had shut the university. They moved buses against the gates and let the air out of the tires, padlocked what could be locked, hoisted the demands on bedsheets from dormitory windows, and turned the campus of the world's only Deaf university into the headquarters of the world's first Deaf general strike. Classes stopped, and the calendar of the semester simply yielded, midterms and lectures and rehearsals suspended into the emergency the way a town suspends itself for a flood, everything ordinary postponed until the extraordinary was settled. The gates that had been built to keep the city out now kept the administration out, and the students ran the grounds with a discipline that surprised every camera crew that arrived expecting disorder and finding logistics: marshals at the gates, assemblies on the hour, food runs and childcare, a press operation with its own credentialing, all of it coordinated in a language the visiting reporters could watch happening and could not overhear. For one week, the asymmetry of eavesdropping that had run against the Deaf for a century ran the other way, and the students used the advantage with a restraint the Board had never shown them. Out of the first chaotic assembly came a leadership of four undergraduates, remembered since as the DPN Four: Bridgetta Bourne, Jerry Covell, Greg Hlibok, and Tim Rarus, students suddenly running a movement under the eyes of the national press, holding assemblies in a field house, negotiating with a Board through interpreters, and rationing their own faces across the networks with a media sense their elders marveled at and their opponents never matched. The four were undergraduates with midterms pending, elected by acclamation in the churn of the first assemblies, and they ran the week with a discipline their own professors marveled at. Their demands numbered four, and the four lines deserve their plain statement here, because rarely in American protest has a list been so complete or so completely won: Zinser's selection must be rescinded and a Deaf president named; Spilman must resign from the Board; the Board, then dominated by Hearing members, must be reconstituted with a Deaf majority; and there must be no reprisals against any student or employee for the protest. Each demand aimed at a different layer of the arrangement: the first at the office, the second at the person who embodied the old governance, the third at the structure that would otherwise reproduce the decision in a decade, and the fourth at the machinery of punishment that had kept every prior generation from making the first three. Whoever drafted the list understood institutions the way a locksmith understands doors. The organizing that carried those demands was a study in what a signing community can do that a Hearing one cannot, and the press spent the week discovering it with visible astonishment, the coverage itself becoming a national seminar in Deaf capability, which was the argument, staged by the arguers, at the institution's expense. Word moved across the campus at the speed of sight, hand to hand across courtyards where a bullhorn would have been useless, relay signers posted at sightline breaks the way other movements post runners; TTYs chattered day and night to allies and reporters across the country; interpreters were marshaled so that every press conference ran in two languages at once, the students controlling both channels, which no protest movement in the country's history had ever done, because no protest movement had ever needed to and none had ever been able. Within two days the strike had a national geography. Deaf schools across the country walked out in sympathy, students at the residential institutes that still stood, the ISDs and their siblings, pouring onto their own lawns with hand-lettered signs, the network of schools that had made signers for a century now making solidarity, children on lawns in a dozen states holding up the names of four undergraduates in Washington. Money and telegrams and endorsements arrived from unions, from congressmen and senators of both parties, from presidential candidates working a campaign season in full cry, the labor federations recognizing a strike when they saw one and saying so with checks, and the movement's timing, one week of astonishing television in an election year, put politicians of both parties on record for a Deaf president, candidates and committee chairmen discovering simultaneously that there was no constituency anywhere for the other side of the question. Nobody in American public life stood up for the proposition that Deaf people should be governed by the hearing; the proposition had operated for a century without ever needing to be argued, and the week's deepest work was forcing it into words, where it died on contact with the air. Unspoken rules are the strongest rules and the most fragile: they govern without appeal until someone makes the ruler say them aloud. The students had discovered what the Willowbrook parents had discovered sixteen years earlier: the country's institutions can absorb almost any private grievance, and almost no public footage.

We were there. The two of us had come to Washington from the Midwest with everything we owned in the back of a car, newly and improbably together, a Deaf Iowan and a Hearing Nebraskan still writing their shared grammar, and Janna was attending Gallaudet that year, her second Deaf institution, arriving from the Midwest almost twenty years after the Iowa School for the Deaf had first given her a language and a world. The campus that year was the whole world in one square of Northeast Washington: the language everywhere, the way it had been everywhere at ISD, classrooms and cafeterias and dormitories running in ASL, the one American acreage where a Deaf adult is the unmarked case, and above it a governance that had just written its opinion of the people below. To be enrolled there that spring was to stand inside the century's oldest contradiction at the moment it finally cracked. That put one author of this book inside the gates as an enrolled student of a university on strike, and the other on the sidewalks of a city learning to watch hands on the evening news, a Hearing Nebraskan early in his own ASL education, watching the city discover a community he was only beginning to be able to follow. This record has kept its distance from its authors for four chapters, and it steps inside now because the week belongs to the small number of stories here we can verify with our own bodies: we were in the crowd, in the cold bright air, in the auditorium at the end. That disclosure is owed here, and so are its limits; memory is an archive with a bias toward light, and thirty-eight years have passed, and a couple's shared retellings polish a story the way a river polishes a stone; where our memories and the documented record differ, the record governs. They do not differ. The week was what the footage shows, and the footage, for once in this record, was allowed to exist.

Zinser flew to Washington midweek to take charge of a university she could not enter and announced her intention to restore order, and the announcement met a campus that had redefined order. She was, by the ordinary measures, a serious administrator handed an impossible commission, and the record should say so plainly rather than make her the story's villain; her credentials were the problem only because the search had defined the job wrongly, and she spent her seventy-two hours as president-designate discovering that no experience anywhere in higher education had prepared anyone to govern a language they could not enter. Greg Hlibok, twenty years old, the student body government's president, went on ABC's Nightline opposite Zinser, with the Deaf actress Marlee Matlin, then a fresh Academy Award winner for the film of the play Janna had starred in on the night we met, joining the broadcast, and a national audience watched a college junior, working through an interpreter, out-argue a chancellor on the question of whether people like him could govern people like him. The format itself made the argument: here was a Deaf twenty-year-old conducting live national television, fluently, through the accommodation the moment required, while the institution insisting on Hearing leadership sat beside him proving that Hearing was the one qualification the job did not need. That spectacle rearranged the pressure. The university's own faculty voted overwhelmingly with the students, a no-confidence verdict on the Board from the employees who knew the institution best; among the faculty ranks that year was Harlan Lane, a Hearing psycholinguist holding a Gallaudet post, who joined the movement he had spent a career studying. Alumni arrived by the busload, some of them elders who had been punished for signing in the classrooms of their childhoods and now watched their grandchildren's generation sign its demands into network cameras, the Milan century closing in front of them at broadcast speed. The campus printed and wore and carried its argument on placards that needed no translation, and the argument compressed itself into the four words of the movement's name, which the whole country could read and no editor could cut. The presidency she had been handed evaporated beneath her in three days of arithmetic anyone could run: a university is its people, the people had withdrawn their consent and their presence, and there was nothing left under the title to govern except the title. Late on the night of Thursday, March 10, Elisabeth Zinser resigned, saying she had responded to an extraordinary social movement of the Deaf, which was accurate, and which also made her the first casualty of a lesson institutions keep having to relearn, chapter after chapter: a decision made about a people, without the people, holds only until the people notice. She returned to her career and a chancellorship elsewhere; the movement never made her its villain, because the movement's discipline extended to its aim, and the aim was the arrangement rather than any person standing in it.

On Friday, March 11, the fifth day, the movement left the campus and walked to the Capitol, roughly two and a half thousand strong behind a banner that read "We still have a dream," the borrowing from Dr. King deliberate and earned, a movement placing itself in the line of American movements and correct to do it, down streets the district had seen carry every American grievance except this one. The Capitol police had managed a thousand marches; they had never managed one that could not hear their bullhorns and did not need to, the column steering itself on sightlines and raised arms, relaying turns and halts hand over hand down its own length faster than any public-address system could have, and the district's press corps filed a week of copy about the discovery that silence can organize. Congressional staff and members watched from office windows along the marchers' route; some of the members they worked for would be drafting disability law within the year, and the memory of the column below the windows would sit in the drafting rooms for the next two years. We walked in that crowd, one of us an enrolled student of the struck university, the other her Hearing partner, new to the language and learning it from her. The day comes back to us as brightness, a bright, shimmering March day, and hands everywhere, the air above the marchers alive with language, conversation running up and down the column in a way no Hearing march can manage, thousands of people talking at once in total silence and total clarity, arguments and jokes and logistics all airborne, the most conversational march the capital has ever hosted. Chants in ASL rolled overhead like weather, a rhythm the whole column could see and join, thousands of hands striking the beats together in the cold March air, and tourists on the sidewalks stood still trying to understand how a crowd that size could roar without a sound. The placards said what placards say. The hands said more, and said it to each other. A march is a body count to the police and a text to its participants, and this text said what the demands said, and said it in the language the 1880 congress had voted out of the classrooms: the language had survived its sentence, and it was now marching on the legislature of the country that had helped impose it. One hundred seven years, September's eleventh to March's, separated the Milan show of hands from this one, and the two votes could not have differed more in their franchise: in 1880 a hall of Hearing men raised hands over the Deaf, and in 1988 the Deaf raised their own.

On Sunday, March 13, one week to the night after the press release, the Board of Trustees met in emergency session and surrendered completely, and institutions almost never do it: no face-saving half-measure, no study commission, no phased timeline. Zinser's withdrawal had cleared the office; the Board named I. King Jordan the eighth president of Gallaudet, the first Deaf president in the institution's one hundred twenty-four years. Jordan had been Hearing once; born in 1943 into a Hearing family, he had served in the Navy before a motorcycle accident at twenty-one took his hearing suddenly and entirely, and he had rebuilt his life inside the community and risen through its own university, enrolling at Gallaudet after the accident and climbing from undergraduate through professor to dean, a biography that let both worlds claim him and neither discount him, the late-deafened man carrying a bridge in his own body. His selection was also, in the quiet manner of successful revolutions, a settlement the movement could love: the most credentialed Deaf administrator in America, unimpeachable by the Board's own stated standards, so that the concession could be cast as merit and the merit could be cast as concession and everyone could sign. Word of the decision reached the student leadership the way everything reached everyone that week, visually and by wire, hands relaying it across the campus before the wire services finished typing, and the campus that had padlocked itself opened its own gates from the inside, which is the only direction gates like that have ever honestly opened. Jane Bassett Spilman resigned the chair, and the Board elevated Philip Bravin, a Deaf trustee, to lead it, the first Deaf chair in the institution's history, with the commitment to move the Board to a Deaf majority. There would be no reprisals, and none followed. Four demands, four concessions, one week from paper to paper, and no other campus revolt of the American twentieth century, in a century that specialized in campus revolts, ran that table. Jordan gave the movement its epitaph and its charter the next day, at the press conference called to introduce the president his own campus had won, when a reporter asked what kind of jobs deaf people could do, and Jordan answered in the words the university's own record keeps: "deaf people can do anything hearing people can do, except hear." The community compressed the answer in the carrying, and Jordan himself retold it that way ever after, until it settled at the seven words that have outlived the week: "Deaf people can do anything except hear." The line did in seven words what the first movement of this book labors to do across five chapters, which is to relocate the deficiency from the person to the arrangement, and it was said by a university president whose university had just been rearranged by its own students to make the saying possible.

And then there was the auditorium. After the victory, the campus gathered to honor Jordan, and we were in that room, the two of us, one of us an enrolled student of the university that had just freed itself, the other a Hearing man who had just watched a week teach more about power than any classroom ever had, and what we witnessed there has lived together in us ever since. A room of Deaf people celebrates in light: hands rise and rotate in the Deaf applause, a whole raked house of turning palms catching the auditorium lamps, the gesture the community uses because clapping is sound and joy should be visible to the people it belongs to, row upon row of raised hands shimmering the way the Friday march had shimmered, the outdoors of that bright Friday brought indoors and electrified, the visual thunder of a people who have just proved something to a country and, harder, to themselves. Jordan stood in that light as the proof in person, the office and the man finally the same argument; Bravin's elevation waited in the week's paperwork; on the floor and in the rows the students who had run the week were learning what winners of complete victories learn, that the list is finished and the work now changes shape, from demanding an institution to running one, from the week to the decades. Jordan would hold the presidency for eighteen years, and the succession would reopen the wound the auditorium had carried quietly. In 2006 his hand-picked successor, Jane K. Fernandes, born Deaf to a Deaf mother, a signer since twenty-three after a mainstreamed childhood, was judged by a new generation of protesters to be, in the phrase that ran the coverage, not Deaf enough; the tent city returned to the gates, the campus locked down again, and on the twenty-ninth of October the Board revoked her appointment, the second consecutive Gallaudet presidential selection decided by protest. The protest was wider than the phrase, carrying grievances about her leadership, the conduct of the search, and the campus's trust in its administration, and the record keeps that breadth; the phrase is what the coverage kept, and the wound it names is the one this chapter carries. Jordan defended her and was himself relabeled by some of the movement's own veterans as a traitor for his voice and his impure ASL, the man the students had installed in 1988 audited out of standing by the standard his own victory had licensed. The authors of this book wrote against that revocation the morning after it happened, and the argument is in the archive; the point held here is the one Janna carries: an identity that must be policed at the gate has learned the gatekeeper's trade from somewhere, and the somewhere was a century of being gatekept. A Deaf successor followed the revocation all the same. The Deaf majority arrived on the Board as pledged. The four graduated into careers the week had opened, in law and administration and advocacy, and the campus they left behind stopped being a place where the question of Deaf capability could even be asked aloud, because the answer now had an office, a title, and a signature. We stood at the spot of history and we marked it, and the marking has never faded in either of us. The Board had believed, one week and a lifetime earlier, that the students would bend and obey as always, and the belief was reasonable in the way institutional beliefs are reasonable, resting on a hundred years of evidence that the governed would keep consenting. What the evidence had never contained was a generation raised after 504, schooled in its own history, fluent in television, and enrolled at the one campus where the community's entire leadership class studies in one place. Janna's memory of the week keeps its own grammar, the grammar of a first language carried into a second, and it holds the week's meaning better than any documentary sentence in this chapter, and we give it here in her words as she gave them, uncorrected because correction would be the old error in miniature: this time, that time, the whole deaf world had been told "enough" and together, they stood and say, "no, now we begin."

And the honest record of that auditorium holds one more thing, because even the brightest room of the week had its weather. Some Deaf people in the world, and some in that room with us, were unsatisfied that Jordan was an acceptable Deaf President at all. He used his voice. His name had been made in the Hearing world. He had been deafened at twenty-one rather than born to it, and in the years after the accident he had described himself as still, at bottom, a Hearing man who happened to have lost his hearing, a self-description he later recanted as his identification settled where it stayed, in the Deaf world, in ASL, in the work. For some, none of that settling counted; the audit of his ears and his biography had already returned its finding. Janna's answer in that room is the answer she gives in her own chapter: people decide who and what they are and how they want to belong, and she accepted I. King Jordan as the first Deaf President of Gallaudet because he said he was Deaf and had dedicated his life to educating the Deaf, and no further examination was owed by him to anyone. The week had just spent seven days proving that a panel auditing other people's capacity ends in a press release under streetlights; a community auditing its own members' belonging runs the same instrument in the other direction.

When classes resumed, the celebration followed the students indoors, and this scene is Janna's, witnessed from a student's chair. Class after class opened with hands up and turning, the Deaf applause carried from the auditorium into the schedule, instructors and students cheering one another across the desks before any lesson could begin, the victory signed again at every doorway of the campus that had won it. One classroom stayed quiet. The instructor stood at the front and did not smile as the students came in, looked the room over with a steely eye, and began teaching without a word about the week, the strike, or the presidency, as if the campus had merely closed for weather. That course was Public Speaking. The teacher had nothing to say.

Begin what, is the fair question, and the record of the next two years answers it in statute. Within weeks of the concession, the disability rights coalition assembling the Americans with Disabilities Act had a new proof text, and members of Congress had watched a constituency demonstrate, on the evening news, that it could organize, argue, and win; Senator Tom Harkin, whose brother was Deaf, would deliver part of his Senate floor speech for the Act in sign, the language of the Milan ban performed in the chamber of American lawmaking. The week's momentum ran east down Pennsylvania Avenue into that drafting room by room, and the veterans of the Gallaudet coverage sat in the galleries and the hearing rooms as the bill moved; and when the ADA was signed on the White House lawn on July 26, 1990, before the largest signing-ceremony crowd the disability community had ever assembled, the political capital of that shimmering March week was in the ink. The Act gets its accounting at the top of the next movement; the point held here is narrower and earned: the country's most sweeping civil rights law in a generation arrived two years after the country watched Deaf students take a university in a week, and the people who drafted, whipped, and signed it had all been watching. A university had been taken in seven days by the people it existed for, without a window broken or a charge filed, on television, in an election year, with a list of demands drawn so cleanly the institution could only sign it. As a proof of concept it has never been bettered in the American disability record: the slow winning at its fastest, a whole institutional arrangement reversed in a week because the film, the organizing, and the argument arrived together, the Willowbrook circuit run at sprint speed by the generation that had grown up watching it.

And yet we carry the auditorium and the lake in the same memory, and the chapter has to close holding both. One of us wrote, in the pages before these, that the ADA and Deaf President Now were stones skipping across the top of a much deeper and darker lake that has been there since the beginning, water first stilled in a Milan hall in 1880, and the sentence was written by the author of this record who stood in that auditorium with her own hands in the light. Both things are true, and their being true together is this book's method. The week won everything it asked: a president, a chairman, a majority, an amnesty, a proof, and a sentence of seven words that hangs in a thousand classrooms. The lake beneath it, the settled water of a century that had voted on Deaf lives without Deaf hands, did not drain because a stone crossed it brightly; the same decade that celebrated Jordan kept closing the residential schools that make signers, the pipelines to the campus that had just won, and the country that applauded the marchers kept building, in its budgets and its benefit rules and its definitions, the arrangements this book spends its second half auditing. What the week proved is permanent: given a language, a campus, and a camera, the governed can stop consenting in seven days flat, and every institution that governs disabled people has been on notice ever since, whether it has read the notice, framed it, or shredded it. What the week could not do is stay won on its own, and nobody who was in that auditorium thought otherwise for long, because the community that filled it had a century's practice in the arithmetic of victories and their maintenance, and had buried too many of its own bright weeks across a century to mistake one more for the end of the work. The palms turned in the light, and the light held for a night, and outside the doors the water lay where it had always been, wide and patient and dark, waiting to see whether the people on the shore would keep throwing. They did keep throwing. They are the reason there was ever a splash at all, and the rest of this record is the ledger of what the water gave back and what it kept.

---