Deaf President Now protest, 1988

[baratron]

How many of you have ever heard of Deaf President Now? I hadn't even heard of the university where this protest took place until I found it by chance on Wikipedia, but I'm rather glad that I did.

In 1988, students at Gallaudet University in Washington DC staged a landmark protest of disability and civil rights. If the president of a Jewish university should be Jewish, the president of a black university should be black, and the president of a women's university should be a woman, then surely the president of a Deaf & hearing-impaired people's university should be deaf? The protest went national, and may have inspired several of the United States' laws promoting the rights of deaf and other disabled people.

It's really awesome - I recommend you take time to read the whole website. I don't mind telling you that it made me cry.

Comments

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I was in D.C. with a student group during the height of that, and so saw it reported on the local news. It deeply influenced my decision to study ASL, and affected my perception of Deaf culture.

[barakta]

There was a recent rekickoff over much the same thing. Some of the university official responses were really out of order.

Interestingly Gaullaudet doesn't have a good academic reputation, say compared with Rochester Institute of Technology which is a deaf unit at somewhere else, but the idea of an institution founded on and running on ASL/sign is very cool.