History of the Gallaudet Protest and Brief Thoughts About the Future

As most of you must know by now that Jane K. Fernandes's [JKF] role as the next president of Gallaudet has been terminated by the Board of the Trustees [BoT]. What a huge victory this was! I really wanted to stay hopeful but wasn't sure how this would end. Before I discuss this more into depth, I'd like to take a moment to reflect on the protest when it first began, and the experiences that happened up to the day JKF's presidency was terminated. Bear with me, but this may be long.

On September 1, 2005, I. King Jordan [IKJ] announced that he plans to retire, thus, a president search process would begin. Yet a bit later, he introduced JKF as president and then immediately corrected himself and said University Provost instead. This obviously made people uneasy. During the search process, there were six people being considered, which were narrowed down to three. People started to voice their concerns about the final three and questioned why Dr. Anderson, a black man with a PhD was overlooked for the final three, despite the fact that he outranked a white man, Ron Stern, with only a master, and Anderson also had more experience on an administrative level than Stern does [in fact Stern only has experience on a high school level]. During this time, a group of Deaf black students became very concerned that the president search was flawed and began to voice the concerns out to others.

The students and faculty voiced out their opinions on the final three candidates, and the results were that 81% students felt that JKF was unacceptable, and 64% of Gallaudet Faculty said that JKF was unacceptable. JKF was clearly the most unwanted one out of the three. However, JKF was selected by the BoT to be the next president of Gallaudet, much to the dismay of, well, almost everybody. I feel that it's necessary to list the reasons why so many people had no confidence in JKF as president: