Gallaudet University

Founded in 1864 as the National Deaf-Mute College, Olmsted, Vaux & Co. organized the campus plan around a meandering circulation network designed to provide choreographed passages of scenery. In 1988, when the board of trustees announced they would appoint a hearing university president over several deaf candidates, students organized the “Deaf President Now” protest to shut down the campus as they pressured the administration to meet their demands. After extensive media coverage of the rallies, class boycotts, and impromptu marches to the U.S. Capitol, the board acquiesced to the students’ demands eight days later, naming Dr. Irving King Jordan as university president.

History

The American School for the Deaf, established in 1817 by Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc, was the first American institution to educate students in manual gestures–not yet known as sign language–and to allow deaf children to learn and socialize with one another. Here, American deaf culture, possessive of its own language, history, and traditions, was born.

Following the influence of Gallaudet and Clerc, schools for deaf children were established across the country in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1856, former United States Postmaster General Amos Kendall donated two acres in northeast Washington, D.C., to establish a school for deaf and blind students. Congress granted “The Kendall School” a charter as the Columbia Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb and Blind in 1857 and Thomas Gallaudet’s son, Edward, became the institution’s first superintendent. Over the next decade, Gallaudet encouraged the formation of a degree-granting college for deaf students, and in 1864, Congress authorized the school to become the National Deaf-Mute College and appropriated funds to purchase additional acreage.

In 1866 the landscape architecture firm Olmsted, Vaux & Co. was engaged to develop a comprehensive plan for the fourteen-acre campus. The firm organized buildings in informal groupings on either side of an expansive green, with academical buildings to the east and faculty residences to the west. Olmsted and Vaux, aspiring to ensure “the senses of sight and smell are gratified in a most complete and innocent way,” intended a Picturesque campus with dense border plantings and a network of curvilinear circulation routes offering choreographed passages of scenery. Most of the planned roads and paths were never built, but the extant circulation in the historic campus core remains a simplification of the Olmsted, Vaux & Co., plan and preserves the indirect movement between buildings. Frederick Withers, a partner in Vaux’s separate architectural firm Vaux, Withers & Co., designed the college’s initial buildings, including the Professor’s House (1867), President’s House (1869), Chapel Hall (1871), and College Hall (1877).

Following Kendall’s death in 1869, the college purchased an additional 90 acres north of the original campus. Olmsted, Vaux & Co. remained engaged and helped site additional buildings in harmony with their original plan, including a gatekeeper’s cottage (1878), gymnasium (1881), and Kendall Hall (1885) designed by Withers, and Dawes House (1895), designed by deaf architect and alumnus Olof Hanson. A bronze statue of Thomas Gallaudet by sculptor Daniel Chester French was erected at the main entrance of Chapel Hall in 1889.

Following Edward Gallaudet’s retirement, the institution was renamed Gallaudet College in 1917. In this era, a eugenics movement was gaining popularity in the U.S., recommending forced sterilization and other restrictive measures to eradicate deafness. Amidst this social and political climate, Gallaudet College remained the only degree-conferring college for deaf students. The school’s reputation for fostering solidarity among the deaf community and providing a rigorous education on par with any higher learning institution led to significant growth in the twentieth century. To accommodate a burgeoning academic program and student population, campus development increased, with major additions completed in the 1960s and 1970s.

While the school flourished in the mid-twentieth century, its location in the heart of the nation’s capital began to have an impact on campus life. In 1968, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., riots broke out just a few blocks from campus. The university responded by erecting a chain link fence to isolate the campus from the bordering neighborhoods and the perceived threat of disruption. Incrementally, the university replaced the temporary barricade with a permanent perimeter fence that surrounded the campus by the mid-1970s. The fence created a visual and symbolic separation between the campus and its urban surrounds but did not prevent further civic action from occurring in and around the grounds.

Deaf President Now Protest

With the appointment of Edward Gallaudet in 1864, the school began a 124-year period of leadership by hearing, not deaf, presidents. In early 1988, just two years after becoming accredited as Gallaudet University, the board of trustees convened to choose a new president from among three finalist candidates. Two of the candidates, Irving King Jordan and Harvey Corson, were deaf alumni. The third, Elizabeth Zinser, was an experienced school administrator, but a hearing person with very little knowledge of sign language.

Advocacy groups called for the selection of a deaf candidate, which was echoed by political leaders including Vice President George Bush, Senators Bob Dole, Bob Graham, Tom Harkin, and Lowell Weicker, and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson. On March 1, a rally in support of a deaf president was attended by more than 1000 university, high school, and elementary school students, faculty, members of the local deaf community, and others. The rally traveled across campus, terminating on the campus mall at a statue of Edward Gallaudet, erected in 1969.

Despite these efforts, Zinser was selected by the board, a decision that sent shockwaves through the school’s population. After her appointment was announced on Sunday, March 6, students immediately mobilized and marched to the site of the press conference at the Mayflower Hotel and continued to the U.S Capitol, rallying for visibility and representation for the deaf community. The following day activists presented the board a list of demands: Zinser to resign and be replaced with a deaf president; Jane Spillman, board chair, to resign; the number of deaf board members to be increased to at least 51 percent; and no reprisals against the demonstrators. By March 8, four students – Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Gerald “Jerry” Lee Covell, Greg Hlibok, and Tim Rarus – emerged as the protest leaders.

On campus, students and allied local citizens gathered with a unifying demand: “Deaf President Now.” Students boycotted classes and pitched tents near the historic Olmsted Green along Florida Avenue, where they barricaded the school gates and blocked traffic from entering campus. The rolling lawns, winding paths, and mature shade trees of the Olmsted, Vaux, & Co. plan, always intended to promote congregation, provide shelter, and confer dignity to the student community, made the historic campus uniquely suited as a site for gathering in collective action.

For days, activists rallied throughout campus, burning effigies, conducting interviews with members of the press, and carrying banners emblazoned with “We Still Have A Dream,” a slogan inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

On March 11 the protestors peacefully marched from campus to another Olmsted-designed landscape, the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. Two days later, on March 13, the university amended their decision and announced the appointment of Irving King Jordan as the school’s first deaf president.

With all four demands agreed to, the Deaf President Now (DPN) movement reverberated throughout the country. The demonstration’s national coverage exposed many reporters and viewers to the unity, capability, and self-determination of the deaf community, and encouraged a national awareness of disability advocacy. The protest catalyzed a new era of civil rights activism for Americans with disabilities, which culminated with the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.