Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page 106 1967 to become the first deaf faculty member of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf [NTID] at the Rochester Institute of Technology. (His career at NTID was stunning he became the founder and first chairman of the English Department and the founder and first director of the Experimental Educational Theater Program there) In fact, Stokoe had hired many of the members of the department who made the decision to replace him.
There areas many versions of what transpired as there are people involved. But it is clear enough that when Stokoe told Arden
Neisser that his colleagues in the English department had "kicked me out" as a result of "the whole matter of ASL" there was only some truth to that statement. 12 Granted, Stokoe's determination to prove that ASL was a language could not have increased his popularity in the English Department. He was concentrating increasingly on linguistics and its application to teaching, and he expected his colleagues in the department to share his interest and enthusiasm more and more, they resisted.
James Woodward, then a teaching faculty member, recalls that "there was so much debate in the English Department about whether to offer a course in transformational and post-transformational approaches to grammar that it was tabled for over a year."13
Stokoe had always been perceived by many of his colleagues as eccentric, and some of them found his nonconformist behavior disconcerting his piping, his fascination with sign language, his literary allusions, his seemingly inexhaustible range of interestsfrom making his own beer and bread to country dancingand his habit of explaining them in great detail. To his supporters, Stokoe's somewhat impulsive behavior was part and parcel of his genius to his detractors it was evidence of his lack of consideration for others.
Virginia Covington describes one instance of "typical Bill behavior" While still Stokoe's secretary she had her office across the hall from his.
I came in one day and he was moving me into his officeall my books, my desk, everything was moved into his office. I
was just flabbergasted. He put up partitions and said, "Oh

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