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Page been able to achieve more, but I'm not sure he would have been able to sleep at night. Robbin Battison remembers an instance when Bill Stokoe "took on" one of the administrators. A number of new administrators had been appointed on campus, and Stokoe was making up titles for them, such as Dean of Parking Lots, Dean of Office
Supplies, Dean of Enchiladas,
and it got a lot sillier than that. One of the deans brought a small delegation to the office to show them the lab, and there was a coffee cup sitting on the secretary's desk with the word "Bullshit" on it. This dean came back later and chewed Bill out for having a coffee cup that said "Bullshit" on it. Bill wasn't embarrassed at all. He just stood up to him and said, "Of course I have aright to have a coffee cup that says 'Bullshit' on it. Bullshit is the level of most of what goes on here at
Gallaudet College."30
This "us versus them" mentality permeated the lab and may have contributed to its effectiveness, as like-minded young linguists gravitated toward the lab and joined Stokoe in questioning the established views of deafness. Some of the lab's researchers were deaf, themselves. No longer just the subjects of studies, they now initiated and directed studies and published the resultsall with
Bill Stokoe's encouragement. One of these researchers was Carol Padden, now a prominent interpreter of deaf culture. (Still in elementary school when Sign Language Structure came out, she is now a professor at the University of California, San Diego,
and a member of the Gallaudet University Board of Trustees) Padden recalls what it was like working in the lab with Stokoe in the late 1970s:
I wrote to Bill while I was a freshman at California State University at Northridge explaining that I was transferring to
Georgetown the following year and wanted some kind of part-time work in the lab. I was determined to pursue a career in linguistics, and I had heard that his lab was where things were happening. Bill got letters like this all the time, and I was just a nineteen-year-old with visions of a career in lin-

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