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

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Page In the view of these administrators, however, Stokoe's lab had been created primarily to find a place fora tenured English professor. And that tenured professor harped continually on the foolishness of their administrative and management styles and their pedagogical philosophies. Standing up for his principles, as always, Stokoe criticized these people at every opportunity in return, they asked him at every opportunity when he was going to retire.
Beginning in March of 1982, Stokoe helped his friend Virginia Volterra of the Institute of Psychology in Rome to plan the Third
International Symposium on Sign Language Research, to beheld in Rome in June of 1983. There was nothing that he would have preferred to do, and there was no one who could do it better, given his energy, his commitment, his contacts, and his knowledge of the field. He and Volterra began an exchange of notes by airmail. Volterra has saved the notebooks because, as she explains,
They are so important to my scientific life. They are really a record of apart of my education. My English was not good;
it is still not good, but Bill Stokoe never cared about that. I started to discuss with him through this notebook sign language research in general, and my research. I could explain to him what I had in mind and he answered me, gave me suggestions, told me if an idea was good or not, how I could develop it, what was going on in the States.
When the first notebook was filled, we started a second one, which we used until after the conference. Just recently we started to send disks back and forth . . . . This has been an incredible experience, to have an exchange of ideas with a person like Bill Stokoe. We have great respect for Bill Stokoe in Italy. The notebooks covered everything related to the conference, and more the topics to be addressed the design of the invitations
(a rendering by a deaf Italian girl of the Coliseum with four columns drawn as hands fingerspelling the word ROME when invitations should be sent the source of funding for interpreters the reaction to a lecture by Baker-Shenk in Italy in June of (tell her the people at the institute were very im-

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