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

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pressedone of the best they have listened to. Tell her how much "bravo" she was!").
But politics were always present. On July 6, 1982, Stokoe used the notebook to complain:
I got very impatient with Dr. Merrill and his stooge (whats the Italian word for stooge) trying to pick out who will go from Gallaudet to your symposium.
They tried that at the time of the International Conference of Educators of the Deaf in Hamburg. I got very angry and expostulated in person and in memos, and they caved inI had been asked by one of the Germans to do a paper on ASL.
Later, Merrill came up with a scheme in which anyone who wanted to represent Gallaudet had to submit an abstract to them.
Finally, I decided not to go to Germany anyway. I did that because when I saw the program, it was all oralism, speech therapy, audiology, and treating deaf people like medical patients. But I'm sure Dr. Merrill still thinks it was because he was so stuffy about the travel money. Of course, he and selected members of the administration hop off to Japan,
Australia, etc, to visit schools anytime they like.
There is no moral to this story, but it has a happy ending EC. Merrill has announced his intention to resign next year But the ending wasn't so happy after all. The conference in Rome was a huge success, with the most prominent researchers in the world presenting papers, including many people who had worked with Stokoe. However, Merrill's departure did not put an end to Stokoe's problems with the Gallaudet administration.
When Stokoe returned to the United States, pressure mounted anew to force him into retirement and replace the lab with a
Department of Linguistics that would "streamline" Gallaudet's research projects. This time around, intrigue flavored the political brew. In 1983 Merrill was replaced as president of Gallaudet by Dr. W. Lloyd Johns. But by January of 1984, Johns's personal life had become the subject of gossip, both on and off campus. He wrote a memo to the Gallaudet community announcing that he and his wife had legally separated, that she had moved to California, and that this disruption would "in no

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