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

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Page Had Johns remained at Gallaudet, it seems likely he would have chosen to appease the linguistic community. However, the impact of the many letters from around the world was lost the moment he announced his resignation. There was no time for
Stokoe, whose retirement date had arrived, to mount another letter-writing campaign directed at the next new president.
In November of 1984, three months after Jerry Lee took over the presidency of Gallaudet, On The Green (the weekly newspaper for Gallaudet faculty and staff) announced that the Linguistics Research Lab would close at the end of December. Readers were assured that
The closing of the lab does not reflect a change in the college's commitment to study language. Research will continue to be conducted throughout the campus. Since the inception of the lab, the college has established the Department of
Linguistics, the Department of Sign Communication, and the Department of Interpreter/Transliterator Instructioneach of which is involved in sign language research. In addition, other units of the Research Institute have started to conduct research on sign language" Trybus dean of the Gallaudet Research Institute stated.
Direction this fall by Gallaudet president Jerry C. Lee to broaden the scope of research and redirect funds to new kinds of research forced the institute to "rethink and reexamine" its work, Trybus said. "We felt we could safely discontinue the laboratory and not endanger the research since it is permeated throughout campus. It is no longer necessary to have a separate lab conducting the research. The administrators and faculty at Gallaudet made no attempt to save the lab, in part because Stokoe had made many enemies along the way but, more important, because they hadn't liked what he was doing. Almost twenty years after the publication of
Sign Language Structure, the administration and most of the faculty at Gallaudet still hadn't figured out why they, the majority,
should try to learn this minority language, much less accord its users respect and autonomy.
The administrators had rehearsed their lines well. Their diplomatic remarks were reported in the student newspaper, the

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