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tute new policies. His task was enormous. Despite having read the report of the Middle States Association and served on evaluation committees that had denied accreditation to other universities, he was unprepared for what he found. When he arrived at Gallaudet in September of 1952, he discovered that the college,
though small, was the headquarters of a large political enterprise, called by those in it "the profession" Actually, it meant the control of the state residential schools for the deaf, where more than half of deaf children were educated.
Superintendents of these schools were appointed by the state legislators and most went directly to them for funding. But very few got this appointment without the recommendation of the president of Gallaudet College. The Gallaudet MA. in the education of the deaf was the road (for men only) to a principalship and later superintendency . . . . Some men, already "trained teachers of the deaf" came to Gallaudet fora repeat, in order to get its imprimatur.
When I arrived in 1952, the Department of Education was still being called the Normal Department. People there thought that "normal" meant not deaf. Deaf people were not admitted. It was customary to say of a superintendent who had the
Gallaudet MA. that "he was Normal in 'President Elstad . . . beefed up the faculty by hiring its second PhD, but Dean Fusfeld, then and later, advised against trying for accreditation because the college was too "special" Many agreed with him, both faculty and alumni, arguing that standards applied to other colleges should not apply to Gallaudet. President Elstad gave Detmold five years to get the college accredited, arguing that if it couldn't be accredited in that amount of time, "it shouldn't exist" Detmold remembers that Elstad took "a lot of flak from his friends the superintendents of residential deaf schools who told him he was crazy to think that deaf people could ever be liberally educated."
Detmold discovered that the faculty at Gallaudet at the time was an even mix of hearing and deaf and was "fairly enthusiastic"
but utterly without direction one professor "taught public

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