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

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Sign linguists. Additionally, Stokoe founded a journal, Sign Language Studies, which provided a crucial forum for dissemination and discussion of the new knowledge.
Increasingly known and respected among linguists, educators, and Deaf people, Stokoe remained a pariah, or worse, in the eyes of Gallaudet's administration. Maher brings out the tremendous stubbornness in Stokoe's characterhow this stubbornness and forthrightness constantly brought him into collision with others, above all, with the administration of the college, with their
(often largely unconscious) depreciation of deaf people and signing but how too it was a prerequisite to his great achievements,
achieved in the face of near-universal discouragement. She brings out, too, the heroic quality of this time (a word which Stokoe,
in his modesty, would never allow).
Maher describes vividly the most grievous chapter in Stokoe's professional life, with Gallaudet's closing in 1984 of the
Linguistics Research Laboratory where Stokoe and his colleagues had labored so productively. Stokoe was then 65 and had devoted 29 years of his life to the college, 29 years of monumental contributionand at this point when he should have been most honored, his lab was disbanded, and his beloved associates were flung out on their ears.
When I met him a couple of years later, he was still, I think, quite mortified and depressed, even though he had remained ceaselessly productive and active, lecturing, publishing, and encouraging others where he could no longer do research himself.
And yet it was clear to Stokoe, as to many others at Gallaudet at this point, that deep change, and even revolution, was in the air;
Stokoe's work, its continuity, its integrity, formed a sort of backdrop to this. The revolution of the deaf broke out in the students at Gallaudet closed the university in protest against anew president who did not sign, who had no concept of what it meant to be deaf, or of Deaf language or identity, a protest which led, in five triumphant days, to the installation of a deaf president, I. King Jordan, the first in Gallaudet's history. Stokoe was crucially behind the candidacy of Jordan, whom he had known and respected for many years. The militancies of '88 paved the way to the cultural rebirth of 1989,

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