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

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Page place. He said the thing he thought would be most effective would be to open the admissions to hearing students and then have an integrated campus. The faculty was incredulous.
I expect that one of the strongest speeches made against his proposal was delivered by yours truly. In fact, I made it so strong that as soon as the meeting was over and I got back to my office, I thought it over and I went down to the president's office and said "I hope you understand there was nothing personal in this statement I made on the floor of the faculty meeting. It's just that my experiences have taught me that in educational settings, deaf people need a place where their mode of communication is respected and that this would go dead against the charter of the college which was setup to provide an education for people with so much hearing loss they couldn't get that education elsewhere" He said, "Bill,
don't worry about it I don't pay any attention to this. All faculty are alike. They don't like new ideas and don't want to go in anew direction, but if you prod them and drive them, they'll come along" At that point, I knew that he had nothing but contempt for the faculty. Bill Stokoe considered himself a man of principle, but many of the administrators at Gallaudet describe him instead as "not a team player" At times his behavior must have been infuriating to them. For example, soon after President Merrill arrived he sent a memo to the faculty asking them to lobby for the passage of a Senate bill to fund Gallaudet's Kendall School, a demonstration elementary school for deaf children. Instead, Stokoe wrote to his congressman "My superior, whose salary comes in a U.S.
Treasury check as mine does, has asked me to write urging passage of HR 18766. This I cannot do, for in my opinion the bill is ill-conceived." Stokoe argued that if the proposal were approved, the Kendall school, where enrollment was declining because of mainstreaming, would become "an almost empty multi-million-dollar showplace In the words of Michael Karchmer,
Gallaudet's dean of graduate studies and research, "Bill Stokoe was an administrator's nightmare.''9
It is no coincidence that Stokoe was voted out as chair of the English Department in 1971, the same year George Detmold

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