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

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Page man than George Detmold had been willing to remain dean of the collegeinspecting fire extinguishers.
Stokoe had tenure, and his research in American Sign Language was attracting worldwide attention and funding for Gallaudet;
so a compromise was reached. Stokoe would continue to teach one course each semester (a requirement since his tenure was in the English department, but as Schuchman explains it, "a lab position was created for Bill as away of finding a graceful solution to the problem. That's the way a lot of units were created at Gallaudet." 20 Bill Stokoe was being kicked upstairs.
It was a kick that was felt around the world, at least the world of sign language studies. The creation of the lab was arguably one of the most propitious events in history for the people who use and study American Sign Language.
Stokoe had never stopped trying to become a more effective teacher. However, his success was limited. He had been teaching the same courses for almost fifteen years, while increasingly devoting his time, energy, and talents to sign language research and the attendant study, analysis, writing, conference-going, speechmaking, and fundraising. At the time of his appointment as director of the Linguistics Research Laboratory (known from the moment of its inception as the "LRL" or simply "the lab"),
Stokoe had just received grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He was now free to dedicate himself to the field of research that he had created, one that was growing rapidly as other linguists around the world began to use his findings as the basis of their own research.
Outside the classroom Stokoe made afar greater impact on deaf education than he could have as a teacher. An observation by
Dennis Cokely in 1979 describes the pervasive influence of Stokoe's research "As administrators and educators of the deaf . .
. realize that policies .. . must be based upon the best available linguistic research in sign language and signed communication,
this search leads directly to Stokoe's work over the past twenty years, since so many research efforts in this field are based, to a greater or lesser extent, on the efforts or ideas of Bill Stokoe."21
The Linguistics Research Laboratory (the name sounds im-

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