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

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Page time, I didn't say thisnor did I understand it in this way just that I was teaching the 'structure of ASL").
I think Bill's work, even before the lab, established ground rules for work on ASL. The work would need to draw from a certain tradition of commitment to data collection and analysis. It would need to divorce itself from the disciplines of education and policy and make ASL an object of study in and of itself. These new ground rules were extremely refreshing for someone like me who desperately wanted a life outside of deaf education. We felt shackled by the overbearing and oppressive presence of the "deaf educators" and Bill's work with all its unusualness (matching the way he dressed and how he furnished his office) just seemed like away out. It was so new we thought we could make anew life for ourselves.
I think I was too young and too inexperienced to follow the details of management and power on campus. I do know that the president of the college at the time, Edward Merrill, barely tolerated the lab and regularly pitted Bill against Orin
Cornett of the Cued Speech Lab for resources.
In Bill's lab we talked about self-determination, language, culture, identity, and throwing off the oppressive tradition of deaf education from the days when people couldn't bring themselves even to use the term "ASL" Bill created the possibility of liberation from old dogmas and, in his constant fighting with the administration, made clear the self-interest of the powers that be. Many of them are now gone, or have taken early retirement, hoping to supplement their incomes by consulting for their few old friends left in deaf education. Nowhere else in the world were deaf people recognized as linguists, as equals to hearing researchers. But hiring deaf researchers was just commonsense to Bill Stokoe. He had expressed confidence in the capabilities of deaf people from the moment he arrived at Gallaudet, and he continued to do so as director of the lab. He told Gil Eastman that he could succeed in graduate school he assured Dorothy Casterline that she was qualified to work with him on the dictionary he gave Carol Padden a job in the lab before she had earned her undergraduate degree.

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