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Page processes of the Research Institute and Division of Researchthis, of course, has been one of the major problems with which we have been struggling for the last year or two with this group" The problem wasn't simply Bill Stokoe's insubordination it was what he represented. The letters of support came not only from linguists but from deaf students who had "been helped personally and professionally" by the work of Bill Stokoe;56 from
Barbara Kannapell, founder of DeafPride, who credited Bill and his lab with "contributing to the positive self-image of deaf people from Anne Fadiman, a writer for Life magazine who had met Stokoe while researching an article at Gallaudet and discovered the beauty of American Sign Language Stokoe's work had produced a revolution. From the point of view of
Gallaudet's administrators, the sooner they could get rid of him the better.
Carol Padden, who today is one of several deaf members of the Board of Trustees at Gallaudet, recently observed that
Gallaudet, sad to say, has lost many opportunities to bring prestige to itself, including nurturing Bill and using his work and his leadership for Gallaudet's advantage. Gallaudet has never been very good at distinguishing between ill-conceived experiments (e.g., Cued Speech, Signing Exact English) and true scholarship. Now, I think Gallaudet is happy to recognize Bill, but it is a recognition that has come far too late. And I still think it is too little. They should name a building after him at the very least.59
Charlotte Baker-Shenk remembers that when Bill Stokoe retired, he was "a tired man, tired of all the fighting, tired of all the meetings and tired of having to go to battle all the time. He kept the wolves at bay for Dennis and me. And that letter writing campaign was exhausting, but he did it for us, and for the lab, and for what he believed in. But when he retired, I think he believed that he had somehow failed."60
A month or two after the closing of the lab, Virginia Covington went over to the new Department of Linguistics to locate something that had been in the library of the lab, a collec-

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