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

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Detmold and Stokoe must have sensed that their actions were alienating, even offensive, to the deaf faculty and students.
Perhaps their behavior can be understood, in part, as that of members of a minority culture at Gallaudet, Stokoe and Detmold found themselves in the position that deaf people often occupy in the hearing world. Detmold and Stokoe were the outsidersthey were hearing and had no family ties to deaf people they arrived on campus with no sign language skills and no knowledge of deaf culture, attitudes, or customs. Even if they had scrupulously avoided any appearance of cronyism, one wonders how quickly they would have been accepted at the one institution of higher education in the nation where deaf people were in the majority.
As Carol Padden and Tom Humphries have pointed out in Deaf in America, "Deaf people must live almost entirely within the world of others. This peculiar social condition leads to a longing to live lives designed by themselves rather than those imposed by others" 19 Gallaudet was one of the few institutions in the nation where deaf people could hope to satisfy this longingand now George Detmold, a hearing outsider, was "imposing" new rules on the students and taking jobs and responsibilities away from deaf people in the process.
Detmold's reforms also earned him praise, however. Jerome Schein, who joined the Gallaudet faculty in 1960, notes that
Detmold "moved Gallaudet from an unaccredited backwater to a fully accredited collegesomething for which he has never received the credit he so richly deserves."20
I. King Jordan also praises Detmold's reforms. Detmold, he explains, was "the man behind the man. President Elstad gets credit for all the growth that Gallaudet went through and for the fact that Gallaudet was accredited and really became a college during his presidency. But it must be remembered that he hired George Detmold to do that."21
Stokoe's friendship with Detmold wasn't the only cause of difficulty during his first year at Gallaudet. The subject Stokoe taught was exceedingly difficult and inaccessible. His passion for medieval literature and languages made him seem arrogant and pedantic to the other faculty and students.

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