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Page Chapter 6
You start to look around the country at work that's going on in American Sign Language now, and you realize a lot of those
people either got their start or got a great deal of their training and experience in the Linguistics Research Laboratory
I. KING JORDAN
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Page As long as George Detmold was dean of Gallaudet, Bill Stokoe was shielded from the politics that affect most institutions. One example of this is Detmold's decision into reject President Elstad's demand that Stokoe give up his sign language research:
Detmold didn't even mention the incident to Stokoe. Detmold also protected his good friend from 'the Great Powers in the education of the deaf" by serving as a kind of buffer. "In the s" Detmold recalls, "President Elstad and I sat through a daylong meeting with them S. Richard Silverman from the Central Institute for the Deaf at Washington University in St. Louis,
Myklebust from Northwestern University, and Edna Levine from Teachers College of Columbia University and the Lexington
School for the Deaf. The very idea that we should engage in deafness-related research was anathema to them. We were solemnly warned to leave all such research to those who were qualified to conduct it and not try to rise above our simple teaching mission" 1
Detmold ignored such warnings and tried to make things as easy as possible for Bill Stokoe, in part because of their close friendship, of course, but primarily because he realized that Stokoe's "scholarly temperament and interests" could be satisfied at
Gallaudet and would ultimately benefit the college:
Of course, if Bill had published from the comfort of a research professorship at Harvard or Stanford, you maybe sure that other university people would have paid quicker and closer attention to him.
Yet I doubt that he could have done what he did anywhere but at Gallaudet. This was the only place that could give him access to a mature, educated, sophisticated deaf community, to the mature deaf language and culture. True, Gallaudet had no tradition of research, none of the laboratories, graduate assistants, grant writers, and the rest of the university research infrastructure. But I gave him all I could space, time, assistants, and money, as he required, and it was enough.2
It was more than enough. Whenever Stokoe needed something, he bypassed the usual bureaucratic channels and simply asked the dean. The fact that the dictionary was the first book to be published by Gallaudet College Press is evidence of Stokoe's

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