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Page way deter Gallaudet from the achievements and potential all of us recognize and desire" 42 However, the issue was too embarrassing, too well known, to be contained, and in the summer of 1984 Johns was forced to resign as president and was replaced by Jerry C. Lee.
None of this would have influenced Stokoe's plans, if not for unfortunate timing. In the early summer of 1983, Stokoe decided to retire in August of 1984, after thirty-nine years at Gallaudet. "I stayed as long as I did" he says, "primarily for the crass motive of building up my retirement benefits But he had another reason as well. Cokely's and Baker-Shenk's research in the
LRL was crucial to the completion of their dissertations, and Stokoe feared that if he left before they finished and the lab closed,
they would be unable to complete their work elsewhere. He believed that once they had their doctorates, they would be considered qualified to continue their work in the labor to work elsewhere on campus.
The Gallaudet administration wasted no time. In 1983, as soon as Bill announced his decision to retire in 1984, the administration announced its intention to close the lab. Stokoe, Baker-Shenk, and Cokely immediately began a letter-writing campaign, asking almost every linguist in the world concerned with sign language research to write to the new president, Dr.
Johns. The response was overwhelming. More than fifty letters arrived from thirty-five states and from countries allover the world Sweden, Italy, Canada, Thailand, Japan, Denmark, Switzerland, Scotland, and England. The letter-writers, some of the best known researchers, writers, and educators in the field, expressed incredulity at the idea of closing the world's preeminent lab for sign language research.
Jerome Schein, who was by this time a professor and director of deafness rehabilitation at New York University, wrote to
President Johns. He wrote to Bill Stokoe as well, expressing the hope that "these few words convey the entirety of my willingness to support you. You and your research colleagues are the cutting edge in expanding our understanding of deafness."44
Ursula Bellugi wrote to Johns, saying, "It is dramatically clear that the scientific world recognizes the critical role that the
Linguistics Research Laboratory has held in developing an un-

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