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

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Page federates, that is, bridge people who knew the language and the culture. We knew that without bridge people we could not get authentic, reliable results because of all the code switching that would happen when a deaf person interacted with us. It was such a polarized environment, an environment where deaf people had been oppressed for so many years, you could not expect them suddenly to show you their language and behavior as they normally would with each other when no hearing people were present.
So we began to work with bridge people who were bicultural in order to get some results that reflected what deaf people really did. But the researchers from "the other side" would only accept their own findings, which fit their assumption that deaf people were like defective hearing people. They could use the same instruments and procedures they always had and think that they were getting an accurate reading of the abilities and the ways of thinking of deaf people. Even before President Johns left, Doin Hicks, the vice president for research, decided that he had to deal with the "outside opinions" expressed in the letter-writing campaign. He wrote to Raymond Trybus to inform him that
The actions of Bill Stokoe in generating the "fan letters" addressed to Dr. Johns by a variety of individuals both in the
United States and elsewhere are entirely inappropriate and represent, in my view, nothing short of serious insubordination.
This is so because the tone of many of the letters makes it quite clear that they were written in response to specific,
inaccurate, and apparently inflammatory statements made by Stokoe (and/or his LRL colleagues) regarding you and me and our intentions, statements, and actions regarding his program.54
There was nothing inaccurate about the statements of Stokoe and his LRL colleagues. Hicks and Trybus wanted the lab closed and Baker-Shenk and Cokely out of Gallaudet. They were furious at Stokoe for presuming, as Hicks put it, to "declare independence' from the normal review and administrative

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