Guest blog: Why I did not support the Gallaudet protest
by Jane Hurst
The Gallaudet Protest of 2006 has been hard on my identity as a protester. I am a veteran of protests about civil rights and the Vietnam War and the women’s movement and gay rights, to mention just a few of the causes that get me out on the streets. I remember when my neighbors on Spruce Avenue and I decided to take our kids to their “first protest” and we all went down to the “Million Mom March.” We felt that we were initiating them into a sacred ceremony of challenging the power structure and making our voices heard for a more just world. Since that time, my daughters and I have attended many protests together including, sadly, many anti-war protests in recent years. But I could not support the protest at Gallaudet.
If you followed the protest in the news, you probably had a hard time figuring out exactly what the protest was about. The surface issue, the presidency of Dr. Jane K. Fernandes, was a screen for the deeper issues being expressed. What I saw was a combination of several factors: students were angry at being disciplined and held responsible for destruction of property on and off campus; everyone currently or previously employed at Gallaudet who had an ax to grind was out there at the grinding wheel; the Deaf elite felt that they should choose the university president and were not successful at the first try; people who held unexamined sexist attitudes accused Dr. Fernandes of “not being friendly” or “not smiling enough” or having the “wrong personality for the job.”
Most of all I think the protest was fueled by the threat to Deaf culture that has been posed by advances in technology which are giving individuals more choice about whether they want to live in that small community or whether they want to take on the wider world, which includes a lot of hearing people. Cultures under pressure have historically reacted in ways that are aggressive and/or self destructive, and I think we saw that this year at Gallaudet.
All those reasons for the protest are not why I could not support it, though. To explain, I have to go back to the Vietnam Moratorium in 1969. I stood with 500,000 of my friends to oppose the war in Vietnam. I was furious, I hated war, and I hated Nixon. After the protest I fell apart. I cried for hours. I had spent so much energy hating war, but I had no idea what peace was and how it might feel. I vowed to begin a search for peace inside myself, which I had to achieve before I could begin to stand for peace in the world. Years of meditation and mindful inner work on releasing my anger followed and continue to this day.
So in 2006 when the Gallaudet protest began, I had to decide whether or not to support it. Sadly, it has not been a nonviolent protest. Though physical attacks did not occur, it has been surrounded by death threats, stalkers, anonymous hate mail, and what to me felt like, well, a really bad vibe. It was so full of anger at Dr. Fernandes that she was stalked on her family vacation and vilified on a “Wall of Hate” put up during a building takeover, to say nothing of the death threats, obscene websites and blogs. All this anger directed at a person is not something I could support. I had spent 37 years working on generosity, self-acceptance, loving kindness, and forgiveness. To put my energy behind something so negative would be a setback for me. I could not support the protest.
Now that the protesters have “won” I am concerned about what will happen next. I have been working with a group of faculty, staff, and students urging mediation and peaceful respect for all which gives me some hope. What we must do is encourage change in the hearts of the people who harbor such hatred. I know that such angry protesters have issues that need to be resolved before they can live peacefully in community with those who disagree with them, so there is much individual work to be done. I know the difficulty of the journey ahead. I know because I was just such an angry protester 37 years ago.
Jane Hurst is Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Gallaudet University where she has taught for 25 years. She can be reached at jane.hurst@gallaudet.edu.