Word: gallaudet
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...summer session at Gallaudet University. A few lazy clouds threaten to water the already green campus and bathe a modest statue of founder Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Off the main quad, an orange steam shovel dips, lifts and pivots, grumbling to itself. Few students hear it. Gallaudet is the country's foremost college for deaf people. When Jim Haynes, at work nearby, instructs his philosophy class that "Plato argued that the concept behind this desk is more real than the physical thing itself," he does so manually, in crisp American Sign Language (ASL). His 12 students watch his hands intently, with...
This is the story of a kind of paradise and how, over a six-month period starting last fall, it was almost consumed from within. Chartered in 1864 by Abraham Lincoln, Gallaudet is host to only 2,000 students each year. But to America's estimated 2 million deaf people, the university's symbolic heft outstrips that of the U.S. Capitol, five minutes south by car. The deaf Harvard, Wharton and Brookings rolled into one, it has produced generations of leaders, activists and entrepreneurs. Whether in classrooms where teachers lecture in sign language, on playing fields where athletes key into...
...last Sept. 28, and Fernandes had just got home. The flasher attached to her phone was blinking, the sign that it was ringing. It was Gallaudet. Fernandes jumped into her Camry, raced back to campus and arrived in time to see a colleague standing on a bench so he could be viewed by the crowd, as he signed the latest news. A freshman had been bludgeoned to death...
Months before, Eric Plunkett, 19, had framed his Gallaudet acceptance letter and told his mother, "In four years, I'll replace this with my diploma." Now his battered body lay in his room in a dorm called Cogswell, discovered when a hallmate named Joseph Mesa Jr. told a resident assistant that Plunkett had missed class and there was a peculiar smell coming from his room...
When Fernandes, delegated by Gallaudet President I. King Jordan to try to handle this bizarre situation, arrived, stunned freshmen were wandering through Cogswell's lobby. "We were shell-shocked," says Tawny Holmes, freshman class president. "I went back to my room and just felt unsafe." Student-body president Chris Soukup hurried over to Fernandes to say the university's gay community was in a state of high alarm. Plunkett had just been named secretary of the campus Lambda Society. And Lambda members claimed that there had been a marked increase in death threats against gays. Some, Fernandes discovered, were hard...