The tacos he’s been raving.

1. Carne
2. Chorizos
3. Pastor

It has the freshest jalapenos I’ve ever tasted. :-)

At the sushi bar. See boats on water. =)

Awesome.

En route to Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA!

In the last post, I’ve pointed out that if the Board of Trustees decided to force JFK to resign, they’d have to pay her 2 million dollars as her lawyers cleverly advised her to put in the contract. Well, the Protest may have already cost Gallaudet more than 2 millions; however, it’s currently hypothetical right now. The Athens Alabama Personal Injury Lawyer duty varies depending on the state and the circumstances.

First, I’d like to say something about how I felt last night and I would imagine this is how most people feel where such an event has put them to make gasps, cover their mouths with their hands and finally hit them hard and they started to weep. When something like that happens, you know it’s bad.

We just all witnessed something that’s never happened in the 142 years at Gallaudet University and something that’s never happened during the 1988 DPN Protest either, 135 incredibly brave students were arrested.

The emotions just blew to all time high—a sky high—and everyone went into an unbelievable disbelief and was utterly shocked. It was one of those rare moments when everything stopped for a min and we were transfixed on our computer screens, incessantly clicking on the reload button for the latest news from deafread.com, only to find out that we weren’t the only ones clicking down our mouses to death, millions others have done the same thing, which sent the server to crash, had to settle with next two or three servers till our senses and million others finally got what’s really going on.

It wasn’t so about the arrests that broke our hearts; it went much more than that. The place we all have come to know Gallaudet University, the uniqueness around the campus, the sense of belonging that all deaf people feel is gone or rather, destroyed. It feels like Gallaudet University is no longer unique from other places where it is the only large-scale place that ASL is not a minority language there.

Seeing those arrests gave me scary flashbacks what would become of Gallaudet University in the future not so far away from now. It will have interpreters in classrooms, just like every other college and deaf students will no longer see the reason to attend Gallaudet University anymore. ASL will not be a mandatory thing to learn or enforced for the sake of communication standard. Then, Congress will begin to see the same thing, decide to cut off the funding, and tell these students that they can just go home to their local colleges and to give them with ADA laws pamphlets to remind them that they have the right to get an interpreter. Gallaudet University is either closed or re-named to perhaps I.K. Jordan University and its mascot animal will be the Lobsters.

Okay, there I’ve said it, perhaps too extreme in tastes or in ASL, “far-out!” or get the heck out of here! But believe me, this is what most of us fear. All right, let’s ease a bit down on the drama side and explain what the hell I was talking about Gallaudet Protest that may have already cost them more than two million dollars. Well, it’s time to think mathematically.

So, 135 students were arrested. I.K. Jordan and JFK have their names locked on the list. They will be meeting over some lobster bisque soup leftovers from their recent super-fancy dinner. They will discuss if those students should be expelled. And if they were to be expelled from the university, that will cost them a lot of money, my friend. Take a look at this chart from Gallaudet University’s website on tuitions and fees.

The estimated total tuition for a whole semester is $10,735 for an undergraduate student. About $500 more for a graduate student. I’ll just use the UG student figures. Assuming they are expelled and will not return next semester, 135 students times $10,735 is a whopping $1,449,225. Not too far away from 2 million dollars to “buy out” Jane Fernandes. I think many of them are freshmen or second-year students, so they would have come back next year, so I’ll take 100. 100 times $10,735 times 2 (for two semesters) comes to $2,147,000. So, a potential total loss is $3,596,225.

Remember, this is all based on the assumption that I.K. Jordan and Fernandes decide to expel them out of campus. Now, is it worth it? so much for J.K Fernandes and so little for the students.

Think about it, the Board of Trustees.

That’s the amount of dollars the Board of Trustees have agreed to pay if they asked her to resign. Obviously, it’s going to take a lot to convince the BoTs to see if it’s worth two million dollars to replace her. Or the FSSA (facuty, staff, students and alumni) finds a way to come up with that amount of money and they can say “Look, we have two million dollars. Please step down.” but that’s just me and my radical thinking. I got this information from where else? Ridorlive.com. Look below about Jane’s contract.

This post isn’t going to be of a Pulitizer’s prize material but a curious observation and opinion by a person who was once a Gallaudet student during his first year of college in 1999 and has been following the protest closely.

The volcano has erupted once again. The protest first started in last May when students were unhappy with the selection of the next University president in Jane K. Fernandes and felt that the presidential search process was unfair and flawed. They also felt that JKF was pampered by I. King Jordan as they both hold a close friendship and JKF has risen all the way from her first job as a Vice President of the Laurent Clerc National Center (which is ironic, that I will explain a moment later), then became a Provost and now she is set to be the next President.

Students feel that with the close relationship between Jordan and she, Jordan would still have some voice/input/control in the future Gallaudet decision-making and isn’t completely out of the picture, basically leaving the current administration intact without going through a big change that would leave him behind the ship. It isn’t very hard to see this because last weekend, two Gallaudet buildings were already named after him and his wife. Perhaps Jordan felt that he deserved some kind of a special party (how does a lobster bisque soup sound to you?) and two buildings being honored after him and his wife for all his hard work, fund-raising skills and one deaf quote that has made him famous, “Deaf people can do anything but hear.” This only enables students to disagree further from him and his administration, feeling that there is an oppression and a suspected fiscal management—-a corruption at play. Gallaudet probably would need more than ten professional CPAs or positions equivalent of IRS agents to audit every cent that has come into the university. Something is sure to find there.

Now, back to the protest, it seems that the protest has caught on a wild fire when someone had an idea of locking out the HMB building where most classes and professors’ classes are. This is strategic because it doesn’t require as many people as it would need to block the whole campus. As in most other protests, they are like a fire or a car engine; all they need is a spark to get them going. Gallaudet students got that spark when DSP decided to get physical with students as one DSP officer tried to choke a student after students kept standing in his way. This was caught on the video. Another DSP officer used a mace spray in an attempt to “shoo” them away out of the HMB building. How did the Administration respond? The public office released a statement that no such accidents occurred and no one was hurt. They probably weren’t aware that those two incidents were actually caught on the videos. So, this only added more to the fire. Now, the Gallaudet Protest has found their momentum, with more people now convinced that there is something that needs to be done about the administration, starting with JKF’s resignation.

To really understand the whole protest, it isn’t as complicated as it sounds. There is a conflict in the philosophy between JKF (and IKJ too) and the FSSA. JKF has announced that in her future plans, she has a goal to include all communication modes from ASL to cued speech to pure oral. She even supports the idea of having an oral interpreter in a classroom if there are some oral students who have no knowledge of ASL and wouldn’t understand what a deaf professor may be signing. JKF sees a problem that with the declining number in unique deaf students who attend deaf schools like myself and my parents, there would be less enrollment numbers to Gallaudet. To help boost the number, she feels that she’d need to welcome ALL kinds of students who have some hearing loss or all of it regardless of what communication mode they use. Gallaudet will give them the accessibility they need when they get to the campus, making it more mainstreamed than it is now.

It may sound good and may help with the enrollment numbers but that’s not what Gallaudet is about. The founder of Gallaudet University, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, went on a ship to Europe to seek what would be the best possible education for the deaf people and in that, he discovered sign language and he personally brought Laurent Clerc, a deaf educator, to America to teach sign language to the deaf. He had to convince Clerc to come with him and there is a rumor that Gallaudet’s first deaf pupil, Alice Cosworth, was the reason why Clerc came, in which they eventually did get married.

With a language that all deaf people can understand, they began to communicate their thoughts better, thus, education is possible. However, the sign language, now known as American Sign Language (ASL), have been going through so much oppression that black slaves or Jews would be embarrassed to hear. For the longest time, hearing people thought ASL was not a language and that it’s equivalent to apes making some funny gestures and in the Milan conference back in 1880, it was decided that ASL must be banned and only oral method shall be taught. As a result, Deaf teachers lost their jobs and ASL almost became extinct but who was there to save the language? None other than Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and the college he founded.

Jane K. Fernandes was a former Vice President at the Laurent Clerc National Center. Instead of promoting or encouraging ASL to be the primary language all across the campus, she does not expect a high level of fluency from each faculty, staff, or a student. Now, she is selected to be the next President and her vision is to welcome all communication modes and expects that such accessibility is to be met. In short, she does not consider ASL to be a requirement to be a student or to work at the university. A good example would be in order to apply to colleges, you’d need to write a strong good essay in English, right? At Gallaudet University, you don’t have to be. There is no specific ASL screening test for faculty, staff and students. Basically, it is possible to waltz through the university with a little knowledge of ASL. FSSA doesn’t want that. They want to see ASL to be as natural as other languages and not to take a backseat to other languages. It seems that the real problem still lies between us and hearing people that they still treat ASL as secondary language and do not want to appoint a person who is deaf-centric and use ASL solely without resorting to what they always want to see—a deaf person who can talk.

This is precisely why FSSA does not want her to be the next leader for the deaf. ASL is like oxygen; we can’t live without it.

UNITY FOR GALLAUDET!

*disclaimer – all of the above was written with speculation and does not claim to be factual or accurate.

Anybody wanna hire me? :-)

Whoa, baby, look what I found. Was bored in the plane, so I asked a girl sitting next to me if I could borrow her Cosmo magazine.

Cool, my uncle gave me his golf travel bag. My clubs better don’t get damaged thru baggage claims. I’m flying to Chicago for a deaf golf charity tournament. Hope I’ll play well!

Mmm… Juicy.