Gallaudet University’s outgoing president told an audience Tuesday that his embattled successor is being punished for an old mistake.
I. King Jordan said that he made a critical error in 2000 when he named Jane K. Fernandes provost without consulting Gallaudet’s faculty.
“That was a terrible mistake,” he said. “I’ve apologized a million times for it, but I’ll never apologize enough.”
Fernandes has “suffered the most from the mistake,” Jordan said.
Jordan is retiring after 18 years as president of the world’s only liberal arts college for the deaf. When Fernandes was announced as his successor last week, the Northeast campus erupted in protest.
Critics say that Fernandes’ hiring was rigged. They also say that she is too abrasive to be university president, a key seat in the deaf world.
Fernandes, who sat through Jordan’s speech Tuesday, says she’s the victim of a culture war. She says her critics don’t like her because she grew up speaking and therefore isn’t “deaf enough.”
She has vowed not to step down.
Jordan was himself swept to power by protests in 1988. But he said the anti-Fernandes protests have little to do with the “civil rights movement” that put him in office.
“In the civil rights movement … it was all the deaf people working together for the rights of all deaf people,” Jordan said. “This protest is about an individual.”
A handful of protesters picketed the Press Club Tuesday. “This is not going to stop,” Gallaudet student Andres Piedrahita said.
One person close to the university said Tuesday that there are worries that the ongoing controversy may endanger Gallaudet’s federal funding.
Gallaudet University
Of the 1,913 students enrolled for fall 2005, there were:
» 1,274 undergraduates
» 466 graduate students
» 173 professional studies students
