perfidy

Well, the feces is hitting the fan-blades with even more alacrity at Gallaudet, the Harvard for the Deaf. Relative to deaf colleges, they bring to my mind Michael's view of "Jimmy", in The Ringer (sixth quote down).

According to today's Washington Post, "Student Rebellion Boils Over At Gallaudet". "Campus Shut Down; Arrests Threatened", &c.

They don't like the University's latest pick for president, the woman who's been provost for the past six years:

As faculty pressure tightened on incoming president Jane K. Fernandes to resign before she takes office in January, she repeated her refusal to do so. Students angrily confronted longtime President I. King Jordan, alumni flocked to the campus and a counter-protest movement grew during a day of upheaval.

This has been going on since May, and has periodically flared up in the news cycle.

Now, the football team, apparently irked that classes have been disrupted, has blockaded the gates to the campus. Complaints about Ms. Fernandes appear to circle around the fact that graduation rates have hovered around 40% during her tenure.

Asked for comment on that complaint, I'd hope she responded with something like "Well, graduation rates would be higher, but these students seem never to listen".

Complaints about university leadership coming from faculty impress me not-at-all, as I assume Gallaudet's faculty is statistically similar to many faculty members elsewhere, implying that they're functional morons with tunnel vision. I could be wrong on that, of course - maybe they're all geniuses, but I don't care enough to go try to disprove my hypothesis. At a minimum, I think we can agree, they're all employees of the university, and nobody offered them a vote. Rightly so, I'd add.

The protesting students, on the other hand, require no such quibble - college students tend to overblow their importance in the scheme of things. I know I did, and I'll assert that these are as well. Like the faculty, they, too, are absent from the table at the presidential selection process.

As such things go, it seems likely that the university will cave, putting expediency over principle. This will be a shame. On the bright side, it's probably been a fairly quiet protest, eh?

[wik] Update: In the Oct 13 WaPo, a story about Fernandes' meeting with the protesters:

...Fernandes said she would not step down -- even as the university's alumni association urged her to resign and declared that there is overwhelming support for her removal.

"She is not willing to come halfway," said protest leader Delia Lozana-Martinez, saying Fernandes wanted to talk to the students only about opening campus. "It disappoints and disgusts me. I don't think it was productive at all."

"She is not willing to come halfway"? Actually, her resignation would seem to be "all the way", and Ms. Lozana-Martinez is less right to be disappointed and disgusted than to be embarrassed for how inanely she thinks, speaks, or both. Turns out the protesters aren't just deaf, they appear to be dumb, too.