Wednesday, May 03, 2006

forgot this bit



UPDATE: Seems to be a rally planned at Gallaudet at 4pm today. I hope people take this opportunity to work hard at drafting a coherent message from students to join the one put out by faculty.

Sandman and many others have decried the lack of organization in the protests at Gallaudet. One thing I want to bring up - today with blogging and paging, everything is happening really quickly. The world is naked. At the time of DPN, how long did it take for people to organize a protest? Yes, people had plans and ideas, but it took time. Fernandes' selection was announced - people immediately began to try getting together. Let's give people a little time to organize and support them instead of pulling them down.

And for people who dismiss student concerns - sorry, but I posted below that the teachers have basically been saying the same thing as the students. Yes, it's not a good argument to say someone is "not nice" - but the argument isn't substantially different from "patronizing"; the latter is just more specific. What we should ask is for students and faculty to be more specific and have a think tank to discuss what's really going on.

I have seen a lot of stupid comments - that she's not Deaf enough or whatever. That is always going to be there. But we need to weed out the serious concerns, like the PART review which may result in Gallaudet losing funds, the fact that the faculty have no confidence in her and have asked for her resignation... There's a lot of things to discuss here. The "feeling" that she's not nice may be covering up something deeper. Let's give Fernandes the chance to defend herself too - although Ridor is right; an evaluation of her time as Provost would be useful. Anyone up for doing that research?

Remember, the world is watching, as my friend Jen reminded me today.

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