It’s not just a protest you’re watching in “Deaf President Now!” It’s a revolution. One with civil rights implications for so many other groups in the decades since.
First-time documentary filmmaker Nyle DiMarco, best known for his TV acting over the years as well as his modeling (he was the first deaf winner of “America’s Next Top Model”), joins with veteran documentarian Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for Superman”) to deliver an extraordinary portrait of one pivotal week in the history of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1864, it remains the only university in the world specifically geared to deaf and hard-of-hearing students. But for the first 124 years of its existence it had never had a deaf president.
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“Deaf President Now!” — a title that comes from the name for the campus-wide protest that engulfed Gallaudet in March 1988 — shows how the student body’s resentment over that fact suddenly boiled over. The film doesn’t explain whether there were protests when two previous hearing presidents were installed by the university’s board of trustees earlier in the 1980s. It just drops in on this one pivotal week when the board appointed Elisabeth Zinser to be the new president, even though there were at least a couple highly qualified and ready deaf candidates for the role, including the university’s academic dean, I. King Jordan.
DiMarco and Guggenheim draw extensively from amateur camcorder footage and archive news material from the period, but place those images in dialogue with four of the protest leaders who recall their involvement in these events today. Now in their late 50s, they’re still as fiery as they were as undergrads, and they help to establish more about what having a deaf president really meant to them. One recalled how his father, an engineer of dental equipment, had been placed in the basement of his place of business because his hearing colleagues were “ashamed” of him — and how his father just accepted it. Another vents his enduring anger at Jane Bassett Spilman, the leader of the board of trustees, and effectively the person who could choose the university’s president and always had chosen hearing presidents.
Conscious or not, the attitude of Spilman and many of the hearing leaders of the university, was that in some way, Gallaudet was not a university, but rather a charitable institution. Spilman was accused of even saying that she felt deaf people were not ready to live on their own in the hearing world, something she denied. But the portrait that DiMarco and Guggenheim paint of Spilman and the university’s hearing leadership is fascinating and one that resonates in many other ways.
The student body was absolutely unanimous in wanting a deaf president. So why wouldn’t Spilman and the board appoint one? What other reason are you there for other than to create the environment your student body wants? It’s because, though they’d never admit it, they thought they knew better than their students. There was an inherent condescension in their leadership: They felt they understood what their students needed better than what they’re students said they needed, almost as if this was a doctor-patient relationship rather than an academic environment where a free-flowing exchange of ideas could be had. But the students had come to understand, perhaps unlike their parents, that they didn’t have to be “fixed” — they had formed their own culture and community as deaf people. They didn’t need to be cared for or looked after or prepared for life in the hearing world. They just needed to be.
That the deaf community could get by on their own: That’s a radical position, because it’s one that doesn’t require their accommodation to the hearing world or their deference to it. And so you can see how that would be threatening to people like Spilman — she wasn’t “needed” by the very university she was in charge of.
“Deaf President Now!” doesn’t overly underline its themes or connect the dots to other civil rights struggles, but you can absolutely see an echo of this in other groups’ fights for equality. The deaf student body here was saying they can lead themselves, they don’t need anyone to take them by the hand. It’s like the struggle for representation in Hollywood of the past 10-plus years, where filmmakers from sometimes marginalized backgrounds have asserted the importance of telling their own stories, rather than let those who’ve told stories for a very long time tell their stories for them. It’s certainly like the student protest movement on campuses across the country today, in which students are again calling for universities to represent views that reflect those of the student body. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, there isn’t just one unifying perspective, like there was with the Gallaudet protest: But on whatever side of those protests students fall, they want to feel like they’re represented in their university leadership and that that leadership is listening to them.
Spilman had been on the board of trustees at Gallaudet for years, but she never learned American Sign Language. Why would you want to be in charge of an organization if you have no desire to understand the people you’re leading? Is power that much an end unto itself? Surely, there have to be other things a wealthy patroness would want to do with her time. Even the newly appointed hearing president, Zinser, didn’t know ASL, but said she would try to learn in two months. When can you ever fully inhabit any culture in two months?
DiMarco and Guggenheim do an incredible of showing the overall landscape for the deaf community surrounding the protest: There’s Tom Brokaw heard in voiceover saying that these demonstrations were shocking because deaf people were always thought of as “a passive minority” (recalling Charlie Gibson’s condescension to Marlee Matlin as shown in her doc “Not Alone Anymore” from earlier this year); there’s archive footage from an educational film from the 1950s or ’60s suggesting that deaf people may be inherently intellectually disabled because you can only think in terms of words, and without words “you have only feelings”; there’s I. King Jordan, eventually, after this tumultuous week, installed as Gallaudet’s first deaf president, acknowledging that one of the biggest hurdles here had been to “overcome our own reluctance to stand for our rights.”
“Our own reluctance to stand for our rights.” How many times have all of us, from any background, felt that reluctance in certain circumstances? A lot. There’s an inherent human desire to not rock the boat. For the deaf community, and many marginalized communities, that’s often taken the form of assimilation. What “Deaf President Now!” achieves in its illumination of a very specific incident is a universal recognition of the power and importance of those who are willing to rock the boat. Of those not asking for acceptance of who they are, but just being who they are.
It’s also to DiMarco and Guggenheim’s credit that they show the nuances within the protest movement. There’s Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, conspicuously the only really prominent female leader of the protest, being very forthright about how her male compatriots would sometimes say stuff asking her to prioritize her identities along the lines of “If there were two boats, would you choose to sit in the one with hearing women, or the one with deaf men?” A group’s fight for their rights does not always translate into a regard for another group’s rights.
Clear-eyed as “Deaf President Now!” might be about those complicating factors, the documentary builds to an almost euphoric ending. When Zinser and Spilman resign, and Jordan is installed, it feels like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like this really wasn’t just a protest achieving its aims, but an actual revolution. And in a way, it was: It was about who holds power — the people actually being represented, or an outside entity who thinks they know better?
Switching up that dynamic, in any situation, counts as a revolution.
Grade: B+
“Deaf President Now!” is now available to stream on Apple TV+.
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