I Didn’t Get Much of a Chance at Gallaudet

I had wanted to work at Gallaudet University for some time. For those who don’t know much about Gallaudet, it is one of only two undergraduate institutes for the Deaf that were mandated by the US Congress¹ and it gained worldwide fame for its Deaf President Protest in 1988.²  The protest was the reason I visited Gallaudet (Fig. 1) for the first time in my life, and the world over there was quite different from the world to which I had been so accustomed.  The visit had also placed a seed in my mind that I might want to work there someday.

There were so many reasons why Gallaudet should have me as a mentor, whether it be a professor or a research scientist at a laboratory of molecular genetics.

I have been profoundly deaf since birth, and I am fluent in both spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL).

I went to the Lexington School for the Deaf and then was mainstreamed into several public schools.  I attended Bronx High School of Science, one of the top high schools across the nation.  I also received a Bachelor’s in biology at Harvard College and a doctorate in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.

I have been involved in the field of Hearing Research for more than 30 years.  By the time I entered Gallaudet, I had already published 24 peer-reviewed articles in numerous scientific journals.

I have been a mentor to many students, most of whom are d/Deaf at several prestigious research institutes such as Kresge Hearing Research Institute (KHRI) at the University of Michigan, the National Institute on Deafness and other Communicative Disorders (NIDCD), and the University of Maryland.  Most of the students were undergraduates at Gallaudet and at the National Technical Institute for the Deafness at Rochester Institute of Technology.  Even one of the Gallaudet students was a co-author in one of my peer-reviewed articles.³

In particular, I mentored Raymond, a postbaccalaureate graduate from Gallaudet, for several years at NIDCD. We even published two papers in scientific journals.^4,5  Under my guidance, Raymond received his Master’s in genetics from George Washington University and got off to an excellent start in his doctorate studies at the Ph.D. program via collaboration between NIDCD and University of Maryland (UMD). He received his Ph.D. from UMD and joined the faculty at the Biology Department at his alma mater.  Unfortunately, he resigned as a tenure-track associate professor after five years for personal reasons.

I applied many times for a job position at the Biology Department at Gallaudet.  The first time in the early 2000s, I applied for a teaching faculty position there.  I interviewed there, but a hearing guy, not I, got the position – he had extensive teaching experience, but he didn’t know American Sign Language.  Two years later, he couldn’t master ASL, and he left.  Since then, I had applied several times for a similar position but I did not receive any response from there.  What a crock of stuff it is when it comes to professional courtesy (or the lack thereof)!

Next, I applied for a laboratory director position at the proposed Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Gallaudet.  At that time, the concept of having a biology laboratory at Gallaudet was controversial because it was the original idea of the Provost at Gallaudet, Dr. Jane Fernandes.  Her idea was inspired by a particular panel at a biennial Deaf Academics conference in 2004.⁶  Two things about Dr. Fernandes – she is d/Deaf and she is an effective college educator.  When Dr. Fernandes was chosen to replace the retiring first Deaf President (I. King Jordan), many Deaf students and faculty members protested because they felt she was not Deaf enough.  They claimed she did not communicate well enough in ASL.  Some even called Dr. Fernandes an audist, a derogatory term for people who are medically deaf and who tend to behave like people with typical hearing.  Before she was to become President, the Board of Trustees succumbed to pressure and rescinded Dr. Fernandes’ promotion.⁷ 

Since then, Dr. Fernandes has been a college president at Guilford College (www.guilford.edu) and raised its academic standards.^8,9  This past August, she became the new president at Antioch College, one of the great small liberal arts colleges (www.antioch.edu).¹⁰  Dr. Fernandes’ hugely successful progress has many of us wonder why Gallaudet would let her go.  Funny thing is, she has been a president for TWO colleges for students with typical hearing!

Let’s go back to the laboratory director position at Gallaudet.  There were at least three applicants (including myself) for that position.  A second was from Europe, and a third had already established his own research laboratory in the West Coast.  All of us applicants had three common characteristics – we all have hearing loss, we speak by voice, and we have been significantly involved in the field of Hearing Research.¹¹  As for me, I had several advantages over them – in addition to my mentoring experiences and my ASL proficiency, I lived close to Washington, DC, the city where Gallaudet is located. The West Coast guy had a tremendous advantage over me and the European applicant – he knew how to run a successful laboratory. However, Gallaudet could not afford to move that laboratory from the West Coast. Had he become the laboratory director at Gallaudet at that time, he would not have become the director of the translational hearing center at a major university in the Midwest a few years ago, let alone obtain a $10.8 million grant early this year from the National Institutes of Health.^12,13

Nearing the end of the position opening, one of the committee members, Derek, resigned from the committee.  He then applied for the position.  Uh-oh, that’s a serious conflict of interest for both Derek and the Biology Department of which he was (and is still) a faculty member.  Why would he do that?  I don’t know – perhaps he wanted the position for himself only.

Derek had advantages over the three of us – he is a Gallaudet alumnus (a member of Class of 1995), he has been a faculty member of the Biology Department since his graduation, and he knows how Gallaudet works, academically, infrastructurally and politically.  As soon as he applied for the position, he got it.

I could not do much about it because for more than five years, I wrote several times to President I. King Jordan and Ann (Derek’s department chair), telling them that I had so much to offer to Gallaudet students.  They would benefit from my academic and research achievements in spite of my hearing loss and I could not understand why Gallaudet would not want me to recruit me.

Finally, Derek hired me as a senior scientist at the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics in September 2008.  However, I believe my position was doomed from the beginning.  It is possible that Derek and his department chair, Ann, might have felt pressure to hire me not only because I wrote to both President Jordan and Ann, but also because I had a solid reputation as a scientist who happened to be d/Deaf.  When I started my position, Derek told me the estimated length of my stay would be three years (meaning the funds came from Gallaudet itself.  Anything beyond three years would have come from grants). Within two months at work, he shortened the estimated length for my position to two years. 

Uh-oh, what was Derek thinking?  Had he been planning to do something drastic?  He hadn’t communicated much with me.

He saw that I already had several projects on songbird hearing at the UMD – at that time, I was under the clear impression that it was OK for me to continue my collaboration at the UMD while on the job at Gallaudet.  One of my projects was about sex differences in songbird hearing and was about to end, while the other was about the role of mitochondria in aged-related hearing loss in a certain songbird species (for whoever wants to know the particular avian species, it’s the Belgian Waterslager canary).  In any event, Derek could have complained that I was spending too much time away from Gallaudet, but he didn’t until the end of the second or third month of my employment when it was time for an evaluation.  

Derek also realized that I had connections with numerous scientists from NIDCD.  I thought they would help Derek and the laboratory, particularly because our primary laboratory project was about Connexin 26 mutations that have been known to cause genetic hearing loss in affected human beings.  However, Derek didn’t make any move – he was only interested in collaborating with two colleagues of his that had been studying those mutations for so long.  It’s interesting that neither colleague was d/Deaf, though one of them was a professor of genetics at Gallaudet.

Derek’s evaluation of my work wasn’t great.  By the time Derek and I finished our discussion, I learned that my 24^th paper (as a culmination of my project on sex differences in songbird hearing) was accepted for publication in Hearing Research. I informed Derek, thinking he’d be impressed.  He wasn’t.  He even looked worried.

In spite of my evaluation, I continued my collaboration on the second project at UMD.  In spite of early difficulties, we were able to produce a poster presentation for an upcoming hearing research conference. 

I told Derek about my poster and about the conference.  He said that the laboratory would reimburse me for some, but not all, of the expenses incurred during the meeting.  So far, so good.  As soon as the conference was over, there was a grand opening at the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics.  I brought the same poster there, and it was viewed by several people (including the second Deaf President of Gallaudet, Dr. Robert Davila¹⁴) who attended the opening.  I thought it went well, but a few days later after the grand opening, Derek told me the bad news.

He said I had to resign from my position.  I should have expected it – because a few days before, I went to the Department of Biology to pick something up, and saw that he and Ann were having a discussion.  By then, I should have suspected something was in the air.  

Upon receiving the bad news, I vehemently protested, saying that I did not have much of a chance to show what I could do. I also pointed at the poster I made for both the hearing research conference and the laboratory opening, but Derek belittled my poster. He added that to save embarrassment on both sides (myself and himself), he offered that I work there for two more months before my official resignation. Otherwise, I would be asked to leave the laboratory immediately. Stunned and distraught, I chose to work longer.

I also looked for a legal recourse. My parents suggested I meet the Ombudsman, and I checked via the Gallaudet website if he or she was available. When I found “not until the coming fall,” I thought the doors were closed for good.  Fortunately, my dear wife Denise decided on her own to go to Gallaudet and was able to find the Ombuds. Surprisingly, we knew her from social gatherings, but it was only one or two weeks before I was to leave Gallaudet. The Ombuds acted as an intermediary between me and Derek with little success, and added that Ann supported Derek’s decision.  I then realized that was what Derek and Ann were discussing just before his request for my resignation.

If I had seen the Ombuds as soon as Derek informed me of his decision, things would have been different, but I had signed all papers (no wonder he was hurrying to have them done), and I was good as gone. Certain officials who could help me did nothing for me because Derek must have told them about me.  I even caught my ‘friend’ the Gallaudet provost (the one who replaced Dr. Fernandes) communicating in ASL with Derek.  I didn’t see what they were talking about because I didn’t want them to see me had I lingered any further.  I’ll never know what they talked about – perhaps it was the provost’s job to protect Gallaudet’s interests in case Gallaudet and I had somehow entered a legal quagmire (e.g., wrongful dismissal).  Since then, I saw the provost twice during social gatherings, and we did not talk or interact either time.  All I remember is that he smiled and waved at me at a distance and walked away right afterwards.

If I had known that had I worked there for more than six months, it would be much more difficult for Derek to let me go, and he knew it.  He knew the way around Gallaudet, and even said to me on my last day of work that in the future, we would laugh about this situation.  You ask me how I know about working for more than six months.  Well, it was the Ombuds who told me.  It was too little, too late.

Derek, I’ll always have a zinger of my own for you. Just before I left the laboratory, I received reprints of the Hearing Research article¹⁵ (See Fig. 2). On the last day of my position, I decided to give one of the reprints to Derek. He reluctantly took it, and probably threw it out once I left the laboratory.  I don’t care because I knew he knew that it is the first publication of any kind ever for the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics.

REFERENCES

¹Gallaudet University – What you do here changes the world!

²Deaf President Now – Gallaudet University

³Adler HJ, Mantooth J, Raphael Y.  (1995)  Comparative analysis of patch lesions in the chick inner ear following acoustic trauma: optical versus scanning electron microscopy. Scanning Microscopy 9:825-30; discussion 830-1.

⁴Adler HJ, Belyantseva IA, Merritt RC Jr, Frolenkov GI, Dougherty GW, Kachar B.  (2003)  Expression of prestin, a membrane motor protein, in the mammalian auditory and vestibular periphery.  Hearing Research 184:27-40. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-5955(03)00192-8.

⁵Dougherty GW, Adler HJ, Rzadzinska A, Gimona M, Tomita Y, Lattig MC, Merritt RC Jr, Kachar B.  (2005)  CLAMP, a novel microtubule-associated protein with EB-type calponin homology. Cell Motility and the Cytoskeleton 62:141-156. https://doi.org/10.1002/cm.20093.

⁶https://deafacademics.org/conferences/2nd_conference_program.pdf

⁷https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6403118#:~:text=The%20board%20of%20trustees%20at%20Gallaudet%20University%20in,the%20start%2C%20and%20prompted%20student%20strikes%20and%20sit-ins

⁸https://ourstate.events/speakers/dr-jane-fernandes/

⁹https://www.guilford.edu/news/2020/06/president-jane-k-fernandes-announces-plans-step-down-2021

¹⁰https://antiochcollege.edu/2021/08/the-next-president-of-antioch-college/

¹¹Adler HJ, Liebman J, Raphael RM, Ratnanather JT, Steyger PS.  (1998)  Early education of the deaf.  Science 279:1617.  https://doi.org/10.1126/science.279.5357.1611l.

¹²https://www.creighton.edu/publicrelations/newscenter/news/2021/march2021/march52021/steygernihgrantnr030521/

¹³https://hearingreview.com/inside-hearing/research/creighton-university

¹⁴https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_R._Davila

¹⁵Noirot IC, Adler HJ, Cornil CA, Harada N, Dooling RJ, Balthazart J, Ball GF.  (2009) Presence of aromatase and estrogen receptor alpha in the inner ear of zebra finches.  Hearing Research 252: 49-55.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2009.04.012.