Dismissed

As a deaf child growing up in Worcester, Jane Fernandes would return home from school crying because she couldn't understand what her teachers were saying. Her deaf mother, Kathleen, insisted that her daughter learn to read lips, which is how she herself had earned her high school diploma and conversed with her hearing husband. Working with a speech teacher, Fernandes began translating lip shapes into sounds and letters. By the end of kindergarten, she could better understand people and speak to them. By high school, she was taking science, math, and social studies with all the hearing students. And by college, she was majoring in comparative literature - and reading and writing French. Then she learned Italian.

This year, Fernandes, 50, stood poised to communicate on a grander scale, but in the end, there was one obstacle she couldn't overcome - not deafness, but the deaf community. In May, she was appointed president of Washington, D.C.,'s Gallaudet University - the world's only liberal arts university for the deaf. But many students and faculty launched an all-out campaign against her. Last month, hundreds of protesters blocked entrances to the campus, shutting down the university for three days. The school reopened, but the demonstrations continued, and two weeks ago, the university's board of trustees succumbed to the pressure and revoked Fernandes's appointment.

Fernandes's opponents cited many reasons why they thought she didn't deserve the job: She's not a good leader; she's insensitive to students' needs; she was selected by a biased search committee. "She leads by intimidation, and it's created a culture of fear on campus," senior Tara Holcomb said, referring to Fernandes's previous stint as university provost.

Fernandes, who was born deaf, maintains that she wasn't supported because she's not "deaf enough," meaning she didn't come from an all-deaf family or attend deaf-only schools. "I stand by my record of professional accomplishment over the past 20 years,'' she said in an e-mail to me the morning after the board's decision. Talking about the trustees, she asked, "How will they ever be able to make a hard decision again?"

"She's qualified as a university president," said Alan Hurwitz, dean of Rochester Institute of Technology's National Technical Institute for the Deaf. "She has a PhD. She taught and served as a department chair. She's published articles and served as provost." Still, to a segment of the deaf community, Fernandes was an outsider.

Her appointment at Gallaudet, which has about 1,800 students, had been scheduled to take effect in January, when current president I. King Jordan, who lost his hearing in a motorcycle accident at 21, was to step down after 18 years. He got the job in 1988 when the deaf community organized widespread protests over the naming of the eighth consecutive hearing president. This time, opponents like sophomore Calvin Doudt thought Fernandes would step down a few days after the protests intensified this fall; she held out for a month. "She's a strong lady," he signed to his football coach one afternoon during a demonstration.

Fernandes developed that trait during an almost idyllic childhood. Her father was a lawyer in Worcester, and her mother stayed home with the five children. If Fernandes wasn't playing with her hearing friends, she had her head buried in a book. Her parents didn't want to send her away from home to a residential deaf school, so she was mainstreamed. She wasn't even aware of sign language back then. Fernandes was a quiet teenager. A hard worker, says her father, Richard Kelleher, but not very expressive.

That changed when she went to the University of Iowa in 1978 to get her master's and doctorate in comparative literature. She happened upon a meeting of the Cedar Rapids Deaf Club, where, at 23, she found herself in a roomful of deaf people for the first time. She immediately became hooked on signing. "I found my place," she said through an interpreter. "These were my people." Her confidence grew, and she told her father her life's goal was to help hearing people and deaf people enter each other's worlds.

After graduating from Iowa, Fernandes directed sign language programs at Northeastern University before joining Gallaudet as the chairwoman of the Sign Communication Department. She left for other work but later returned and, in 2000, was named provost, second in command to the president. Fernandes made some unpopular decisions in that position that came back to haunt her. She reduced funding for programs of high-profile faculty members. She disciplined students who tore down goal posts after the football team had its first undefeated season. And she was criticized for desegregating the campus deaf elementary school, which, to her, had developed two tracks: Black students were in remedial classes, and white kids were in regular ones.

As president, one of her goals was going to be recruiting more students from mainstream schools, where the majority of deaf students are now educated. "She's a change agent," says Shirley Shulz-Meyers, a professor of English at the university who supported Fernandes. "People at Gallaudet haven't experienced someone taking on change this deeply."

Now the university has a lot of healing to do - and so does Fernandes. She's unsure whether she'll remain at Gallaudet in a teaching or administrative role. She says she still loves the school and remains committed to creating an inclusive educational environment, one where sign language is at the core but which embraces all hard-of-hearing and deaf students, even those who are mainstreamed and read lips. "Every one of them deserves the education that Gallaudet offers," she said. Otherwise, individuals like herself would have no place at a university that should feel like home.

Brooke Lee Foster is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine. E-mail comments to magazine@globe.com