Deaf President Now!: Not To Be Silenced

by Karenna Blomberg

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

The deepest impact of Deaf President Now!, the Nyle Di Marco-directed documentary recounting the titular student protests at Gallaudet University, does not come on its initial watch. While I was impressed at the narrative storytelling while watching my Sundance screener, it was only after I had closed the laptop and sat with it that I really felt the fullness of DiMarco’s intent.

In 1988, Gallaudet University, the first college for the deaf and hard of hearing in the United States, had never actually had a deaf president. The school’s board and leadership were majority consistent of fully hearing people, many of them corporate bigwigs like Jane Bassett Spilman (wife of then-Bassett Furniture CEO Robert Spilman). The 1988 search for a new university president had come down to three candidates, two deaf and one hearing. The documentary opens with the news reaching the hopeful Gallaudet students on the ground that the college’s board of trustees, with Spilman as their figurehead, had chosen the hearing candidate.

The immediate outrage from the students of the university, who had believed that they would finally be granted a president who understood their needs and culture, quickly turned to formal protest. Four students were subsequently singled out as the leaders of those protests: softspoken class president Greg Hlibok, adamant feminist Bridgetta Bourne, government major Tim Rarus, and hotheaded “cool guy” Jerry Covell. Deaf President Now! mainly follows these four, as they recount the events of the weeklong shutdown of the Gallaudet campus, and the greater context surrounding the movement. 

Model-turned-actor and well-known deaf rights activist Di Marco is shockingly adept at storytelling in his first directing gig. His passion for telling the story is certain throughout. Electrifying imagery is a strong suit of the film, both from the included archival footage (shots of a swaggering Jerry in a Canadian tuxedo and shades hyping up the crowd, and Greg nervously but passionately debating Zinser on the news) as well as from the b-roll produced for the documentary, including shots demonstrating the method the protesters used to signal to all the students on campus to come outside onto the quad: setting off the fire alarms. 

But the thing that stuck with me well after finishing the film is its multifaceted but even exploration of the social intricacies of a minority community. Deaf President Now! does not shy away from letting you know that the protesters were not a solid, united front. Not every student at Gallaudet joined in the protests, and even further than that, the leaders of the movement, for the most part, did not get along (Jerry and Greg frequently butted heads, and Tim, Jerry and Greg’s disdain for Bridgetta’s feminist slant was specifically eyebrow-raising). 

There was also much debate as to who counted as “part of the deaf community,” and it was obvious how hearing people like Zinser and Spilman, without even trying, othered and condescended to the students while trying to convince them they were on the same side. I. King Jordan, the College of Arts and Sciences dean who was born hearing but became deaf after an accident in his twenties, was another interesting case study in this, with his flip-flopping from the side of the students to the side of the treasury. Some of the students also felt that Jordan was not “really deaf” because he had grown up hearing, and had sided against the students for a time during the protest. 

This feeds directly into the biggest takeaway from this documentary, and the final note Di Marco leaves us on; the idea that one of the major disadvantages to any minority community is that they constantly have to ask for and define things that come to others without thought or question. Able-bodied people do not have to be concerned about what it means to be able-bodied or what limitations they might face in a day. Whereas those with disabilities are constantly being forced to assess and re-assess what they want and need and identify as in order to live in greater society (arguably—a kind of code-switching). Every new day for every individual disabled person is a new definition of what their disability means to them. 

However, the trek of overcoming their different viewpoints and definitions of their community in the way that Bridgetta, Tom, Greg, and Jerry did, leaves the film on a hopeful note. Throughout all of the exploration of careless discrimination and intercommunity politics, there is still a consistent emphasis on the idea that none of those factors should supersede any person or group’s ability to speak themselves and to be heard.