Unbowed Against the Tide

One day when Jane K. Fernandes was in second grade, she got up to sharpen her pencil. When she turned to go back to her seat, she saw her classmates laughing at her. Because she is deaf, she had not heard the teacher ordering her to sit down. Humiliated, she tore out of the classroom and ran home.

Her mother, who is also deaf, sent her right back to school. She was not raising a quitter.

Fernandes, now 50, is reaching back to the lessons of her childhood as she wages the battle of her career. And once again, she says, she will not be the one who quits.

Selected to become the next president of Gallaudet University, the country's premier school for the deaf, she says she is fighting for principles that have guided her work as a deaf educator. Yet growing numbers of angry students, faculty and alumni say Fernandes is the wrong person for the job.

Her future could be decided today as the school's board of trustees is scheduled to meet after a month of hunger strikes and demonstrations, as well as a campus shutdown. Protesters have accused Fernandes of being heavy-handed, vindictive and aloof during her tenures as provost and head of Gallaudet's elementary and high schools. Some have even questioned whether a woman who grew up speech reading, or lip reading, so adeptly that some college professors never realized she couldn't hear can identify with most deaf people.

In a time of major cultural shifts in the deaf community, Fernandes has emerged as a lightning rod for the dissatisfactions and fears. "Jane Is Killing Our Future," says a banner that has been displayed for weeks at the main entrance of the 142-year-old campus on Florida Avenue NE. Nearby hangs a cartoon drawing of Fernandes, a crown atop her brown bangs, her fists balled up in frustration.

"I let my accomplishments stand for themselves and speak for themselves," she said in a recent interview, saying that the attacks have been "very hurtful."

But in the tense, even paranoid, climate that dominates the campus, the very qualities that have led Fernandes to succeed -- her tenacity, her drive, her unwillingness to bow -- might be working against her. It could be that, given her background, she knows no other way.

As a small girl in Massachusetts, she took piano lessons for the discipline and structure, even though she couldn't hear the music. As an undergraduate at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., without interpreters or support services, she became fluent in French. In graduate school at the University of Iowa, she embraced her identity as a deaf person; after learning American Sign Language, she won the Miss Deaf Iowa title, promising to bridge the gulf between the deaf and hearing worlds. Working with deaf children in Hawaii, she built a glowing reputation as she fought state officials who tended to view the deaf as mentally disadvantaged.

But in her 11 years at Gallaudet, her no-nonsense style has often rubbed others the wrong way. Sometimes she has walked across campus so deep in thought that she has failed to recognize and greet friends.

"I call her inner-directed," said James Fernandes, her husband, a retired Gallaudet communications studies professor who, like the couple's two teenage children, is not deaf.

"Jane's first concern is never: How will this play? How will this look? Will everybody like me if I make this decision? Her first concern is: What is the proper thing to do? What is going to make this program work? That's who she is, and people who want a glad-hander politician, well, that's not what she is first."