DPN: An Act of Violence
As you may have heard, MSA blasted the BoT, faculty members and students for their roles during the Unity for Gallaudet protest. MSA claims closing the university for three days was ‘an act of violence”, and BoT was remiss in ousting Fernandes.
I enquired as to the handling of MSA after DPN. After all, during DPN, the protesters closed the university for *gasp* FIVE days. And not only that, but both the president and the  BoT chairperson resigned!
Want to take a good guess?
         ::::drumroll::::
Nary a mention! The MSA review in 1990 went smoothly without any incident.
Keep in mind, the conditions fueling UFG were exactly the same ones that prompted DPN: a paternalistic BoT that didn’t have the pulse of the Gallaudet Community. Both times, the stakeholders appealed to BoT for action yet failed to receive a response for months. According to Jordan: “I described how many, many things happened before DPN happened and before the protest happened. Protest is appropriate when all of the other options have failed and people did try and work at rallies, wrote letters, they met with Board members. All of those things failed. Then the wrong decision was made. It was appropriate to protest.” http://blog.deafread.com/mishkazena/2007/01/11/jordan-said-protest-appropriate/
So according to the current definitions of MSA, DPN was an act of violence, then.
Does this make sense to you?
To see the MSA exit  report, click on this http://pr.gallaudet.edu/dailydigest/?id=10134
email contact: mishkazena@aol.com
As you may have heard, MSA blasted the BoT, faculty members and students for their roles during the Unity for Gallaudet protest. MSA claims closing the university for three days was ‘an act of violence”, and BoT was remiss in ousting Fernandes.
I enquired as to the handling of MSA after DPN. After all, during DPN, the protesters closed the university for *gasp* FIVE days. And not only that, but both the president and the  BoT chairperson resigned!
Want to take a good guess?
         ::::drumroll::::
Nary a mention! The MSA review in 1990 went smoothly without any incident.
Keep in mind, the conditions fueling UFG were exactly the same ones that prompted DPN: a paternalistic BoT that didn’t have the pulse of the Gallaudet Community. Both times, the stakeholders appealed to BoT for action yet failed to receive a response for months. According to Jordan: “I described how many, many things happened before DPN happened and before the protest happened. Protest is appropriate when all of the other options have failed and people did try and work at rallies, wrote letters, they met with Board members. All of those things failed. Then the wrong decision was made. It was appropriate to protest.” http://blog.deafread.com/mishkazena/2007/01/11/jordan-said-protest-appropriate/
So according to the current definitions of MSA, DPN was an act of violence, then.
Does this make sense to you?
To see the MSA exit  report, click on this http://pr.gallaudet.edu/dailydigest/?id=10134
email contact: mishkazena@aol.com
January 23rd, 2007 at 9:09 am
That does raise very good questions.
Good observations, MZ.
Can anyone explain this?
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:39 am
Efforts are being made to discredit the recent protest, which sounds strange because so much parallels the last protest including the reasons mentioned in IKJ’s own words.
The intensity of the discredition could be due to legal and political issues that we do not know about. This might be more than a case of covering one’s ***.
January 23rd, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Hmm. I can understand that from Gallaudet’s POV, but MSA? Isn’t it supposed to be a neutral party?
January 23rd, 2007 at 4:33 pm
MZ,
Precisely what I was saying in your other post re: MSA suppoedly being neutral. I asked just how long is Jordan’s reach? Just how many friends he has on the MSA team that is investigating Gallaudet? SOmething that should be checked.
January 23rd, 2007 at 5:25 pm
I do wonder, Cy. The whole thing is too contradictory.
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Just because MSA’s review on Gallaudet University in 1990 did not say anything about DPN does not necessarily mean that it viewed DPN favorably. Its silence on DPN could be interpreted in either ways.
What are missing from the picture are the standards that were in effect when MSA evaluated Gallaudet University in 1990. Did any of these standards have any similar wording as the current standards in respect to academic and intellectual freedom?
MSA’s silence on DPN can’t be used as precedent for MSA’s position on UFG. It could be that MSA decided not to address DPN in 1990 but decided to address UFG this year.
Although there exist some commonalities between DPN and UFG, I think that there is a real but subtle difference between them. It seems that DPN got the overwhelming support from the community not just in Gallaudet University but also in different places all over the world and if there were any dissenters, the number would be extremely low. However, UFG did not get support as much as DPN. There were a sizeable number of dissenters who did not agree with the method of closing the campus. This might have prompted MSA to object to closure of campus because doing so deprived the academic and intellectual freedom of the dissenters.
That is just my perspective and it is definitely not infallible. (This is just a fancy way of saying, “I could be wrong”.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
josephpietrojeungriolo@gmail.com
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.