‘It’s awfully difficult to talk above this loud noise,” says the chair of the board of trustees at a liberal arts university. It’s the late 1980s, protesting students have shut down the campus and now, midway through a tense meeting, someone has set off the fire alarm. But here’s the thing, Gallaudet University in Washington DC is the world’s first deaf university. The students can have a conversation just fine with the alarms blaring – in sign language. But trustee chair Jane Bassett Spilman does not sign. In fact, she appears to be completely ignorant about deaf culture – and, dressed like a Margaret Thatcher lookalike, all handbags and helmet hair, she is the easy-to-loathe villain of this fascinating documentary.
Co-directed by actor and deaf activist Nyle DiMarco with Davis Guggenheim, this is the story of an eight-day student protest at Gallaudet in 1988. Trouble started when the board, led by Spilman, appointed a hearing person as the university’s president, over two deaf candidates. The film’s heroes are the four students who led the uprising: Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Jerry Covell, Greg Hlibok and Tim Rarus; they are entertainingly interviewed here. With a blend of archive footage and re-enactments the film-makers skilfully recreate the urgency, passion and energy of their protest.
In the end, the students won and Gallaudet appointed its first ever deaf president, I King Jordan. Fascinating, too, is the shift in attitudes. What Spilman and her cronies represented was an old mindset that deafness was something to be fixed, that deaf people needed to helped; the students had grown up with that audism. One former student describes being smacked with a ruler at school if he signed, another explains that his deaf grandfather told him not to sign in public. But their generation were done with it. Their energy and spirit of resistance are glorious.
• Deaf President Now! is on Apple TV+ from 16 May.
