It’s easy to paint the protesters at Gallaudet University as young causeheads that have listened to too much Rage Against the Machine and idealistically mused on revolution. But theirs is not a battle to save the rain forest, stop sweatshops, or even impeach President George W. Bush. The continued intensity of their protest — now in its second day of sucessfully locking down the Northeast campus — is fueled by conflicts over culture, identity, and authority. The students may soon be arrested and the university may eventually become quiet again, but spare a radical compromise, the issue isn’t likely to go away.

If this were simply a protest about an incoming university president that not many people liked, it would hardly be this intense, much less long-lasting. But wrapped into the complaints surrounding the selection process of president-select Jane Fernandes are issues of deaf identity and the university’s respect for it. The Post’s Marc Fisher did the protest about as much justice as any mainstream journalist could in a column he authored yesterday on his blog, Raw Fisher. Quoting from two deaf individuals, Fisher concludes:

Focus instead on the simple matter of Gallaudet’s purpose and the idea that deaf students deserve to see their campus as a place where they will always be heard and where they will be able to understand what is going on around them. Those who for one reason or another live in a world apart are always striving to find ways to thrive in the larger world, but they also want to know that there is a place where they can be understood as they are. Far too many people who get caught up in our culture wars get only one of those two parts. But both are essential, and that’s what the conflict at Gallaudet is really all about.

Deaf blogger Allison Kaftan similarly noted yesterday:

Raise your consciousness a bit: We’re talking about the ability to be led by someone who empathizes with his or her constituents and will act on behalf of and in the common interest of the Gallaudet University. This also means recognizing Gallaudet’s unique role as not just a place where students should be expected to excel academically, but also as a model to D/deaf people everywhere of what we’re capable of doing.

Take these and the many other opinions floating around on the protests and on thing becomes clear. They may be protesting a university administration that is distant and out-of-touch, but they are also protesting the fact that the distance between them and their leaders denies them some of the basic rights associated with their identity. It’s not that Fernandes didn’t learn to sign until later in life, it’s that her allegiance is to an old guard that hasn’t run the university particularly well. When a university created to serve the deaf doesn’t do so effectively, it denies its students their rights, their identity, and their culture. That’s not a protest that will soon go away.

Image taken from the Gallaudet University FSSA Coalition website