I am posting in response to regarding the connection between Jane Fernandes and Joseph Mesa.
People, repeat after me. Jane Fernandes is not the devil. Jane Fernandes is not the devil.
JANE FERNANDES IS NOT THE DEVIL.
Seriously. Ever since it was announced that she is returning to teach at Gallaudet, the GallyProtest mailing list has been full of hate mail about her and why she shouldn’t come back. (She will be teaching Intro to Deaf Studies, and I. King Jordan will be teaching advanced psychology classes.) Oddly, there has been much less about IKJ than about JKF. There’s been the occasional “his legacy is tarnished, he destroyed himself” bit, but nothing like what JKF has been put through.
This thing about her connection to Mesa – the kid who committed the 2001 murders, which I remember well because I was taking night classes there at the time – is just ridiculous. Lots and lots of teens are troubled, and they don’t grow up to kill people. Mesa obviously had something pathologically wrong with him that Fernandes – not a trained clinical psychiatrist herself – could not have diagnosed. I’m sure she felt at the time that she was trying to give a troubled kid from another culture, Guam, a better education. She had him brought to MSSD for his education, not so he could grow up to kill two boys later.
I’m tired of everybody claiming that JKF ruined Gallaudet. I’m tired of the claims that she has no business coming back to campus. The fact is, she is coming back to teach. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell she will get back into an administrative position anytime soon. She taught sign communication long before she became VP of the Clerc center (in 1995) or provost (in 2000). There are basically zero students left at Gallaudet who took her sign communications class. She might very well be a highly skilled teacher, but the GallyProtest people continue to vilify her at every chance they get.
Jane Fernandes was not the right person for the presidency of Gallaudet University. That much is obvious now – she would have been a continuation of the administration that led the college into its current accreditation crisis. But that does NOT make her the devil, and it does NOT mean she will be a bad teacher. I’m just so fucking tired of all this bullshit about her. Pretty much everybody I ask on campus – all of my peers – don’t even care that she’s coming back.