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One year after student-led protests forced Gallaudet University to rescind a presidential appointment, some measure of calm has returned to the nation's only liberal-arts university for the deaf.
It is less clear, however, whether that calm will endure.
Gallaudet was visited earlier this month by a team from its accrediting agency, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which in July had placed the university on probation after finding it was out of compliance with eight of the organization's 14 standards, including those regarding leadership, integrity, and student retention. The protestors who ultimately succeeded in getting a presidential appointment rescinded may now be facing a more formidable opponent: an accreditor.
The accreditation team left the campus last week saying that Gallaudet had moved into compliance with only one of those standards: that concerning admissions criteria.
Gallaudet still has "a long way to go to fully resolve all concerns of the commission," the university's interim president, Robert R. Davila, said in a letter to the institution following the visit.
But perhaps even more troubling, the visiting team warned Gallaudet that the central premise underlying recent revisions in its curriculum and mission statement -- a strengthened emphasis on the use of American Sign Language -- may be flawed.
The accrediting agency advised the university to "research and verify" as quickly as possible that there is a sufficient number of students who want to pursue a bilingual education in English and American Sign Language, Mr. Davila wrote.
That advice ties directly into the controversy that led Gallaudet's trustees last October to rescind their appointment of Jane K. Fernandes to become the university's new president.
"The protesters objected...