Gallaudet University inaugurated its first deaf female president on Friday afternoon. Roberta Cordano stepped into the role of president last January, a move that was formalized in Friday’s ceremony.
From the start, Cordano demonstrated herself to be a hands-on type of leader. A few weeks into her presidency, a massive blizzard known as Snowzilla engulfed the District of Columbia. Gallaudet lost power to over a third of its campus, and school officials had to decide overnight how to house students and faculty families living on campus suddenly displaced by the loss of power.
As a native Midwesterner, Cordano put her cold weather know-how to good use, shoveling snow and inviting 13 students to stay with her in the president’s mansion during the power outage.
“That experience here really ingrained us the sense of a community, because we all chipped in to help each other,” Cordano told Diverse after the inaugural ceremony.
Cordano’s presidency is an expression of Gallaudet’s quest for self-determination. Gallaudet is the world’s only liberal arts institution for the deaf and hard of hearing, but from its founding in 1864 up until 1988, it was led by hearing presidents. Radical change only occurred after the student-led “Deaf President Now” (DPN) protests rocked the university in the late 1980s.
In 1988, the Gallaudet Board of Trustees selected Elisabeth Zinser, vice chancellor for the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, as the institution’s seventh president. Zinser was not deaf and, as a result, her selection was met with fierce criticism from the student body. DPN shut down the campus for eight days, Zinser resigned, and the board brought in I. King Jordan, the school’s first deaf president.
Jordan presided over the school for nearly two decades, and in 2006, was succeeded by Robert Davila and subsequently T. Alan Hurwitz. All three were on stage at Cordano’s inauguration to welcome in the new president.
