I King Jordan

Gallaudet University's board of trustees chose the dean of the school's college of arts and sciences to become the first deaf president in the 124-year history of the school for the hearing impaired. I. King Jordan, a popular campus figure, was chosen to replace Elisabeth Ann Zinser, a hearing woman, who resigned early Friday after protests from students seeking a deaf leader had virtually paralyzed Gallaudet's campus.

The newly chosen president of Gallaudet University, the nation's only liberal arts college for the deaf, received a no-confidence vote from faculty Monday in a dispute that she said came down to whether she was "deaf enough" for the job. The vote, which passed 93 to 43, is nonbinding. The fate of Jane K. Fernandes rests with the board of trustees, which has said it will not alter its decision to hire her.

Lawrence R. Newman, a prominent advocate for the rights of the deaf community and a former longtime teacher and administrator at the California School for the Deaf in Riverside, has died. He was 86. Newman, who served two terms as president of the National Assn. of the Deaf, died Monday at his home in Riverside of complications from an emergency surgery and a long battle with Parkinson's disease, said his daughter Laureen Newman-Feldhorn. "Larry was a true gentleman and someone I admired for his hard work and dedication on behalf of the deaf community," T. Alan Hurwitz, president of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world's only liberal arts university for students who are deaf and hard of hearing, said in a statement to The Times on Tuesday.

As Phyllis Frelich grew up in the small town of Devils Lake, N.D., going to Gallaudet College in Washington was one of life's greatest aspirations-just as it was for many other young, deaf Americans. "The dream was to get out of wherever you were and to meet and mingle with the cream of the deaf world, all together in one place," Frelich recalled-and that place was Gallaudet, the most important school for deaf students in America, known as "the castle on the hill."

Deaf students returning to Cal State Northridge this semester are getting high-tech help with note taking. An experimental classroom with a built-in projection screen, fashioned after one at Gallaudet University in Washington, now allows deaf students to see a close-up image of a speaker while simultaneously reading remarks captioned at the bottom of the screen. "This changes the way deaf people will receive information," said Victor Galloway, director of the National Center on Deafness at CSUN.

More than 500 angry students blocked entrances to Gallaudet University, the nation's only liberal arts college for the deaf, and forced it to close Monday in a protest over the selection of an educator who is not deaf to be the institution's president. "A lawful, proper and final decision was made," Gallaudet board chairman Jane Bassett Spilman sternly told students who dramatically confronted trustees on a gymnasium stage.

Nearly 20 years ago, massive student and faculty protests at Gallaudet University led to the appointment of I. King Jordan as the first deaf president in the long history of the nation's only university for the deaf. Now student and faculty protesters are demanding the resignation of the woman chosen by the school to succeed Jordan in January. The months-long demonstrations against the appointment of current university provost Dr. Jane K.

Even the most uninformed person could have deciphered the gesture making the rounds among deaf students at Cal State Northridge last week. It was the deaf power salute--one hand held to an ear and the other raised as a fist in the air. The salute symbolized the solidarity among students at CSUN's National Center on Deafness with their counterparts at Gallaudet University in Washington, the nation's only liberal arts college for the hearing-impaired.

The world went silent for Patricia Halloran more than 60 years ago, when she tumbled off a stairway inside her family's home in Tennant, Iowa. She was just a toddler then and couldn't understand. Even the grown-ups, it seemed, were at a loss. No one could explain where the sounds went or why they would never come back. So Patricia, Tennant's only deaf resident, had to go it on her own. She would point and drag people by the hand and occasionally stamp her feet to make herself understood.