Wrapping up a week filled with activities was the long awaited "Deaf President Now Revisited," a two-day conference in GUKCC celebrating the 10th anniversary of the DPN movement.

A wide range of topics provided conference attendees with the opportunity to discuss DPN's impact on deaf leadership, employment, legislation, and the performing arts.

For conference-goer Richard Weinbaum, an aviation design engineer from England, the conference provided a framework in which to assess the international impact of DPN. While deaf leadership in Europe has always been strong, Weinbaum emphasized, DPN has slowly begun to chip away at the barriers to language access, which Weinbaum believes has its origins in American deaf cultural activism. "There's more emphasis on sign language here," he said during a break between sessions. "In England, I still have to write back and forth to communicate with most people."

The conference "really reinforces what we already want to do," said Dr. Gertrude Galloway, superintendent of the Marie H. Katzenbach School for the Deaf in New Jersey. Nancy Bloch, executive director of the National Association of the Deaf, agreed. "We see the word 'politics' as negative," she said. "But politics is not a dirty word. It's how things get done."

Presentations included "Putting DPN in a Historical Perspective," "DPN and Invitational Leadership," "Art and Attitudes," and "Sociopolitical Activism: Past, Present, and Future." The event included a keynote speech by Senator Tom Harkin.

The changing climate of deaf culture and activism since DPN is clearly different, said Dr. Allen Sussman, a professor in Gallaudet's Counseling Department who served on a panel with a number of prominent deaf advocates chronicling the sociopolitical activist history of def people. "There's a different breed of deaf people today," said Sussman, one with more resources to deal with oppression and discrimination.

Paramount to this success is the belief that deaf people must support each other, said Mathematics Professor Harvey Goodstein. He recalled a senior trip he took to the Chesapeake Bay with a group that included Albert Couthen, now president of the National Black Deaf Advocates and an assistant principal at the Columbia campus of the Maryland School for the Deaf. The group was denied admittance to a restaurant because of Couthen's race. "He said, you go ahead," remembered Dr. Goodstein. "But we said no. We can go someplace else." It is this everyday activism that underlies the deaf community's success in breaking down barriers, the panelists asserted.

Not all panelists felt that DPN had a major impact on their lives. Actors Phyllis Frelich and Robert Daniels from Deaf West Theatre noticed a discouraging lack of progress in performing arts for deaf people. Daniels see part of this problem rooted in the deaf community itself, where people are reluctant to push themselves and others to become better.

In the arts, young deaf people still have to create job opportunities for themselves and this sometimes means starting from the bottom, said Daniels. "There's too much grandstanding. I want to see more work produced by young people," said Daniels. "We should strive to be better."

Frelich attributes nearly all the progress made in the arts to Mark Medoff's award-winning play, Children of a Lesser God. Recalling how the play's publicists refused to put the word "deaf" in any of its advertising, Frelich believes that it was the play and its film adaptation that brought attention to deaf actors, and possibly made the protest itself more effective.

Closing remarks were made by Gallaudet Board of Trustees member Philip Bravin, who played a prominent role in DPN and became the first deaf chair of the University's board. Bravin emphasized that the successes of DPN must be protected with continued vigilance. "The Civil Rights movement had its historical events. This is ours," he said. More than that, DPN is an event that has grown larger than the 99-acre campus where it was born. This scope extends to a continued press for more deaf leadership, an emphasis on quality education for deaf children, and a need to ensure that deaf portrayals in media and film are realistic. "We have to do our share of planning for our future," said Bravin. In addition to activism and leadership training, this responsibility includes conferences such as "DPN Revisited," and the documentation of oral and written deaf history, he said. "I have not yet written about DPN myself," he smiled. "But I will."