In 1988, students at Gallaudet University came together to form a single “voice” that was heard, but more deeply seen, by the world. Now known as “DPN” (“Deaf President Now”), these deaf students formed a community with a cause. They influenced pedagogy: abandoning lessons, closing school gates, refusing to move until their demands were met. They altered the power structure and strengthened their community: rejecting the newly appointed president and getting many teachers to join their cause. Not long after the protests began, schools for the deaf in Canada and West Germany closed on their own, and the media descended in droves, scrambling to get interviews from students who didn't speak and to record demonstrations where the "voices" of protest were a sea of ​​silent and limp wrists waving above 2,000 heads. These students wanted an end to the oligopoly; they wanted a voice, similar to their own, to represent them in decisions that affected their school and their lives. They wanted, quite simply, a deaf president. For 124 years, the president of Gallaudet had heard; for 124 years, these hearing chairs have been elected by a board of directors composed primarily of hearing officers; for 124 years, Deaf people have had no authority, no representation, in the only place they should have had it: their exclusive and only Deaf university. So, on March 9, the hearing board elected another hearing chair from two deaf and fully qualified candidates, the Gallaudet students decided to protest. Forming a powerful and cohesive voice, these students have made themselves highly visible in the news and have raised awareness of Deaf people around the world about a dozen times over. By the end of the week, the chair of the short-lived hearing had resigned; their heart... middle of paper... Gallaudet had come of age through language, because of language. Now that they had a language to call their own, a language that even the dominant auditory culture could no longer refuse to grant the status of "reality," those students had something to lean on. Before the linguistic acceptance of a language they called their own, deaf people, both culturally and individually, had no obstacle against the dominant "social grammar" or any way to persuade and empower. Persuasion and power, definition and acceptance of both self and society, begin with language in all cultures. And such socially and individually constructed beginnings among deaf people, such questions of literacy and linguistic (re)definition with the use of ASL, and such successful demonstrations of power and persuasion as occurred at Gallaudet in 1988 constitute the core of the studies on rhetoric, literacy and culture.