Deaf President Now  Deaf President Now (DPN) was a student protest in March 1988 at Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. The protest began on March 6, 1988, when the Board of Trustees announced its decision to appoint a hearing candidate, Elizabeth Zinser, over the other highly qualified Deaf candidates, Irving King Jordan and Harvey Corson, as its seventh president. Gallaudet students, backed by a number of alumni, staff, and faculty, shut down the campus. Protesters barricaded gates, burned effigies, and gave interviews to the press demanding four specific concessions from the Board. The protest ended on March 13, 1988, after all four demands were met including the appointment of I. King Jordan, a deaf person, as university president. Gallaudet University was established in 1864 in Washington, D.C. by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet's youngest child, Edward Miner Gallaudet. Gallaudet University was the world's first university for Deaf and hard of hearing students. Throughout Gallaudet’s history, the Deaf community had always felt more or less unsatisfied with the Deaf representation within the faculty. Significant push for a Deaf president, however, came when Jerry C. Lee, who had been president since 1984, resigned in 1987. In the months following Lee’s resignation, Gallaudet's Board of Trustees looked at candidates for the next president; during this time, several organizations campaigned for a Deaf president. These organizations wrote letters to the board recommending qualified deaf candidates and reached out to the media to gain support. People such as Vice-President George H. W. Bush and Senators Bob Dole, Bob Graham, Tom Harkin, and Lowell Weicker wrote letter endorsements for the cause. Efforts during this time were unsuccessful in garnering a powerful and unified student backing for a Deaf president. On February 28, 1988, the Board had narrowed the pool to three candidates: hearing person Elisabeth Zinser, Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Irving King Jordan, Gallaudet's Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who had been deaf at age 21 due to a motorcycle accident; and Harvey Corson, superintendent of a Louisiana School of the Deaf, who had been born deaf. A group called the “Ducks,” a radical fringe faction of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), began organizing a rally.