Capping off the first year of inquisitive magazine, our just-published fourth issue takes as its theme “class,” and – as managing editor – I am thrilled to be bringing Brendan Stern’s contribution to that theme.

Brendan’s essay, “The Case for a More Heterodox Deaf America,” achieves exactly what we seek for inquisitive: it brings readers into a world they may not have considered and makes a principled case for heterodoxy as essential to both Deaf America’s survival and the nation’s democratic health. The essay also provides a window into Gallaudet University, the world’s only four-year university for deaf students, where Brendan serves as associate professor of American politics, the Executive Director of the Center for Democracy in Deaf America, and head coach of the debate team.

Here, we follow up with a Q&A on some of the ideas Brendan spells out in his article.

Alice: In your essay, you argue that Deaf America has drifted away from the liberal principles that once fueled its greatest civil rights gains and has moved toward a rigid orthodoxy that claims to protect Deaf America but may actually endanger it. What do you mean by that?

Brendan: I’m reluctant to make sweeping generalizations. People and cultures are always more complicated than the categories we put them in. But without categories, there is, as William James said, only “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.” Contrasts bring clarity, even if they blur some nuance. So with that caveat (and a little hesitation), here’s what I think is going on.

Deaf America’s greatest civil rights gains were rooted in liberal principles of reciprocity and persuasion, appealing to others as equals rather than commanding obedience. But today, those habits and skills are crumbling, replaced by a quasi-religious orthodoxy that claims to protect Deaf people while deepening our vulnerabilities.

Under this new creed, deafness is recast not as a medical condition or a uniquely beautiful culture, but as a sacred benefit to humanity. Hearing people are no longer seen as potential partners but as subordinates, even culprits, expected to show obedience under the banner of allyship.

What began as a fight for dignity and equality has, in too many cases, calcified into a demand for reverence and submission.

In contrast, consider the liberal vision of George Veditz, the famed deaf leader whose name adorns school buildings and whose advocacy still endures. He did not cast hearing people as oppressors, but as fellow citizens in a shared project. He fought inequality by persuading without preaching, writing op-eds that helped overturn a federal ban on hiring deaf employees. His most quoted line about ASL, “the noblest gift God has given to deaf people,” is usually recited without its first half: “It’s my hope that we will all love and guard...” That first half matters. The words “it’s my hope” reflect a willingness to appeal rather than command. The words “we will all” frame ASL as a gift entrusted to everyone’s care. Veditz combined reverence with humility, inviting deaf and hearing people into a posture of shared responsibility. Our selective editing of his words exposes today’s drift, where we too often demand deference while neglecting the openness, argument, and persuasion on which democratic life depends.

Beneath this shift lie two competing visions of liberation. One enshrines a “Deaf World,” where disagreement about prevailing beliefs is treated as heresy; the other imagines a more perfect Deaf America, where disagreement is treated as civic duty. One seeks to dominate space and narrative; the other to secure equal access in the public square. One casts deaf people as perpetual victims and hearing people as oppressors; the other sees both as citizens capable of harm and insight.

The orthodox vision can rally the faithful, and real threats do exist such as the possibility of being engineered out of existence by medicine or technology. But when resistance calcifies into dogma, it undermines the very conditions on which Deaf America’s future depends. Liberalism protects the possibility of persuasion; heterodoxy is the practice that sharpens it. Abandon both, and it is not the powerful who pay the price, but the vulnerable.

If Deaf America is to emulate Veditz’s success and withstand today’s technological and political pressures, it must face a hard truth: survival depends on the hard work of heterodoxy, not on the false security of moral certainty.

Alice: You’ve poured energy into launching Gallaudet’s first-ever debate team and into introducing Deaf middle and high school students to competitive debate, not just with one another or on safe issues, but with hearing peers on controversial questions. That’s a risky path, and it would certainly be easier to toe the line. Why take that risk, and why are you so passionate about debate as a practice?

Brendan: Debate is not a parlor game. It builds tolerance, sharpens thinking, and forges leaders, but only when the stakes are real. Debating bubble-wrapped issues with people who already agree may comfort, but it does nothing to prepare us for democratic life.

John Stuart Mill saw it plainly: you don’t truly understand an argument until you’ve heard it from someone who believes it, defends it in earnest, and presses it with all its force. Debating only with people who already agree is like preparing for war by marching in parades. You look committed, but you’re unprepared when the bullets start flying.

That’s why I find it puzzling — sometimes even absurd — when people praise debate yet insist certain issues must never be argued with hearing people. If deaf students only spar with one another, they never face the arguments awaiting them in the public square. Shielding them from that pressure doesn’t protect them. It denies bad ideas the sunlight that weakens them and leaves Deaf people without the persuasive skills they need to achieve their goals.

Some argue that debating controversial issues—such as whether parents should be required to teach ASL—legitimizes harm like depriving deaf children of language. But isn’t language deprivation already happening? To withdraw from these critically important heterodox debates is to concede the status quo.

That’s why controversial debates matter. When the Gallaudet debate team visited Georgetown to argue whether deafness should be cured — with students from both schools taking each side — 64 percent of the audience voted against it. Some criticized the debate as a question that should never have been asked, but that only proved the point: avoiding hard questions doesn’t make them disappear. It leaves us unprepared to answer them. When Georgetown returned to our campus to debate whether the world would be better without religion, students on both sides again challenged dogma and expanded minds through viewpoint diversity, open inquiry, and constructive disagreement.

Debate, at its best, is not just a contest of words but a vessel of progress. It compels contact across difference, pulling us out of isolation and into the public square to confront opposing truths and deliberate the questions that shape policy and define who we are. That, in the end, is the work of democracy.

Alice: Why do you argue that persuasion is so central to Deaf America’s future, and how does heterodoxy strengthen it?

Brendan: There are three ways to achieve goals: bribery, coercion, or persuasion. In a democracy, the first two are rarely viable. For a small, dispersed, and low-power population like ours, persuasion is the only path. Most deaf children are born into hearing families. We do not control school boards, hospitals, or legislatures. Even Gallaudet, the so-called “Mecca of the Deaf World,” depends on federal appropriations. In a democracy, authority flows from the ballot; in Deaf America, it flows from argument. By necessity, we are a culture of converts.

Our political system makes this unavoidable. American democracy rests on consent and individual rights. Representatives and laws rise or fall by majority rule, while federalism multiplies the need for alliances across regions and traditions. For Deaf America, survival depends on persuading people of influence with whom we might share little, in a country where every opinion is open to the force of argument. Like it or not, that is how the system works.

Take Deaf education. It hasn’t lost its necessity; it is losing the argument for its necessity. Demographics, technology, and policy create headwinds, but they are not destiny. Parents and policymakers still choose — and those choices turn on whether anyone persuades them that Deaf schools serve their children’s interests. Too often we act as if the value is self-evident or that science alone will make the case. It won’t. Deaf education will not be saved by being right, but by being convincing.

Too many leaders recycle slogans that fire up the faithful but do not reach decision-makers. That is the difference between mobilization and persuasion. Mobilization energizes insiders; persuasion recruits potential allies. We are too small, too dispersed, and too dependent on spaces we do not control to rely on mobilization alone. As John Tomasi notes, a basic feature of the liberal creed is meliorism — the belief that people can work together across lines of difference, using reason and persuasion to build a better world. For most Americans, meliorism is an aspiration. For Deaf America, it is survival.

This is why heterodoxy matters. Persuasion cannot be reduced to a single approach. No one argument or identity will persuade everyone we need to reach. As Richard Rorty observed, democracy is built not on one big creed but on “a thousand little stitches.” Persuasion means finding small bridges — shared values, overlapping interests, unlikely allies — and stitching them together. Orthodoxy seeks one grand truth to bind all; heterodoxy weaves the many that truly hold.

And that heterodox work takes us across ideological divides. Deaf schools exist in red and blue states. Deaf people vote across party lines. Both parties have at times defended and attacked Deaf education. If persuasion is built of many stitches, some of the strongest must be sewn in places we find least comfortable.

That is also why Deaf advocates must keep showing up at the Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference, where oralist frameworks dominate. The act itself is heterodox — not only to challenge, but to listen, learn, and refine.

In short, heterodoxy strengthens persuasion by pulling us out of echo chambers. It forces us to hear views not our own, to test our convictions, and to craft the arguments that might build a better Deaf America.

Alice: Gallaudet University is a unique institution, and my sense from you is that it is, in many ways, a place where heterodoxy has been kept alive in spite of so many pressures to conform. Tell us about why HxA members should know about and “get” Gallaudet as a powerhouse of intellectual freedom?

Brendan: Gallaudet matters for HxA because it is one of the rare places where heterodoxy is not engineered but lived. As the only liberal arts university for Deaf people in the world, it resists the sorting that narrows intellectual life elsewhere. Students arrive from every family, class, race, region, and worldview, and often stay in community long after graduation. Deaf people, too, seem to be more at ease with openness and friction, shaped by the nature of sign language and by a habit of pushing against some of the world’s deepest orthodoxies. The result is an organic heterodoxy woven into the university’s DNA that most campuses only dream of.

Gallaudet also matters to intellectual life because it forces higher education to confront its blind spots. The oldest questions — What is a human? What is language? What is normal? — can be asked anywhere, but if we want richer answers, ticking the usual boxes of politics, race, gender, or class will not suffice. To meet Mill’s standard that truth emerges only when ideas face their strongest objections, heterodoxy needs Deaf people and the institutions that sustain them.

But let’s not exoticize Gallaudet. It is not yet a “powerhouse of intellectual freedom.” It is more a fledgling laboratory of heterodoxy, subject to the same pressures facing colleges and universities everywhere. What makes it unique is its potential, and what I find hopeful is the growing number of Gallaudet faculty, students, and administrators working to bring that promise to life. Yet even their efforts can only go so far on their own.

That is why I hope Gallaudet will continue to draw on HxA’s resources and renew the liberal arts as a space for disagreement and discovery. Heterodoxy may be in the DNA here, but genes do not express themselves without nurture. It is up to us to provide the challenge and care that allow heterodoxy to flourish.

Alice: One of the most startling things (for me) in your essay was your argument that the heterodoxy of Deaf America isn’t just about Deaf survival but about the health of American democracy itself. Say more.

Brendan: The heterodox case for Deaf America is that what sustains it is precisely what American democracy is losing.

Democracy does not rest on constitutions or elections alone. It depends on “schools of democracy” — voluntary associations and communities where people learn to cooperate, compete, and compromise across difference. But those schools are weakening or even disappearing due to sorting and the death of civic life.

Deaf America offers an antidote. Its associations remain relatively vibrant, and its pluralism and translocal networks sustain cross-cutting ties that have become increasingly rare. Social scientists describe such “schools of democracy” as vital because they generate the contact, trust, and reciprocity that make self-government possible in a diverse society.

I saw this firsthand at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, where I grew up. My peers spanned abilities, races, classes, and worldviews. A basketball teammate was a Vietnamese immigrant from the San Joaquin Valley who later became a vocal supporter of Elon Musk. Another classmate came from an affluent Silicon Valley WASP family and went on to attend law school at Berkeley. We shared little besides being deaf, but we shared a team, a school, and a community. That was democracy in practice, and I only realized how rare it was when I transferred to a hearing high school.

Today, the future of the two Americas will turn on how well we confront the questions that animate our divides: Who should decide what’s best for a child — parents or professionals? How important is a shared language to prevent disunion? Do we accept the bodies we are born with, or remake them into the bodies we choose? These questions have no final resolution, and they do not belong only to Deaf people. What matters is how well we engage them — by arguing openly, across differences, with persuasion. And it takes practice. That is why we launched the Center for Democracy in Deaf America (CDDA) at Gallaudet to foster disagreement, debate, and civic engagement in ASL.

We see Deaf America as a coral reef: dense, diverse, interdependent. Heterodoxy is the oxygen that keeps it alive. When the oxygen thins, the reef bleaches. And when reefs collapse, the entire ocean suffers.

See the new issue of inquisitive by clicking here.