Patrick Hayashi | Interview 2 | March 17, 2023

FARRELL: This is Shanna Farrell back with Patrick Hayashi on Friday, March 17, 2023. This is our second interview for the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives project and we are speaking again over Zoom. Pat, welcome back. When we left off last time, we had talked a lot about your early life, a little bit but your career, but we didn't talk a ton about your education. I wanted to start there today and I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your experience in grade school? I know you were in kindergarten in Oakland and moved to Hayward around that time, but do you remember when you were in school in Hayward, what your experience was like in grammar school?

HAYASHI: I started 00:01:00Cherryland Elementary School in I think the third grade, it might've been the fourth grade, and I remember liking it. I think my brothers and me were the only Japanese in the school, but I'm not absolutely sure about that. No, that couldn't have been right, there were probably two or three others in there, but I didn't feel any racial animus or anything like that. There probably was some, but I probably hadn't thought about it in those terms at that point. I think the teachers were good and kind, and there was a nice balance of playing and studying. I tended to do well in school, and I think that was largely because I mentioned 00:02:00before that I grew up as a reader. All my family were readers, and so if you read a lot, school tends to be, I think, easier rather than harder.

FARRELL: Were there any books that you found yourself most drawn to or any genres that you liked most?

HAYASHI: I'm not sure, but I think I mentioned this earlier, but I grew up with this great children's library, and I had read all of Sherlock Holmes and Grimms' Fairy Tales and most of the Book of Knowledge, the child's encyclopedia, before I was seven and furnished my mind. I liked everything and I went through phases. I went through a science-fiction phase and others. We had an 00:03:00outstanding children's librarian, I forgot her name, Miss Conklin, and she was very kind and very, very smart. It turned out later that I learned that she had written books on insects for kids, so she had a little terrarium in the children's library. She knew I like to read, and she liked to help people develop their reading interests, and so she would steer me in different directions. I read not only a lot, I read quickly, and my dad took the kids to the library once a week, so there were always these books there. One of those things was that if I ever wanted a book, my parents would buy it for me and so I just read a lot.

FARRELL: Yeah, 00:04:00yeah, something I can definitely relate to. Outside of school, were there any interests or hobbies that you had?

HAYASHI: I mainly just played sports. Yeah, I was pretty coordinated, and I liked playing sports, and I had friends who played sports, so mainly we just played whatever sport was in season. It was a time when there was Little League, but I didn't play Little League. Most of the sports done when I was growing up were done in the local school. Now, people travel and it's pretty well organized, but that wasn't the case when I was growing up.

FARRELL: When did you start playing tennis?

HAYASHI: I started playing tennis in junior 00:05:00high school. I saw a tennis match and it appealed to me. I had a close friend Phil Gratton, and he and I borrowed my uncle's tennis rackets and tennis balls and we went up to a basketball court in the junior high we were going to, and we would just hit the ball on the courts. At some point after a few months, we went and got our courage up and played on regular tennis courts. I practiced a lot, and by practicing, I mean I hit balls against the wall and then I had created this setup where I had a tennis ball on an innertube tire actually, cut thin, and I just used to hit and 00:06:00way into the night. It worried my father I was hitting so much and then I read as much as I could about tennis. That was when the great Australian players were playing Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver, and I admired them and learned from them. In high school, I got very lucky. There was this tennis coach, Mr. Beal, and he volunteered to teach our high school tennis team, and he was an amazing guy. His son was high ranked and actually had beaten Pancho Gonzales. Mr. Beal taught himself to play tennis, so he could work out with his son, and he was a terrific athlete. 00:07:00He approached tennis as kind of a conceptual challenge, and so he figured things out. He was a great teacher and he paid attention to the mental side too. He would say, "You have to anticipate that when you go into competition, your game will drop 20 to 25 percent just because of the stress, and so you have to prepare yourself to win with your game 20 to 25 percent lower than its top level." He gave little lectures like that. I ended up winning the league championship twice and so in Hayward and 00:08:00that section, I was pretty good. But when I went to college, I realized that I wasn't that good.

FARRELL: You went to Hayward High School. You may have mentioned this last time, but I've also heard you say that you graduated exactly halfway, like 250 out of 500 kids. Were there any significant classes or teachers or even mentors that you had during your time in high school?

HAYASHI: I didn't have many mentors. I guess my tennis coach was a mentor but my social studies teacher, Mrs. Baron had a deep influence on me. One of the things that she would do -- I had 00:09:00her for four years. That was the way it worked, she was my homeroom teacher, and I don't know much about her. In retrospect, I think she was Jewish and on Fridays, she would read. One year she read from Hiroshima by John Hersey and it kind of embarrassed me because it was about the atomic bomb and Japanese, and I was preferring not to be Japanese at the time. I listened, and she was a good reader. One time, there was one Friday, there was this one guy who was not a student. I think he was Mexican, as we called them at the time, and 00:10:00he was a low-income guy and not a particularly academic guy. He went up before the class and asked her if she could read that day. I thought, wow, that's really something, this book is having an effect on him. I thought, maybe I should let it have an effect on me, and so I paid a different kind of attention at the time. Afterwards, my wife Sandy became a substitute teacher, and she substituted at Hayward High School and met Mrs. Baron. She then invited us to her house in Walnut Creek so Sandy and I went out there for coffee, and I met her 00:11:00in and her husband. Her husband was an English teacher at a local community college, and we're talking and he said that I should plan on getting my master's. I thought master's, yeah, I barely scraped through my bachelor's degree and it just was unheard of. Then I lost touch with them. For about ten or fifteen years ago, I tried to track her down, but I think she had gone to Arizona or Phoenix, and I wasn't able to contact her. I tried pretty hard actually because I wanted to thank her. That was a shame. There was another woman at Hayward High. I think her name is Eleanor Gerard, and it turned out that she taught 00:12:00school at Topaz. She may have taught me there, but I'm not sure. She ended up marrying the principal of the school and she was well known as being an incredibly sympathetic and effective teacher, and apparently, the quality of teachers there really varied. But I did a little research on her and she volunteered to go and teach at Topaz and I think out of a sense of social mission. But, of course, I wouldn't have talked to her at Hayward, and if she had mentioned it, I probably would've been embarrassed by it. But that's another example of missed opportunity in a sense. 00:13:00FARRELL: You had mentioned somebody planting the seeds for you for graduate school, getting your master's, and then you said you barely scraped by in undergrad. But you started at San Jose State and I know you played tennis on their team, and you had also mentioned that for a minute. But I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your decision to go to San Jose State and what you were majoring in then?

HAYASHI: My decision was made by my friends and me, Mitch West and Roger Boyle, and we're all trying figure out what to do. They said that they were thinking of going to San Jose State and I said, "Well, that sounds like something." I really hadn't thought about it and I looked into it, and you had to have a certain number of Bs or above to get in, in 00:14:00college prep courses. I did the calculation and I think I had to get all Bs or above in the time remaining to get in, and so I studied and I got in. I wanted to commute with my friends, and that's how most of my friends went to college, but my dad said, "No, you have to stay there." I found a room with kitchen privileges and I moved in there. I moved in and had a roommate named Tom [Watts]. He was a good guy and it was mainly athletes but not all, and it was a nice place. One of the things that happened to me is that I met this girl, 00:15:00Linda, and she took an interest in me, which was surprising. She was very interested in things like foreign films and things like that and so she would take me to see Ingmar Bergman and things like that, things I barely understood but if you get into that, exposed to it, things start to change. Because of my test scores, I was eligible to be in a special track. I remember a writing teacher who was very skilled and good, and she was an actor, and that interested me 00:16:00but everything was sort of removed. I didn't see myself as a student; I saw myself as an athlete. I didn't know what I was going to do; I thought vaguely I might be a lawyer. At the time, a 2.6 [grade point average] would get you into law school in Hastings, for example, but I didn't even know what a lawyer did. I didn't know lawyers, my family ran a nursery. There was a family lawyer, but that was something else, so mainly, I just screwed around. At the time, a 2.5 would be seen as really good, and that's where I hovered around. For some reason one semester, I ended up 00:17:00getting a 4.0. I hadn't studied harder or anything, it was just as series of circumstances. That changed my sense of who I was. I used to play a lot of tennis with guys who went to Berkeley, and so I decided that I would go to Berkeley. I had a tennis-playing friend who wanted to go to the University of Virginia and I said, "Why do you want to go there?" I didn't know anything about it and he said, "Well, because that the men get to wear coats and ties." I said, "Well, that sounds cool." I applied to the University of Virginia and they accepted me, and so I told my dad that I wanted to go to the University of Virginia. He said, "We can't afford that," so I went to Berkeley. And there, 00:18:00oh, boy, that was culture shock. At San Jose in the group I hung out with, we would start studying about two weeks before finals and then we just crammed. The first night at Berkeley, I stayed in the dorm with a tennis-playing friend. First night, I said, "Well, what should we do? Should we go shoot some hoops or what?" They all went to the library and I just was astonished. The whole culture of studying, seriousness, and thinking way ahead in terms of their own academic and career development, I have never encountered. I think I told you that I majored and decided I was going to become premed, and that was because I half 00:19:00read a book by Tom Dooley who went and the sort of medical evangelist in I think Thailand or Vietnam and that sounded romantic. I took Chemistry 1A and Physics 1A and science courses, and I was just annihilated in the courses, and just after two or three weeks, I had no idea what I was doing. Came the first physics course, and the night before, I was talking to a friend who is a good student and was premed. There were physics formulas that you have to apply for certain things and he said, "You know you really need to know the formulas, you have to have them memorized." I said, 00:20:00"You do? That made no sense to me." He says, "You could always look them up." That night, I tried to memorize a bunch formulas and did very, very poorly. I didn't fail the test, but I came close to failing, and the same thing happened in chemistry. It was just a disaster. After that semester, I don't know what I did. I think I continued and then I was doing so poorly and was so uncertain about what to do, I dropped out. I dropped out with a very low GPA, but I hadn't been put on probation and so I left in good standing. That's when I went to work for Western Electric as a mail carrier.

FARRELL: Roughly what year was this? Do you remember?

HAYASHI: About '64 I think.

FARRELL: Okay, okay, all right, so you 00:21:00must have been at San Jose State early, like '60 --

HAYASHI: ‘61 through '63.

FARRELL: Okay, and you were at Cal from '63 to '64?

HAYASHI: Yeah.

FARRELL: Okay, great, thank you. I think when we start talking about Asian American studies, that actually helps ground things.

HAYASHI: Oh yeah.

FARRELL: Can you tell me a little bit about your experience as a mail carrier, I guess also why you decided to be a mail carrier at that point?

HAYASHI: I don't know, I must have been looking through the newspapers and found an advertisement. I lived in Hayward and it was in Burlingame so I had to cross the San Mateo Bridge to go to work. I took a test and apparently I did very, very well in the test. I remember parts of it is that if you're 00:22:00carrying someone on a stretcher and you're going upstairs, which is the best way to hold it and which person carries the most weight and so forth. Apparently, the head of the mail room saw how well I had done and so they offered me the job. I think I mentioned you that my father taught me how to work and so I was a very, very good worker wherever I went. I got along with people. I like people generally. I liked the job, I enjoyed it quite a lot and met friends. In the mail room, there were a lot of people my age, very diverse, and we used to make little musicals and sing musicals in the mail room, and it was just fun. 00:23:00FARRELL: Did you work for the postal Service?

HAYASHI: No, no, it's --

FARRELL: It was just sort of arbitrary?

HAYASHI: Yeah.

FARRELL: Yeah, and how long did you do that for before you went back to Cal?

HAYASHI: It was either nine months or a year.

FARRELL: Okay, and did you enjoy working versus being in school?

HAYASHI: Yeah, quite a lot actually, I liked working.

FARRELL: What was it about it that you liked?

HAYASHI: I think having the responsibility, having friends, working in a pretty social environment, and then playing hearts at lunch.

FARRELL: And then you returned to Cal as an English major. What was the impetus for going back? 00:24:00HAYASHI: I realized that I should get a degree and I thought that the only thing I really like to do was to read, and so I said that means that I should be an English major. I applied to San Francisco State, which at the time, in English was more selective than Berkeley. I mean it was right after the beat revolution and they had a strong faculty, and they turned me down. But I could return to Berkeley automatically because I had left in standing and so I returned and then I declared English as my major. I was returning I think the second semester of my junior year and so I had a lot of ground to make up. I 00:25:00would take two or three English courses a semester. I don't know if we were on the semester or quarter system at the time, but in any event, I had a lot of reading to do and a lot of writing. I always think that for me, I would be a good English major now because I know how to read and I know how to write. But there, it just went over my head, not all of it but a lot of it went over my head. It was too bad, and I did poorly. A B would, it was like a big deal, I got a couple of A's but not many.

FARRELL: I can certainly relate to that, I look back at my time in college and was like, right now I'd be a 00:26:00great English major, but then probably not. [laughs]

HAYASHI: Yeah.

FARRELL: But you did end up graduating from Cal. Did you graduate in '65 or '66?

HAYASHI: I don't remember.

FARRELL: Okay, okay. From there, I know you started working as a mail carrier on campus in 1966. What were your career aspirations, or were you hoping to do that? Or were you hoping to do something else?

HAYASHI: I didn't have career aspirations and partly because I grew up in a family where career was not discussed. I remember my brother asking me if Dad had ever talked to me about college and I said, "No, and how about you?" He said, "No." My dad once suggested that I think about 00:27:00becoming a plumber and I think he saw me as not very disciplined and not much of a hard worker and kind of a goof-off in a way and hoped that I would get a trade that would keep me alive. But then, I was a mail carrier and a neighbor worked in personnel. He said, "We're starting this management intern program, you should think of applying." The program was aimed at developing a cadre of mid-level managers who could take on higher-level positions. 00:28:00In my class, there were two people and we would rotate through the basic departments like accounting, budget, and planning, and purchasing, and space sciences lab, and six or seven different programs for a few weeks at a time just to get oriented and get a sense of it. At the end of six weeks or six months, we would be placed in a permanent position. So I applied for it, and it was very, very competitive but they chose me along with another guy, George Dea. Maybe there was a third guy too, but I'm not sure. It was good, it was terrific. 00:29:00I rotated through the contracts and grants office, which I think is now Sponsored Projects, and they offered me a job. They weren't supposed to, but they did. I took it -- I wasn't supposed to, but I did. It was near the end of the program. I started as a contract grant administrator, which pretty much was a clerical task where you check for the proper overhead rates and things like that and then you process a proposal and then you wait for the award. But I started to read the proposals, and that was a real education. I remember reading a 00:30:00proposal for someone to study petrified scats in South America, I think it was in Peru. I didn't know what a scat was, and so I look it up, petrified feces. The guy comes in and I said, "I don't mean to be rude, but why would someone want to study petrified feces?" He said, "Oh, by studying the petrified feces, we can understand what they ate. If you understand what they ate, you understand a huge amount. You understand if 00:31:00they were hunters or gatherers or if they farmed, if they were nomads. You understand if they cooked their food or not, and if they cooked their food, what kind what kind of vessels they used to cook their food in. Once you start unpacking that, you learn a huge amount about their social structure." That enchanted me and I thought, wow. I started reading all of them carefully.

FARRELL: Did other people in the Sponsored Project office read the grants, or did they just process them?

HAYASHI: They just processed them.

FARRELL: Okay, so as you were reading these grants, did you learn anything from reading them? I mean you just described what you learn content-wise, but in terms of your career later, did you take anything with you from that experience?

HAYASHI: No, no, I never had anything like a career plan. I know that some people develop them and think about them, but it’s just never been on my radar. 00:32:00I don't know why, and nor did I worry about it particularly. Part of that is demographic. When I would apply for a job at Berkeley, there would be maybe four or five, six other candidates. It's not like today, and most of the things were word-of-mouth. As I was working for Sponsored Projects, budget and planning wanted to hire me also because I had rotated through them, and so they ended up hiring me to do special projects. I was on what's called dual employment, so I don't know if they even have them, so I split time 00:33:00between both of them. In budget and planning, I handled Letters & Science, and did budgeting for Letters & Science. One of the things that happened at the time is one of my jobs was to review appointments and promotions to make sure that they had the FTE, and if the promotion went through, to make sure that they have the money, allocate the money. The employment form would come, and at the time, the employment form would come along with the person's entire employment package, the entire package. That included the original 00:34:00application, the original review, all reviews for merit increases done by the budget and planning committee, the highly confidential committee that reviews promotions. For example, if a person was being put up for tenure, the budget and planning committee would establish a secret committee and then send the person's material to that committee. The committee would then comment confidentially on it as to whether they thought the person merited a tenured position. The commentary was extremely blunt because they took it seriously, and they were also working confidentially. I 00:35:00read them all. It was amazing, and I went back and I read the personnel files of former faculty of mine, and I also saw the commentary they made about other people. Now all this stuff is like locked up in the bank vaults, you can't see it, but I had a glimpse -- not a glimpse, I had a prolonged examination of a part of the university that very, very, very few people ever get. First of all, it gave me a real respect for the tenure review process but then I learned how people think about 00:36:00intellectual merit and academic achievement, and what they thought was not.

FARRELL: Were you enjoying the work? I know you had a long career at Berkeley, and you're reading these grants, learning things, you're learning how people think about things, you're going to review these files. Are you enjoying this, are you thinking you want to stick with this for a while?

HAYASHI: The funny thing is the notion of enjoying it or not, I never thought of it in those terms. I guess I did enjoy it, I felt like I was learning something, I never thought of it as something that I'd like to do or not do. Again, looking back at that point in our 00:37:00society, it was right before the Baby Boomers and so there was this kind of tide that was lifting all ships, and opportunities came my way. I think during my career, I applied for three jobs. Well, I didn't apply for the mail job, carrier job, that was given to me by a friend of a friend. But then after that, I applied for the management intern job, which I got, and then I once applied to be deputy director of the student learning center, which I didn't get. But besides those, I had never applied for a job ever again. That part has something to do with my weird sense of career progression. I have to excuse myself for a second.

FARRELL: Sure, no problem, I'll pause the recording. [BREAK IN VIDEO] 00:38:00FARRELL: Okay, we're back. This actually is a good segue into Asian American studies. I'd love to hear your perspective on this. From my understanding, that grew out of the Third World Liberation Strike movement and started at San Francisco State, and it was a newer term as well. Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of that department? I know that with ethnic studies, there's Black studies, there's Latinx studies, there's Asian American studies growing out of this. But if you, from your perspective, could tell me your memories of the origin of that department?

HAYASHI: Well, the San Francisco State strike, which was quite violent and turbulent. 00:39:00It triggered a similar sympathetic strike at Berkeley, and it was violent and scary. One of the things that happened was that Wheeler auditorium was set on fire. That shows the kind of intensity of the strike and there were helicopters dropping tear gas around. There were a lot of people who ordinarily didn't have a prominent place at Berkeley like the Brown Berets, which were a group from I think Richmond and El Cerrito. You had a lot of Black Panthers on campus, 00:40:00and a lot of Asians got involved, but the Asians who were involved typically didn't identify as Asian. They were usually involved in other organizations like the Young Socialists and things like that. But Asians got together and Asians were also influenced by the Vietnam War and many were anti-war. But the anti-war movement in the United States at the time focused on bringing our boys home, ending the draft and bringing our boys home, and the Asians involved saw it as a racist war. That 00:41:00one of the reasons it continued so long is that Asians were not seen as human beings, and that was most evident by the kind of weaponry used. Napalm was dropped on people, and napalm would land on the grass and then burned through the roof and then set people on fire. Because napalm is burning oil, and you can't get it off, and if you try to help someone, you get it on you. People saw that and the Asian Americans saw how Asian people, we were being perceived, that allowed that kind of weaponry. At that point, 00:42:00I don't know how it happened, but the term “Asian American” was coined because up to then the term “oriental” was used, and there was a sense that that was a term used by colonial powers. Now, none of this was clear-cut like this. It was just sort of the free-flowing conversation and it emerged. The administration for its part, I think, had a combination of being truly shaken by the violence of the strike. Because even the previous major strikes like the Free Speech Movement, they weren't violent, but this was violent. This brought people to the campus who the campus had never dealt with before, and so there was apprehension 00:43:00there that, oh, I think made people want to appease the strikers. But also I think though, there was a genuine sympathy because Berkeley, at its heart, is a liberal institution. They agreed to have not a Third World college but a Third World ethnic studies department that would eventually evolve into a college. My job, as a budget person, was to set up the budget and so I met with different people. In one meeting, there were three or four young Asian graduate students who came to meet Errol Mauchlan who was then the assistant chancellor for budget and planning, to talk about setting up a budget, 00:44:00and I had volunteered to work on that. We were waiting outside his office and they were extremely friendly. Some of them were pretty imposing. I mean, they were wearing Mao jackets and the red star of China, communist China and stuff, but they were just very nice people and nice to me. They asked what I studied and I had said English and they said, "Well, we could really use you. You could teach a course for us." I laughed. I said, "I barely graduated." They said, "No, come on." I volunteered to be a reader in their freshman reading and composition class, and after one term, I started to teach my own section. One time, I 00:45:00actually taught four sections, and I had to make my own curriculum. I had to grade the papers, I had a couple TAs, but it was all figuring out as I went along. There wasn't hardly any Asian American literature at the time, so I gravitated to Black literature and some Jewish American literature. Because they talked about, oh, the experience of marginal people in a way that resonated with Asian Americans. I especially started to study James Baldwin and it was amazing. At the same time, I had to figure out how to teach writing, which meant that I had to learn it myself. I read a lot of books and just started teaching writing, learning 00:46:00how to teach writing. I don't know how well I taught it, but I learned it pretty well, and over time, I became a strong writer. I was a pretty strong writer before because when I worked for Errol Mauchlan, he was a strong writer. You give him a draft and he would just completely change it. I started a little challenge too, to be able to draft something that he wouldn't change, and so over the course of a year, I got so that I could. In other words, I was learning and trying to emulate him, and I became a strong writer there. All this investment in writing, I enjoyed, and it paid off tremendously because as you 00:47:00know in the university, you assume that everyone can write well, but you soon find out that that's not true. That some of the people in the highest levels can barely write at all, and they know it and or the good ones know it and so then they look for people who can do the writing for them. That was one of the reasons I was offered jobs because they knew I could write.

FARRELL: Oh, that's really interesting. Let's see, you started teaching these writing classes at about 1969, and I know you had mentioned before that one of the books you read was No-No Boy and James Baldwin. I've heard in another interview that Notes of a Native Son was an important one. But what were some of the other texts that you were teaching? 00:48:00HAYASHI: We taught Love Story one semester. [laughs] Our curriculum was not well thought out. It consisted basically of whatever I was reading that I liked and then we would share it. I remember at the very beginning, we taught something about medieval Chinese. We had no idea what we were doing at all, but the whole program was like that, not the entire program. There were some teachers like Floyd Huen. Floyd Huen is Jean Quan's 00:49:00husband, who was the mayor of Oakland. They taught courses, and Floyd would have a sort of anticolonial curriculum, Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere, and we required that, but I was never able to read the book myself, I couldn't get through it. It is one of those deals were your students were required to read it, but you haven't read it yourself, and it was pretty haphazard.

FARRELL: [What else did you teach?]

HAYASHI: I may have taught some of the essays from [Ralph Ellison’s] Shadow and Act. One of them is "The World and the Jug," and he talks 00:50:00about how white progressives look at Black life as if it's in a kind of terrarium and don't quite understand that there are people down there, and the people want to shout up say, "Hey, be careful, we're down here." As an example, he talks about how people talk about how awful segregation was and how Blacks have to sit in balconies in movie theaters. He said, "The view from the balcony was quite nice" and that it was kind of a little sanctuary. 00:51:00They could laugh and they could cry and it was liberating in a sense. Most importantly, they could learn and they could develop their own sensitivities, examine their own sensitivities. Essentially what he was saying is it may seem from a distance and from a structural sense as unfair, and it was, but that doesn't mean that the experience was not deeply humanizing and liberating and edifying.

FARRELL: You were the head of the department from 1971 to 1973. Can you talk a little bit about how that came to fruition?

HAYASHI: Well, 00:52:00we were run by a student council. I think there were seven people in it or something, and most of them were undergraduates. There might have been a graduate student or two. The coordinator of Asian American studies, the head of the program was just one of those people. Because I knew the nomenclature and the processes of the administration, I started to have a decisive say in a lot of the things. Gradually, people looked to me to handle the administrative portion of the program, and it just emerged out of that. The decisive change in the concept of the position came when 00:53:00we wanted to hire Ron Takaki, and then we brought him up from LA. He had been denied tenure in LA and we brought him up and talked to him. He showed us his book, none of us read it, and he seemed like a nice guy. There were questions as to whether or not he was revolutionary enough, whatever that meant, but those are the kinds of things we would think about. We decided to attempt to hire him, and because I knew what the process was then, I handled that. Because of my 00:54:00experience with the budget committee, I sent his packet to two history professors, Win Jordan and Charlie Sellers, both American history. Win Jordan had won the National Book Award on a book on slavery. I asked them what they thought, if they could give me a confidential reading on what they thought, and they both came back with the same answer. They thought that he was a solid scholar but nothing spectacular. Now solid, that seemed good enough for us, and so I made his case and sent it to the chancellor's office. Chancellor Bowker 00:55:00calls me and he says, "Can you come? I'd like to talk to you about this case." I said, "Sure," so I went over. My hair at that time was down to my shoulders, I was wearing combat jackets and hiking boots and stuff, and I think I had a mustache but I go over. I had a friend who worked in academic personnel and she told me that what had happened is that the budget committees sent Ron's folder to the secret review committee of three people. Two of them had recommended he be appointed to a tenured position, and one of them had strongly objected. 00:56:00That was when it came back to the budget and review committee, they decided to go with the recommendation of the dissent and recommended against appointment. Bowker didn't know that I knew that, but that's what I knew. He went up and he said, "I'm getting a little pushback on this appointment, why do you want him?" I told him that at UCLA, he taught the largest lecture course on the campus and that he got extraordinarily high teaching reviews. I explained to him what I had done with having history professors review that and told him what they thought. I said he would be a massive upgrade in the academic strength 00:57:00of the program, and more important, that we're now functioning as a ghetto. If he taught this large course that attracted a lot of students, it would "break" our isolation, and other departments would start to take notice of us." He said, "Do you ever see him being the head of the program?" I said, "Absolutely, I'm going to leave in a year." He said, "Well, you've given me all the information I need. I'm prepared to support it." I said, "Before you do that, why don't you meet him? We'll fly him up and I'll introduce you to him." Ron flew up and I took him over to the chancellor's office on the back of my motorcycle and dropped him off. I said, "I'll leave the two of you talk to by yourselves." Bowker said, "You don't have to do that." I said, "I think that would be better," and so then I went walking. I was 00:58:00sitting out in front of Sproul Plaza half hour later and Bowker comes and Ron come walking over and then he says, "May I talk to you?" We stand to the side and he said, "I'm prepared to support this appointment." He didn't tell Ron that, but told me, and so that's how Ron got appointed. When I reported back to the student council, they said, "What does it mean that he's tenured?" I said, "Well, that means that he can't be fired." They said, "That's not acceptable. He's got to be subjected to the will of the people and we have to be able to terminate him if he turns out to be counterrevolutionary." Those were the kind words used. I said, "I'm not going 00:59:00to do that." They ordered me to rescind the appointment. I said, "I'm not going to do that." There was a little tussle and I just said, "I'm not going to do that. We put him through all this, he's already been through this once before at UCLA, I'm just not going to do it." They had no recourse. I mean, they could've tortured me or something, but you know? That's how the student council lost its power, and the head of the division, me, took on a different dimension.

FARRELL: [They were opposed to] o tenure? I think what everyone wants still is to get that tenure appointment. But it's interesting the other side of it is like, well, you want to have some recourse if something 01:00:00goes wrong from the people who wanted him there, right? I think that that's an interesting discussion, but also the fact that he did go through that at UCLA, and you were like, well, we can't put him through this. Did the students eventually come around to your side of things?

HAYASHI: No, they graduated and left. That was the other part.

FARRELL: That's a good point, because there are cycles. How did you see Ron's appointments impact the department?

HAYASHI: Initially, he was kind of like a fish out of water because even though he had a rough 01:01:00time at UCLA, he was in a regular department with colleagues and stuff. Here, no one had a PhD. There were some grad students in sociology that I think he felt an affinity to, but within the department, there was no one there who was his peer. But I think that gradually he started settling in and his courses were very good. He started to attract students from other places and then he started to attract grad students to work with him, so he built his career there. I wasn't around during this time, but he started writing in a more popular way and 01:02:00he started writing books that were extremely well-received generally, Iron Cages. He started critiquing things like The Last of the Mohicans and the racist perspective that the permeate a lot of popular American literature and so he established himself as quite an iconoclast. He was a strong public speaker, and so he would speak around the country. I think he was being considered for a MacArthur for a while and we lost touch for a while, and then we started to get together from time to time. 01:03:00We'd have dinner, my wife and I and his wife Carol, would get together, and I enjoyed those. My wife had a travel agency, and he did their travel, and wherever they would travel, Carol and Ron would paint watercolors. They would sit together and they would paint the same scene, and so they would show us their watercolor journals. I always enjoyed that. When Ron was going through his tenure battle at UCLA, he took up sculpture, and so he did some sculpting, little whimsical pieces, and I like them quite a lot. Carol was a quite accomplished batik artist. We mainly talked about 01:04:00travel and art, it was enjoyable, and I started to like him as a person. Then then he had suffered periodically with bouts of depression and had to go through electroshock therapy. He was, at one point, falling again into a bout of depression was afraid that he was going to have to back into the hospital, and he ended up hanging himself instead. It was a very painful end to, I think, a productive and creative life. Yeah.

FARRELL: Yeah, that's 01:05:00I think a good way to say that, a very painful end to creative life. Speaking of your wife, I'm wondering if you could tell me how you met her?

HAYASHI: We met on the Channing Tennis Courts. At the end of the class, they had a double tournament and she and I were paired together as a doubles team, and we won the tournament. She invited me to go sailing with her, which was problematic because I don't swim, but I went and we've been together ever since. She was getting her teaching credential at the time.

FARRELL: And you had a daughter as well, right?

HAYASHI: Sandy had a daughter from her first marriage, Christy, and I ended up adopting Christy.

FARRELL: Okay, 01:06:00and this is in the early '70s, right? I guess what I'm getting to is that you left --

HAYASHI: I think it was '69.

FARRELL: ‘69, okay. Because in '73, you decided to leave Cal because you felt burned out and went to Japan with the two of them.

HAYASHI: Right.

FARRELL: Can you tell me a little bit about your decision to leave Cal and move to Japan?

HAYASHI: Well, it was Sandy. Sandy loves to travel, that's why she started a travel agency, and I think it was mainly her idea. If you notice something, I tend to go along with things as they emerge, I'm not much of a pathbreaker. She had this idea that we would go to Japan and that seemed like a good idea. We were reading about different places and we read about 01:07:00Sendai. It was nicknamed “the city of scholars” because it had sixteen colleges and universities and so we figured that that would be a good place to teach English. We went there, and I didn't have a lot of money. Sandy knew Japanese at that point and Christy knew a little. I thought that it was genetically encoded in me, and that once I hit the motherland, it would just flow out, and that turned out not to be true. What flowed out was the Japanese I learned when I was talking to my grandparents; it was five-year-old Japanese. Anyway, we got there, and we met some people right off the dot and met an American guy. We told him we were looking for an apartment. He said, "Well, you can have mine," because 01:08:00he was leaving. He said, "You could have my job too," and so he gave me his English teaching job. On day two, we were set and met some other people in the foreign student community and had a tutor. We had a Japanese tutor, so one of the tutors said, "Why don't you become a student?" He arranged for me to become a graduate research student in educational sociology at Tohoku University. Now Tohoku turned out to be quite a prestigious university, one of the seven former imperial universities, and so there I was. It was fun. One of the things that they were trying to start was a university extension program, and 01:09:00so they had a lot of material in English. They all read English quite well, but they didn't understand the technical nomenclature, so I could help them a lot, I could explain things to them. My main professor was head of the Japanese American Friendship Society and so he would arrange for me to meet with groups in the city and talk to them. Because I had some experience teaching ESL, I had a facility to be able to explain the same thing in English three different ways, and so people really liked to hear me speak 01:10:00because they could understand my English, and it was interesting. He was very careful to treat me as his graduate student at the university, but when we were doing some public event together, he spoke to me as his colleague. That's when I started to pay attention to the different levels of politeness in Japanese. I found out later that it was an extremely progressive program. They always chose every year one of their graduate students, advanced graduate students to be the lecturer or lead assistant. The year I was there, they chose two women, 01:11:00which was unheard of in Japan, but they were that the strongest students.

FARRELL: Do you mind if I pause for one second? I'll be back in about thirty seconds?

HAYASHI: Sure.

FARRELL: Thank you. [BREAK IN VIDEO]

FARRELL: Okay, we're back. Given that was your experience at the university, what was it like for you to move to Japan and live there?

HAYASHI: It was a wonderful experience. I found moving to a different country and culture with a different language scary. I didn't know my way around, I didn't have friends, and people 01:12:00assumed that I was Japanese and they were alarmed when they found out I couldn't speak Japanese very well. But I made my way, I made friends, and I think I came to enjoy it. I used to run a lot and I ran the San Francisco Marathon. I wasn't in good shape -- well, I was in good shape -- but I went out too quickly, and I ended up hitting the wall at mile twelve. I thought, oh, God, and I knew exactly what was happening to me. I was starting to burn muscle rather than oxygen, and I said, “Jeez, 01:13:00I have 14.2 miles to go, what am I going to do?” I said, “Well, just see what happens because you'll never be in this position again where the only way you can make it through is through your own strength, mental strength.” So I did, and I finished. One of the things that happens is you start getting paranoid, and there was this guy, really old guy, I think he was in his seventies. I'd be walking and then he'd run past me and he would piss me off. So I would start up again and I would pass him and then I'd start walking again and he would pass me, and it became funny, it was absurd. When it was 01:14:00over, it was an experience I knew I would never experience again, but it taught a lot about myself, I learned a lot about myself. One is that I wouldn't quit and two is that I could see the absurdity of things that happened. I view Japan that way. It was a wonderful experience and I saw things that I would never experience again. There was a man also from Berkeley who came, and I forgot what field he was in, economics or something. He wasn't getting any help from his head professor and he was just foundering, he just didn't know what to do. 01:15:00I asked him if he would like to meet my professor, and he said yes. I asked Sasaki Sensei if he would meet with my friend and he said, "Yes, of course." We met at Sasaki Sensei's office. In that situation, it would fall to me to make tea. I said, "Sasaki Sensei [Japanese]." What was amazing is somehow, I fell in to teineigo, the highest form 01:16:00of politeness, which I didn't know I knew. He was startled and he replied very graciously, "Yes, that would be very nice." I started to make the tea, but I didn't know how to make tea, and it boiled over and made a mess, and he saved it. I cleaned up and then I served it to them and he said, "Oh, it's very good." What I found there was by changing my language into a form of politeness that I didn't know I knew, and him responding in the same way, that there was an absolute understanding of our relationship to each other reflected in the language and the 01:17:00activity. With that came not a sense of subordination but a sense of absolute freedom of knowing your right place in life at that moment nice. I said, “Wow, what a wonderful experience.”

FARRELL: How long did you live there for in total?

HAYASHI: Twenty months.

FARRELL: Okay, okay, and you did you end up earning your degree there or did you end up transferring back to Cal?

HAYASHI: No, it was a nondegree program.

FARRELL: Oh, okay, I see, okay.

HAYASHI: From there, one of the major things that happened is I used to take periodic trips to Tokyo to buy books. I found a bookstore that had a very nice selection 01:18:00of books in American higher education by major people like David Riesman and a guy named Martin Vesey. I went back and I started reading about American higher education and so I suddenly got this very solid, larger perspective on the structure and history of American higher education. I could see my experience at Berkeley and my experience in Asian American studies in a historical context. They didn't seem so much as aberrations but rather as one of endless attempts at changing American higher education. 01:19:00It gave me a scaffolding to think through everything I had experienced. Of course, then I had the Tohoku University experience there too.

FARRELL: [So from Japan you returned to] the States and to Berkeley?

HAYASHI: I'm trying to think if this is correct, yes. I had taken a seminar given by Clark Kerr and Marty Trow on American higher education. What had happened is that Clark had been fired by Ronald Reagan and 01:20:00then after a couple years, people realized that he had to teach something, he couldn't just hang out. They created the special seminar, and it was secret -- it wasn't advertised -- and they recruited twelve students. We sat around a seminar room and Marty and Clark were at the head of the table. Outside of the seminar table, there were about at least a dozen high-ranking faculty who wanted to hear Marty and Clark talk about higher education. I assumed that Clark would just mail it in but he was not that kind of guy. Every evening, they would speak 01:21:00about their latest thoughts and they were well-developed thoughts, and they didn't agree with each other often, and so it was a real active conversation. It was extremely intimidating needless to say, but I got to see two of the finest minds in the world with respect to higher education talk to each other, and so there's nothing like that. I had written a paper, I had it written on Asian American studies, and Clark liked it and Marty had written. He said, "I found this interesting, but I don't think you went far enough, and forgive me for going on at length, but that's the nature of criticism." 01:22:00He wrote a four-page critique of a very short paper; he actually wrote more than I did. It really pissed me off until after a few weeks and after the course was over that I realized that it was a real sign of respect. I read what he wrote, and I learned from what he wrote. In Japan when I was coming back, I said I was thinking of coming back and studying public policy or going to Stanford and studying education. He said, "They were both good choices, we've enjoyed having you here." So I went back there. I already had a master's in public administration, but the public policy program was a two-year 01:23:00program, and I thought I'd get a doctorate, but that wasn't in the offing. You have to go through the two-year program, and very few students went for their doctorate, but I went through the two-year program. I did well and distinguished myself because of the quirkiness of my intelligence. I had to write a paper on organizational design or something and so I ended up writing about a worm farm that Sandy and I started as a kind of how to build an organization. The faculty absolutely loved it and based on that, I was one of two students in the class who were invited to go on for a doctorate with funding. 01:24:00Again, I hadn't really thought about it, but I just went on whatever path opens up.

FARRELL: [Did you enjoy it?]

HAYASHI: Oh, no, it was awful because public policy, the master's program is highly structured. You take core curriculum and then suddenly, there's no structure at all, and it was awful. I was just at sea making no progress. I didn't know how to go about it, I didn't know how to choose the research subject, and it took me fifteen years to finish it. In the meantime, I went back to work and then I was appointed associate vice chancellor, and so I had major responsibilities, but that 01:25:00really wasn't the problem. The problem was I just didn't know what I wanted to write about. I ended up writing my dissertation on admissions because Marty was about to retire, and I thought, jeez, I better get this done before he leaves. I cranked something out and I asked the three -- Marty was one of the people in my chair -- on my committee and two friends, so they just sort of said, “Okay,” and they signed it. It was not a good dissertation.

FARRELL: Given that you had a lot of other stuff going on, but it did take fifteen years, what did it mean to you to finally earn your PhD?

HAYASHI: It was like the marathon. I knew a lot of people in my position and all of them quit 01:26:00but because of the marathon. I said, “Well, I don't know if I'll ever finish this damn thing, but I'm not to quit, and got it done.” When I was working for [Richard] Atkinson, he said, "Why don't you tell people you have a doctorate?" I said, "It doesn't really matter to me and I don't remember it most of the time." Because most of the time in that environment if you have a doctorate, particularly a PhD and you're not faculty, you make sure people know that. Well, I had my PhD when I started working for him, 01:27:00but most of my career -- the higher levels -- I established without a PhD.

FARRELL: Is it okay with you if I pause? I want to check in with you about the session.