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MA: So going back to the strike...

JH: Yes.

MA: ...can you talk about the impact of the strike on, on academia and in general, what the impact was?

JH: Well... how should I say it? As far as I'm concerned, the irony of the strike was that the very people we had to force to recognize us, that is, the administration and the Board of Trustees, still sat in judgment of everything we did, because they controlled the budget, all right? Now, who's on the Board of Trustees? You don't know their names, but without knowing that, you knew that they were white, old, rich, males, businessmen or lawyers. And how do they get there? They're appointed by the governor. Who does the governor appoint? He appoints people who have contributed to his campaign and stuff like that. So they tend to be somewhat conservative. And they want the educational system to train students that are some value to them. And, "What the heck is Ethnic Studies anyway?" They're not interested in Ethnic Studies. Now, the administrators at San Francisco State are, they're passed on by the Board of Trustees, of course, the president and people like that.

And so, you know, there are things like, I'll give you an example. The Chinese American students wanted a course on Chinese American community. I says, "Okay, we'll go into Chinatown and we'll find somebody who's lived that life, thought about it, written about it, and we'll hire him." So we find somebody like that, and we go back, and I go to the Dean of Faculty, and I said, "We want to hire this person." And the dean says, "What's his qualifications?" I'd say, "What do you mean?" He says, "What's his degrees?" And I said, "What the heck has that got to do with anything?" I said, "If I applied for the job, you guys would be happy because I have a fancy Ivy League degree. But the only way I can teach that course is as an anthropologist because I'm not Chinese American." So I'm going to start with anthropological models of analysis like kinship systems, patrilineal societies, so on and so forth. All the theories and all that kind of frame of reference would be anthropology. Well, no Chinese in Chinatown goes around with anthropological models of kinship in his head. His world view is something else again. And if we're going to teach Chinese American kids about self identity and community, we don't start with outside/in models, we start with inside/out models. After all, whose definitions of us put us into concentration camps? It wasn't ours. So anyway, that's what we needed to do in Ethnic Studies. Well, even if I talked the Dean of Faculty into hiring this guy -- oh, by the way. Do you know why he asks that? It's because San Francisco State is accredited every ten years or so. One of the criteria for accreditation is how many PhDs you got on your staff. You know, this reminds me of a quote by a social scientist. It said, "The system secretes its gastric juices so as to polish the rough stones of dissent into smooth pearls of conformity." And right away, if I hire somebody from the community and he wants a promotion or anything like that, he has to publish in the traditional journals, overseen by traditionalists. So the system has its way of, even after we get people with our orientation, to pressure them into -- and I can't complain and say, "Hey, you can't have promotions." They're raising their family and everything like that. So little by little, I think it gets eroded away.

And the same sort of thing happens with classes. The Black Students Union had a class on African American music. And so I wanted to hire people like John Handy, an internationally-known... and so I tried to split time with the, with the music department. Have Handy half time music, half time in black studies. And the music department said, "Oh, you know, we don't have enough of a position even for half time." He was teaching one course there. Well, gosh, who controls the music department? It's people who focus on nineteenth century Western music, symphonies, you know. There's nothing wrong with that, but John Handy plays to an audience that's quite large, and it's part of our music tradition now. And so it's things like that that make it very difficult to innovate in the educational system, because it's based on tradition.

MA: So Ethnic Studies as it was envisioned by the students of the Third World Liberation Front, is that even possible to exist in academia, in an academic environment like San Francisco State or Berkeley?

JH: Well, it was a start. And we did make a lot of changes, and it still exists to some extent. My feeling is that down the pike, if the trend continues and Ethnic Studies comes to be looking like any other department, then it's time to do something else. But you know, this, although we've made a lot of changes in race relations in this society, it's not gone by a long shot. Look what's happening with Obama right now, you know. So it's, lot of it has changed in form, and it's gotten a little bit more subtle and things like that.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.