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[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

JG: Well, let's talk about your academic career. You were talking earlier about why you ended up at UC Santa Barbara. It's interesting, I mean, I knew you hadn't studied Japanese American history per se, or you didn't write a dissertation along those lines, but maybe I'd like a little more information about how you ended up eventually doing Japanese American history after starting out in British and American history and then going to England.

AH: When I first went to college I started out as a psychology major, and I thought that I was going to be a shrink of some sort. I loved that because you have these juvenile indulgences in reading other people's character, and a lot of people seem to be oblivious to those things, and you think you're really clever at being able to isolate the reason for this and that and the other thing. Then you start taking psychology courses, and after Psych 1-A, the first course, which is a wonderful general introduction to psychology, then you move into -- I went to Berkeley -- taking psychological statistics, scientific method, and then I hated psychology. I never wanted to be into that again. So I got out of that major and became an English major. And that one semester I spent at Berkeley, my grades consisted of a D in psychological statistics, a C in French, a C in scientific method, and a B in English. So I became an English major. I was waiting to get these postcards from Berkeley to see if I flunked out, but I didn't. So when I transferred to UC Santa Barbara I became an English major. I would have stayed an English major. I liked it. I really enjoyed being an English major, but then what happened was that you had to take four semesters of a foreign language, preferably French, to be able to stay as an English major. And I told you my mother was dyslexic, and foreign languages, my brother and I were both terrible at them. You two are both really good at foreign languages, so you probably can't share this feeling that we have, but my brother was terrible and I was terrible. And so the French 3 teacher said, "I will give you a C in French 3 if you promise me that you won't show up for French 4." So anyway, that ended my English major.

So I was looking for something that would salvage what I liked about literature, and that's why I was interested in things like American studies or intellectual history. And the old intellectual history wasn't tied so much to culture in the sense of anthropological culture; it was tied to culture in the sense of belletristic culture, so it was literature. And so I was going to take intellectual history because I would be able to read a lot of novels and be able to keep that activity alive, and I liked that. I really enjoyed intellectual history. But even intellectual history started to shift a lot, too, in that intellectual history started to become a rigorous analysis of the history of certain kinds of ideas, and there was a school of intellectual history started by Arthur Lovejoy at the University of Chicago where they would take, say, the idea of unity, and then you would trace, for instance, the development of that particular idea. I didn't care about that. I really liked the social and intellectual aspects of ideas. How did ideas manifest themselves in society and into culture, and that was the thing that I really enjoyed. When I got my job at Cal State Fullerton, I quickly changed my course title from "Intellectual History" into "Cultural History." I renamed it so there'd be no question about what it was that we were going to do. I was involved in hiring most of the people that taught in the American Studies Department over at Fullerton because I was a cultural historian and most of them got their degrees in U.S. Cultural History or American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania or Brown University. So I felt very comfortable with cultural history.

I should just back up a little to the point where we left off. What happened was that I finished my doctoral orals, and then what I did was to get a job over in England, because I was going to write my dissertation there. And when I got over there, my job consisted of coaching rugby at a secondary modern school and teaching seminars in U.S. history at a redbrick school called Reading University. It was then reputed because a prominent writer named John Wain, a so-called "Angry Young Man," had taught there a few years earlier. So anyway, I was at Reading for only three or four months. I was supposed to stay in England for two years and try to write my dissertation, and then my dad died at age fifty-three. So I had to come back to Santa Barbara and help my mom out, and so this is what happened. I came back to California, it was in the middle of the academic year, and it was December 1965. I'd taken my doctoral exams in June 1965. And this John Bircher from Orange County by the name of John Schmitz, who you might have heard of -- he later ran for president of the United States with General Curtis LeMay as his running mate. He was a Bircher, but he taught at Santa Ana College. And he got elected to the state assembly of California and so there was a job open in the middle of the year, and when I applied for it they hired me. And so here I am replacing a Bircher, and I used his office, I had his telephone, and I got all these calls from women's groups saying, "Would you come to speak to our group?" And I said, "I think you've got the wrong person for this particular thing. I'm not even a Republican."

So, in any event, I taught there at Santa Ana College for just a little while, and then somebody from Cal State Fullerton who taught intellectual history classes decided he was going to accept a job at the University of Hawaii, a guy by the name of Idus Newby, who wrote on the history of the South, and was really a very talented historian. He ended up retiring at the University of Hawaii. But, so what happened is I got the job at Fullerton, and I was there for forty-two years teaching at Cal State Fullerton. There was one year, in 1979-1980, I taught at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Of course, I had my regular sabbaticals and leaves, but generally I was there all forty-two years. I had a tough time finishing my dissertation. I really had a tough time doing it because I wasn't able to concentrate on just writing that, because in the Cal State system, you teach four classes a semester. But I was hired as a guy that was an ABD, "All But Dissertation," and almost everybody in my department then was that way. And we were all about the same age. I was twenty-seven-years old when I started at Cal State Fullerton, and we were like grown up college kids, but not that grown up. A lot of the time was spent avoiding doing our dissertations. Going to bars, for instance, talking about this, that, and the other thing.

Eventually what happened was that it finally came down to time running out on me. I had to finish my dissertation by the end of the summer of 1971 or else I was going to lose my job. And I thought I had it made, but I didn't finish it. So the department had to have a vote, and so they voted to strip me of my professorship. They agreed to keep me teaching there for that particular semester. I had exactly the same classes, but I only got paid two-thirds of my salary. And boy, I'll tell you, I finished my dissertation within about a month and a half or two after that happened, and so they restored my job. They had to have a vote to restore my job, and one person voted against me. So it was like thirty-two to one. Of course, I always thought, "Who was that person?" You know how it's like one person in the class doesn't like your class? The rest of the people like it, but you're more bothered by that one person who doesn't like it than the people who like it. So, it wasn't too long after that that I started to change my attitude toward things. I always was dedicated as a teacher, I never had problems, I got nominated for teaching awards and received glowing student evaluations for my teaching when I was younger, but I just wasn't finishing my research projects in a timely fashion.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.