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KU: Where were we now?

BS: I was asked to take the position of assistant dean.

KU: Yes, and you were at UMass Amherst for nine years.

BS: Ten years.

KU: Or ten years, okay. And you were in the division of educational policy?

BS: Oh, yeah, that was one of the divisions, right.

KU: So you were assistant dean and then you returned to the regular faculty?

BS: Right.

KU: Can you talk about what you had ended up focusing in on, on educational policy?

BS: Before I get into that, let me talk a little bit about one of the incidents that happened to me while I was assistant dean. I was in that position for three years, and toward the end of that period, there was a strike called by black and Hispanic students, most of them graduate students. There were about three thousand students in that school of education from all over the country, in fact, and they had recruited a lot of black and Hispanic students, lot of them with military backgrounds. And so they complained about not being paid by the school, and they decided to go on strike to protest this, and they shut down the school for two weeks. I greatly sympathized with those students because I knew the fiscal background of a lot of these programs, and so I talked to the other administrators about this, that I really think they have a point here. They refused to listen to me, and I finally asked my office to begin to collect information, and I wrote three memos about three different programs, which I thought had raised a lot of questions. I told the then-acting dean that he needed to really look at these memos and take some action. Well, he wouldn't listen to me, and I said, "If you don't do something, I'm going to resign and (...) take this to the chancellor's office." And he wouldn't listen and so I went to the chancellor's office and they had me meet with the legal counsel there. And in the middle of my conversation with the legal counsel, I get a phone call from Agnes, and I got on the phone and she said, "Bob, you'd better come back home and take a look at this," and she described to me that she had come home and the windows on the first floor of our (two-level) house (had been) bashed in with a note attached to the handle on the door saying, "Bob, lay off or next time it's you." I relayed this to the legal counsel and he said, "Bob, I think you're on to something." So I went home and all hell broke loose. Because then news got to the (local) press, (which published a story on the incident).  (The paper had) an ace reporter there who had just started. He later won a national prize. Anyway, so he started publishing articles on this. He did research on them, for example, he found that the honorarium paid to so-called consultants that I had documented in the memo, one of the memos, had listed social security numbers that he discovered had not even been issued by the social security administration, so that was clearly a fraudulent case. Anyway, to make a long story short, it resulted in the resigning of three deans, only one of them survived. They convicted one of the faculty members, and another faculty member got off because his father was a judge himself. Anyway, that was something that stood out as one of the experiences I had there.

KU: There were programs to support minority students, but somebody was defrauding those.

BS: Right, right, which was why they weren't being paid. It's hard to imagine something like this happening in an academic institution, but a lot of these guys were street thugs who had been recruited into the program.

KU: They were trying to get an education and went wrong.

BS: Right. It's even kind of unbelievable to me to this day.

KU: So that happened when you were the assistant dean. Did you end up resigning?

BS: Yeah, I ended up resigning, going back to being a full time faculty member. But as a full time faculty member, I also had more time to develop the programs, including the establishment of an Asian Faculty Association, which came about because a friend of mine, a colleague in another department, was being denied tenure. And so I told him what we needed to do is bring together some of the Asian faculty and see if they can help us with this. That's where my community organizing came in handy. And then when we got together, about six, seven of us, we discovered that all of them had similar problems of being denied tenure or promotion. And so I said, "Now we have to make this group of you bigger," and so we went to the (phone directory) and found there were about forty other Asian faculty on campus. We called a meeting of all of them and about thirty of them showed up and formed the Asian Faculty Association, which then joined later with the Black Faculty Association, the Hispanic Faculty Association, formed a Minority Faculty Association. This association had a lot of success in turning around a lot of personnel cases like tenure and promotion, and we also influenced a lot of searches for chancellor, vice chancellor, other positions. They would come to us asking for our advice. We also filed a class-action suit against the university as Asian faculty, to the U.S. Office of Civil Rights in Boston, and they decided to come out and investigate the situation, which greatly increased our influence over the administration. I also taught a course on Asian American Studies there. There were only about four hundred Asian (students) on campus, but about eighty percent of them ended up taking my course over the years. I taught that for about five, six years. I also developed one of the first multicultural education programs in the country, which I taught for several years there. We had a large number of students go through that program. In fact, we still have some faculty there that are continuing that program.

KU: What kind of program was it?

BS: Multicultural Studies. It was really combining the study of all groups, because I had the perspective that you can't study just Asian Americans alone, you have to also study other groups to see how they interact with Asian Americans. And so that's what I did with that program.

KU: It's kind of like an Ethnic Studies program around different groups?

BS: Right.

KU: Was it a degree program?

BS: No. Well, it was a teacher credential program. Because I had a lot of teachers going through that program. In fact, one year, a group of teachers from the Amherst schools came to me and asked me to teach that course through a grant called the Teacher Center grant. And I said, "Well, I have a better idea." I said, "Why don't five or six of you who have taken my course before work with me to develop the same course that you would team teach with me to teachers in the district?" So they decided they would do that. And we taught the course as a team, even had the assistant superintendent take the course. There were about thirty or forty people taking that course.

KU: And you said it's still around, so a lot of people have gone through that teacher training curriculum program?

BS: Right.

KU: Could I just go back a little bit? What came out of the complaint that you filed with the U.S. Office of Civil Rights? Do you know what their findings were, how that was resolved?

BS: Well, I think just the fact that they came to campus and reviewed matters had a big influence. Because it turned around a lot of personnel actions and so forth, and so I don't know if they felt the need to issue a report because the administration was already reacting to it.

KU: And was this complaint mainly about faculty tenure and promotion?

BS: Yeah.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.