<Begin Segment 29>

SF: In your experiences [Interruption] as chairperson, and dean-ship, one of the issues must have been the rise of the Asian American movement. Students, Asian students must have made interesting demands on you, seeing that you were in this position of authority or responsibility, and how did that play out?

FM: Yeah. Yes. As it happens, the point at which I came into the chairmanship, it was that point of student rebellions, as I say. In fact, we've had the joke around our family that the student rebellions in our department started just as soon as I became chairman. [Laughs] And it ended around '71 or so, when I went out of office. [Laughs] So there's a direct correlation between rebellion and my chairmanship. But then I went into the dean's office at the point where the Asian crisis, the Asian protest emerges. You know, the Asians waited until the Black protest had run its course, and then, having become aware of their own ethnicity, they move in. And I had become, come into the dean's office at that point where I was called upon to run the ethnic programs because of what was assumed to be the skills I had in that area.

Yeah, I was called on to help organize or help establish the Asian American Studies program. But I didn't think of it as something separate from what else, what else I was doing, namely, helping run, establish the Black Studies program, and helping establish the Chicano program, and the Native American program, and so on. It was all part of the same pot, and so I never thought of myself as being particularly a leader in the Asian American Program so much, as that I was trying to run all these ethnic studies programs which were, perhaps, the most, the greatest headache of the Dean's Office in that period.

In fact, the dean, a guy named George Beckman, came to look upon me as a key member of the Dean's Office, I suspect, because the program that was causing -- uh, the set of programs that, which were causing more headaches for the Dean's Office than almost any other, were in that period, were the Ethnic Studies programs. And I was the guy who was intermediary as the associate dean in the Office running those programs. So when he went on to the provostship, and he had an acting deanship to fill, I was a little surprised that he called on me to be the acting dean. Here were three other guys in the Office who were -- and at least one of them who was much longer in tenure in the Associate Dean's Office, who might have been picked as acting dean, but he called me in and said, "Would you take over the acting deanship, until we find a dean?" And he roped me in, because he said, "It shouldn't be more than six months." I think if he'd said it was going to be a long term experience, I would have begged off, because the deanship is not a thing to do as an acting person. But, anyway, I thought this would be an interesting activity, and so I went into it. But, as I say, I think he called on me to do so because the Ethnic Studies programs were so -- in his mind, and probably in actuality were -- among the more difficult.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.