<Begin Segment 31>

MM: So, after that year you came back to Hawaii. And in 1962 a very important thing happened in your life, and in Mildred's life, and that's the birth of your son, Randall.

RK: Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, Randy came into our life and of course, as you well know, it does effect your daily routine and other things. But he's been a welcome, a very good addition.

MM: Let me ask a question then that actually has personal roots for me. What was it like being a father and being an academician at the same time?

RK: Well, a lot depends on your duties at that time. I think most of the time I was still doing... what was I doing? In administration, as you well know, your time is not your own. You have so many meetings and this place to go to and that place to go to. Whereas in a faculty you have your class schedule which pretty much binds you, but the rest of the time you're on your own. You can do, well, you can do your work in day or night or whatever, weekends. So, in that sense I think, being a professor in academic life is flexible and makes it easy. And you have vacations when your children have vacations, usually. So that's helpful. But when I got into administration, as Mildred can tell you, they saw very little of me.

MM: Around the time Randall was born was when you had just become department chair for political science, and also you were the senate chair for the university faculty. What's the role of shared governments in an academic setting? And how important is that?

RK: Yeah, well, this is before the university unionized. But the faculty senate was the voice of the faculty and we thought, as faculty members, we thought this was an essential voice in determining university policy. And in many ways, I think at that time we did have a voice at the policy table. I went regularly to the meetings of board of regents. And fortunately, the board was then led my Herb Corneulle, who headed one of the, Castle & Cooke, one of the big five firms, but a great guy. Herb read the Publisher's Weekly. He's an Occidental grad. But anyway he was, and he was very fair, and he ran -- when he was chairman, I still remember his, he kept the meetings short, to the point. And once as a faculty senate chair I was, I used to attend all of the board of regents meetings and that monthly, and was on campus. But as I was rushing from my office to -- I got a phone call, and it was a long phone call. By the time I got through and rushed over to the administration building, and entered the meeting room, Herb Corneulle says to me, "Dick, you're just on time, we just adjourned." So those were the days when the regents minded their own business, the policy-making, kept the meetings short. They didn't go into micro-managing, I thought. So those were nice days, but maybe it's nostalgic. We think so.

But one of the things I must say that my contribution to the faculty set, I found myself spending a lot of time -- we had no secretary -- so I had to spend a lot of time -- and we didn't have computers or e-mail -- I spent a lot of time typing my own notices, running around campus delivering the notices and I said, "Now, we need a secretary." And on one of my visits I was at UCLA and I was in Chuck Young's office, the president then, or chancellor, and I met the faculty senate chairman at that time. I don't know who he was. But he took me to his office, and lo and behold he has two or three secretaries, he's got... so when I went back home I said to the administration, "You know, if you really honor what we're doing, you ought to assign us a full-time clerical help." And lo and behold, they consented. And that was my, one of my major contributions to the university governance. I think to this day they still have a person assigned full-time to help the faculty.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.