<Begin Segment 32>

MM: Clearly, throughout your career you've been on both sides of the fence. You've been a faculty member and a leader in the senate faculty. You've also been an administrator. In a healthy organization, and a healthy university, what's the relationship, or what should a relationship be between faculty and administration?

RK: Well, there shouldn't be a fence. I think we're all after the same thing. Of course, we bring sometimes different points of view to the table, but we ought to be able to hash this out. I guess a lot of it, as in politics, there's a lot of campus politics. I think often the answer is compromise. You can't hold to extreme positions, especially as there are large numbers of people affected, students affected. So, I don't know, but you always find some people rather recalcitrant, overly aggressive, and so forth. Well, as well know, in administration that's... they show you organizational charts and so forth, but, and they have these efficiency gurus, but mostly I think it's a people business, which life is about. I think if you have healthy relations with key members of your administration and faculty... you don't have to agree with them all the time, but if you're on talking terms and tolerate each other, I think things can work out.

MM: After 1963 you became much more involved in the upper administration of the University of Hawaii and I don't think we need to go chronologically through each position, and certainly you were, you held positions like Assistant to the President, Vice President for Community Colleges, University Vice President, Chancellor of the West Oahu College, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, and Acting Chancellor for University of Hawaii at Manoa. Certainly a very illustrious career. What are some of the high points? What are some of the things that you tackled that you're very proud of and you remember fondly?

RK: When you look at the list that you just read off, you can, one thing they never trusted me with was the budget. [Laughs] They never let me handle the money, which was so crucial.

MM: Who is "they"?

RK: Well, the administration. Never got a job, of course, that's not my forte. I was more into the academics, so-called purely academic side. But, as you know, so much of what the university does, I found out as I got into administration, was controlled by the budget boys.

MM: Right.

RK: Not only at the university but also in the governor's office, downtown. I got into administration rather reluctantly, but when we selected Tom Hamilton as the president of university, I was faculty senate chairman, so, of course, I got to meet him. And Tom was a person who really honored the faculty voice. And he was a political scientist. And we really got along very well. So Tom said to me, he came in early January, the legislature met in mid-January. And he says, "You know, I understand you know the legislature well." Well, I worked in Legislative Reference Bureau and lot of my friends who were members of the legislature. He said, "I need help, so can you be my assistant?" I thought it'd be just for that semester, so, so he, they lightened my teaching load and I got to be the assistant to the president, and early on was primarily working with the legislature. Well, I was lucky in that Tom Hamilton was a superb person. He was good in public relations, privately shy, but publicly he was a great speech maker. He wrote his own speeches and he was very effective in the community, very popular in the community and with the faculty, too, although later on with the Vietnam War he ran into trouble. But, the, but Tom Hamilton was such an able administrator, and I learned a lot from him.

But later on, even after Tom resigned, well, one of the assignments, it was during that legislative session that I worked with Tom, Tom Hamilton, that the legislature decided to buy Jack Burns' idea of enlarging educational opportunity beyond the high school, that is, build community colleges. So when the session ended and they passed the act authorizing community colleges, they said, "First of all, do a thorough study and convince us more and how we should organize the colleges." Tom gave me the assignment. It was assigned to university, so I was given this job of planning for the community colleges. And that was time-consuming but very heart-warming and interesting. We decided to canvass all of the high schools in the state. And we got a terrific return of ninety percent of questionnaires we sent out to the seniors, asking what their knowledge was of the community college and whether they'd go and how much they're willing to pay and so on. And as a result, we wrote a report. My wife wasn't being paid, but she's better at research than I am, especially in mathematics and quantitative analysis. So she helped me a great deal and we got a report out within six months, I think, with student help advocating a community college for the university -- for the state and tying it in with the university.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.