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MM: Yeah, let me challenge you for just a moment.

RK: Sure.

MM: But I think you're being modest when you describe this period in, the period of time. That you did more than just simply write this report in six months, that in fact you had to lay the groundwork for people accepting the ideas and dealing and facing down the opposition to the community college ideas.

RK: Well, this is when the Democratic Party was in full power and getting into full bloom. And one of the major planks was to increase educational opportunity. And Governor Burns, I said we'll work with him, and he bought into this idea in a big way. So we had his total support. And the Democratic Party was quite united and so many of them followed Burns. But even independents, I knew, I must say I knew most of the Democrats in the legislature, I knew most of the legislators. So I could to talk with them one-to-one. Lot of them asked me what it was about, this and that. And we got tremendous support for community colleges. This was opposed by some factions. The conservatives said we're destroying vocational education. Because our plan was to convert the technical schools, which were post-high school institutions assigned to the Department of Education. And they were strictly so-called vocational. They trained carpenters, plumbers, sheet metal workers, electricians, cooks and so forth. And they thought that the community college, especially when taking over by the university, would minimize these programs. So, for good reason they, so if that's the case, they were gonna vote against community colleges taking away. And of course the technical school people had their own lobbyists. And they didn't, people don't want change. They thought they'd lose their jobs. Some of them said, "Well, if you become a college, unless I get at least a master's degree or at least a, or even a PhD." So there was resistance to change.

And one of the most delightful things is, Honolulu Technical School, which was the biggest vocational school, said to me, "Okay, Dick, if you think that's such a good idea, we want you to debate this. We're gonna choose a labor representative and we're gonna have a student body assembly, and you people, you're gonna talk and defend the community changing the technicals, converting them to community colleges." The interesting thing is, they chose the wrong labor leader. They chose a labor leader who was a friend of mine, who was more for liberal education. He made a greater plea than I could have, saying this was a good step. That even an auto mechanic ought to more about English, and on and on he went. And this a good way to... and that you should treat all post-high school students equally. The thing that surprised me when I didn't know much about the technical schools, so I visited them as were, to talk about this idea of converting them to community colleges. And here were these students who were, who had their high school diplomas, treated so differently from those of us at university. When you're a university freshman, of course, you think you're free of anything. You can smoke, you can eat hamburgers for lunch or whatever, eat when you want and so on. These technical schools are run like public schools. You know, they ran from eight o'clock to three o'clock, they had a lunch break and the cafeteria was open only for an hour or so, and limited menu. And when I went in and said, "Oh, you know what we're gonna do, we're gonna have a open cafeteria and they can have potato chips and hamburgers and so forth," thereupon that we were gonna change the scheduling. We're gonna have 'em take some English and this and that. So we got a lot of opposition from the faculty. But we had, but the Democrats were pretty much in favor of community college. The more I spoke to people, the more they were convinced it was a good thing. So, we had surprising support.

In fact, when we went to Maui it was, they had very progressive political leaders and they were the ones who were most anxious to convert the Maui vocational school, technical school to a community college. And I remember going to Maui. And they were on a piece of land on about a few acres. And there was an empty space, a vacant lot of considerable, sixty acres or so. And I thought we should naturally expand into that area. I think it was part of state land so it wasn't gonna be difficult. So we had to convince the land board that we should, they should turn this acreage over to the Maui Community College. I went to testify with the land board and I thought I made a good case for getting forty more acres. I got chastised. "Why didn't you ask for sixty?" You know, that was the climate of the time. And so there was terrific support for community colleges.

MM: Has that support eroded over these last four decades?

RK: I don't think it has. There's always this tension, as you know, between universities and community colleges and they're vying for money. Early on, the community colleges, as I used to tell Tom Hamilton -- and in those days we didn't have reapportionment yet, so the power in the legislature was still with the neighbor islands. And if you put the community college in the neighbor islands in the rural areas, when there came a fight between the city and the rural areas, you know where the votes would be.

MM: Right.

RK: But we had tremendous support on, for the community colleges. Sometimes the University Manoa people think that the community colleges are getting more than they are. But it's a constant feeling of competition.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.