Presidents of the University of Hawai`I: Kenneth P. Mortimer

Presidents of the University of Hawai‘i Kenneth P. Mortimer

Center for Oral History Social Science Research Institute University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa July 2014 Copyright © 2014 Center for Oral History Social Science Research Institute University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa

This is a slightly edited transcription of an interview conducted by the Center for Oral History, University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa. The reader should be aware that an oral history document portrays information as recalled by the interviewee. Because of the spontaneous nature of this kind of document, it may contain statements and impressions that are not factual.

People are welcome to utilize, in unpublished works, short excerpts from the transcription without obtaining permission as long as proper credit is given to the interviewee, interviewer, and the Center for Oral History. Permission must be obtained from the Center for Oral History for published excerpts and extensive use of the transcription and related materials. The transcript and audio recording may not be duplicated or reproduced by any party without permission from the Center for Oral History, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa, 2560 Campus Road, George Hall 212, Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822. This oral history is dedicated to Kay Burton Nagle and the late Lorraine Murai Mortimer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jean Imada, former Administrative Assistant to the President, University of Hawai‘i

Judith Inazu, Associate Director, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa

Velma Kameoka, Director, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa

David McClain, former President, University of Hawai‘i

Joyce Najita, Director, Industrial Relations Center, University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa

Albert J. Simone, former President, University of Hawai‘i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Project Staff ...... ix

Photograph ...... xi

Introduction ...... xiii

Interviews

Biographical Summary ...... 1 Session 1 ...... 2 Session 2 ...... 22 Session 3 ...... 50 Session 4 ...... 75 Session 5 ...... 102 Session 6 ...... 125

Glossary ...... A-1

Index ...... B-1

PROJECT STAFF

Center for Oral History Social Science Research Institute

Director and Principal Investigator Warren Nishimoto

Research Coordinator Michi Kodama-Nishimoto

Research Associate Holly Yamada

Publications Specialist Cynthia Oshiro

Student Transcriber Kenory Khuy

Kenneth P. Mortimer

INTRODUCTION

The Center for Oral History (COH), a unit of the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa, was established in 1976. The only state-supported center of its kind in the islands, COH’s major function is to research, conduct, transcribe, edit, and disseminate oral history interviews with persons possessing knowledge about Hawai‘i’s past. COH seeks to provide present and future researchers with first-person, primary source documents with which to write history from a diversity of perspectives. Since its inception, COH has disseminated to repositories oral history interviews with more than 800 individuals and deposited in archives, a collection of more than 36,000 transcript pages.

COH also produces educational materials based on the interviews, conducts classes and workshops on oral history methodology, and serves as a clearinghouse for oral history research relating to Hawai‘i.

University of Hawai‘i Presidents Oral History Project Background and Methodology

This is one of a series of transcript volumes of oral history interviews with former presidents of the University of Hawai‘i.

The initial push for the series came in the mid-1990s from University of Hawai‘i president Kenneth P. Mortimer, whose office provided funding and general fiscal support. Former presidents Harlan Cleveland, Fujio Matsuda, and Albert J. Simone were apprised of the project and invited via letter by President Mortimer to participate in the interviews.

COH director Warren Nishimoto met with Judith K. Inazu, executive assistant to the president, to discuss details and logistics of the oral history project then followed up President Mortimer’s letter with a telephone call to the three former presidents to secure their commitment.

In 2011, after obtaining a similar commitment from Kenneth Mortimer, he, too was interviewed as a former president of the University of Hawai‘i.

In order to place the university presidency within the context of each president’s life experiences—his socioeconomic background, family, community, education, and academic and professional career—the interviews followed a chronological, life-history format.

Each was asked to comment in detail on his years as UH president, focusing on his ambitions, goals, accomplishments, and disappointments. Each was also asked questions about his relationships with individuals and institutions inside and outside the university (i.e., the board of regents, deans/directors, faculty/staff, students, the governor, legislature, other elected officials, community activists, and business leaders). Other major topics discussed include: reasons for and circumstances surrounding their accepting and leaving the post; the major issues confronted during each presidency; and the presidents’ roles and methods in dealing with issues.

Finally, each former president was asked for an assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, recommendations for the future of the University of Hawai‘i, and his reflections on life and career in Hawai‘i and elsewhere.

Cleveland, Matsuda, and Simone were interviewed by Warren Nishimoto and/or COH Research Associate Michiko Kodama-Nishimoto between January 1996 and September 1997. Mortimer was interviewed by Nishimoto and Kodama-Nishimoto in February 2011. Most of the interviews were conducted in Hawai‘i. Additional interviews were conducted in Minneapolis, Minnesota where Cleveland was president of the World Academy of Art and Science, and in Rochester, New York where Simone was president of the Rochester Institute of Technology. An unrecorded preliminary interview was conducted with each former president in order to establish rapport and obtain biographical information. No set questionnaire was used in the recorded sessions; the interviewers followed an outline of topics designed specifically for each interviewee. Each topic outline was constructed using biographical information from: the preliminary interview, each president’s vitae, and various written sources. The presidents participated in several interview sessions, with each session lasting an average of ninety minutes.

The interviews were transcribed almost verbatim by COH-trained student transcribers. The transcripts were audio-reviewed against the original recordings, then edited slightly for clarity and historical accuracy.

Each president reviewed his own transcripts. Each was asked to verify names and dates and clarify statements where necessary. COH then incorporated the changes.

Prior to releasing their transcripts for publication, the presidents read and signed a legal document releasing all rights, title, and interest to the edited transcripts to the University of Hawai‘i Center for Oral History for scholarly and educational use.

Kenneth Paul Mortimer

Born in 1937, Kenneth Mortimer, the second of four children of Richard and M. Patricia Mortimer, was raised in Massachusetts where he attended Middleboro High School.

Graduating from Hebron Academy, a college preparatory boarding school in Maine, in 1956, he matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania where he obtained an AB in English in 1960 and an MBA in International Business from The Wharton School in 1962.

He married Penn student, Hawai‘i-born Lorraine Murai, in 1959.

In the mid-1960s, he began studies at the University of California at Berkeley where he received his doctorate in Higher Education in 1969.

As Assistant Professor of Higher Education and Research Associate at Pennsylvania State University’s new Center for the Study of Higher Education, Kenneth Mortimer began what was to be a long and distinguished career in research and administration at Penn State. He was promoted to Professor in 1975; served as Director, Center for the Study of Higher Education (1976–1981); and joined Penn State’s central administration in 1983, as Acting Vice-Provost and later, as Vice President and Vice Provost.

In 1988, he was named President of Western Washington University.

From 1993 to 2001, he served as President of the University of Hawai‘i and Chancellor at Mänoa.

Succeeding Albert Simone in March 1993, he arrived at a time once described by a faculty member as a period when “no one could have been a successful president.” For most of his tenure, the university experienced huge reductions in state funding.

As president during the state’s decade-long economic slump, Mortimer’s task was a daunting one. He oversaw the reallocation of funds, tuition increase proposals, the procurement of more federal grants and contracts, and a dramatic stepping-up of fundraising efforts via the university foundation.

He also dealt with issues relating to university governance. He sought for UH, a new relationship with the state. He helped the university obtain constitutional autonomy, which meant more institutional control over its own affairs and finances. These efforts required close working relationships with the governor, legislators, state and university administrators, business and union leaders, regents, faculty, and students—all of whom expressed their varied views on the president’s actions.

Actions for which he was criticized included closing the School of Public Health, proposing tuition increases and having marshals on campus during student protests, and developing observatories on Hawai‘i Island’s Mauna Kea.

In May 2000, he announced his intention to resign the following year. However, he said that criticisms of his decisions did not lead to his resignation.

The Mortimers returned to Washington where he continued to share his knowledge and experience, relating to academic governance and management. He also assumed active roles on the boards of several foundations and agencies.

A decade after his university presidency ended, Mortimer, a frequent visitor to Hawai‘i, set aside time for his oral history. Having conducted oral history interviews and being keenly aware of their value, he responded to questions carefully and candidly.

By using recollections and stories of his childhood, speaking about his academic and professional background in higher education, sharing the comments and observations of those who knew him well, recalling the myriad challenges he faced as a university president, and articulating his knowledge and perspective on issues and actions taken, he provided a portrayal of himself that chisels away the oft- mentioned impenetrable “stone face”.

This oral history, coupled with events that have transpired since 2001, will allow interested observers and scholars to better understand Kenneth Mortimer, his actions, and his contributions to the development of the University of Hawai‘i.

Transcript Usage and Availability

This volume of transcripts includes a photo of the interviewee and a detailed subject/name index.

A biographical summary precedes the interview.

There is a series of numbers at the beginning of each transcript. This series includes, in order, a project number, cassette number, session number, and year the interview was conducted. For example, 25-45-1- 11 identifies COH project number 25, cassette number 45, recorded interview session 1, and the year 2011.

Brackets [ ] in the transcripts indicate additions/changes made by COH staff. A three-dot ellipsis indicates an interruption; a four-dot ellipsis indicates a trail-off by a speaker. Three dashes indicate a false start.

The transcripts are the primary documents presently available for research purposes.

Transcripts are available online at scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu.

The audio recordings are in storage and not available for use, unless written permission is obtained from the Center for Oral History.

For more information, visit the Center for Oral History website at www.oralhistory.hawaii.edu. BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY: KENNETH PAUL MORTIMER

Kenneth Paul Mortimer, the second of four children of Richard Paul and M. Patricia Goodwin Mortimer, was born in 1937 in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Upon his father’s return from military service in World War II, the family moved to a small farm in Middleboro, Massachusetts.

Dr. Mortimer graduated from Middleboro High School in 1955 and Hebron Academy in 1956. He received an A.B. in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1960 and an M.B.A. in International Business from The Wharton School in 1962.

In 1959, he married Honolulu-born Lorraine Murai, a fellow Penn student. They were happily married for 45 years before her passing in 2005.

The Mortimers in 1962 moved to San Francisco, where she was employed by the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California Medical School and he worked for Remington Rand as a salesman.

In 1965 he studied Political Science at California State University-Hayward, moved to San Francisco State University in 1965–66 and then began his studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. At Berkeley he was a United States Office of Education (USOE) Research Fellow and received a Ph.D. in Higher Education in 1969.

His first post-Berkeley appointment was as Assistant Professor of Higher Education and Research Associate at Pennsylvania State University’s new Center for the Study of Higher Education. There, under the able guidance of Director G. Lester Anderson, he was promoted to Professor in 1975. He became Director upon Dr. Anderson’s retirement and served in that capacity from 1976 to 1981.

Dr. Mortimer’s scholarly career resulted in over sixty publications. His most recent book (2007, with Colleen O’Brien Sathre), The Art and Politics of Academic Governance: Relations among Boards, Presidents, and Faculty, is a treatise on many years of research, study and practice in academic governance.

In 1983–84 he was appointed to chair the National Study Group on the Condition of Excellence in Higher Education by the National Institute on Higher Education. The Study Group’s report, “Involvement in Learning” was widely reviewed nationally and resulted in significant national discussions and reforms.

Dr. Mortimer joined Penn State’s central administration in 1983 as Acting Vice-Provost and eventually was appointed Vice President and Vice Provost.

He served as President of Western Washington University from 1988 to 1993. He then served the University of Hawai‘i as President and Chancellor at Mänoa from 1993 to 2001.

In 2001 the Mortimers returned to Washington state and he became a Senior Associate at the National Center for Higher Education (NCHEMS) in Boulder, Colorado. At NCHEMS he advised numerous universities and state agencies on matters of academic governance and management. He served as a director of Puget Energy, chair of the NCHEMS board, a trustee of Hebron Academy, and a board member of several foundations and agencies.

During his career, he chaired several other national boards and commissions, including the Association for Higher Education, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and the Joint Committee on Accountability.

He and his wife, Kay Burton Nagle of Sunray, Texas, reside in Woodinville, Washington, where they enjoy “monitoring” their five adult children and spoiling their four grandchildren. 2

Tape Nos. 25-45-1-11

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

with

Kenneth P. Mortimer (KM)

Honolulu, O‘ahu

February 14, 2011

BY: Warren Nishimoto (WN)

WN: This is interview number one with former president of the University of Hawai‘i Kenneth P. Mortimer. And today is February 14, Valentine’s Day, 2011. Interviewer is Warren Nishimoto. And we’re at the Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai‘i campus.

Ken, good morning.

KM: Good morning, Warren.

WN: I wanted to start by having you tell me the year you were born and where you were born.

KM: I was born in 1937 in Wakefield, Massachusetts, which is about twelve or fifteen miles north of Boston, generally considered nowadays to be a commuter suburb of Boston. My family settled there after they emigrated from England.

I stayed in Wakefield for the first eight years of my life. I was born to Richard Paul and Mary Patricia Mortimer. My father was a rebel of the first order. (WN chuckles.) For example, he ran away from home when he was fourteen, his freshman year in high school, and stayed away for two years. And he ended up on a farm in Nebraska just working as a field hand. He went into the navy for four years when he was seventeen years of age, and when he got home, he married my mother.

My mother was born in Woburn, Massachusetts in 1913. Her mother died when she was like three or four years old. And my grandfather Henry Goodwin remarried and they put my mother in a Catholic girls’ boarding school. So she was raised in a Catholic boarding school. She became very accomplished as a musician: voice, piano, and violin. And that love of music stayed with her through life.

My dad was a blue-collar worker. When he got back from the navy in 1933, he did a variety of things, but I remember one of the jobs was tying knots in a rope factory. I suppose that’s all mechanized today. But he’d come home with his hands all sore from working on ropes, tying knots all day. (WN chuckles.) I thought that was funny.

WN: Do you know how they got together?

KM: Well, yes. It’s not well known here in Hawai‘i, but my mother and father are first cousins. And they couldn’t get married in a Catholic church. My mother was a staunch Catholic, my father was Congregational. And the Catholic Church wouldn’t marry first

cousins in those days. So, anyway, they’d known each other for quite a while since my maternal grandmother and my paternal grandmother were sisters in the Messier family from Vermont. My daughter [Lisa Holman] has done a Mortimer genealogy, which is fascinating to me. The Messiers came over with Napoleon’s troops and were abandoned in Canada. Those French Canadians filtered into Vermont.

So they married in 1933 and took off on an automobile trip to California. I don’t know how they did it, what kind of car they were driving, or how they paid for it. But my mom got pregnant with my older brother, Bob, and they came back to Wakefield. Bob was born in 1935.

WN: How many are there?

KM: There are four of us. I’m the second of four children. Bob was born in 1935, I was born in 1937, my younger brother David in 1939, and my sister in 1944. When World War II started, my father reenlisted in the navy. To my chagrin, I don’t know why or just how it is, but I remember we lived in four or five different places in Wakefield. I can remember Catalpa Street, and Sweetser Street, and Maple Street. But when he went off to the war in late ’44, he was thirty-three at the time and he had four children. But he got in. They took him back in the navy. He became a salvage diver. So we then, the five of us, the four kids and my mother, were in a one-bedroom apartment on Columbia Road in Wakefield. And one bedroom means my brother and I slept this way, and my younger brother across the foot of the bed. And my mother and sister slept in the living room. There was one bathroom we shared with the people across the hall. It was down the hall.

Dad came home in 1945 or so and bought a small farm in Middleboro, Massachusetts, which is about forty miles south of Boston. Really quite close to Cape Cod, Brockton, and the New Bedford-Taunton area. That was a thirty-five-acre farm for which they paid $5,000. Half of it was swamp and woods. But I guess from the Nebraska days, he was going to be a farmer when he got back from the war. So we moved down there in February of 1946. That’s a significant event in my life because in the Middleboro public schools, they had already gone through long division and I missed it. And so began my long problem with mathematics. (WN chuckles.) I always traced it back to that. I missed it and I never caught up until I really got to graduate school. I mean, I had all kinds of trouble with mathematics. I finally got over it when I did well in graduate school with statistics. It became a professional necessity for me to be numerically competent, as they say.

WN: So tell me about, first of all, you can tell me abut Wakefield, Massachusetts, what kind of a town that was. You probably have a slight recollection of it.

KM: I have been back and visited once or twice. My grandparents are buried there. It was a commuter town. I was born in Melrose Hospital. Jane Tatibouet, a local person, [former legislator and UH regent] was also born in Melrose Hospital. She turned out to be a regent of the university after I left. And so Wakefield didn’t have much of a birthing facility. It really was a bedroom community for Boston. So I remember all that moving around there, but not much else about Wakefield because I left when I was about seven or eight.

Middleboro is my town of definition. We stayed there until I graduated from high school. And my parents didn’t leave until actually in my second year of college. So the public schools in Middleboro were my base.

WN: And how would you compare Middleboro with Wakefield?

KM: Middleboro was a more rural community. The major industry in town was a shoe factory, Walkover Shoes. It was far enough from Boston that it was difficult to commute from there. You could take the train into Boston, but forty miles in those days before those super highways was a two-hour drive through Brockton and up through the suburbs of Boston to get into the city.

So more about our life on the farm because we ran a small farm. Kay’s [i.e., KM’s wife] is from Texas and they’re used to sections of 640 acres; her daddy had four sections. Well, we had 35 acres, half of which was woods and swamp and not useable. But my older brother and I used to get up in the morning at five o’clock and milk the cows. I’d do it two or three times a week, and he’d do it two or three times. And [when] Dad wouldn’t have to go to work—the two days that he didn’t have to go to work—he did it. He had a full-time job and tried to run a farm. We had seventeen cows we had to milk in the morning before we went to school.

WN: And what job did he have?

KM: He was a corrections officer at a state penal institution. It wasn’t a heavy security penal institution, it was a farm. And the inmates worked the farm. He used to call himself a “screw.” I don’t know what they call themselves nowadays, but it was a supervisor of those inmates. He had to be at work at four o’clock in the morning. It was a state job. So that’s how he really supported the family and ran the farm. The tragedy is, the things you can think about, we had a herd of hogs, about forty, and we lost them all to hog cholera. We had a dairy farm and chicken range and all that. I learned to drive a tractor as most farm boys do. So that part of my life is, I think, the formative life in terms of hard work and responsibility. You had chores to do and they had to be done. The cows had to be milked and mucked. You had to take care of those things. In the summertime, you took in hay. That was before the days of balers. We used to pitch it up into wagons. There was a river running in back of the property. When we’d get through with the hay, then we’d jump in the river. That river’s polluted today, but those days, it was a Tom Sawyer kind of a youth, if you think about it. I never thought we were poor, but I know we never had any money. I mean, that we all understood. And so, we used to like to pick strawberries for a nickel a basket so we’d have a little spending money. On our hands and knees, up and down strawberry beds.

WN: And who were your nearest neighbors? Where were they?

KM: Not too many actually. One across the street, one beside us, and there was a mile between us and the next house. And we lived in really North Middleboro, rather than in town. So my mother’s big decision was to send us to Middleboro to schools. My sister went to a one-room schoolhouse in North Middleboro. There was a small school system in North Middleboro. My mother’s decision was to send the three boys to downtown Middleboro schools because we were from a bigger environment and she thought we’d do better there. We took the school bus four or five miles into town. So Middleboro was a small town upbringing, if you will. And I went through high school there. I was Mr. Everybody in high school, I guess. I lettered in three sports, and sang in the choir, and played in the band, and was president of the student body.

That was a great experience for me. Sports were my life and I couldn’t understand anything else. I mean, academics became second. The only way my mother got me to pay attention to algebra was she threatened not to let me play football. So that got me to pay attention to try to shore up that weakness.

WN: Tell me about your father. How did he discipline you?

KM: Not much at all. He had a very quick sense of humor. Educated only through the eighth grade, but he used to read encyclopedias and dictionaries as a hobby. He was a very bright man. We did get lickings when we deserved it and that kind of stuff. It was physical. Now they call it “child abuse.” (WN chuckles.) We never thought of it as child abuse. It was just, you know, “Get in line or else.” (WN chuckles.) And there were certain things. I can remember. We were fixing something on the farm one day and he says, “Get me the bolt cutters.” And I didn’t move. And he said, “Get me the bolt cutters.” And then he hollered at me, “Get the bolt cutters,” and I started to cry.

And I said, “What are bolt cutters?”

WN: And you really didn’t know what they were?

KM: I didn’t know what bolt cutters were.

WN: You weren’t being a wise guy?

KM: No! I said, “What are bolt cutters? I don’t know what bolt cutters are.” It was the same when my mother said, “Fold your pants.” And “Find the crease.” And “Find the seam.” And then she started to holler, “Find the seam, find the seam!”

And I finally, “What’s the seam?” The story of my life is, you just have to tell me what the game is and I’ll figure it out. But I got to know what a seam is. And there’ll be some stories about that when I arrive in Hawai‘i in 1962. I’ll talk about that later.

So my parents—my mother—was raised as a Catholic but came disaffected with that religion. We were raised in a Baptist church. Actually, for her, that was a big switch, as you can imagine. She eventually became a Christian Scientist and even a practitioner in Christian Science. So what I’ve said to most people is, my father was around and all that, but I got most of my values and behavior from my mother. Of all the four children, I look the most like her. And I have followed the life that she would have admired. I was the first to go to college. Not the first one to go, first one to graduate from college. And I’ll talk a little bit of that struggle later.

The life-changing event for me was, I was chosen to go to Boys State in 1954, where you go to meet with the governor and all that. There were two boys [selected] from every high school in the state, I suspect. I don’t really know if that’s the case. When I was there, I met a fellow from Nantucket. We struck up a friendship. When I went home, the job I had lined up for the summer had evaporated. I had lined up to be the supply boy for a Dairy Queen operation. When I arrived back, the guy that had the job before decided that he wanted it, so I was out. So I went up to Nantucket. I didn’t have anything else to do. And I stayed with Jack Topham and got a job in a restaurant, the Mad Hatter, as a kitchen boy.

Well, I’d worked in restaurants before. My first job was at thirteen years of age washing dishes at the Golden Spur restaurant. I kept that job all the way through high school. Even when I was playing football on Saturdays, I used to arrive there on Sunday morning and clean up the Saturday mess. So I was used to working in restaurants. When I was in Nantucket, I began my experience with college kids. I was going into my senior year in high school. They were all there for the summer and most of them were from Harvard, Yale, Smith, Wesleyan, and places like that. Elite colleges in the East. And they began to tell me that I could aspire to that. One of the people there was a fellow named George Freiday, who was a French faculty member at Hebron Academy in Hebron, Maine, and said to me, “What are you going to do when you grow up?”

And I said, “Well, I’m going to go to college, but I don’t know how I’m going to afford it.” Nobody else in my family had ever done that. And we, of course, didn’t have any money.

So he suggested I come to Hebron for a year. My mother and father drove me to Hebron where we met with the headmaster. It’s outside of Lewiston, Maine. My high school advisors were against my going to Hebron. Now, I wasn’t an academic dummy. I think I graduated in the top 10 percent of my high school class, but I wasn’t a real star, academic star. But I mean, I just muddled through. So that year at Hebron was a turnaround year for me academically and emotionally, and a whole variety of things.

First and foremost, I didn’t want to play sports anymore. At Hebron you have to play a sport a semester. Fall, winter and spring. I tried to get out of it. The headmaster told me that you can’t hang around in a boarding school, you know, all boys, and not have an outlet for your energies. (WN laughs.) A hundred and eighty boys at Hebron. Now it’s coed and I served on the board of Hebron for a while. The headmaster’s name was Claude Allen. He gave me a half-tuition scholarship. Room, board, and tuition were only $1500, of course, in 1955, ’56.

That year at Hebron was a real turnaround for me. They worked me academically like I’d never been worked before. Hebron had a way in English of grading you above the line and below the line. And they didn’t give anybody higher than a C. Above the line was what you had to say, and below the line were the mechanics. I adopted that when I was teaching graduate students. I told them, “If you can’t write well, you’re not going to be able to function as a doctoral student.”

I didn’t do well at Hebron. In fact, again, the algebra came up and beat me over the head. I didn’t do well in the SATs. I wanted to go to Harvard but I didn’t get admitted. The headmaster told me as soon as he saw my SATs, “You will not be admitted to Harvard.” Well, I’d only had one semester of chemistry at the time. They had me taking the chemistry SATs. I didn’t know squat. It’s also why I say, “I never tested very well anyway, so there.” You can’t measure tenacity and other matters of that sort.

So the headmaster said, “You will go to Brown.” And Brown’s in Providence, Rhode Island, an Ivy League school. The people at Penn [University of Pennsylvania] had interviewed me and were interested in me. They told the headmaster that, so when Brown admitted me, they didn’t give me any financial aid. So the headmaster got on the phone and got me some financial aid at Penn, and that’s how I end up in Philadelphia. (Chuckles)

At Hebron I won the most prestigious award I’ve ever won in my life. It’s called the “Hebron Cup.” And it’s awarded to the graduating senior who has the qualities most admired by the faculty. So it wasn’t for academic excellence. I didn’t win any of those awards. I’ve received, as you know, lots of awards in my life. But that’s still the one that I value most. The part of it that’s funny, again, when I graduated from college in 1960, I got a letter from the headmaster. It said, “You still owe us about $600. And we never bother the boys with these matters until they are ready to assume that obligation.” (WN chuckles.) I thought my parents were paying it, but they couldn’t afford to. So when I got out of college, I began paying Hebron fifteen dollars a month to pay that room and board stuff. So years later, when they approached me after my time here [i.e., as UH president], I agreed to serve on their board and have done some other things for them. But that’s the institution that I’m most fond of, I guess.

WN: Now, when you were at Middleboro School, what kind of a student were you there?

KM: I was a good student. Good in history and some other matters like that. There’s a thing called the Silver M Society. I was elected to that for good citizenship and leadership. I did graduate in the top 10 percent of that class, but there were only 108 people in the class. And so I was a good student, but I never. . . . I was a good student because I thought that’s what was required of me. I’m very much oriented to being successful. That’s probably the story. My father asked me---when I was getting a driver’s license, he’s sitting in the back seat, I was beside the examiner. And the examiner started to ask me about my plans. And I said, “I’m going to do this, and this, and this.”

My father says, “What makes you so different?”

I said, “I don’t know. I just want to be better.”

And I think that’s the only way I can explain it. When I was reading what people had to say about me for this particular set of interviews, the words “tenacity” and “He gets things done,” and all that sort of stuff come up. And that’s probably true. When I was here in Mänoa, particularly in this circumstance, but in my administrative life, I was to say, “I’m a dangerous man when I know what I need to do.” And that used to get people a little nervous. Because I’d sit down with people and say, “You’ve got a half a dozen priorities you have. Which of them are the most important?” And then the blood would drain from their face as I began to tell them what we could support and what we couldn’t. So that’s been a characteristic of my life. And the other things, the nicest things were said about my mother instilling a sense of integrity in me: what’s right. And I think I got that before I got to college.

WN: I wanted to ask you, I wanted to go back a little bit, to your chores and responsibilities you had on the farm. What kinds of things did you have to do, what things were you responsible for, and did you take on a bigger load than, say, your siblings?

KM: Well, my older brother and I were really the two siblings of record here. My younger brother and my younger sister were around, but I’m, of course, very competitive. And Bob and I used to fight all the time. Dad worked five days per week, and between us, we had to cover the milking in the morning. So that was one chore that we had. And one week I’d have to do it twice and another week, three times. We had to milk seventeen head of cattle before we went to school.

WN: And what kind of farm was it?

KM: Well, it was a mixture of things. At the time, the largest [number] of cows we had was seventeen. As I told you, we had a herd of hogs, forty, all of whom we lost to cholera. But when you’re doing farm work, you’re doing stuff that’s really hands-on. For example, we had a garbage route. We would drive to Boston twice a week with my father and stop at grocery stores and pick up their waste, animal waste and other matters, and feed it to our hogs. So somebody had to always go with Dad because you’re lifting all those barrels and getting them on the truck and so forth. Boston was a forty-mile drive. I can remember those times in terms of those trips because they were sort of fun on the one hand. Of course, the normal routine of farming, in the spring, hay has to be cut and brought in, et cetera. We lost our barn to a fire from spontaneous combustion. We put the hay in too green. And it eventually caught fire and the whole barn caught fire.

We also did some truck gardening. My father was quite an articulate, glib, and outgoing personality. One of the things he liked to do was take the vegetables he had grown and park his pickup truck alongside the road somewhere or go calling on people in the city,

house-to-house, selling them fresh cantaloupe, corn, tomatoes, and stuff like that. That was a way to get cash.

But it’s hard to say what all the chores were on the farm, but they are and just my mother and father and my older brother and I were really responsible for the chores. Halfway through that, we got, I think, a hired man who lived on the property with us. Dad built him a little shed in the back. But it was chickens, cows, anything else. We had a occasional horse around for my baby sister to ride.

WN: Did you have a horse?

KM: No, I rode the horses and all that. We used to go to the slaughterhouse to get horse entrails to feed to the hogs. In those days, they were slaughtering horses a dime a dozen. So those chores were just normal for anyone who lived on a farm. And it’s a small farm, so you’re always digging, digging, digging. I mean, half of it was swamp. One day, my dad was plowing with an old Fordson tractor that had a worm gear in it. And when you get stuck so it won’t move, the front wheels begin to come up. You better get your foot on the brake in a hurry. He didn’t and it flipped over on him. We had to dig him out and get the fire department down there. It’s lucky he landed on a harrow in the back it was carrying, just between it, on a safe place. He could have killed himself. His leg was pinned under the tractor. So we had to get the fire department to dig him out.

One time we were burning off a field. We got the fire started at the other end of the field, started one down here, the wind wasn’t blowing (chuckles) the way we wanted it to blow. So I remember him hollering, “Hey, I need some help over here.”

I said, “I’m busy over here.”

He said, “Well, if we don’t get this one pretty quick, it’s going to get to the woods.”

So, I mean, it was burning up the field. Those are the kind of experiences we had.

We had a rowboat on the river, the Taunton River, right in back of our farm. In the summertime, we would camp out at night with a blanket. I tried to be as athletic, as agile as some of these guys. We’d be out there in the woods at night and sleeping by the riverbank, and doing silly things with BB guns, and things like that. But some of these guys would grab these thin trees and swing from tree to tree. I could never do that. I’d always fall, you know, pretty soon, anyway. I just didn’t have that kind of ability. I have a chunky, compact body. When I swim (chuckles) I work hard. (WN chuckles.) Some of these people, it just seemed like when they get in the water, they just float. My body sinks.

WN: I wanted to ask you. You were just telling me what you did to have fun as a kid. What other things would you do to enjoy yourself? Who were your friends?

KM: Mostly high school classmates. I don’t remember too much about the earlier years except fighting. I remember a lot of it. I did get into a lot of scraps because I guess I deserved it. Whatever it was. (WN chuckles.) That sort of stopped when I got involved in organized sports. It seemed to be an outlet for my energies. The eighth grade was the first time they had an organized sports program. We were allowed to play organized football and became cannon fodder for high school freshmen. And they had basketball, too.

WN: Were there organized sports outside the school?

KM: No, gee, we did pickup things. I mean, we were always playing tag football with the neighborhood kids, and baseball, or whatever. We had a basket set up on the barn and my brother and I used to compete playing basketball and stuff like that. But no, I never did anything like Little League or any of that stuff. It wasn’t around in my day. Of course, we lived in the country. It’s only four miles from town, but four miles is a long way. When you miss the last bus at ten o’clock at night, you had to walk. There were no such things as cell phones and things like that.

WN: And were most of the kids that you played with or hung around with in similar economic circumstances?

KM: No, actually you’re digging pretty deep here, Warren. No, actually, when I went to high school, I couldn’t afford to do things like go to the drugstore for a Coca-Cola between the time school was out and the time practice would start because I didn’t have money like that. And I had friends, one whose father was a vice president in a—W.T. Grant. Another’s owned a restaurant. I never felt discriminated against or anything like that. But I know I didn’t have the kind of financial resources people like that seemed to have as a routine. I mean, they could get Daddy’s car and go to the prom on a weekend or something like that. I learned a lot from that. At the time, of course, you’re a little embarrassed by the things you can’t do and so forth. But as I said, I didn’t think of us as poor. But I know my mother pawned her wedding ring. That was a family heirloom. She had a platinum ring with some stone in it. I assume it was a diamond. She had to pawn it. I didn’t know that until many years later. I’m just saying we were always in debt in one way or other.

When we got off the farm my last two years in high school to another residence a few miles from there, Dad took a job working for Sears Roebuck as an appliance salesman. Eventually he ended up as a pipefitter for Electric Boat [Company] in Groton, Connecticut. He never held a job for more than three to five years at a time that I can remember. He was very creative with his hands. He started a heating air-conditioning business. I took a semester off from college to try and help him but I found out he wasn’t much of a businessman. He’d do the work before he figured out how they were going to pay him. So when he finished the job, he’d walk in and ask for his money, they’d say, “Oh, I haven’t even talked to the bank yet.” I mean, he wasn’t destined to be successful in that regard. Very bright and a good man, but when I saw those things, I realized that that’s not going to be my lifestyle.

WN: Now, tell me about your mother. You said she taught you integrity. What kind of a person was she?

KM: We say my brothers probably take more after my father. My mother, well, I don’t know what to say about that. She was raised in a very strict environment. But she had values that were admirable. And this question of telling the truth, working hard, doing the right thing when you didn’t know what the right thing was. I’ve always had this sense of doing the right thing and I don’t know where that comes from. I was telling you a story earlier that I’m not going to tell in public. I knew that wasn’t the right thing to do. I wouldn’t have done a thing like that. And when I first got here in Hawai‘i, I went around and told every legislator things I would not do. You cannot tell me who to hire. It is not right. I’ll talk about that when I go into the Hawai‘i experience.

You know, when I was in graduate school, I was reading David Riesman’s book [The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character] about being inner-directed. I’m an inner-directed man. And the criticism of me in my job as president in both places was that I’m an inner-directed man, that I don’t communicate well. I’ve talked about

these jobs in a variety of ways, and what they teach you is what you do not do well. You get them for what you do well. When you’re in them, you begin to find out that you really don’t wow the people. You’re not a charismatic figure. You can’t give a speech and expect everybody to get in line.

My mother was also inner-directed in that way. She would say, “You cannot come at Kenneth head-on. That’s not possible. You can get him to do whatever you want him to do if you just find a way to go around the barn or get him to want to do it himself.” I was, as some people would say at that time, a stubborn, difficult child. I was in all kinds of scraps. And they used to ask my mother, “Where did you get that kid?” My older brother was a gentleman and I was sort of a punch-him-in-the-nose first. (WN chuckles.) She told a story many times, and I can’t help it. In the first grade—and my brother was two years ahead of me—they wanted to know at the first parent-child meeting, “Where did you get that one? Somebody walks down the aisle, he sticks his foot out and trips him. And finally he starts to fight with him.” So it was a scrappy kind of life.

And I said I really got control of that in my eighteen- to twenty-two-year period. I got involved in sports and eventually realized that you can’t beat everybody up. Sooner or later you’re going to take one on the chin and it hurts. One day, I came home beaten up pretty badly. And my mother was chagrined. My face was all swollen. A weightlifter and I had had a tiff on the basketball court at practice. And so he waited for me outside and beat the stuffing out of me. I came home and my mother was so chagrined. My father said, “Leave him alone. He’s had enough of a beating today.” So the issue was, whether I was going to go to school the next day, which I did. My face was all swollen and black- and-blue. Well, that won me a lot of points from the guys who saw the fight (WN chuckles) because I wasn’t going to stay home. But that’s the last fight I ever had. I really got beaten, (chuckles) as far as I can remember.

I was active in the church all the way through to the time I got to Western Washington University, actually. I led youth groups. And when Lorrie [Lorraine Murai] and I got married in 1959, we got baptized together. So that was always part of my life and a very important part. But the older, the more experienced I got, the more these sort of what I call moral dilemmas come.

WN: Did you mother ever catch you lying or doing anything . . .

KM: Yeah, here is my most embarrassing experience with my mother. She was active in the church, a Christian Science church. I drove to pick her up from a Wednesday night service. It was in the middle of summer and the church windows were all open. I’m in the car, I ripped the underside of my coat on the—and I let out a string of expletives. (WN chuckles.) And of course, everyone in the church heard it. And when my mother came out, she had tears in her eyes and told me how embarrassed she was. So I had an attitude, I guess, you’d say.

WN: (Chuckles) Now, I was reading an article and it said she sewed your clothes out of feedbags?

KM: (Laughs) Yes. On the farm, when you buy grain for the cows, they used to come in almost like calico kinds of things. My grandmother and my mother were fairly handy. During the late years on the farm our grandparents came to live with us. The feedbags were a calico sort of material. And they made underwear out of them. There are pictures of us, the three of us standing there, the three boys, and all of the suits we were wearing were handmade. So, yeah, they did make some of the suits—I mean, underwear—out of grain bags. The women sewed us our Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. There are some

pictures of my brothers and I, the three of us, standing like stairs. And all of those suits were made by my mother and my grandmother.

WN: Here in Hawai‘i they made them out of rice bags.

KM: Yeah, well, it’s the same thing. I got to know this culture, and as you know, way back from 1962 on—my ex-brother-in-law lived here all of his life. And we used to swap childhood stories and find out we were doing the same things. We made guns out of rubber tubes. You pull them and stretch them over with a Popsicle stick here and you stretched the rubber like that just on a piece of wood. Then you go hunting each other and you pull it like that, the rubber band goes boom. And it’s not just a little rubber band, it’s a half-inch [wide]. It’s made out of old [tire] inner tubes. And those were the kind of fights you would have. Well, they were doing that here, too.

WN: (Chuckles) Yeah, right.

KM: I think kids do the same things the world over.

WN: Right. Pretty universal, huh? Besides that, what else did you make? What kind of toys did you make?

KM: I’m not very creative and I didn’t make toys. I just used whatever was—I can’t remember having a toy. I really don’t. I mean, I got a bicycle. Again, it’s part of this feeling like the second son is somebody’s shadow. I’d always just get hand-me-downs, and that used to make me angry. I can remember, one of the greatest disappointments in my life was for Christmas, I got a pair of storm boots. They’re boots that come up to your knee. And I put them on and they were the wrong size. They were the first new pair of boots I can ever remember having. I was so disappointed they were a wrong size. They had to be sent back to the catalog and it was another two months before I got them, you know. (WN chuckles.) I was just chagrined.

I got a catcher’s mitt. My uncle worked for Spaulding sports outfitters and got me a catcher’s mitt. And that was a prize. And we had a football, but it was the family football. So I didn’t have really toys. It’s hard to remember the Wakefield days. There’s a newspaper article that I got hit by a car in Wakefield. It bothers and amuses my daughter. But I apparently ran across the street and some guy hit me. I don’t remember. But toys were not in my world.

And then, of course, I did take violin lessons. I told you I played in the band. I played the tuba, sousaphone. I sang in the a cappella choir. I am a tenor and took voice lessons.

WN: Did your mom have a say in that?

KM: Yeah. She made us all take music lessons. My brother played the piano. She’s often said that the two younger kids were treated very differently than the two older kids. Much sterner, much more disciplined. Part of that, I’m quite sure, was because of my mother’s upbringing. She didn’t have a lot of experience in life, so everything for her was new. She was afraid of us not doing the right thing. So sometimes the lickings were severe. I remember one time when we lived on Catalpa Street and I was under staunch orders not to take my younger brother—and I couldn’t have been more than five years old at the time myself—not to take my younger brother in the swamp. I used to hang around the swamp. And of course, I took him there and he fell in and I had to go in and get him. And I brought him home. And he had on a blue bunny suit and it was soaking, sopping wet.

“How did he get wet?”

“He fell in the swamp.”

“I told you not to take him in the swamp.” And I got it for that. And another time, I put my fist through a window and I got it for that.

But my formative years were really Middleboro. I can remember some of these things from Wakefield, but the Middleboro days and the farm and having those responsibilities, all the way from mucking out cows and shoveling manure and spreading it, to a garbage route. I had a summer job working in a fish market, filleting fish and shucking oysters. And I got all the kind of restaurant jobs you can think of: dishwasher, and all the way. When I finally gave up the restaurant experience, I was the vegetable cook at a fancy restaurant in Nantucket. So we always believed work was a noble enterprise.

In fact, Kay and I went to a weekend seminar on the theology of work and finally learned that it [i.e., work] has Biblical as well as other kinds of roots. I never worried about the kind of work, as long as I could work and be willing to do whatever it took in the early days to earn a buck.

The story I’m most fond of occurred when I went to Philadelphia, I’d never been out of New England in my life. My mother put me on the train in Providence. I changed trains in New York City Grand Central. What a big deal for me. I’m carrying two suitcases. A guy stops me and tells me a sob story, I give him a ten-dollar bill. He says he’s going to send it [back] to me. He’s hard up now. What do I know? It’s the first time I got hustled.

But I can remember when my brother and I, this was from Middleboro days, were going up to stay with my aunt in Wakefield as sort of a mini vacation. We were in South Station in Boston, the two of us standing there in our Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. And a guy says, “You kids are from the farm, huh?”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, you still have manure on your shoes.” (WN chuckles.)

I can remember hayseed kind of stories like that.

So I’d never been out of New England. My mother put me on the train in Providence, Rhode Island. And I changed trains in New York and ended up in Philadelphia at 30th Street Station. And I didn’t know where the University [of Pennsylvania was]. I’d never been there. So I asked some guy where it is and he says it’s like up there. You know, it’s West Philadelphia. It happened to be about seven or eight blocks. I had two suitcases. So I start walking. All I can think of is Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia.

(Laughter)

What do I know? I don’t know from nothing. Well, I finally made it to the university and learned how to get around, but I lugged two suitcases, which were all I had in the world. When I tried to register I found out I didn’t have enough money to register. They’d given me a half-tuition scholarship. And I thought, well, the first semester I would have to pay half of that, and I had $400 in my pocket. I had earned that in the summer in Nantucket. So I didn’t have any other source of support. So when I went to register, they told me that freshmen had to pay room and board. And that was another couple hundred bucks. I didn’t have it so I couldn’t register.

So I began to hustle. I got a job in a women’s dormitory washing dishes and that paid for my food. And I got a job in the laundry and that gave me some spending money. They don’t loan money to first-time freshmen, but they had an emergency loan that they were able to give me. So, that was the experience. Nobody told me about these matters, as far as I remember. And so then you say, “I’m here and I’m not going home. And I’ll find a way to stay. It’ll take a little while.” So I had one of the largest work scholarships Penn had ever given out because I was working my freshmen year twenty-five, thirty hours a week.

But I did meet Lorrie [i.e., Lorraine Murai] in the women’s dormitory, so that’s another story. I majored in English, but I didn’t decide to do that until my junior year. I didn’t know what was going on. You know, I just wanted to graduate. I was working hard to support myself and you just need to get through. Lorrie was a year ahead of me. Our birthdays were eleven days apart. We were both born in 1937. We worked together in the cafeteria. She waited on tables and I washed dishes. We’d take our evening meal together with a bunch of other student workers before we would then have to go back to work. Serve dinner and wash the dishes.

I’ve always said that I never asked anybody to marry me. Both women I’ve married told me we were going to get married. But Lorrie started writing me when she came home to Honolulu between her junior and senior years. She wrote me a letter. My parents had moved to Connecticut by that time. So we started exchanging correspondence during that summer. Then in November, we had our first date, which was a movie. In later years I asked her the name of the movie, and she could not remember. It was Pat Boone in State Fair. One thing led to another and so I said, “Why don’t you come home and meet my parents for Christmas?” Her oldest sister Ernestine was living in New York at the time. So we stopped in New York—I stopped in New York. She stayed with Ernestine for a while, then came up and spent a weekend and met my folks.

In February, we decided to get married. She didn’t want to come back to Honolulu. I still have a letter from Ernie [Dr. Ernest] Murai—who as you know, was an important person in the local culture—trying to persuade me not to marry his daughter. He said that I was a young man without prospects and if I really loved her, I’d let her come home after she finished school. And when I got settled, then if things were still okay, then fine. “Then we’d be pleased to see you.”

I told him “Thanks, but no thanks.”

I thought maybe it was an interracial thing. But no, that was not part of their culture. I did do a lot of reading about interracial marriages before I started dating Lorrie. The only place I could find anything on it was Hawai‘i. We got married in 1959. There were still miscegenation laws in Southern states prohibiting interracial marriages. They weren’t declared unconstitutional until 1976. We were used to getting stared at in restaurants in Philadelphia. The cultural aspects of it were not important to us but I had a friend from Virginia who tried to persuade me against it. He was a colleague and argued that this was a big mistake. You just don’t marry people of another race, etc.

WN: How did your parents think about it?

KM: My uncle wanted to know what side she was on in the war because he was a veteran. All of our adult males went to World War II: my father, and my two uncles. And we lost a cousin over Germany in a bomber. All that was a part of our early lives. I remember Pearl Harbor and so did Lorrie. I remember my father being away for six to eight months, and all of my uncles, and my cousin. Uncle John was a medic in the South Pacific and didn’t

come home for three years. So he wanted to know what side was she on in the war. And that was a hard attitude to have. My other uncle was wounded in the D-Day. He was in there a couple of days later than D-Day, but nonetheless he was part of that. So the war was always a part of our life. That part of it.

But my parents were aces. My mother said, when she saw her, “She’s beautiful.” Now, we had not yet decided to get married when they first met her. Eventually we decided to get married in our rented flat in Philadelphia. I was active in a church. The preacher was going to come by and marry us in our apartment. But the family decided to come up to Philadelphia for the wedding in ’59. Ernie Murai, Hazel, cousin Joan, sister Jeanette, cousin Tadao (he’s Edmund Kato, but we call him “Tadao”) and her sister and her husband from New York. And my parents came from Connecticut.

We were broke. I didn’t have the money to pay for a wedding ring, so Lorrie bought them. Forty-four bucks for two rings. My brother-in-law, who lived here in Hawai‘i, had a brother who was a jeweler. Lorrie got a job while I finished college. When the Murai clan arrived they had this suitcase full of envelopes. I didn’t know what that was all about. And they sat down, started opening the envelopes—cards and money! (WN chuckles.) Money! My gosh, I’d never seen so much money in one place in my life. My recollection, it was five or six hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. And that allowed us to go on a brief honeymoon. (Chuckles) We rented a car and drove around Pennsylvania. We just found family videos of that wedding.

WN: At the time, were you aware of who Ernie Murai was, in terms of . . .

KM: No. None of that mattered to us. In 1959, he was Democratic national committeeman. And he would come and visit us in Philadelphia after we married and on his way to Washington D.C. But I learned later that he was Kennedy before LA (i.e., he supported John F. Kennedy’s candidacy for the vice presidential nomination in 1956). And he [Ernest Murai] has one of these ties, PT-109 ties. So he was a big Kennedy man in Hawai‘i. In fact, he was in opposition to his political ally Jack Burns, who supported LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson]. In 1960, Ernie Murai became the first Asian [American] ever to receive a presidential appointment as director of the customs for the Port of Honolulu. I’ve checked with Senator [Daniel] Inouye about this. A presidential appointment [had to be] approved by the U.S. Senate. As far as we can tell, he was the first. And Senator Inouye would know. Or at least he would have. I checked it out with him.

But no, I didn’t know he was an active politician here. I knew he was a dentist. I got to know him well later on. But I didn’t know all these things at the time.

WN: Just going little bit back to Middleboro again. Who were some of your influential mentors in high school?

KM: Well, there were a few teachers that I remember, but what I remember most is they did not think I needed to go to prep school. I went there against their recommendations. The vice principal told my parents it’s not necessary. I did have some English teachers and advisors.

A high school story I will always remember still makes me mad. My older brother was president of the student body when I was a sophomore. When elections for the next president of the student body came, a few folks said, “Ken, we want you to run.”

“As a junior?”

That’s not done. “Yeah, but we’re mad as hell at these other guys.” So I agreed to run and my brother supported my opponent. And that really made me angry.

WN: Well, why did he do that?

KM: Well, I have no idea, except I’ve never gotten over it. I finally told him about it. And he wrote me a little email saying . . .

WN: This is Bob?

KM: Yes. He wrote me an email saying, “I wouldn’t do that today. Family first.” (WN chuckles.) But I came in second, so I was vice-president when I was a junior. And then I put together a ticket to run for the job when I was into my senior year. I was the only one that got elected. Nobody else on my ticket got elected. (Chuckles) So I don’t know how to explain things like that except to say I was somewhat of a maverick. The way I explain this, by the way, in my adult life is, it took me a long time to get my intellect ahead of my emotions. It has been a constant struggle in my life and one reason I turned out to be the “Great Stoneface,” if you will. My colleagues in graduate school used to call me the “Great Stoneface.” “Give me a little hint, will ya? Smile from time to time.”

WN: (Laughs) I thought they just called you that here. Oh, okay.

KM: No! That was in graduate school. Kay gets mad because I don’t have wrinkles.

(Laughter)

WN: That’s right!

KM: She says, “When you don’t smile, how’re you going to get wrinkles?

WN: (Chuckles) You were thinking ahead.

KM: Well, you can’t punch everybody in the nose all your life. And you have these tremendous feelings. For example, I usually worked harder than anybody else. When I had a job, I was always recommended for the next one because I worked. I knew how to work and I learned that on the farm. So, I got promoted rapidly in anything I did because I knew how to work. But my anger continued to plague me throughout my high school years. How to get your emotions under control. One part of it is intuition, usually your intuition’s pretty sound. You can get philosophic about that, but even the best decision- makers will tell you to trust your gut. My emotions are such that I can cry at a drop of a hat. Well, you can’t. You just have to learn how to get it under control, because it gets in the way of being successful.

WN: Right. Now, you said that you wanted to go to Harvard.

KM: Yes.

WN: When did you have that inclination that, you know, intellectually, you had it.

KM: Well, it wasn’t an intellectual thing. When I went to Nantucket in the summertime, that would have been the summer of 1954, I was around all these college kids and realized I could aspire to emulate them. Nobody from my high school went to an Ivy League institution. I think one guy went to Brown. But I got to think that I could aspire to that. Two or three of my closest friends in that summertime were Harvard students. So I said,

“I’ll go to Harvard.” But I’d never been to Harvard. I don’t know anything about it, et cetera. But then I broadened that to say I need to go to an Ivy League school. And today, I think that’s a lot of foolishness, but at the time. . . . It’s not foolishness if you’re going to live on the East Coast. There is a hierarchy in Wall Street, and all that. Eventually, I graduated from The Wharton School [University of Pennsylvania]. Wharton and Harvard control Wall Street, as they say.

WN: Now, did your mother or your father mention Harvard at all or. . . ?

KM: No, they were stunned. “We can’t possibly do that.”

And I said, “Don’t worry about it.”

Well, that was always my response to these things. A lot of people tell you, you can’t do thing. But I mean, how is a kid whose parents cannot afford to send him to Hebron going to afford an Ivy League education? I don’t know. I just told you, when I went to Penn, I didn’t have the money to get in. I mean, eventually, some things are impossible.

I have been called both persistent and stubborn. If you read the last chapter of David Yount’s book [Who Runs the University?], which contrasts me and Al [Albert J.] Simone, Al Simone was a guy who’d keep fourteen balls in the air and didn’t care if he dropped one. Mortimer would throw one ball up, catch it, look at it, put it aside, then throw up another one. And that’s sort of true. I mean, it is a good contrast between two styles.

All through my life, I have been aggressive. I majored in English because I couldn’t get the hang of poetry. And I knew I could lick that if I just kept at it. But I didn’t have the literary background to understand the meaning of poetry. Usually, if you’re reading seventeenth- or eighteenth-century poetry, there are esoteric references in there and you need to know something in order to interpret their meaning, to know that language. I read Chaucer and I couldn’t understand it. So I decided to major in English because I needed to learn that stuff. (WN laughs.)

Remember, I told you my mother said, “You can’t take him head-on. You gotta go over here somewhere.” And that’s an attitude you need to get under control. Because that kind of thing doesn’t serve you well as a person. And it certainly doesn’t make you effective in whatever it is you’re trying to do. So that part of my life causes me still problems today because I’m the Great Stoneface, which means I have a hard time telling people I love them and things like that.

Thirty years after we’re married, we’re driving down the freeway one day and Lorrie looks at me and says, “You never asked me to marry you.”

I said, “What?”

She says, “You never asked me to marry you.” (WN chuckles.)

And I said, “Probably that’s right. You told me we were going to get married, and I said, ‘Okay.’” (WN chuckles.)

And when I asked Kay to marry me, I said, “Kay, if I asked you to marry me, will you?”

And she said, “You’ll have to ask me first.” (WN chuckles.)

So, it was this kind of crazy kinds of stuff. But, you know, we decided to get married. It was sort of a joint decision. I don’t remember much about it, you know, except we were in love, we knew that.

WN: This is sort of contrasting to your direct approach to things.

KM: Well, these are family stories. Direct approach, yes, but part of this is my emotions. One of my favorite administrative quotes is, “You don’t ask a question till you know the answer.” Administrators work hard, so that you don’t put questions to a board of regents that they can’t say yes to. So you do a lot of finessing and a lot of consulting so that when it gets to them, it’s not a big deal. You know where things are going to happen. And as you’ll learn later, I made one mistake in that. I don’t think it was my mistake.

So that part of my life I thought I got control of sometime in college. But I really was in no sense an intellect until the second time I went back to graduate school. Being an English major in an Ivy League institution is working with people who have been reading all their lives. The worst experience of my life was the graduate seminars in English. Senior year, you had to take a seminar, and you sit in with six or eight majors. I didn’t do well. On the final exam, the last in my senior year, the professor writes “love” on the board and says, “Write about love.” And I was paralyzed. I handed in a blank blue book. I couldn’t—what am I going to say? I had read Shakespeare, and Milton, et cetera, and I couldn’t write a simple essay on love.

But I finished, as they say. Graduated in 1960. Lorrie and I were debating that last year of college, what was I going to be when I grow up? And I really wasn’t setting the world on fire when I was doing interviews as an English major. The associate dean of admissions at The Wharton School, the M.B.A. [program], was the same person who had recruited me out of Hebron, Ray Saalbach. I decided to get an M.B.A. So I applied to The Wharton School. I had to take the graduate business apps. And I didn’t do well in that either. I got a 32nd percentile on the graduate business apps. But this was 1960, the year they came out with all these studies that, “We got to have more liberal arts majors in business.” They let me into The Wharton School because they knew me. And I did graduate in the top 25 percent of my undergraduate class at Penn, something like a B-minus average. So I was one of the guinea pigs they let in, to try and see if these English majors could cut it in business. And of course, I almost flunked out. First semester I was on academic probation.

WN: Don’t you have to take math in business?

KM: Yes, but I was really out of my element. The first exam there was what are the seventeen advantages of decentralization or some silly thing like that. I had taken accounting, but money and banking was a mystery to me. So I was in with a lot of engineers and people who had been business majors as undergraduates. The Wharton School was a fifty-two credit M.B.A. If you came in with an undergraduate business major or had taken all of this stuff, they’d cut it down to thirty-six credits. I had to take something like forty-six credits, because I’d only had two undergraduate courses that would transfer. So, I graduated near the bottom of my class at The Wharton School. I’m sure the faculty would love to know that today, but. (WN chuckles.) And the average grade at The Wharton School was a C. You know the average grade in graduate school is usually a B. I mean, if you can’t cut it, you get a B-minus or something like that, and everything [else] is an A. I came out of The Wharton School with a C average and near the bottom of my class. I never did understand what my class rankings were.

But the same thing. I was an international business major and had to write a thesis. I brought my thesis into my advisor, whom I only saw two or three times during my whole year the two years I was there. I’d see him when I was registering for courses. You’d have to sign something. And he bled all over the first ten pages. But I found out what was necessary. So I went home and rewrote it and gave it back to him. And he said, “This is great. I never thought you’d be able to do it.”

Again, I said, “Professor Darling, all I need to know is the game. Whatever the game is, I can do it.”

I wrote a thesis on the iron-and-steel industry in India. I wanted to go work for the Feds, but I’m blind in one eye and I couldn’t get in the foreign service because of that. I passed all the federal management exams I took. I wanted then to go to work for the Agency for International Development, but they weren’t hiring that summer because Congress had a freeze on things.

Then Ernie Murai calls and says, “Why don’t you guys come? You’ve never been to Hawai‘i, Ken.” This was the summer of 1962 when I had finished at Wharton.

So for a graduation present, he gives us a ticket to Honolulu. Lorrie had had a job interview or two with a professor at University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. She had been a lab tech for a pharmaceutical firm in Philadelphia. That’s how she supported me for those first three years. I mean, I had jobs when I was in school. And so he said, “If you’re ever in San Francisco, stop by. I may have a job for you.” So we flew to Honolulu. On the way over, we stopped in San Francisco. She interviewed with the guy. We came back, he offered her a job. So we stayed there.

So my first visit here was in 1962. And all of those buildings weren’t here. They [the Murais] lived on St. Louis Heights and you could still see the Royal Hawaiian [Hotel] and Moana [Hotel], which were the only really big hotels down there at the time. So that was quite a time.

WN: What were your impressions?

KM: Well, my sister-in-law had come home. And I knew her when she was in New York. And they’d moved back to Hawai‘i and were living with my in-laws, which is only about a mile and a half from the University [of Hawai‘i] on St. Louis Heights.

(Telephone rings. Interview interrupted, then resumes.)

KM: So when I arrived, on the drive in from the airport, and they would ask me, “How do you pronounce that?”

And I’d say, “Like-like.” [KM is referring to the pronunciation of Likelike Highway in Honolulu.] You know, they’d make fun out of the haole. (WN laughs.) Anyway, it was quite an experience because I’d never been west of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania at that time.

Dr. Murai, Ernie, got the family together and rented the second floor of Wo Fat Restaurant in Chinatown. And I was the only haole in the room. There must have been forty people there, I don’t know. And of course, they were all looking to see what I would eat. I mean, I can remember all that. But they were a very gracious family and there was never a hint of any wrong. Ernie, my father-in law, did all the cooking at night. He’d always stop at Star Market on the way home. And then he would call and say, “What will the haole eat tonight?” (WN chuckles.) But there was never any “damn haole” or

anything of this sort. No, he was very gracious. And so was my mother-in-law. They all were very gracious. So that 1962 visit was my first time out here. And then we went back and located in San Francisco.

This brings to mind another one of those stories. We didn’t have any money. Lorrie had a job, so we could muster enough to get an apartment right across the street from Kezar Stadium. We stayed in California for seven years. I worked for two-and-a-half years for Remington Rand selling office equipment. I was a Wharton School M.B.A. I thought the world was going to open its doors for The Wharton School people. But on the West Coast, they hire Stanford [University] M.B.A.s. And I don’t test well. I had a few tests for companies.

So I took the only job I could get, which was selling office equipment for Remington Rand. I did that for two years, two-and-a-half. I was a miserable salesman. I did well enough, but I didn’t like it. What I did learn was how to sell. People have asked me where did I learn how to raise money [as University of Hawai‘i president]. And I said, “When all those doors were being shut in my face, I was making a hundred cold calls a month, I learned that when somebody said no, it wasn’t my fault.” You know, you got to get your ego in line with all that rejection. And the old story: if you keep asking, you’re going to get slapped in the face one out of ten times and one out of ten times you’ll be successful. And you have to learn how to handle the other eight times. That was a big learning experience for me.

I decided I wanted to go back to school, but I had this Wharton School average I needed to get rid of. I mean, I had a C average for graduate work and no graduate program would touch me. So I went to school at Cal State-Hayward. I wanted to get a Ph.D. in political science. “But you’re an English major. What are you going to. . . ?” So I went and got a political science major in two quarters at Cal State-Hayward. And then I went to San Francisco State for a year and did the work on a political science master’s degree, which I never got because I already had a master’s degree and I didn’t need another one. But during that time a professor of political philosophy asked me if whether or not I was interested in being a graduate assistant for the department that year. And “Sure,” I said, “I’ll learn something about that.” So they had me doing curriculum research on political science.

WN: I wanted to back up just a little bit. What went on intellectually or mature-wise between going from English major to a business major?

KM: Earning a living. When I was in office as president, I would go to all these mixers for freshmen. What I learned is you cannot ask them what they’re going to major in because they’ll all tighten up. Most of them don’t know and that’s good. You go to college to discover. If you want to be an engineer or scientist, you better get into a science curriculum. Other than that, most of them are in college to, for whatever aims one wants to use. And I said, “The main thing is, don’t hurt ’em.” It’s almost like the Hippocratic Oath. Kids go to college for a variety of reasons. I went to college because I wanted to be successful. And it really didn’t matter to me what I was studying. I was just there to get on with my life and to get my ticket punched. I really felt that way. I was going to be successful in something other than what my father and mother had done. I had an uncle who was in insurance, but I didn’t really have any people around me about whom I could say, “I want to be like that.” So I took English. I had to major in something, so I majored in English. After I graduated, I began to develop this interest in politics and matters of that sort. Then I said, “Well, the thing that I really would like to do is be a faculty member at a university.”

WN: When did you come to that conclusion?

KM: When I was working at Remington Rand. I realized that I wasn’t cut out for that kind of life.

WN: While you were getting that B.A. in English, it didn’t even cross your mind to go on in English in grad school?

KM: I didn’t do very well in English, and the same with business. It was a question of “What are you going to do now, Kenneth?” Lorrie and I were sitting down and saying, “Well, our lifestyle’s probably going to be improved down the road.”

First, Lorrie and I always agreed that my career was going to support the family. There was never a discussion about a dual career. She gave an interview once here about that. And she said, “We always just [agreed], Kenneth was going to do that, and I was going to do other things.”

So, it was what am I going to do? And an M.B.A. seemed to be the thing to do at the time to get out of the A.B. in English route. But at the time, you don’t think there’s any rationality to it. In retrospect, I’d have been a better lawyer than a businessman probably. But I don’t write well. And even at home, writing is an hour an inch for me still. So the M.B.A. was a disaster from a confidence point of view because I didn’t do well in it. I eventually got the lay of land and then breezed through it. Again, I was working twenty hours a week and everybody else was full time [student]. And I never took a lighter load because I was working.

WN: Where did you live in Philadelphia?

KM: West Philadelphia, Osage Avenue. We rented a flat there, one-bedroom flat, second floor. Seventy bucks a month, furnished. And it was walking distance from school. Lorrie had a job at a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, the drug company. She did cardiovascular research. She tested the effects of drugs that a company would have a license to develop a drug, pretty much specializing in heart drugs. I said Lorrie’s killed more dogs than anybody in the world, I think. You know, they do these experiments on dogs. In San Francisco, she was the lab tech or the assistant to the director of the cardiovascular research institute at University of California at San Francisco, Julius Comroe. And he was the consultant to Johnson & Johnson in Philadelphia. That’s how that connection got made. She worked with him for the seven years until Lisa came. We had a baby in 1968. She stopped working when Lisa was born.

So, when I became convinced that the job for me should be a teaching job and not a sales job, I decided I needed to get a master’s degree in political science and teach in the California community colleges. That expanded to a Ph.D. When I got back to school that second time, I really began to soak up knowledge. I was that proverbial sponge at that time. I enjoyed the study of politics and started to major more in public policy aspects of it. A course in constitutional law really made me happy. And political theory and things like that, I got the love of just the pursuit of knowledge for itself, which I think is crucial for most faculty people.

As I got into it and realized I was going awfully well, a number of people said, “You really ought to go on for a Ph.D.” I was working as a graduate assistant. He was a scholar of higher education and a professor of political science, and had connections at [University of California at] Berkeley. So he said, “You really ought to look into this.” And I was doing this curriculum research, looking at political science curricula because

they were changing it. I found that very interesting. So he arranged an interview for me at Berkeley with T.R. McConnell, who became my mentor. T.R. McConnell was a former university president and an eminent educational psychologist. The Berkeley folks had just received fourteen fellowships from the U.S. Office of Education to develop research training fellows. After Sputnik, the Feds decided the nation had to have more educational researchers. Berkeley offered me a fellowship for a Ph.D. program in higher education and accepted all my political science work. I only took three courses in higher education during my doctoral years. I spent three years there from 1966 to 1969.

An important part of the program was you had to pass courses in educational psychology, sociology, and philosophy or you could take the final exam. If you passed it, you didn’t have to take the courses. So I went into the philosophy exam. I took the exam and flunked it. (WN chuckles.) So I had to take the course. The guy teaching it was Jim Jarrett, who was a former president of Western Washington University, where I eventually became president. And it comes back to haunt me twenty years later because the people at Western called Jarrett and said, “What do you know about this guy?” (WN chuckles.) And so that’s twenty years later.

So, at any rate, when I first saw McConnell a couple of times, he’s asking me questions and I had to talk about the things that interested me, mostly in political science. He pulled out a speech he had given. He said, “Why don’t you read this and tell me what you think about it.” So I came back to see him a couple of weeks later and I said, “This is all great theory, but there’s no data to support any of those arguments.”

So he said, “If you gathered data, what would you do?”

And I said, well, it so happened he was arguing there were academic oligarchs. In the literature of social science, you know, you run into iron law of oligarchy. So I explained the politics of it for him.

He said, “Why don’t we try to do that?”

So I matriculated in September 1966. In January, I had another graduate assistant, a secretary, and I was running a project. That project turned out to be my dissertation. I took about a year and a half to finish all my qualifying exams. Then another year and a half I was supervising that project plus two others in Berkeley. So when I left there in 1969, I left with a dissertation on the Berkeley faculty senate, which was published by the Center for R & D. We also did studies at the University of Minnesota and at Fresno State [University]. So the Berkeley Ph.D. in higher education was an alternative to a Ph.D. in political science. And they made it very easy for me, I mean, in terms of I really didn’t take much coursework. Three courses and you have to take statistics. I finally beat mathematics by taking those statistics courses. Enough so that I can manipulate data.

WN: Well, it’s about eleven o’clock. Doing this for an hour and a half. Let’s stop here and then we’ll continue tomorrow. Okay?

KM: That suits me.

END OF INTERVIEW

Tape No. 25-46-2-11

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

with

Kenneth P. Mortimer (KM)

Honolulu, O‘ahu

February 15, 2011

BY: Warren Nishimoto (WN)

WN: Okay, we’re going to start with session number two, with former president Kenneth P. Mortimer. Today is February 15, 2011, and we’re at the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Hawai‘i. Interviewer is Warren Nishimoto.

Ken, good morning again!

KM: Good morning, Warren.

WN: Okay, we were talking last time---we were just getting you to Berkeley, and you’re starting your Ph.D. studies at Berkeley. And I know you were an English major at Penn, you got an M.B.A. from Wharton School at Penn. You know, worked a little while, then you went to Cal State-Hayward and Cal State-San Francisco, and you studied political science and public administration. Then you went to Berkeley, and you worked on your Ph.D. in higher education.

KM: That’s correct.

WN: What went on between all of this, that got you interested or turned on to higher education, and what is higher education as a major?

KM: Well at the time, it was a fledgling area of studies rather than a discipline, an important distinction. An area of study allows you to specialize in something, like health or education policy; I specialized in policy relevant to higher education. When I was studying political science, I was also, as a graduate student at San Francisco State, doing research on curriculum in political science for the department chair.

He was Robert Berdahl, the co-author of the Duff-Berdahl report, a commission appointed in Canada to make recommendations about the organization of Canadian higher education. Dr. Berdahl had also done his dissertation at UCLA on the University Grants Commission in Britain as a study in political science. So I began to see higher education as a specialty. I was intending to move into public administration/political science because of my M.B.A. and because I’m more oriented to getting things done than I am to thinking about them.

So Bob said, “You really ought to talk to these---this program in higher education Ph.D. program at Berkeley.”

T.R. McConnell was also a world-class authority on the University Grants Commission, so Bob knew him well. Mac had just retired as director of the Center for Research and Development in Higher Education at Berkeley.

Up to that time, professors of higher education had largely been ex-administrators who, when they went back to the faculty, did not want to go back to being a chemist or whatever. So they start to teach about higher education. We used to criticize them because they were only qualified to tell “war stories.” There were three major centers at that time—Columbia, Michigan, and Berkeley—that had received federal money. They were operating under very famous people, such as Earl McGrath at Columbia, Algo Henderson at Michigan, and T.R. McConnell at Berkeley.

So I went over to see McConnell, and got interested in higher education. He was a psychologist, just beginning to explore administration as a field of study. His major intellectual contributions had come in the study of college students. Berkeley developed the Omnibus Personality Inventory, and there was heavy emphasis in the program in the college student. Of course, this was in the ’60s when we were founding one community college a week, and everybody was wondering how to spend the money fast enough.

So we had a conversation, and they said, “Well, you’ve already got all of your minor work and all that, and we’re a very loose program—Ph.D. program—you have to pass our qualifying exam.” Then you have to have residency at Berkeley for, I think six quarters, which meant that I could pretty much do, under general guidance, what I wanted to do while getting a Ph.D. So, it had a lot of appeal for me.

And then they made me a research training fellow. Those were the first ones that were awarded by the feds as a response to Sputnik. The College of Education at Berkeley had fifteen of them. I arrived in the fall of ’66—at Berkeley, that is. So as I mentioned yesterday, I walked in and at that time, I was in my mid-twenties and ready to move ahead. And as I said, I really began to be immersed in the academic world and develop some thoughts about it—becoming a faculty member in higher education. So that’s what I did in three years.

I mentioned that Mac gave me a paper of his that he had written—a speech—and I looked at it and said, you know, “These are fundamental concepts out of political science/sociology. There have been other studies that we could copy to show whether or not the Berkeley faculty senate was run by an oligarchy.” I did a study to find out if that were true, and if so what were the characteristics of the oligarchy?

That’s how I got started in doing research. There was no requirement for research training fellows to do anything other than go to school and pass exams.

WN: And in that field of higher education, what was the fundamental question that was being asked that you needed to answer in order to do research?

KM: The same questions that are asked in a political theory course or a philosophy course. What’s good, ugly, and beautiful? What’s a good undergraduate education? What do students learn in college? How like other organizations are universities? All these kinds of comparisons—the university is what? Is it like a public school? Or is it like the army? Well, then you get into varying concepts of hierarchy and how much of the hierarchy concept fits a university organization.

WN: Now, Columbia is a private school, and Michigan is a public school, Berkeley’s a public school . . .

KM: Yes.

WN: Did curriculums change drastically because of the nature of the . . .

KM: No, I think it changed because of us, and I don’t think there was that much content everybody agreed that you had to have, just the history of American higher education, the college student, the curriculum, and administration. That’s about it. And after that, you have to get your methodologies, and you’re getting a degree in education, so you had to pass the core courses of philosophy, sociology, and psychology of education. You could take the course or the exam. I flunked one of them. (Chuckles) When I walked into the psychology class, another fellow and I were very interested when Robert Gagne, an eminent learning theorist, said, “This is the 250 questions from which the final will be taken, and you can either take the final or come to the class because we’ll answer them all.”

Well, we said, “To hell with that! We are not interested in that.”

So we went out and parceled up the 250 questions to three of us. Each guy wrote a third of the answers and exchanged them, and we took the final exam. It was an important learning experience. At the end of it all, I asked, “Who really won? Did Bob Gagne win?” He won. He got me to learn what he wanted me to learn. He doesn’t care how you learn it, as long as you, you know. (WN chuckles.) And I probably learned more that way. The philosophy of education course had a lot of political theory, so I walked in to take that exam, too. One of the questions was write about Aristotle’s views of education. Well, I’ve never read Aristotle’s views of education, so I wrote an essay on what I think Aristotle would have said if he’d had anything to say about education. And I flunked.

WN: Why?

KM: Because I---well, because I didn’t pass the exam. I mean, they just---it was pass-fail, so they just flunked me. So I had to take the course.

WN: (Laughs) In essence, you tried to b.s. your way through that one?

KM: I wasn’t interested in all of these requirements that you have to get out of the way in order to do what you want to do!

WN: Mm-hmm [yes] and what is it that you wanted to do?

KM: Well, I wanted to get on to the problems in which I was interested, not somebody else’s. I’m twenty-six, twenty-seven years old at that time, and I was beginning to feel my academic “oats.” I did become president of the higher education students’ association. HESA, it was called. I met a lot of very interesting people that way because I would have to set up brown bag lunches every Wednesday. Harold Hodgkinson turned out to be director of NIE National Institute of Education. Owen Chamberlain was an eminent physicist. I went over to Stanford to get him and squired him around. Later I told my graduate students, that’s the way you learn to meet people is you do what you—and they’ll remember you ’cause you drove them to the airport.

So I did all those things and paid my dues, I guess you say. The unusual thing about it was that I matriculated in September, and in January, Mac gave me a budget, a secretary, and another graduate assistant to direct a project. The student wasn’t that happy about it because he thought he’d be working for McConnell; he wasn’t, he was working for me. And I did those projects of two-and-a-half years while I finished my Ph.D.

WN: And to what extent was the curriculum practical?

KM: No, not practical, really, I mean when you’re doing the history of American higher education course, it was just that. I mean, it was a standard history seminar. The statistics courses were taught by ed psych people. But you do have to understand analysis of variance and other matters of that sort. Later on, I had one of my eminent graduate students—he turned out to be a chaired professor at another university—when I was at Penn State, he came to me and said he wanted to do a dissertation using analysis of variance. I said, “What?”

WN: (Chuckles) You mean, study the method?

KM: No, he wanted to do a dissertation in the administration of higher education using the analytic technique of analysis of variance. Statistics for me were a means to an end, and in the social sciences research in those days, you had to do tests on whether there were significant differences. We cataloged every member of the Berkeley faculty senate committee over ten years. I sat in the records office of the president of the university, not Berkeley, but the president of the university, and went through all of the vitae of faculty publications. I created a publication index on each person’s scholarly output over ten years, and weighted it and did all the things that statisticians do. Because the question was whether those who served on senate committees don’t do much research, but we found out it was the exact reverse.

In Berkeley, the oligarchy was around people who were really eminent in their field. Nobody from the college of optometry had ever been appointed to a Berkeley senate faculty committee. And nobody from the foreign languages had ever chaired one. So I interviewed a hundred faculty members and [asked], “Why not?”

“Ah, these guys from foreign languages aren’t world-class scholars. The world-class scholars in French are in France; they’re not here. And these guys in optometry, they’re just grinders; all they do is grind lenses, that’s not respectable academic work.”

So the academic oligarchy at Berkeley existed, but there was a price to get into it. The price was international eminence. And that taught me a lot and also affected my future research. I was a person who would go out and talk to the people rather than sit and crunch numbers. I did do a numbers study on the faculty and the state system in Pennsylvania much later, of course. They elected to bargain collectively. And I did a survey on the faculty, trying to figure out how they voted as they did. That was a straight voter study right out of the Gallup polls. I designed some stuff that I thought would be more realistic. I was using the methodology and theories of political science to examine the kinds of organizations that universities were, and I was the only political scientist around in the department at that time.

WN: Sounds like you were heading more and more into the quantitative research field.

KM: Well, yes, I sat down and crunched all those numbers, but I interviewed a hundred faculty members, including some Nobel Prize winners. Melvin Calvin was a prizewinner in chemistry. His secretary squires me in to his office. I’m about five minutes late, and he’s not there. There’s a door over the side, I hear the john flush. (WN chuckles.)

He comes out, walks over to the fireplace he has in his office, never said a word to me— put on a pair of gloves and put another log on the fire. Then walks over and sits down, takes off his gloves, and said, “What can I do for you, young man?”

(WN laughs.) I mean . . .

WN: And how did you feel while this was going on? I mean, were you . . .

KM: Well, I was in awe of those guys, of course. Nobel Prize winners, Owen Chamberlain was there. These guys were the top of their field, you know. So I’d ask the question: “Why have you been on all these senate committees?” And it taught me a lot about faculty governance, which of course, led into my studies of collective bargaining when I moved to the East Coast. My dissertation was on the Berkeley faculty senate, and then McConnell had us doing studies of governance at Fresno State and at University of Minnesota to provide comparisons. We eventually published a book—my first book— Sharing Authority Effectively is largely about those studies.

So I got out in three years.

WN: I wanted to ask you about, what was Berkeley like in the ’60s when you were there? (KM chuckles.)

KM: It colors you substantially, I’ll tell you, because it was the height of the demonstrations. We arrived in San Francisco, about the time of the Cadillac Row sit-ins. That was minority kids against automobile employers. It spread to Berkeley in the Free Speech Movement in 1964. I matriculated Berkeley in ’66. In 1967 Ronald Reagan became governor of the State of California and fired Clark Kerr, the president of the university. And Clark got off that remarkable statement: “I went out the same way I came in, fired with enthusiasm.” (WN chuckles.)

So all that, armed cops, demonstrations. . . . And I left there in 1969 at the height of the dispute called People’s Park, where the kids were demonstrating. Reagan would have none of that. I had an office in Tolman Hall, which was right next to the chancellor’s residence. The kids were out there demonstrating, and they were gassed by helicopters. So I smelled tear gas, the last day I was there, filing my dissertation.

Later, that colored my whole attitude about demonstrations. They’re serious things, and people can get hurt. When I was a vice president at Penn State, we were in a building and heard the kids were marching on the building, I said, “We got to get the hell out of here.”

And they said, “What’s the matter with you?”

I said, (chuckles) “I have experience with these things! I get nervous when these things happen!” (WN chuckles.)

Because, you know, at Berkeley, they burned down buildings and stuff like that, so it got pretty serious. Madison [i.e., University of Wisconsin], Berkeley, and Columbia [University] were the real hotbeds of that sort of thing in the ’60s. It was all about the Vietnam War and the draft. These kids were getting drafted. And it’s hard to explain what that means to somebody who doesn’t know about that. It’s not part of our world any longer. We had to cross picket lines to get to class, and that was a big dilemma. Even when I was chairing the higher ed students association, there were a bunch of students who wanted to try to persuade the faculty not to give grades. So you were in all of that constant feeling of activism.

WN: And how did this feeling of activism---did it clash with your worldview of things, or was it . . .

KM: Well, it was an atmosphere to get used to because it was part of the world of higher ed that I was interested in at the time. But it also got in the way of my moving forward and getting out of there. I wasn’t interested in joining any of that sort of thing. I’m blind in one eye, so when I got drafted, I flunked the physicals. I knew I wasn’t going to get drafted. It was part of the atmosphere at Berkeley at the time. There was a faculty member in education named Arthur Jensen, who was being critiqued for his racist views when he raised the issue whether or not racial differences were genetic rather than environmental.

(WN laughs.) The Berkeley experience did refine my views about open and free campuses. The Free Speech Movement turned into the “Filthy Speech Movement.” So sure, that’s distasteful, but it is not prohibited. It’s bad taste. You can say whatever you want about it. When the students demonstrate here at UH against letting the military recruit on campus, I overruled them every time it came up. A free and open campus doesn’t mean only whom you, people you agree with, can be on it. And there are students who want to participate in ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] and other matters, and so I overruled on things like that.

I overruled Western Washington University students on Playboy. The Supreme Court held very clearly that you cannot censor a news rack and say you cannot sell Playboy and Penthouse. You can put up a sign saying this stuff is hazardous to your health, and other matters of that sort. The student government at Western decided that they’d do it and I overruled them. The question of who is responsible never troubled me because I knew it was my responsibility as a chief executive officer.

But those things are all from the Berkeley days. You go to great lengths to keep a campus open and free, and meet the clear and present danger test. And as I will tell you later on, when we had that UH demonstration on campus about tuition, we had entered into the danger areas. In that 2000 UH case, we were told that the Honolulu police would not be on call for us, but it would be the sheriff’s department. They couldn’t guarantee us anything more than a four-hour response.

WN: This is when you were . . .

KM: Here . . .

WN: Yeah, right . . .

KM: Yeah.

WN: Okay.

KM: I believed a four-hour response was not adequate to protecting the safety of the campus and, particularly, the board. So I arranged some things, and they were supposed to do it down on University Square buildings, way down by the Bank of Hawai‘i. And only after we were halfway through the meeting did I know that Eugene Imai had billeted them up in the medical school building. So we had those dogs and armed SWAT [special weapons and tactics] guys on campus, and I told them at that time to get them off.

WN: We’ll get into that . . .

KM: Yeah, but I mean, you know, where do you get that? The danger signals that I learned at Berkeley were you’ve got to protect safety as a priority. And again, I mean, that’s not irrational; people shot the windows out at College Hill. So it’s not irrational.

WN: At Berkeley at the time, did you feel you were in the minority, or . . .

KM: Yeah, because I wanted to finish. I really didn’t have any social agenda. First, I believed with Roger Heyns [Chancellor, UC Berkeley], that the university should not engage itself in political activity. You provide the opportunity for people to do what they want within the canons of, well, peace. But the university should not take positions on social issues, and to some extent, I was in the minority in that view. Because the argument is the university is an instrument of war since we do defense research. But my view was, and still is, that a university should avoid partisan politics whenever possible. One has to participate in the political process as a leader of an institution, but it is a big mistake to get involved in partisan politics. People cannot separate your views from those of the university, so you somewhat, in my opinion, sacrifice your right to speak freely on political issues or partisan issues. I know my successor didn’t agree. I mean, Al Simone didn’t agree with that either.

But that came from Berkeley. We were looking at the intellectual and psychological makeup of college students. And that was an important breakthrough. Omnibus Personality Inventory was created at Berkeley. It did personality profiles of different occupations. And we found out that theoretical physicists and musicians were, personality-wise, very similar. And so are dentists and carpenters. It was a very interesting thing to think about that. You often find that the more politically liberal people in the university are in the humanities, but also in mathematics.

WN: Could be mathematics could be a humanities . . .

KM: Well, I used to argue . . .

(WN laughs.) See, I don’t even mind this being said. I had friends, and I used to say, “Mathematicians are among the brightest people in the university, but they’re the dumbest people I know.” (WN laughs.)

WN: It’s like you saying, “We weren’t poor, but we just didn’t have any money.”

KM: Yeah, exactly, I’ll tell you later about my Penn State experience, but so when you’re dealing with a bunch of people who are very bright and accomplished and all of that, and then they’re trying to tell you how to run things.

I ran into a faculty member at Western [Washington University] last year, and he said, “I quoted you the other day.”

And I said, “What did you say?”

He said, “Effin’ amateurs.”

(Laughter)

KM: I said, “Is that all you can remember?”

WN: (Chuckles) Now, when did you say that?

KM: Well, in private conversations or something like that, I’d say, “I hate amateurs.”

You know, this is a professional business running here. We’re a very large organization, a billion-dollar corporation. Western was a hundred million. And it can’t be run by

amateurs. There has to be some sense of a special culture. The academic culture is special and you have to understand that, but there are times when. . . . People have to get paid, safety has to be maintained, residence halls have to be run, and cafeterias have to be administered. So I worked hard at those issues intellectually before I ever began to practice seriously.

WN: Before we move on, I just wanted to ask you about your acculturation process on the West Coast.

KM: Mm-hmm [yes].

WN: I mean, you’re an East Coaster . . .

KM: Yes.

WN: And then you’ve been living on the West Coast for a good number of years now . . .

KM: Seven . . .

WN: How did you and your family . . .

KM: We spent seven years in California. Lorrie adjusted well. California was, for me, an atomistic society. You could live beside people and not know who they are. This is particularly true of San Francisco in the ’60s. So in my first trip there, I was impressed by how clean everything is, and how bright the sunshine is. And then the nature of San Francisco community was, everybody was from somewhere else. It was hard to find a native Californian. And I got used to that. There were only 18 million people in California then; it’s like 36 [million] now. So we enjoyed our time in California immensely, but we’ve enjoyed everywhere we’ve been.

WN: So your daughter was okay with schools and so forth?

KM: She was born in San Francisco and just a year and a half before we left. When we went there, we were only twenty-three, twenty-four, something like that, and I was thirty-two when we left, so seven or eight years. So it was a great place for a young married couple to hang out, and we enjoyed it and made some good friends, and the Berkeley experience was seminal—well, one of the seminal things—in my life. I think it was just accidental; you move along, and the next opportunity comes up, and you. . . .

WN: Right. Well, speaking of next opportunity, you got your Ph.D. in 1969?

KM: Mm-hmm [yes].

WN: And moved onto your first faculty position . . .

KM: Yeah, that’s another interesting story because G. Lester Anderson, who became my next mentor, had been commissioned to start a Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State, and had been given a generous budget. In those days a quarter of a million was a lot of money. And he was looking for bright, young guys. Lester happened to be McConnell’s first graduate student at Minnesota in the ’30s. So he called Mac and said, “Have you got anyone?” Those were the days before affirmative action. You didn’t have to advertise jobs; you simply hired right people. . . .

WN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm [yes].

KM: And Mac says, “You ought to look at Mortimer.”

And he came out and interviewed a few people at Berkeley. I also interviewed at North Carolina-Chapel Hill for an assistant professor job there, and had an offer to stay at Berkeley as a researcher to finish some more projects. I took the Penn State offer, largely on Mac’s recommendation, and largely because I saw the opportunity for rapid advancement. At Chapel Hill, I’d have been teaching four quarters a year, whereas I had a researchers’ and faculty tenure track appointment at Penn State. I only taught one or two courses a year. I had a graduate assistant and half a secretary and travel money. In social sciences, when you have that, you can beat the world. Lester was an excellent man to learn from. I went there and did proceed pretty rapidly. I was a full professor six years out of graduate school. I was an associate in three years and full in another three.

Lester had to retire in 1976 because he was sixty-five. That was the old days of mandatory retirement. They did a national search, and the staff said, “We ought to have an internal candidate, Ken, you’re it.” So I became a candidate, but let’s step back. Lester, in 1969, brought two guys to Penn State that fall: me and Stanley Ikenberry. Stanley Ikenberry eventually turned out to be president of the University of Illinois [1979–1995] and also president of the American Council of Education [1996–2001]. And so we were---Stan’s only two years older than I am, and he was on an R and R as dean of the College of Education at the University of West Virginia. He’d become a dean when he was twenty-nine.

WN: When was he at Illinois? I think I was there.

KM: Seventy-nine. . . . Well, he stayed there for fifteen years. Then he was professor for a while and became president of the American Council. When he took that job, I went to Chicago to talk with him, and he wanted me to come with him as a vice president for the American Council, but I decided to stay here. Anyway, Stan Ikenberry and I were the first appointments, and then Larry Leslie came the next year. He turned out to be another very distinguished professor of higher education. He was a graduate student with me at Berkeley. And Lester kept saying, “Where can we find bright guys?”

And I said, “You got to talk to Larry.”

So Larry came, and Bill Toombs from Michigan, and then S.V. Martorana—a famous name in community colleges, who was a consultant here with Dick [Richard K.] Kosaki in the community college movement. “Marty” was chancellor of the community college system in the state of New York. So that was really a high-powered group. We went from nowhere to somewhere in the higher ed reputation game and became one of the top three to five centers in five years.

In 1975, I became a full professor and got a call and was asked by the nominating committee in the Association of the Study of Higher Education, which is the professor’s association, would I run for the board. And I said, “Sure, why not?”

What I didn’t understand was the lead vote-getter would become president of the association, and I was the lead vote-getter. So just the year I became a full professor, I also became president-elect of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, an indication of how well known we had become in that five-year, six-year period. Now Stan left us after two years. He decided to stay at Penn State. Then he left us to become a senior vice president at Penn State.

WN: And it was all state-funded?

KM: Yes. I became its director then, after the national search in 1976, and directed it for five years. And knew I didn’t want to do it too much longer, so I started trying to get out of it about the end of the third year, and it took me two years to arrange an orderly transition.

So in my intellectual work at that time, Lester suggested as my first study at Penn State should be to replicate the study that I had done at Berkeley on the Penn State faculty senate. In 1970, the collective bargaining law passed in Pennsylvania. What is this creature called collective bargaining and does it fit the academic world? And the answer was, well of course it does—I mean, one size fits all. But my answer was, I don’t think so. So I started to learn about what it is and what it entails. And then, my views changed. In the state bureaucracy like the state colleges of Pennsylvania, the enemy there was always the legislature and the governor in terms of their control over that system. (When I got to UH, I made lessening state interference in the university one of my priorities.) We can’t run a university that way. I became fairly well known in the area of collective bargaining. My strategy was to gather everything I could about bargaining with faculty in Pennsylvania. So if you came into the state of Pennsylvania, you had to talk to Ken Mortimer about collective bargaining. (Chuckles)

So I was giving papers and writing about it. When I arrived here in Hawai‘i in 1962, we went to the Big Island to visit family friends in Hilo and Kona. Bobby [Robert] Fujimoto and Ernie Murai were both buddies in the old days, and their kids went to school and college together. When I was in New York, giving a paper, Harold Masumoto walked up to me afterwards—I had never met him—he said, “Bobby Fujimoto wants to talk to you.” Bobby was on the Board of Regents at the time, and UH was involved in this, the early stages of collective bargaining.

I got to be an authority, put it that way, on it, and a non-partisan. I said I was neutral; I took money from both sides as a consultant. I would go anywhere and talk to anybody about it. One of the experiences that called me to the attention of the Penn State people was when in 1973, the faculty at the two-year campuses filed a petition to bargain collectively and to separate off from the main campus at University Park for that purpose. It would be very much like if here, the community colleges wanted to bargain separately. The university didn’t know what to do about that. So Stan Ikenberry, the senior vice president at the time, said, “Ken knows a lot about that. Why don’t we get him in here?”

So I became assistant to the president for half-time. The faculty senate wanted me to come and address them about collective bargaining, and I stood up there for over two hours, answering questions from over 200 faculty members about collective bargaining. That sort of made my reputation at Penn State. I wouldn’t take one position or the other. The guys who were in favor of the union would ask you these loaded questions, and the management guys would ask you some, and you’d always turn it.

Stan also involved us when Jack Oswald became president of Penn State in 1970. He wanted a plan. And there had been staff fooling around, trying to write a strategic plan for the university. Jack fired them and hired Stan. And Stan came to us at the center and said, “Hey guys, we got to write it, we got to write it in the next few months.”

So me and Lester and Stan and a couple of others sat down and went through all the stuff that the planners had gathered and wrote the first strategic plan for Penn State under Jack Oswald. And the funny part of that is, in 1979, when Stan had become president of the University of Illinois, Jack Oswald wanted another strategic plan just before Stan left. He was going to retire in 1983. So Stan, after he took the job—the Illinois job—calls me again and says, “I promised Jack I’d finish this strategic plan before I left for Illinois, so you’re on again.”

And so we went through that again. So this was important because the third time was when Bryce Jordan became president, and needed a strategic plan.

WN: You’re talking about strategic plan for the entire university?

KM: Yes, twenty-two campuses. I stepped down as assistant to the president in 1975 or so after a year. During that time I drafted up a bogus set of demands. They weren’t bogus; you take them from what they had demanded in other contexts. And we had legal analysis, visited all the deans and all the vice presidents to get the university ready for that campaign. I trained my replacement in the planning office who was one of my graduate students. And eventually the election was delayed a couple of years and two- thirds of the faculty voted not to adopt collective bargaining.

WN: No to collective bargaining . . .

KM: Yes, voted against . . .

WN: No to a faculty union.

KM: Yes, correct.

WN: Now, as special assistant to the president, were you considered management? I mean, in other words . . .

KM: Would I have been in the union?

WN: . . . if they were to say yes . . .

KM: I would have been in the union—first, I only stayed a year as a special assistant and was only half-time employment. I was not willing to interrupt my academic career.

WN: So as special assistant, you were considered management?

KM: I don’t know; we never got to that. The university . . .

WN: Oh, you were a faculty member, right?

KM: I was on a tenure track. And they offered me a full-time job in the administration. In about 1974, Russ Larson wanted me to become assistant provost, and I said, “Thanks but no thanks, I need to be a full professor before I start fooling around with administration.”

In the meantime, I was still developing an academic career. I wrote and published a lot, as you’ve seen in my vita. I got a big break. Somebody asked me to write a piece on accountability in 1970, or somewhere around there for the American Association of Higher Education. I wrote a monograph-length piece on accountability. I couldn’t even find the word in the educational index. Nobody knew what accountability was in those days. So I have one of the original pieces on what is accountability, all out of political science.

WN: And how did you define it back then?

KM: Well, I didn’t. See, most were defining it as accountability for student learning. I didn’t come around to that till 1984 (Involvement in Learning). I treated accountability as a

political term. I wrote extensive works on decentralization and other management concepts.

So I was really, you know, glorying in this relative freedom to follow your intellectual nose. In the collective bargaining game, I got to be Mr. Personality because foundations would call up and give me money to study this and study that. I mean, we got a grant from the Carnegie Foundation to catalog the events of collective bargaining in Pennsylvania. Walter Gershenfeld, who was a labor studies professor at Temple, got the money, but they told him that he had to work with me. We had never met, so he called me up and we shared the grant and did a study, a questionnaire, and went out and talked to the people.

So all this time, I was out talking to the people about what was going on. I only crunched a few numbers after these early days. But mostly, it was field study. I mean, in 1979–80, I got money from the Lilly Endowment to run around the country, talking to universities about how they handle budget cuts. That gave me the reputation as a budget-cutter because I wrote a monograph called “The Three R’s of the ’80s: Reductions, Reallocations, and Retrenchments.” But if I had known I was going to be a university president . . . (WN laughs.) I never . . .

WN: That’s following you all the way through! (Laughs)

KM: I never would have used that title. So that proves I wasn’t “on that track,” as they say.

WN: You should have added a couple more R’s on the other side. (Laughs)

KM: Yeah, so it was something else.

WN: Research, or something.

KM: Yeah, yeah. And I also wrote a monograph about the dynamics of academic personnel for a provost. I wrote that these are all things you got to know to be a provost. So I was really caught up in academic pursuits. I served on twenty or thirty dissertation committees and chaired five or ten and taught an administration course. And I was marvelously mentored by Lester Anderson, who would find a way to curb my natural inclinations to go off half- cocked.

WN: Well, from ’83, you got really into administration as Penn State’s provost.

KM: Well, when Bryce became president, he fired the provost. Ted Eddy had been a candidate to be president of Penn State. So the first thing Bryce did was to fire him.

WN: The Penn State system was that the provost was actually in charge of the university . . .

KM: Well . . .

WN: The main university?

KM: No, actually, that’ll come along---the president of the university was also the chief executive officer of the main campus, University Park, and president of the entire system. The provost was the chief academic officer.

WN: I see.

KM: And by no means was he the chief executive officer of the University Park campus.

WN: So the boss was still the president. . . .

KM: Yes.

WN: . . . of University Park . . .

KM: Yes. So Bryce came up from Texas where he was one of the top three administrators in the Texas system and former president and founder of the University of Texas at Dallas. He was a very creative guy, and I enjoyed immensely working for him. He got the graduate dean to come in as acting provost, and the graduate dean, of course, fired the two vice provosts. One of them was Dick Chait, who turned up as director of the Institute for Educational Administration at Harvard. Now he is a full professor at Harvard. And another was Rosemary Schraer, who became chancellor of the University California at Riverside. So the acting provost—again, I had been around then for twelve years, thirteen years—asked if I would come in and help him out until things could stabilize.

So I said, “I can only give you half time.”

And he said, “That’ll have to do.”

That fall of ’83, Bryce was also looking for somebody to help him with strategic planning, and I didn’t say too much about it until the provost said to me, “You’ve got to get involved in this.” So I wrote Bryce a note.

By that time, he had already hired a professor of business to help him. But he said, “I’ve heard about you,” and of course he’d heard about me from Stan Ikenberry, who was president of Illinois.

Bryce asked me to come in to see him. When I went in, open on his desk, was the Chronicle of Higher Education. He said, “The feds are going to appoint a study group on higher education. Do you know anything about that?”

I said, “Yeah, I’m going to chair it. They’re still fooling around with the details, but I’ll be the chair.”

He looked at me and said, “Does anybody know about this? Do the PR people know about this?”

I said, “No, it’ll come out.”

So I was appointed to chair the group because the administering agent was going to be the National Center for Higher Education management systems. I had been appointed to the board in 1980 as one of two researchers. They wanted to put researchers on the board, so they appointed Pat Cross from Berkeley and me. So then the feds asked NCHEMS to manage a national study group.

“Well, we want Mortimer to do it; we know Mortimer” and so forth.

The context of the time is important to understand A Nation at Risk. A Nation at Risk, the [David] Gardner report, didn’t say anything about higher education. The feds wanted something said about higher ed, and they didn’t want to go through all the bureaucracy of it again, so for a hundred thousand bucks, they asked to staff it.

They appointed Sandy Astin, [Harold] “Bud” Hodgkinson, and a group of very well- known people, and I was the chair. And we met seven times during that year and issued a report in 1984. Ted Bell was secretary of education at the time. And he said, “We can release it in the East Room in the White House but I’m not sure the president won’t talk about school prayer.” Ronald Reagan was president.

We, as a group, said, “To hell with that. We’re not interested in that!”

So we released it in an auditorium at George Washington University with Secretary Bell there. The evening before, Lorrie said, “We got to get T-shirts or sweatshirts, you know, and iron on these stickers on them: Involvement in Learning.” Lorrie did “iron on” shirts but forgot the E in “involvement.” So, these were headline stories, but in the bottom paragraph in one of the U.S.A. notes, “Profs can’t spell.”

WN: (Laughs) Poor Lorrie.

KM: Yeah, well we were ragging her about that. (Chuckles)

So that got me into another realm of visibility nationally, beyond just administration stuff. I was profiled on the front page in the Chronicle of Higher Education as the man behind the quality report. It had a picture of me standing cross-armed in front of Old Main at Penn State. Speculation about whether or not I was going to go into administration, wonderful words said about me from the people on the commission, and things like that. So one thing led to another . . .

WN: Now what was going on in higher education at that time? This is the ’70s, whereas---I mean, Reagan was president—no, no he wasn’t president.

KM: It was actually ’80s. He got elected in 1980 . . .

WN: That’s right, that’s right, in 1980.

KM: In 1980.

WN: Right. But prior to that, was federal funding and state funding going into the universities? Or were they . . .

KM: Yeah, they . . .

WN: Was it going up or down?

KM: If you remember, the watershed in higher education came in the early ’70s, when the feds started giving money directly to students through Pell grants and other programs of that sort. Most of the higher ed establishment opposed that. But that’s when you had the growth of federal financial aid efforts. And so that was the big thing about then. There was a lot of money in research. The NIH [National Institutes of Health] grew enormously during those times. USOE [United States Office of Education] was in a state of flux, but when Gardner issued his report, it was a wakeup call or whatever you want to call it. It was a Republican report.

The Newman report on higher education had come out in 1972. (Frank became a good friend of mine.) They issued another one in ’78 or so. But anyway, ours was the first report on higher ed in a decade. And it was really dominated by the accountability movement for student learning. And that for me was a big, kind of a switch. The main

issues in the report were anything you could do to get students involved in their own learning but that you have to do that within an atmosphere of standards, you know, not just anything, but some standards. Then you have to assess the results of the learning and feed that back, and that’s all it is, folks. The rest of it is details, as they say.

WN: But it was still an era where state universities depended on the state government . . .

KM: I argued that what will happen when you give money directly to students is that universities will raise tuition. And that’s of course, what’s been done. I’ve testified to that here in Hawai‘i. I said, “If you give it to me, I’ll raise it.” I don’t want to do it, because when you do, they take other money away. And I, finally, was commissioned by WICHE [Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education], about four or five years ago, to write a paper on the governance of financial aid. I wrote that there is no connection between federal policies, state policies, and institutional policies in financial aid.

The feds have said they should give out based on need, and the states would say, “Well, we want to keep people home, so we’ll do it based on what they did in high school”— that’s merit. And then the universities said, “We want to get national Rhodes Scholars in here.” And so they’ll pay bright students to come, so you have a need-based, and then, you know, it gets mixed up. And the institutions sit there and find out what everybody else is going to do, then they make their decisions about what they’re going to do.

When you got into the ’80s, the big debate was about student learning. In ’84, three reports came out. The American Association of Colleges came out with “Integrity in the College Curriculum.” They talked about the content of the curriculum, which we had avoided. Then Bill Bennet, who was director of NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] at the time, came out with his report, which was really a very philosophical piece. So the quality reports were dominating the agenda.

WN: Was he NEH? Bennet was a . . .

KM: NE. . . .

WN: . . . [secretary of] education, right?

KM: No. He was director, first, of the National Endowment for Humanities.

WN: Okay.

KM: I don’t know what his history after that was. He was from Texas, and was not from Texas but was on the faculty at Texas. A student of John Silber.

So the quality reports were issued in that fall of 1984. Ours was the first, and that involved me in two or three of these speeches a month all over the country. I was profiled in the national news, et cetera.

At the same time, and when Bryce came to Penn State in ’83, I was working on this acting associate provost job. Bryce wanted me to stay in administration, but I said, “I’m not going to be anybody’s associate provost.” I mean, if you’re going to make me a vice president, I’ll talk about it. And so he promised that he would.

Bill Richardson came from the University of Washington as the new provost. Bill was a graduate dean at the University of Washington and eventually became president of Johns Hopkins University and the president of the Kellogg Foundation. I was acting vice

associate provost at the time, but they were conducting a search for the associate provost job, and I would not become a candidate. Bill finally figured out that if they made me both vice president and vice provost, I’d shut up, which is what they did. (WN chuckles.)

And it was probably the best job I have ever had in terms of my creative talents because the president’s executive assistant and I were right here between the president’s and the provost’s office. I became the vice president for change, because they sent me to do all of the very difficult things. For example, we were worried about half the undergraduate enrollments at the University Park campus would be in business and engineering. But that would mean a really unbalanced place. So we had to create an alternative to the business college. Bryce’s idea, “We’ll create a school of communications. Ken, go do that.”

We merged the film people out of the arts college, the journalism school, and some people out of the speech department, and fashioned the school of communications. I became its acting dean while we recruited a new dean. Bryce wanted to merge two colleges: the college of human development and a college of health, physical education, and recreation. I managed that merger. We closed the department of community studies, and I managed that closure. The cable television interests started a museum on our campus—and I managed that.

WN: This is all after you wrote that article on retrenchment—the Three R’s?

KM: Well, yeah, right. I was still writing and still working. The mathematics department had admitted their normal complement of something like twenty or so Ph.D. students. When their students arrived, they found out thirteen of them were not competent to teach in English. They were from China. So that problem was turned over to me. The chemistry department went bankrupt, and that problem was turned over to me. So I had a lot of experience in fixing things.

WN: What was your philosophy, your overriding philosophy, when you were given a project like that?

KM: Well . . .

WN: What do you start with?

KM: Well you start with the basics of university life. For example, we were not going to dismiss tenured faculty members when we closed the community development department. There were some sociologists, political scientists, and public policy people in community development. We agreed with the dean, who, of course, opposed this matter, but nonetheless, we agreed with the dean that these people would have an opportunity for a year or two to find another place in the university if the receiving department would accept them. The dean wanted the transfers to stay in his college. I said, “That isn’t going to work because your college isn’t broad enough.”

Some of these people really should go and talk to the sociology faculty and see if they are acceptable to the sociology faculty. So the principle was, we weren’t going to dismiss tenured faculty members. For the first time in Penn State’s history, I bought a few people out of tenured contracts. My most satisfying one involved a secretary I was trying to get to retire. She had been at the university for a long time—twenty-something years—and after two or three conversations, each time she came back, I thought she was going to do it. Finally, about the third. . . . “Look, Evelyn, this is right for you. What’s—”

“Well, I really wanted to get my twenty-five-year Penn State chair.”

So I gave her one.

WN: What’s a twenty-five-year Penn State chair?

KM: Well, it’s a chair with arms on the side of it, your name on the back . . .

WN: Oh! (Chuckles) Oh really?

KM: Yeah . . .

WN: A real chair?

KM: Yeah, a real chair, a piece of furniture. But, I mean, to get that matter accomplished without being brutal. . . .

WN: So how many years did she have?

KM: About twenty-two.

WN: Okay.

KM: I mean, they gave me one when I left, and I only had nineteen years, so I broke that dam too. I broke the dam of trying to persuade the business people that it’s worth it to buy a tenured person out and let him go on his way. As long as we don’t fill in the position for X number of years, et cetera.

I have written in my notes that one of the things that I am proudest of in those days is that I gained the confidence of the other side of the house—the business people. I think I had the confidence of the academic side. But I was able to work with everybody. I became associate secretary of the board for a year when an associate secretary of the board left. The secretary of the board of Penn State was the president, and he was the voting member of the board. The associate secretary really administered the affairs of the board. So Bryce asked me to do that for a year, which was a really great experience.

There was a contested election for the new chair of the board. Carol Cartwright, a vice provost, and I were sent into a room to count the votes. Carol Cartwright eventually turned out to be the president of Kent State University in Ohio. The victor won by one vote. Bryce had to vote in that election. I came to believe that it’s not good to be a member of a board when you have to cast these kinds of votes.

The other experience I enjoyed was when the previous president of the university, Jack Oswald, that I had been assistant to ten years earlier, was not happy with the record being written of his years as presidency. And he asked Bryce to have me do his oral history. So I met with Jack in Philadelphia. I did my homework and the history was to be released after his death. So I’m able to talk about that freely now. There was a close vote on the board about whether he was going to continue as president, and he made a point in his oral history: “No, that was not the issue. The issue was who was going to be chair of the board.”

He wanted to set the record straight about collective bargaining, et cetera. He wasn’t happy with what historians were saying about his time as president. So that got me deeply into the histories of presidencies and so forth.

I was member of the kitchen cabinet and the budget task force and all of the major committees. I chaired the rump group. You might wonder what a rump group was. A rump group was a small group of people put together to find out what the political influences were of Pennsylvania legislators. So I got the printouts of all their donators— anybody over 500 bucks. There was nothing there. People don’t give more than 500 bucks to state legislators in the ’80s. The question was how we could activate the alumni in the legislature. I became the president’s representative on the Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Universities, PACU. Of course, the president was a member, but he didn’t go. I also represented the president in the practice sessions in preparations for the board meetings. We had twenty-three campuses, and all the construction projects were reviewed for the board. And budgets were prepared for them. I was the president’s guy to review them and say, “The president isn’t going to buy that.” You know, “That can’t be done that way, it’s got to be done this way,” et cetera.

I managed all the executive searches. I had a staff who handled the paperwork, but when the dean or a vice president job came up, Bryce would appoint a chair, and I would meet with that chair, and we’d go through the details of committee operation. And I sat in all of the interviews with candidates. A dozen deans were replaced and a couple of vice presidents. I sat through all those interviews, and I was responsible for keeping them active while the president was deciding what to do.

WN: This is in your capacity as vice president/vice provost.

KM: That’s right. So I was a vice president without a portfolio, except I got to handle a lot of the very dicey issues.

In one case all the department chairs in a college supported the incumbent acting dean, but Bryce wanted to appoint somebody else. They wrote him a note saying, “We’re all in favor of this guy, and we’ll all resign unless we get him.”

Bryce gave me the letter and said, “Go talk to them.”

I called each of them and said, you know, “The president is going to appoint. . . .” The guy he did appoint eventually turned out to the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jim Moeser.

And they all got in line, but you had to talk to them first.

Another faculty came to me from the labor studies group. They weren’t going to move from their current digs. I said, “Gentlemen, can’t we talk?”

It was a great experience, but I came to believe that it was time for me to move on I was in my late forties. So then people began to talk to me about what I was interested in, and the Chronicle of Higher Education speculated about my future. I knew that as a Ph.D. in higher education, I wasn’t going to get into an academic provost job. I had been a finalist for dean of education at Berkeley and dean of management at UC-Davis. I was on a list of five that they sent the chancellor. I never got interviewed.

WN: This was about while you were vice president/vice provost?

KM: While I was doing these things, yeah. And I began to look around and say, “Well I could do that, and I could do that.”

I began to let my name be dropped in a few hats, and I made finals at Berkeley and at UC-Davis, but I never got interviewed. I never got a call from the chancellors or anything like that. So I knew that somebody with a Ph.D. in education wasn’t going to make it as an academic leader. And there’s a lot of wisdom in that. Education is all about teacher education, and I didn’t know anything about that. So I’m not bitter about that, but I realized that if I was going to do anything, I need to jump chairs. I had never had any significant line responsibilities. Five years as director of a center, I had a quarter of a million dollar budget. Now the provost that came in cut the center’s budget by 40 percent. He said, “If you guys are so good, you can go out and raise your own money,” which I did. So when I left that directorship, I was on five different grants. And that’s no life for a sane man.

So, I began to think that I should step out on my own. I went to see a Penn State alum named Alan Ostar, who was president of the Association of American State Colleges and Universities. I said, “Alan, I’m thinking of leaving Penn State, and. . . .”

Oh, and couple months later, he said, “I’ve recommended you to be president of Western Washington University.”

WN: He mentioned that to you?

KM: Yeah.

WN: You didn’t seek it out.

KM: No, no. He nominated me.

WN: Okay.

KM: And I said, “Where the hell is that?”

WN: (Laughs) Okay.

KM: He said, “You ought to look at that place. It’s a really fine institution.”

The record of that is very strange, but I had contacts in the state of Washington, where I knew some guys at the University of Washington. So I called and asked one of the vice provosts at UW, and he said, “That job is probably wired for Bud Davis, in Oregon. Bud had been fired by the governor as chancellor of the Oregon system, and he was everybody’s hero because he got fired by a governor.” I thought that was interesting.

WN: (Chuckles) Yeah.

KM: But because of Alan’s recommendation, I persisted. I’m told later, that Bruce Alton was running the search for the academic search service, which was an arm of AGB, Association of Governing Boards. I had done a lot of work for the AGB over the years. I directed their study on selection of college and university trustees. That commission was chaired by the governor of North Carolina. Dick Lyman, the president of Stanford, was on it. So was Clark Kerr, really eminent people. I did all the staff work for them, and that means I ran around the country talking to everybody about how to appoint trustees. We issued two reports: one for the public sector, one for the private sector. So I was known to AGB, and again was a Ph.D. in education. Western is largely controlled by the Arts and Sciences. I learned later, from the people on the search committee, that I wouldn’t have made the cut except Bruce Alton said, “You got to look at that guy.”

So they kept me in the pool. I went to an interview in Seattle—you know, one of those airport interviews. I was quite reluctant. I said, I wasn’t really sure I’d be interested in Western—“You should invite me to the campus and then we’ll make our mind up.” Well, I made the short list of three people—and then the newspapers get a hold of it. But I wouldn’t talk to the newspapers very much, and they sent out a list of questions for the candidates, and the other two guys filled it out, and I didn’t.

WN: Why?

KM: Because I wasn’t sure what I would do. First, you don’t know what you’re going to do when you’re in those situations anyway, and I’m not somebody who promises something I can’t do. And of course, that’s what turned the tide in both of my presidencies. An issue came up in both of those search committees. And I said, “Look, if I tell you I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it.”

I’ll tell you a story. Larry Tanimoto was on the search committee here at UH when I met with the board of regents. He asked me, “Everybody else is telling us we can have all these things. Why don’t you say that?”

I said, “Because I’d be responsible for delivering, and it can’t happen. It isn’t going to happen.”

So, at Western, I went there with the understanding that the job was wired for Bud Davis anyway. I went through the interviews, and they asked me some questions, and I met with the board. Then I said, “You got to get smaller to get better.”

I didn’t do much homework on it until a week before the interview, you know. The newspapers were reporting that I was a deadbeat, not very interested in the job. So when I left, I said, “No, I’m not sure I would take the job, if offered. I’ve got to talk to my wife.” Lorrie was with me. A story: When they invited me to campus. I say to Martha Choe, “Martha, you should know, my wife is Asian.”

WN: Who was Martha Choe?

KM: Chair of the search committee.

WN: Oh.

KM: She said, “Oh that’s not too bad, I’m Korean, you know.” (WN chuckles.)

She turned out to be on the city council at Seattle and is now a director of administrative affairs for the Gates Foundation. A pretty eminent person in Seattle and a member of that minority community in Seattle. Last time I saw Mazie, the minority people dragged me to a fundraiser for Mazie Hirono in Seattle, and now I’m on her Sucker List. (WN laughs.)

So when I left Western’s campus, I said it would all depend on a lot of stuff. That evening, before I got on the plane, Craig Cole, who’s a great friend of mine now, said, “You’re my candidate. I really would like you—will you take this job?”

Well, I said, “Well, I’ll think about it. Give me a call.”

WN: Who was Craig Cole?

KM: He was on the board.

WN: Okay.

KM: And so . . .

WN: So he had made up his mind that . . .

KM: Yeah, he said, yeah, “I’ve looked at them all, and you’re my man. I want you to come and take this job.”

And I said, you know, “I’ve been told that this is wired for Bud, and. . . . ” Bud, whom I knew. Bud had squired me around Oregon when he was chancellor, trying to persuade me that I should move to Oregon. He spent a whole day with me, drove me to Eugene, et cetera. I was giving a speech in Portland, so Bud took me down to Eugene and Corvallis and showed me his home and because he figured I was an up-and-coming guy, and he wanted me to think of the Oregon system. A hell of a nice guy.

So the board was going to go into session a week later. Craig called me the night before, and I said, “Yeah, Craig, if they offer me the job, I’ll probably take it.”

He said, “Well, you’ve got to let them know.”

How do you do that? He gave me the phone numbers of all the trustees—about seven members. So I called them all that evening, and I said, you know, “I understand you’re concerned about my enthusiasm. I will be happy to become president of Western if we can work out the details.” So in my notes, they tell me they stayed in session for four hours, and then offered me the job.

And there’s a Lorrie story in all of this. It’s a beautiful campus; it has outdoor sculpture. And Lorrie loved the climate there; she never liked to be in hot weather. But they didn’t have a permanent presidential residence. The existing presidential residence was owned by the student dining hall reserve funds. Bob Ross and Paul Olscamp, my predecessors, had lived in that house. The board decided they needed to get it out from under having the students think they own the president’s house. So they were looking around to rent a house. I took the job in June and went out for a visit in July. Al Froderberg walked me around a showed me a couple of houses. I said, “This one’s fine.”

We got there in August, and we were going to arrive in September, but in August, when I took Lorrie with me, she looked at the house and said, “This will not do.”

One of the university employees said, “Let’s go look at the president’s house.” They wouldn’t give him a key to the house on Toledo Hill. So Lorrie and Curt walked along the parapet outside the windows. She looked in there and says, “We’re going to live there.”

And we get back home, and she’s telling me this, and I said, “I’m going to have to call the chairman of the board and tell them that the deal that they’ve just struck for another house is not—”

“Yes, that’s what you’re going to do, Mr. President,” she says.

So that’s what I did.

WN: (Chuckles) That was part of the negotiations?

KM: Well, the housing thing was, you know, they got to put me somewhere. I mean, it was going to be a house, yes.

WN: So this is a, on your side, taking the job was contingent upon getting that house?

KM: No, I had already taken the job . . .

WN: Oh, you had already taken . . .

KM: I just told them—I didn’t try to resign or anything—I just said, “No, we’re not going to live there; we’re going to live here.”

WN: Oh, okay.

KM: And told my vice president, I said, “Go, get us out of that lease over there.” They hadn’t signed it yet anyway. So they had to pay the guy a little money and buy us out of the deal.

The Western experience was a great experience. I was there four-and-a-half years. One of the questions in my appointment was whether I was using Western for stepping stone to something else. That came up in the discussions and in the appointment letter to me. It said, “While there is no contract; it’s expected the president will stay for at least five years.” I said I wouldn’t talk to anybody else for at least five years unless Penn State or the University of Hawai‘i presidencies came open. And then I’d at least talk to those people. So it wasn’t I was going to go to Hawai‘i or Penn State; I just wanted flexibility, and if those presidencies came open, I could at least discuss them.

WN: I think we can get this on the next time, but I’m curious to know why those two institutions.

KM: It was part of that negotiation of that contract. That was the best board that I’ve ever worked with.

WN: You mean, Western Washington . . .

KM: Western. There were seven people, all committed to the university, with a minimum of fuss and bother. But the biggest issue when I arrived was the arming of the campus police. The board had split on the matter but had voted against arming the campus police. There were some incidents on campus of firearms, etc. The campus police were unionized and got the union people to say that they can’t go into an area that’s not safe. So the Bellingham cops would have to go in. We kept losing arbitration cases on a safe working environment. It got to be an embarrassment, so my first task was to get the board to reverse itself. It took about six months to a year, but the board showed a lot of maturity in that. The funny part of it was, a legislator who was a very close friend of Craig Cole had this article pinned on his bulletin board, “Campus police at Western shoots his finger off.” After we armed them, one of the officers was cleaning his weapon at night and discharged it into his finger. He said, “These are the guys you want to give weapons to?” (WN laughs.)

The second major issue at Western was learning to live in the shadow of the University of Washington. Western was a rolling admissions place; they started admitting people in the fall, and when they had enough, they cut it off. The state had enrollment caps on each institution. So the state legislature said, how many students—full-time equivalents—and you had to be plus or minus 2 percent of the target. So it was a pretty serious cap.

The population of Western Washington, fifty miles wide from Vancouver B.C. down to Vancouver, Washington, is like the country of Chile. Fifty miles from the ocean you find two-thirds of the state’s population. The atmosphere was that Western’s always a place you can go if you can’t get into the University of Washington. So I told them we had to cut that out. I turned over the whole admission staff within a year or two. Then we held all admissions until April and admitted the most qualified. So all of a sudden, Western began to be selective. Our entering GPA went to over 3.5. We began to rival the University of Washington in the SAT and GPA scores of our freshman class. I found out that the U.S. News and World Report questionnaires were coming into the university, but nobody was filling them out. So we got ranked in U.S. News and World Report very soon thereafter, and Western’s reputation changed substantially. We sold it as a small school. It was eight to ten thousand students versus University of Washington’s thirty thousand. Western’s not small, but compared to that, it is.

WN: Is it a commuter school?

KM: Western?

WN: Yeah.

KM: Three thousand students live on campus in residence halls. So it’s not a commuter school. Seattle’s ninety miles away, and we were getting 65 to 80 percent of our students from the west side of the state, the largest portion from the Seattle metropolitan area. You could say, and I did many times, if you draw a hundred-mile circle around Bellingham, you’ll find more people than are in Seattle because you take in Vancouver, British Columbia. So that was an easy sell on my part that we had to make choices about who gets into Western because there aren’t enough seats on the west side. There were only six public universities in this state. Three of them are on the west side. One is Evergreen State University, a very small place; the University of Washington; and Western. And not too many people want to go across the mountains to go to college. So it was a seller’s market, if you will. We changed the reputation of Western by the simple matter of remaking admissions. The admissions staff told me that they—many—well, they all laughed at the—but they really couldn’t stomach what they criticized as an elitist view.

The second issue was private fundraising. We began to work on that too, and it doubled or tripled in my time at Western from about a million to three or four million when I left. And we had just started its first campaign to raise private funds.

WN: Well, let’s continue on with Western the next time, but I wanted to just ask you to sum up today—what was your legacy at Penn State? What did you accomplish there?

KM: Well I think I preserved the . . .

WN: You’d been there twenty years? Almost twenty years.

KM: Nineteen years. First, of course, I grew up professionally and matured immensely. And I was talking yesterday about my temper and emotion and all that. I got control of that at Penn State. I was dealing with some very difficult—and I say knotty, K-N-O-T-T-[Y]— problems to which there weren’t any solutions. I mean, we got a gift from the foundation, 10 million bucks, for a chair in each department in the College of Science. The recipient of that chair had to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences. We were recruiting those type of faculty. One walked in, and tore all the wallpaper off the wall; he just couldn’t stand it. Well that’s state property. (WN chuckles.) So you’re into how you’re going to fix that problem. And you put the chemistry department in bankruptcy,

45 how’re you going to fix that problem and preserve academic values? There was a conversation between the dean of the college of human development and the provost when we were merging those colleges and closing community studies. And the dean made a direct pitch to the provost that these tenured positions need to stay in his college. And the provost turned to me and asked why. I said, “Well the principle of tenure is at stake here, and that’s what we’re preserving.”

And there’s one principle is keeping lines for a dean, but the other is at what cost? We committed to these people years ago in tenure-track positions, and just because we’ve made a change in the structure of the place, didn’t mean that all of a sudden, that contract is abrogated. And so the most sound academic thing to do was to let a sociologist talk to the sociology department to see whether or not he’s acceptable to them. So what was I protecting in that regard? I met, many years later, with a guy who I really had to put the screws to. He was angry at me at the time. When he came to Seattle, I went down to have lunch with him, and he said, “Now I understand what you were doing. You were the president’s man.”

I said, “Yes, you’ve got it right. It had nothing to do with our friendship. Just you needed to get in line with this particular policy, and my job was not to brutalize anybody—to get things done in a way that preserved academic values.”

That’s when I get back to that inner-directed man I talked about yesterday. No, I’m not anybody’s shill, on the one hand. A few times, the provost told me to do some things, and I looked at him, and I said, you know, “I’ll do that if you want, but here’s what I think we ought to do.”

And he’d say, “No, you’re right. Go ahead and do it that way.” And it usually was because that can’t be done and this can.

I also got some fundraising experience because we started the first campaign that Penn State had ever run. It’s an interesting story, but we couldn’t identify one million-dollar prospect when that started, but there were 58 when we finished. The campaign started with a goal of $250 million, but finished at $356 million. I went to all the campaign functions; I had the responsibility of raising a couple million for the cable museum and participated in all those conversations. The man who led Penn State’s campaign was chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch. We asked him for $30 million. This was after I left, but he said he couldn’t possibly give that kind of money. But he went back and found out that his stock in Merrill Lynch was worth $300 million, not $100 million. So he endowed the College of Arts and Sciences at $30 million. We had these ten chairs, a $10 million gift from the Eberly family. A National Academy member in each department in the College of Science, and I managed a lot of that. So I learned from all that.

I went to board meetings regularly. I got experience. The two years I spent selling, as I said, I didn’t like that job, but I learned to sell universities because I got passionate about what I was selling. When you get the “handbook” of presidents, you find every president does the same thing: they start with a strategic plan, they raise private money, and they set priorities. That is not rocket science. It’s whether or not you can do any of those things that make a difference. My intellectual training and experience taught me that it’s not thinking about it, it’s the doing that makes a difference. The best thing anybody said to me here, when I left, was Bill Lampe, professor of mathematics. He said, “Everybody talked about autonomy for a century, but you did it.”

I said, “Thank you very much. It took eight years.”

But it started in 1978, and you don’t want to forget that.

WN: Right, right.

KM: And so forth.

WN: Now Penn State, of course, there’s one segment of that university that has autonomy, that always had autonomy and always was good at fundraising, and that’s the football program. What was your relationship with Joe Paterno and that . . .

KM: Well, I. . . . Joe was at several social occasions, but I didn’t get to know him well. I should have said this earlier. Bryce appointed a strategic study group on the status of women. We had fourteen strategic study groups while we were doing the strategic plan. These study groups dealt with special issues. A friend of mine was appointed chair of the one on the status of women. Over a period of two or three years, they issued three or four reports, with 190 recommendations on the status of women at Penn State. Bryce said, “Ken, take care of this, will you?”

So part of it was about women’s athletics, where I got heavily involved. We had doctors in our athletic health center that would put a Bible on the table beside a woman that would come in with any kind of sexual transmitted disease and preach to her. Men were allowed to go behind screens when they took urine tests. Women had to do it out in front. So we had to fix issues like that.

It got me involved in Title IX and other athletic issues. Penn State is fond of saying that it doesn’t have any state support in its athletic programs. But I looked at that very carefully, and I know how they can say that, but it isn’t true. These half-time coaches teach P.E. in the off-season, and they’re on tenure track. Joe Paterno was a tenured professor. But the football program was clean, and Joe ran a great program. But it was an embarrassment to us when he seconded George Bush’s speech at the presidential nomination convention. The man’s Republican. Joe became a hero during that time because he turned down the New York Jets coaching job. What I was learning is how to deal with an icon. And it ain’t easy. And they cut their own swath. I learned a lot at Penn State.

I also honed my values about things and also developed this sense of what’s right and what isn’t right. I mean, we arrested something like eighty black kids at four o’clock in the morning.

“Why?”

They surrounded the building holding hands. The vice president for student affairs was a former fullback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Bill Asbury, and an African American. We needed to go out—Carol Cartwright and I—and go to a press conference and announce what’s going on. Bill went out in front of us and broke the line just by leaning on it. We could get out and do a press conference about what we were going to do. Kids came in the building but the trustees had a policy that we couldn’t leave them in the building overnight. When I was managing crises here [i.e., UH] and at Western, there was no such policy, and I left kids in buildings three days at Western. But so we arrested almost a hundred kids—at four o’clock in the morning, put them in school buses and ran them down to the local gendarmes. What do you learn from all of that?

WN: What was the issue?

KM: I think it was the Sullivan principles—investments in South Africa? That might not be right.

WN: Was it . . .

KM: Well . . .

WN: It had nothing to do with affirmative action on campus?

KM: Well it had to do with minorities on campus and the minority center and other matters like that. Bryce was trying to build up a minority population. There was no black church in State College, and a black couldn’t get his hair cut in State College; no barber would touch them. So this was the ’80s. To break that mold was not a small matter. Outside of athletics, you know. So that was a big problem for us, and then the question of the status of women in Title IX in athletics emerged.

So what was I learning? Well, I learned a lot about women’s issues with those 190 recommendations, some of which were off the wall, but others were really quite sound. How do you treat people? I prided myself that I was able to work with women very well, but that was a learned behavior. It was not—I mean, when I was a kid, whites fought with blacks in Middleboro over use of the swimming hole. And the N-word was used in my house. So my views of these events were seeded at Berkeley but rooted at Penn State. Of course, marrying a Japanese woman and going through that was part of my learning experience as well. I got commendations from the women’s commission at Penn State for my activities on their behalf. I came to believe there’s a rationale for these views. In my scholarly days, they did studies showing the discrimination of women in certain things, and I’d say the statistics of that don’t work out. If you’re running a multiple regression, it depends on what order you put them in. You know, what explains most of the variance. If you just redo those data, you’ll find most of the variants are explained by X, not gender. Well, I was hardnosed because I said, “Well, the data don’t show that what you’re saying to be true. And if you ran them a different way, you’d come up with a different answer and you need to. . . . ”

We reviewed this conversation many times, and I said, “What difference does it make if you put women in positions of power?” You can identify the difference that it makes. For example, they pay a lot more attention to safety issues, lighting in the parking lots at night, etc. You can’t get men interested in stuff like that. So there are a set of issues that come out to be women’s issues, but they’re really not; they’re institutional issues because you got to have a safe campus. And when you’re demonstrating, who are the people you have to protect? If you’re on a board with minority people, you can’t let them be the first to raise an issue because that confirms a stereotype. So you develop this kind of thing to make sure that one of us is the first one to speak, not a minority or a woman. Carol Cartwright was one of our vice provosts, and she wanted to manage the study group of women. We said to her, “Carol, you don’t need that burden. Let Ken do it because . . .”

WN: This is where—Penn State?

KM: Yes. So what did I learn? Well I learned a lot about getting along with people, but I also got some real internal values about the dignity of people. You have to do some very tough things. I used to say, you know, “I don’t lie, I don’t cheat, and I don’t brutalize people. But I do make hard decisions.”

I grew up at Penn State. When I left there, I was fifty-one and had a lot of experience in dealing with tough problems. When I got to Western, the second day I’m at Western, I’m

down testifying before the higher education board, the coordinating board. I’m sitting in a restaurant there, outside of the hearing room, and the chair of the HEC board [Higher Education Coordinating Board] sat down. The big issue was branch campuses in the State of Washington. We’re going to start branch campuses of the universities. He comes over, and shakes my hand, and says, “Welcome to Washington,” and says, “Now, we’ve got this plan, this is what we’re going to do, and there’s twenty-three million in it for you if you go along.” (WN chuckles.)

And I say—for Western, that is—and I say, “What’s the plan?”

It’s to create branch campuses at the research universities. Now, as a scholar of higher education, you know that that’s the most expensive institution known to human kind. They’ll all want doctoral degrees, and they’ll all want research-oriented faculty. We have differential faculty salaries under our contract here in Hawai‘i that recognizes the market. So I said, you know, “Yes, we need branched campuses, but really—this ought to be known as Tacoma State University, not to be the University of Washington-Tacoma.”

Well, I got disabused of that pretty fast. I went to see the chairman of the revenue committee who was from Tacoma. He says, “I understand that you’re opposed to branched campuses.”

I said, “No, sir, I’m not opposed to branched campuses; I just think they ought to be done in a more cost-effective way.”

I went to see the speaker of the house, who was from Vancouver. He says, “There’s going to be a branch campus in Vancouver, what else you want to talk about?”

I lost that battle, but one of my consulting clients in recent years has been the University of Washington. The Tacoma branch has gone very well, but now they’re going to start offering doctoral degrees. And the Bothell branch hasn’t gone well at all. Why all this story? Bill Gerberding, president of the University of Washington, wasn’t at all interested in branch campuses. So they get Sam Smith, who was a friend of mine from Penn State and president of Washington State University, and drive him through Tacoma. They rent a helicopter to fly him over the city, and he makes a big announcement, “Where do you want the campus?”

Of course that gets Bill Gerberding interested because he doesn’t want WSU in his backyard. So all of that got resolved through highly political ways. The politicians said we want the University of Washington—we don’t want a teaching college like Western; we want the University of Washington. Or, we want Washington State—a research university. So I lost that battle. The next time I met with the HEC board director, he said, “I understand you are badmouthing the HEC board.”

And I said, “I’m a scholar of higher education, and these data don’t work.”

Anyway, I agreed to tone down my rhetoric for very good reasons.

WN: Let’s get into that when we continue tomorrow.

(WN and KM discuss schedule.)

KM: My basic research method was to go interview the people from a series of planned questions. That evening, I would sit in my hotel room and then dictate my notes.

WN: Right, right. Yeah.

(WN and KM discuss book signing.)

WN: I asked you about Joe Paterno because, you know, sports is a huge issue everywhere, especially at a school like Penn State and Hawai‘i.

KM: Penn State, I came to respect athletics because of its integrity, and because of Joe’s integrity, but I also came to be very skeptical of the nature of athletics. When I was here [at UH], I cut their budget. Evan [Dobelle, KM’s successor] let them run deficits, but I didn’t. But the Penn State thing was quite an enterprise.

And when I arrived at Western, and I was supposed to go to a football game. It was in Civic Stadium, and I didn’t even know where it was. I drove around, trying to find it. (WN laughs.)

END OF INTERVIEW

Tape No. 25-47-3-11

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

with

Kenneth P. Mortimer (KM)

Honolulu, O‘ahu

February 16, 2011

BY: Warren Nishimoto (WN) and Michi Kodama-Nishimoto (MK)

WN: Okay, this is session number three with Kenneth Mortimer, former president of the University of Hawai‘i, and today is February 16, 2011. We’re at the Social Science Research Institute on the Mänoa campus. The interviewers are Warren Nishimoto and Michi Kodama-Nishimoto.

Ken, session number three, welcome.

KM: Thank you.

WN: And we were talking about Western Washington University, and you talked about a couple of the major issues that you were faced with. One was arming of the campus police . . .

KM: Mm-hmm, yes.

WN: . . . that you had to deal with. And I was just wondering, you know, you told the story—I think it might’ve been off tape—about the housing situation at Western Washington.

KM: Yes.

WN: Can you talk about that?

KM: Well, they had a house that was owned by the Student Dining Service reserves. We were the only public university in the state of Washington that didn’t have a presidential residence. There are six public universities in Washington. The board was concerned about that and wanted to get an appropriation from the legislature to buy a president’s house. The two past presidents lived in this place on Toledo Hill, and the board decided that the new president wasn’t going to live there. So when the previous president passed away suddenly, the search committee started to rent something for the new president.

In the interim, the board put in the capital budget for the university money for a president’s house. When I went out to Washington as president-elect a couple times, Al Froderberg and I looked at a couple of places that they had sort of reviewed. And I said, “That will do.” And Lorrie came out with me in August, since we would arrive as presidential couple in September. She said, “No, that will not do. And my furniture won’t even fit in that bedroom.”

WN: Was that okay with you? I mean with . . .

KM: Well, no, it wasn’t because I don’t like to make waves. One of the vice presidents said, “Why don’t you go look at the house that they’re using?” which was vacant at the time. She couldn’t get a key to it. So they walked outside the parapet in front of the big glass windows overlooking Bellingham Bay. Lorrie looked inside and then told me, “We’re going to live there.” We discussed it when we got back to State College. I had to call the board and tell them we were not going to live in that other place, we were going to live at Toledo Hill. So that’s how it got resolved. Minimum modifications were made to that house. They took out a wall downstairs so it was a very large room to entertain in. In my first legislative session, I removed the presidential house from our budget request because I said I didn’t want the first issue to be with the legislature arguing for half a million dollars to buy a house for the president. It was a difficult situation because we were the only state university without one. That is still the case at Western.

In fact, after my retirement from UH, I went on the Western Washington University Foundation board. From the time I was there, they had started to ask people to make private donations to a housing fund so that we could buy a presidential house. For fifteen years or so, my compatriot Al Froderberg had been working on it. They had about a million dollars in the fund. When I agreed to go on the foundation board, one of the principal tasks they turned over to me was to worry about a presidential house. The Foundation board bought a property without my knowledge, and they were renting it out till Karen Morse retired. It was a million-dollar property.

When they got me involved in it, it was going to be another million to renovate it. The board of trustees couldn’t approve that. And I’ve been through this presidential housing issue in many cases, where I’ve been a consultant, once when I was a vice president at Penn State in the transition from Jack Oswald to Bryce Jordan, and again as a consultant to the University of Washington regents. It’s always an issue. And some institutions handle it with style. I’ve seen presidents go down on this issue because they’ve been too opulent in their lifestyles.

As president, you have to guard against the feeling of living in a cocoon. My favorite cocoon story is about the Internet. From 1984 to 2001 I had two secretaries, or executive assistants, managing my life. We developed a system whereby I carried cards in my shirt pocket. I knew what I was doing today and for the rest of the week, and most appointments were managed for you. And when I retired [from UH] in 2001, email was the thing. David Lassner sent somebody in with a computer to put it on my desk. She starts to tell me about email and I said, “How do you turn it on?” (WN chuckles.) I didn’t type either. So in that cocoon world of the executive, from 1984 to 2001, I was living in somebody else’s world. I mean, I didn’t know how to put gas in a car anymore. My wife always kids me about that—how do you change a light bulb? (WN chuckles.) Hey, when a car goes fritz, you call somebody up, they come and get it. So it is an unnatural life, I guess.

So my heart goes out to President M.R.C. Greenwood to have news about housing on the front page. In my opinion, it’s a story that will last for a day or two, and she will not say anything about it. Howard Karr, chair of the regents, put out a statement: that it’s the board’s responsibility, and that’s the appropriate thing to do. Beyond that, she just has to say very little.

WN: Now at Western, were you given an allowance? Is that why you . . .

KM: No, I lived in their house. There’s a technical point in the tax codes. So when you negotiate a presidential contract, and you’re going to word it, that you live in the university’s residence “for the convenience of the university.” That makes it a tax-free

benefit. I don’t know if she [Greenwood] has to pay taxes on a housing allowance. It’s one of the downsides of being a president because you’re out of the real estate market for quite a while. And, you know, you’re living in somebody else’s house, but the real estate market is going much faster than you can save money, especially in Hawai‘i. Part of the reason we never thought we could live here permanently is because we couldn’t afford it.

WN: I’m not getting into specifics on salary . . .

KM: Mm-hmm [yes].

WN: . . . but you went from being a vice president and vice provost at a major—huge land- grant—state university [i.e., Penn State University] to become president at a—sort of a lesser-known, sort of secondary four-year college [i.e., Western Washington University]. Was that an upgrade for you in salary?

KM: Well, no, I cast no aspersions on anybody else. I was making about eighty thousand as a vice president at Penn State, which was a lot of money in 1980. And I took the job at Western for ninety. When I went to Western, they got very interested in making sure that I stayed. I said I wouldn’t talk to anybody else for five years unless Penn State or the University of Hawai‘i presidency became open because I had special ties to those places. The board gave me a deferred compensation package and put away ten thousand dollars a year in a fund that I would get title to if I stayed for five years. So, my compensation when I left Western had gone up to about—including that—about a hundred and thirty- five a year. When Howard Stephenson offered me the [UH] job, he offered me a hundred and thirty-five thousand a year, and I said, “I can’t accept that. I’m going to come to Hawai‘i and pay a state income tax. I’ll take the job for a hundred and fifty.” I felt I shouldn’t take a cut and so that was how we decided. There were a lot of issues in those days relating to the issue that nobody should make more than the governor.

But the board at Western tried to give me raises when nobody else was getting them and eventually told me, “It’s none of your business what we pay you. That’s a board decision.” And so I was in the position of donating the raises that were given to me to the university foundation. Just because I felt it was a question of principle: nobody else is getting raises, you can’t either. It’s the same when I arrived here because nobody else was getting raises. I left here by a hundred and sixty-five or something like that. And then they paid Evan Dobelle four hundred and forty-four thousand. And my parting shot to the board, “Gee, if I had known you were going to pay me that, I’d have stayed.”

(Laughter)

KM: That’s just in jest. So I missed all the salaries that people talk about today. I have been consultant to public college presidents that are making almost a million dollars. And those things are just different now. When asked whether I aspired to any job like this, my answer was, “I never wanted to be a president to be one; if I’m going to be a president, I want to do something.” I’m a very dangerous man once I know what I need to do.

I should have mentioned yesterday that housing transition and those money issues. Money was never a big deal with me, except it’s how you keep score, and I am competitive. But I didn’t mind my situation here. When Ben Cayetano was the governor he wanted to know why the budget director made more than Earl Anzai, who was director of DAGS [Department of Accounting and General Services]. I don’t know how you explain those things except that’s the nature of the market. I’ll tell you what a barrier salaries were to recruiting top administrative talent because they would not come here from the Mainland at those salaries. We were not competitive, and our faculty salaries

haven’t been competitive either. It’s the same problem, I appointed some people without searches because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to meet the Mainland market.

Now I am back to Western, again, I told you yesterday, it was the best board I’ve ever worked with. It was mostly young people, appointed by the governor, confirmed by the senate—seven of them. One of the things they said to me in a public meeting, after my first evaluation, was, “We can’t think of anything to tell you to do differently.” They were very happy. Then they took me aside privately and told me, “You know, talk a little bit more about staying and things like that.” So it was a private conversation as an evaluation. The public posture was that this is the greatest guy since sliced bread. And you can find the contrast to what has gone on here.

I should have mentioned yesterday that in 1987, a light plane went down with the president of Western in it, Bob Ross, and two vice presidents, Don Cole and Jeanne DeLille—administrative vice president and the vice president for development, respectively. Those three were coming back from the meeting in Olympia. So I became president of Western after that search. And what I failed to mention in my previous conversation, a large part of that first year was healing. People were still crying in meetings about the accident because they lost three close friends. That incident colored my first year at Western. The plane went down in November of 1987, and I was president in September of 1988. Bob Ross, in contrast to me, was a six-foot-three-[inch], two- hundred-and-fifty-pound Arkansas guy, and I’m an East Coaster who was eagerly waiting—one of my colleagues said—eagerly waiting for them to invent a fourth piece to a suit. (WN chuckles.) I was the “Beast from the East.” (WN laughs.) We had a snowstorm one year, and I wouldn’t close school. I said, “This is nothing. What’s the matter with you?” (WN and MK laugh.) [KM makes raspberry sound.] “Close school? You have three thousand students living in dormitories. You close school, what are you going to do with them?”

WN: To this day, when it snows in Seattle, the whole city closes down, right? As opposed to the East Coast.

KM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But again, there are technical reasons when you close an operation, you have to deal with compensatory time off, et cetera, so it didn’t make sense from a variety of reasons. But there was no safety issue; it was just more cold than snow.

WN: Well, tell me, okay, this is what, ten months after the president and two of his aides went down, and here you are, you’re coming in from the East Coast to be the next president. What was that year like for you?

KM: Three vice presidencies were vacant; everybody was acting. There was an acting provost, an acting director of development, an acting vice president for administration. And the external affairs guy had been the acting president.

Al Froderberg was my predecessor as interim president for that period of time. Al had been a professor of mathematics who taught the introductory calculus course for years at Western. My predecessor wanted to have a lobbyist in Olympia. He thought Western was disadvantaged by not having an effective voice in the capital. So he conducted a search and monitored among the numbers, and Al got that job, and so he started visiting Olympia regularly.

The provost resigned after, you know, the normal rotation. They recruited somebody from Nebraska who couldn’t get there till January of 1988. So Al became acting provost from late June of 1987. And then the plane goes down, and the board says, “What do we

do now?” And Al says, “You have no decision to make unless you don’t want me as acting president, because the provost is acting president.” So that’s how Al became acting president.

So my first task was to gather the troops and to recruit staff. The dean of the Graduate School was the acting provost when I arrived. I conducted a national search and appointed Les Karlovitz, who was dean of science at Georgia Tech. Les died within nine months. He came in September and died in April from cancer. I appointed another interim provost, conducted another search, and appointed a professor of history as provost. So in those four-and-a-half years, I had three different provosts. In my book, I’ve tried to talk about how difficult it is to hold a staff together. And I’ll tell you later that when I arrived here, the same issue was on the agenda.

The other part was we had a plan, everybody does plans, it gets almost like mothers’ milk. Presidents walk in and say, “I got to get a plan.” And everybody does it. I looked at ours, and found thirty-five goals, most of which I believed to be unachievable. So I just said, “That’s just a way to judge my incompetence. We’ve got to have something meaningful.” So we put together a strategic planning process. As I told you, I had done a lot of that for Penn State. As a consultant, I’d run around talking about strategic management, et cetera. In general, plans all have things like quality, strategic advantage, community relations, diversity, and raising money—husbanding resources. One of those five or six might vary, depending on the institution, but you can find them in all strategic plans. So we did put together one, and it has lasted for twenty years, with only slight revisions.

I discussed yesterday a problem we had in admissions. And so we remade the admissions process that first year, and the result of that was substantially the improvement in the quality of the entering freshman class and our national rankings.

WN: Now this is totally different system—separate systems—from the University of Washington . . .

KM: That’s correct.

WN: . . . and Washington State. There were two separate . . .

KM: The six public universities in the state of Washington, and all have their own separate boards of trustees.

WN: Oh, okay.

KM: All appointed by the governor. And there is a coordinating council—the Higher Education Coordinating Board. One of my criteria for becoming a president was I wanted to work with my own board. I didn’t want to be a president in a multi-campus system, whether the principal office was in Long Beach or Madison. Boards are a big deal, and managing boards is a very complex process. So at Western we had our own separate, strategic plan. One of the things I learned quickly was that the community and the university had been at odds for a number of years. We were perceived as a liberal enclave in a conservative community, with student demonstrations, et cetera. I had a feeling that the university was not part of the community. And so when reviewing one of my first letters to the board about my first year, I reported that Lorrie and I had held over seventy events in the university’s residence with members of the community. I became chair of the Fourth Corner Economic Development Board. Fourth Corner is the fourth corner of the U.S.—it’s in Whatcom County. And I became chair and joined the Rotary, et cetera.

Lorrie became very active in the foodbank fundraising. She taught English as a second language in one of the technical schools. Vietnamese refugees had to integrate themselves into the community.

A second need in the plan was to set some priorities academically. The strategic, competitive advantage that a place like Western has is it’s in the left corner of the U.S. Mainland, and it’s right on the Canadian border just thirty miles from Canada. So when you look at what you could really be good at, or what is called a strategic competitive advantage, you need to identify those things, and invest differentially in them. This is very difficult in times of reductions and reallocations and retrenchments. It is a very difficult way to make change. It’s much better if you have new money, but I never had new money in my thirteen or fourteen years as president. It was always cut and slash.

WN: You talked about the community relations and things fundraising and so on and so on. That was the job of the president, but when you were vice president at Penn State, did you have to do that? Or in other words, how different was the job you took?

KM: Well, the president’s job is always very visible. As a vice president of Penn State, I was a member of the president’s kitchen cabinet, so we were in all the meetings with the staff about what we’re doing and went to a lot of the public events. And some of the problems I had were dealing with major donors.

At Penn State, I was a member of the kitchen cabinet and my office was between the president and the provost. When the executive assistant was out of town, I’d do the president’s mail. It was a heck of an experience. They’d get a hundred-fifty, two- hundred-and-fifty pieces of mail a day. And that’s where I learned the mail log system anyway. Then when I became president [of UH], Jean Imada went back to Western to learn how to manage me. So yeah, we were all involved in events that were an important priority for the university. When I became a vice president, a guy in a dark suit visited me at Penn State and says, “You have to be a life member of the alumni association.”

“Why?”

“Well, because. . . .”

We all had to make our individual pledges to the campaign. We’re going to raise money, and you have to first put it up yourself. The largest gift I ever made was here at UH, when I was running this campaign. So those things led me to understand that that’s what you do in the public university. So when you move into Western and you look at them and say, “Well, they have a foundation, but they’re not raising any money.” And so that was the next priority. You have to get out there and raise private money. We sat in the solarium on the top of Old Main building with three or four community leaders and went through lists, the Zurlines and the Millers—I remember, they’re good friends today—we went through lists of the people in the Bellingham community that needed to be invited to the president’s house for dinner. Then we could start to cultivate them because nobody had really ever done that. Lorrie and I were different in that regard. That’s an experience we brought to Western. Lorrie and I benefited immensely from the stewardship and/or the mentorship of Bryce and Jonelle Jordan at Penn State. And we went to all those fundraising dinners, and all the kickoffs, and all that sort of stuff. I learned what that was about.

I’ve mentioned that the experience I had selling office equipment twenty years before was very valuable. I used to think as president, I’m sitting in somebody’s office with a brochure which is the same thing I was doing when I was selling. Except as president, I

didn’t have to sit there too long. Because they’d usually give you an appointment, for example, “The president’s here.” Fundraising stories are just great to tell. We had a Vehicle Research Institute at Western. We were building solar cars, racing them around the country. We entered a race in Australia, to drive across the desert with a solar car. We were coming in second or third against Michigan and other top schools. A donor got interested in the program and donated some money. He then began to work with the students and the faculty member about the technology of it. Then he just wanted to decide who was just going to drive it and other matters of that sort. And so I sat down with the director, Michael Seal, and this individual, Ward Phillips, and listened to the dispute— and I said, “Well, Ward, the only thing we can do is give you back your money because these things are under the control of the faculty, not under those who donate money. We are really pleased to have your money, but we can’t accept it.” And I gave it back to him. It became a headline under the Bellingham Herald. Then I got a call from a local businessman, Chuck Wilder, who owned a paving firm. He said, “What’s with this Ward Phillips guy?”

And I said, “Well, you know.”

“Well, I’m going to fix that S.O.B. Will you come over and see me?”

So I went over to see him. He owned a gravel pit, almost on the border of Canada. His firm had bought it thirty years before. It was on the books for $40,000. And he had an offer to buy it for $328,000, but he didn’t want to deal with the tax implications. So I arranged a no-touch deal. He deeded the gravel pit to us, and we sold it within thirty seconds. These things are matters of integrity about who’s running the university. I never would compromise on those things. You make your compromises in this life and then these difficult jobs but not on issues like that. So I got lucky to some extent and because nobody had gone around doing this before in that community.

It’s amazing to be twenty years out of office when I started in 1988 at Western. We tried to move into Seattle because we had a lot of alums in Seattle, but nobody had done any work there. When I went to Seattle to call on people, there was no support structure. So we started having events in Seattle, and I started calling on ex-trustees, just to get the network going. Karen Morse, my successor, did an excellent job cementing that. And I went to a Western event in Seattle the other day, and it’s amazing to me what’s gone on in the twenty years. But we, I think, mostly had started that. So when I arrived, we were getting about a million dollars in donations. When I left, it was about four million, four years later. Then they ran a campaign after I left; I designed a campaign for them, which raised $22 million over a period of three or four years. This is not rocket science; you just have to do it. These are almost obvious to experienced people.

WN: When you arrived at Western, was the culture similar to how it was when you arrived at UH in terms of getting state support and fundraising being almost like a secondary . . .

KM: Well, yes . . .

WN: . . . thing.

KM: I think it’s true. In the history of higher education, the public universities didn’t start raising private money till well into the ’70s. And now you have Michigan and UCLA doing these billion-dollar campaigns. Penn State’s in a billion-dollar campaign—the B- word. It’s the big word among these presidents nowadays.

WN: It used to be the M-word.

KM: Yeah, right. (WN laughs.) Now it’s the B-word. Things have changed. You know, the numbers have just gotten out of sight. I might have told you this story about Bill Schreyer who was chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch. He was the chair of our campaign. And eventually, they asked him, after I had gone, for $30 million. And he said he couldn’t possibly do that; he wasn’t that wealthy. Then he went back and checked his Merrill Lynch stock and found he’s worth almost $300 million, rather than $100 million. So he gave $30 million to endow the undergraduate college of arts and sciences. We got a $10 million gift to endow a chair in each department in the college of sciences. The recipient of the chair had to be a member of the National Academy. So that was the Penn State experience.

Western had nowhere near that kind of alumni base or anything of the sort, but the message was the same: you can’t make it on public support alone. Scholarship money has always been the easiest to raise, and the most difficult to raise is program money to endow things like the Center for Oral History—that’s difficult money to raise.

The biggest opposition to fundraising was the faculty. And the biggest opposition in Hawai‘i was a little different. Some of the neighbor island people couldn’t see what was in it for them. So the culture here was different as well as the complexity of the university. But I mean, when you start fundraising—as it is in a strategic plan—there’s a template. The strategic plan has to identify what the core mission of the university is, what its competitive advantages are, you have to talk about quality, diversity, and resource acquisition. So everybody does.

Diversity was a big key word in those days, and that’s another thing that I worked hard on at Western. And I was there three months ago, and an admissions director that I hired showed me these diversity figures now that have tripled since I was there. Western was a sort of white enclave away from Seattle. I visited the black high school in Seattle, and I was talking to students, and I said, well, 4 percent of the people at Western are African American. One kids says to me, “What are the rest of them?” Well, I said. . . .

I started the Center for Minority Affairs and gave minority students a place in the student union. I appointed a women’s commission. Remember, I had managed the 190 recommendations from the strategic study group on the status of women at Penn State. So when I got to Western, the issue was on the table. These things are always issues, and you got to be doing something about them.

So the Western time was a very good experience for me. I think they believed we were very successful as a presidential couple; I know they do. We moved back there when we finished here.

WN: So what would you say your legacy at Western is?

KM: Well, it’s hard to know when people ask you that because it’s not really what did I get done. Well, we improved diversity figures. We got them started on private fundraising. I didn’t talk much about the priorities, but our academic priorities were clearer. As an example, the English department had some vacancies from people retiring, and I insisted that they get somebody who was facile in minority literature. They would have none of it. And they asked me to go to a retreat with them out to Lake Whatcom, which I did, and I listened to them. I finally said, “Look, the lines are not going to come forward unless we have somebody in minority literature. So that’s the choice, and if you’re not interested in that, then I’ll put them somewhere else.” That’s hard ball if you say that to faculty, but the chair of the faculty senate told me, “You know, we’ve been here for decades, and you’re coming in and rearranging the furniture in our living room.” And I allowed as

how, “That was a good analogy, but these are the things I want to get done, and here’s how I think we can go about it.”

WN: You said that when you came, the donations were one million . . .

KM: About a million.

WN: When you left, it was about four.

KM: Annually, yes.

WN: Now, in terms of state support, when you started, what was it when you . . .

KM: I don’t know the answer to that. The first year there, it went up. After that, it went down every year. Western is the least well-funded public university in the state of Washington, on an appropriation per student basis. I went to Olympia with that argument but they said, “You guys are so good. So we should cut the other guys, right?” How do you answer something like that? We were being well ranked in U.S. News and World Report, and we were very successful at selling ourselves as an alternative to an urban research university. All of a sudden, it got out that Western is not a place you can rely on if you don’t get into the University of Washington. That made a big difference in the way we were treated before the legislature.

We did simple things. We had a facilities budget put forward to build a $50 million science facility. Well, that was a lot of money in the ’80s, and for especially an institution of Western’s size. So we agreed with the legislature to a package where we got so much a biennium. We built a chemistry building first, a biology building second, and then a physics building. That was the way we skin that cat. We would have never got the science facilities if we hadn’t. People want to name buildings for people who just passed away and/or retired. I put a stop to that. I said, “We’re going to raise money and you put names on buildings for donations, not for honorific reasons. And if you really believe Joe is so great, go out and raise some money, and we’ll name a scholarship for him.”

I get back to my inner directedness, then I had a set of beliefs about things that aren’t right. Everybody who retires thinks they ought to have something named after them, and you just can’t live that way in the university. That was a problem at UH as well. We were giving out honorary doctorates when I arrived, and I put a stop to it.

WN: I really want to get into the university, and I know in the context of talking about Western, you always bring up UH. I think it’s a good time to get into the University of Hawai‘i.

MK: Can I ask one question?

WN: Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

MK: You know, I noticed that when you took your job at Western Washington, you told them that, “I’ll take this job, but if an opportunity comes for me to be at the presidency of the UH. I’ll take that.” And I was wondering, from how far back were you interested in the University of Hawai‘i’s presidency?

KM: Well, I never was interested in being a president. My first visit here was 1962 because my wife’s family lived on St. Louis Heights. And as I mentioned yesterday, as a graduation present for my M.B.A. from Wharton School, Ernie Murai gave us a ticket to Hawai‘i to

meet the family. Later, I got to be a faculty member and somewhat of an authority on academic governance, I had given a paper in New York City on collective bargaining, and Harold Masumoto came up to me and said, “Bobby Fujimoto wants to talk to you.” Bobby is a family friend. Hawai‘i Planing Mill Barney Fujimoto and Ernie Murai were close. Well, Barney was a Republican, and Ernie was a Democrat. Bobby’s younger sister went to school here at UH, and Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Michigan with Ernestine, Lorrie’s older sister.

So when I started to come out here, as a faculty member, I didn’t want to hang around in St. Louis Heights with all the family kids, and go to the beach. University folks knew of my expertise. So when I started visiting here regularly I walked in and Joyce Najita, director of the Center for Labor Education and Research, gave me a place to work. And Ken Lau, at the time, was I think, an executive assistant, or secretary of the Board of Regents. He helped me get introduced to university officials.

So I had this long connection with people here. The issue at Western was whether or not I was using it for a stepping stone to something else. So I promised the board that I wouldn’t talk to anybody else for five years except if the University of Hawai‘i and/or Penn State called. I had emotional ties to both. I had been at Penn State for nineteen years. So, I didn’t want to pass on opportunities to talk. I didn’t say that I would take those jobs but I wanted to talk about them if they became open. During the Cecil Mackey adventure, Harold Masumoto and I talked about that with me. I said that I was not ready for anything like that. Because after Mackey, Bobby Fujimoto was chair of the board. I went to a reception at the cottage on College Hill, and I met Gladys Brandt and Al Simone at a pool table in the cottage. I said to Bobby, “When the hell are you going to make him president?” So Al took me to breakfast the next morning. (Chuckles) But I mean, because I knew Bobby and I knew Al and they invited me to this social function after the board meeting, when we’re all shooting pool in the cottage at College Hill. So I just put in a qualifier; in my discussions with Western, that would be the only reason I would even talk to anybody.

WN: So this was in ’88 when you were about to take the Western job?

KM: Yes.

WN: So you already had a pretty good idea that if there’s a chance that you may be named or maybe be approached . . .

KM: Well . . .

WN: . . . to take the UH job.

KM: Other matters being equal and the same with Penn State. But once you get rather visible in the national community from my academic work and from “Involvement in Learning” and other matters of that sort, offers began to come in. When I arrived here in 1993, the first year I was here, a number of positions came open. I arranged for a sub-committee of regents to go to the University of Washington to look at the research operation because we were under the gun from the feds to get our audits straight. On the front page of the Seattle Times, it mentioned I was a possible candidate for the presidency of the University of Washington. I had only been here a year or so, or even that. And then the president of Penn State resigned, and it appeared in the Seattle Times that I was one of the people that they wanted to talk to. And then some nut nominated me for the chancellorship of the University of Madison-Milwaukee.

WN: University of Wisconsin . . .

KM: I mean, Wisconsin-Milwaukee. And so those things appeared in the paper . . .

WN: Now when is this—what year are we talking about?

KM: Well, my first year as president—’93 here.

WN: Oh, here, okay.

KM: And so that appeared in the papers, and so the rumors started and Gladys Brandt said, “He’s looking around.”

WN: I see.

KM: And I had to explain to the board I have no control over things like that. And I’d been a visible person at Penn State, my name came up naturally during speculations. It was the same with the University of Washington—I had a reputation in that state. So the regents believed—Ed Kubo was one of the regents. He said, “What’s the difference between this and the president of Penn State?”

I said, “About a hundred thousand dollars.” (WN and MK laugh.)

Obviously, I got a smart mouth. And when I was asked after the first year after my presidency at Western, what did I think of the first year—my accomplishment the first year—I said I didn’t get my foot in my mouth. (WN chuckles.) So I learned to curb my propensity for one-liners, which I no longer have to do, as you see.

I got a call in June of 1992 from Joyce Najita. I had been president of Western then for about four years. She said, “Harold, Ken, and I—Harold Masumoto, Ken Lau, and I— want to nominate you to be president of the university.”

And I said, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m engaged here, we like the community.”

And she says, “Think about it. I’ll call you in a couple of months.” Because I guess the deadline was August.

So then I get a call from Joyce about the middle of August or some time around there. She said, “Harold’s coming to Seattle, and he wants to come and see you.” Harold has kids that live in Seattle.

And I said, “Don’t send Harold to see me. You know, I will—all right, all right, I’ll send my papers in, but I have a golden handcuff at Western, and I’m going to get a fifty- thousand-dollar bonus if I stay another year.” That was a lot of money to me. “Second, I will not agree to be a public candidate. It’ll have to be confidential.”

So I came out and interviewed in Hilton Hawaiian Village. And then they asked me to come back, and I said no. And so Pepper Shiramizu calls me—and I had known Pepper years ago, and said, “You got to talk to us.”

I said, “You know, I got these problems, and I’m not going to be public because I’m engaged in what I’m doing here.”

We discussed it, and I got the feeling—and I don’t want to say how—that I was the number one candidate on the short list and the job was mine to screw up if I didn’t interview with the board well. Something like that. And I had assurances to that effect. And then Howard Stephenson did call me and say that, “We’re being sued by the Advertiser for access to the four finalists.” So I allowed them to release the names on Saturday. I came for the interview on Wednesday, and they offered me the job that night. So that’s how all that transpired.

But one of the deals I was going to get on a plane and go back home. Harold Masumoto called me from the airport and said, “What’s the problem?”

I said, “Well, I got this golden handcuff where I am.”

“We can solve problems like that.”

So I got a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus for signing.

WN: Harold was chair at the time?

KM: No, Harold was working for the governor.

WN: Oh, Masumoto.

KM: That was right after election day in 1982, and it took the board about three weeks to get the public meeting stuff fixed so right before Thanksgiving is when the announcement was made.

WN: This was ’92?

KM: Yes. And what was appearing in the newspapers was, “Mortimer is the board’s choice, but he’s holding out for a tenure-track job for his wife.” We got a large charge out of that.

WN: How’d they get that?

KM: I don’t know how they get it. Why do they get it? Jeanette, Lorrie’s sister calls up, “Lorraine, what are you going to teach?”

(Laughter)

Lorrie was not a faculty type. She was a presidential spouse, and that was all part of our deal—I mean, our marriage commitment. And so it was all that sort of stuff in the news, “Mortimer Going to Say Aloha,” etc., and I couldn’t say anything. I had agreed to take the job, but it was up to the regents to manage the appropriate timing, and give public notice.

First, by the way, I agreed to come out only if I was the last candidate that they talked to. As far as I was concerned, I was happy where I was. Larry Tanimoto said in the meeting, “All these other people tell us we can have all these things, why aren’t you telling us that?”

And I said, “Because I’ll have to deliver on it. And you can’t have those things.”

And then we’ll get into what the issues were. They had planned one campus in Kona and one in West O‘ahu. I looked at all this and said, “It’s not in the cards.” The Kosakis [i.e.,

Richard and Mildred Kosaki] had done a plan. And I know the Kosakis—they were friends. The plan was an excellent description of the situation, but it made no choices. They were not charged to make choices. They did an excellent job explaining the issues with which the University of Hawai‘i had to deal, but when you read that it was a wish list.

Ruth Ono, who was a regent at the time, asked me when I was going to run for governor. And I of course, was—I mean, I remember that because—what is that all about?

WN: Did she actually use . . .

KM: She used that word.

WN: Just like that?

KM: She asked me, “So when are you going to run for governor?” (WN chuckles.) And so . . .

WN: And what’d you say?

KM: Farthest thing from my mind.

The advantage I had in interview situations was because I had managed all of those executive interviews at Penn State. I managed the search for all the executives—deans and vice presidents. So I’d sat in over a hundred such interviews and watched people kill themselves with the first two words out of their mouth. We were interviewing a woman for dean of the College of Human Development. We sat around a table like this at the Nittany Lion Inn for breakfast at seven-thirty in the morning. She orders a shot of scotch. How much more do you need to know? (WN and MK laugh.) Well, I checked that out— she did not have an alcohol problem, but it was unusual and wasn’t to go on in State College, I can tell you that. She was a very competent person and all that, but, as I said, I’ve seen dozens of things like that.

I said, “If I’m going to take this job, I can’t tell you I can do something when I know I can’t.” It isn’t going to happen. The announcement was made the day before Thanksgiving in 1992. Lorrie’s condition was they had to air-condition College Hill. She wasn’t going to live in this environment without air conditioning. The chair of the search committee for the regents was Roy Takayama. Roy knew Lorrie’s father. So I’m hemming and hawing back in Bellingham—all the reasons I don’t want to come out, et cetera. Roy says, “I want to talk to your wife.”

And I said, “She ain’t here.” And she was sitting right there on the bench. (MK chuckles.)

He said, “Well I’ll call back.” So he did, and he asked Lorrie the question, “Your husband seems rather reluctant—will you veto this job if he takes it?”

She said, “We don’t have that kind of relationship.” I remember I’ve kidded Roy about that—“What kind of a question is that?” Well, Roy was just going to find out where the obstacles were.

(Laughter)

That’s how deals are cut, right? Harold, Pepper, and Charlie Neff, who was the consultant to the search—kept me alive when I kept saying why I can’t do this. And as long as you say why you don’t want to buy something, I can keep talking and find out what will get

you to do what I want you to do. And that’s, of course, if I weren’t known here, and they weren’t convinced that I was the right guy—I don’t know why, you’d have to ask them. But Momi Cazimero checked me out, and I said, “She knows more about me than my mother.” And she called the people at Penn State, et cetera, so they did a pretty thorough job on me and then decided that I was the one—for whatever reasons. They went at it in a very astute way, in my opinion, because I would not have taken the job. We were happy at Western, and Lorrie really did not want to come back to Hawai‘i.

WN: I was going to ask you that.

KM: No, she didn’t. I mean, she was raised here, but she doesn’t like warm weather. So it was, I had these connections, and I sort of knew what I thought the problems here were and I thought that I could do something about them. The board wanted to have an installation ceremony. But I said, “We’re broke, we can’t afford it. We’ll have a convocation in the fall.” That’s when I delivered a statement on what I was going to do. I said that we needed to set priorities, and we needed to raise private money, and we needed to develop a different relationship with state government that characterized this university for its first eighty years. I really believed that.

WN: And you say, change in relationship between university and state government, you’re talking about autonomy?

KM: Well, that’s what it came to be called, and that was good terminology. And the key variable in that was the Economic Revitalization Task Force, but there are some other matters in the chronology.

MK: Before we go on a little bit more, I was wondering, you know, from your view of things, what kept you sort of interested in the job at UH? We know that the UH wanted you, and you were saying, “Well, I can’t do this, I can’t do that.” But you were here for the interviews, you were going through the whole process, what interest did you have?

KM: Well, it’s always nice to have people chasing you. That’s always nice. I said before I ever became a significant administrator—when I was profiled in the Chronicle [of Higher Education] about Involvement in Learning, I was asked about my administrative aspirations. I didn’t want to be a president just to be one. The challenge of Western was fairly clear to me, and I felt that I could get something done what I thought needed to be done here. The first big issue on my plate was whether to also become chancellor of Mänoa or not. I didn’t think—and I don’t think today—that you can be an effective president if you don’t have a really strong say about what happens where 68 percent of the budget is spent. And so I was asked about that in the interviews, and I said, “I was at Penn State, and we didn’t have a separate chancellor for University Park.” They just asked me to soft pedal that and study it for a while, which I did. Harlan Cleveland wrote about this, “The greatness of a university is inversely related to its proximity to state government.”

I believe that, and I had seen a lot of systems around the country and found that it varies from state to state. The cultures of the states are immensely different, particularly on politics and public policy issues. And I had a sense that I knew this state better than I would have had I not been coming out here for forty years, but that I also had this blend of talent and just sheer determination, if you will. But I knew something about local culture. Lorrie would say, “Mainland haoles come out here and tell us what to do and go home in three years, and you can’t do that.” And it’s true. So I just had a sense it was my time. I knew Al Simone fairly well, by the way. Other than that, it’s just hard to say. I was fifty-one when I took the Western job and fifty-six when I came here.

I have said—and I don’t mind saying—it was not a good move for my career. It wasn’t. Nobody survives this job. You look back to Tom Hamilton and it repeats itself—you either quit or get fired. So I knew something about that, too. I was friendly with Harold Enarson, who was the former president of Ohio State. He’s one of the people I consulted before I took this job. And he told me, “Forget it.” Harold’s dead now, so I can say that. He said that the way the board treated presidents was bad. It’s just not a job that can be done. It’s interesting because fifteen years later, who do they appoint to evaluate Evan Dobelle? They named another close friend of mine, Bob Atwell. Bob Atwell and I served on committees together. He calls me, “What the hell’s going on out there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not part of it.”

It’s a small network of people around the country and you can find out what the deal is. I thought one of the major problems here at the time was the nature of the board and its political involvement. But I was assured that under Howard Stephenson’s leadership, that that’s not as severe a problem as it was in previous times.

WN: So it was the board actually selling UH to you by telling you they would change . . .

KM: Well, I don’t know how they would describe it. I was doing my homework, and I know a lot of presidents and a lot of other people and all the consultants they hired. I told you S.P. Martorana, a colleague of mine at Penn State, was one of the consultants to the community college system here in the ’60s. So, I mean, you know these things and because you are active in the national community. And then you get back to why did I take this job, and I just told you, I didn’t think it was a good move in my career. If I wanted to be famous, I could have done something else. I was being very successful where I was. And I think I could have had other public university jobs. I think. But you never know.

WN: So how did you convince Lorrie?

KM: I told her we were going. We had always followed my career. We moved back to Bellingham because she said, “When you’re done with all this foolishness, we’re moving back to Bellingham.” (MK and WN chuckle.) So when we got married at twenty-two years of age, I mentioned that we determined that my career was going to support the family. That’s always the way it went. So when we moved to Penn State from Berkeley, that was my choice. I had three offers. The move to Western was my choice. The move here was my choice. The last move was her choice. Our daughter gives us these little cards every now and then. She gave us this cartoon of two old folks passing cards to each other. We don’t even have to talk anymore. (WN and MK laugh.) So, we were just young together and we aged together. When we decided to come, we talked about it some, but. . . .

WN: Now, in retrospect, though, would you say you being married to Lorrie is a big factor in you being hired or them wanting you to be hired?

KM: I think so. I really do. I think that it was the best thing they can get, next to a local boy, is somebody who has local ties. You go back to Fudge’s [Fujio Matsuda] history and so forth. Jack Burns appointed Fudge because he wanted this place—the state—to begin to put Asian people into positions of leadership. And that’s why he chose George Ariyoshi [as Lieutenant Governor]. I thought that I could bring a sensitivity to this place. For example, when we started our fundraising thing, we were told that we don’t do that sort of stuff here. And I would just say, “Well, you haven’t, but you can.”

Joe Blanco had a little dinner for me when I was here about a week or two. And who has he got there but Henry Guigni, the senator’s [Daniel Inouye] chief assistant. The first time I saw the senator, he said, “The last time I saw your wife, she was this high.” My first year or two, we went to a ceremony at Punchbowl for veterans. Inouye was the speaker, and I was there shaking hands—they didn’t want to talk to me; they wanted to talk to my wife. They would stand in this long reception line of AJA’s—“I knew your father, I knew your father. . . .” My mother-in-law was still alive.

Claire Nakamura, one of my staff, told me that her parents were repatriated back to Japan during World War II. My in-laws were the chaperones for that group, who were taken by boat to California and then across the country and then shipped back to Japan. People don’t forget that stuff here.

So as Henry said to me, “We knew your father-in-law, but not everybody liked your father-in-law.” (WN and MK laugh.) My father-in-law was the first Asian American ever to receive a presidential appointment and be confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 1960. He was director of customs.

You know, I was told certain things that, culturally, tend to be true but tend to not reflect local culture, you know. I got in trouble once when commenting about the lack of eye contact in an interview with Ka Leo, and they were asking me how I was responding to different cultures. I said it was somewhat Asian culture—it’s a mix, you know. And gee, my daughter’s a hapa, you know. Well, what got out was that I said, “For example”— there was a woman reporter sitting right across of me—“you looked me in the eye the whole time during this interview. When I’m in Hilo, shaking hands at graduation, those kids did not look me in the eye. So it’s somewhat different.” She was Filipino, I believe. What came out was that I regarded lack of eye contact as a negative thing. And of course, that’s not what I said. In fact, she wrote a letter to the editor saying—“I don’t know why everybody else is offended; none of us were.” A little article appeared in Ka Leo but a month later, it appears as a headline in The [Honolulu] Advertiser. So who in the hell is ginning that up? Same people who were quoted in this morning’s paper—it’s the same people. It was one of my more disappointing experiences, having to deal with that issue and having to explain it. And then the more you explain, the longer the story’s alive. So I was very disappointed since that was not my intent, and it was not a negative comment— it was an observation. And it was accurate in terms of when you move around the neighbor islands and fine some of them are quite rural, and some of them are quite, let me say, Americanized, or whatever you call it.

WN: Of the four candidates, three were Mainland haole men and . . .

KM: That’s true.

WN: . . . the fourth was an Asian, local woman.

KM: Yes, yes.

WN: Were you aware of that or what were you . . .

KM: I knew Joyce Tsunoda well. Joyce and I had served on the Board of NCHEMS [National Center for Higher Education Management Systems] together. I even unstopped her toilets once when she and her kids were in Boulder, Colorado. We were going to go out to dinner with the group when she comes out to the car, “Does anybody know how to fix a toilet?” So I go in and unstopped her toilet. So when Joyce was provost at Kapi‘olani

[Community College] when it was down on Pi‘ikoi [Street], she took me to a sushi place, and I don’t eat sashimi. She said, “All the haoles eat sashimi.”

And I said, “Well, I don’t.”

I knew other people like Dewey Kim, Harold, etc., so I assumed Joyce was a candidate. That’s another reason I was sort of reluctant to get too heavily involved. The other candidates were Roy McTarnaghan, who was the second-in-command at Florida, University of Florida system, Greg O’Brien at the University of New Orleans, and Joyce. But I knew, when I came, that unless I didn’t interview well, that I was the top choice.

So when I arrived in March of 1993, the first major problem immediately on my desk was that the feds had stopped funding because of irregularities in our accounting system. And that was a contest of, you know, between the faculty at Mänoa and Dr. Fujio Matsuda, the former president, who was executive director of RCUH. A very difficult problem was that Fudge believed that faculty should be taking care of that stuff themselves; he wasn’t their policeman. And faculty believed that the accountants ought to be handling that, and so forth, so that was the problem. Diane Plotts, who was a fiscal officer at Hemmeter, was managing for the Board. So that was the first major issue that needed to be managed because it was on my desk immediately.

But the quickest lesson I had in Hawaiian culture was this: I arrived March 1. I took two weeks off because I had been coming out, using vacation time, and I wanted some break between the Western experience and the time I had to take office. So they gave me two weeks compensatory time for the time I had spent out here as president-elect. I came in about the 15th or 16th of March, and the women had just not been invited to the NCAA women’s basketball tournament. They had been shunned by the NCAA. And everybody’s saying to me, “You got to do something about this, you got to do something about this.” (WN and MK chuckle.) Well, at Penn State, it’s not a big issue; these things happen all the time. Governor John Waihe‘e had a three-page letter to the NCAA in the mail the next day. I learned something about local culture. The governor responded; I didn’t need to say anything. Well I should’ve, as they say, but that’s what you learned about the importance of athletics in this town. So that was the first experience.

The rest of it related to budget cuts of a major order. Waihe‘e had been governor for a year and a half, but I didn’t have much contact with him. Although I did meet with him from time to time.

When the budget cuts got really severe was, of course, when Ben Cayetano took office and realized that there was a major hole in the budget. So those things began to pile up. In the time that I was president of the UH, the rest of American higher education was growing in leaps and bounds, and America was on a roll. Hawai‘i was in a depression. So we lost more state support in that period of time than any other university in America. So coming off the Simone years, which were relatively affluent years where you were able to do SHAPS [School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies] and SOEST [School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology], and things like that and new initiatives, it was a difficult pill to swallow.

So when I arrived, I visited each of the campuses to get to know things. And I’m not a cut-and-slash guy and I listen before I make too many changes. There would be changes, but I wanted to learn the lay of the land. I had an acting provost at the time—Paul Yuen was acting. And I knew I had to replace him. So I made the trips around the state and learned that there had been a promise made to build a campus in Kona. The Board was deeply involved in site selection for a West O‘ahu campus. We had seven different public

hearings where we listened to testimony on tentative sites. The Board had standards. They wanted nothing less than five hundred acres, etc. And so those kinds of issues were on the table. I said things like, “I don’t know how you’re going to build a campus in Kona—it’s not in the plan.” I mean, these things take decades.

WN: It hasn’t taken place yet.

KM: Well, on it goes. And then the same with the West O‘ahu situation. Well, I was deflating people’s expectations, and that doesn’t make you a very popular fellow. As I mentioned, these jobs teach you what you not do well. You get appointed to them because of what you have done well. But what you learn in all of this public visibility is that my brusque style doesn’t play well in public. So I’d be with the people in Kona, and I’d say, you know, “This isn’t going to happen. I don’t understand that at all. And I don’t know how you got the feeling that this could happen.” Everybody assumed that Hamilton Library was going to be expanded. I go to the legislature and find out it’s like twenty-six on the priority list for capital expenditure of the university. And the faculty were all saying, “We’re going to fix Mänoa—I mean, Hamilton Library.” And the legislature says, “Maybe we’ll get around to it when you guys put it up on your priority list.” So I did. That’s how Hamilton got expanded. I talked to my predecessor and he thought other things were more important than Hamilton. I have no criticism of that. But to the faculty, the library is a big deal.

WN: The fact that you were president of the system as well as chancellor of Mänoa, was that a problem, right off the bat?

KM: Yes, I mentioned this federal problem. Then I had to decide whether to have a chancellor at Mänoa. There’s a history to that issue, and I looked at it very carefully. Dick Kosaki was the last acting chancellor at Mänoa. I met with Dick, and we talked about it. Again, I’d known Dick from previous times. I think I called Al Simone about it as well. I’m not really sure that I did. Then I looked at—they had just separated UH-Hilo from Hawai‘i Community College. But they never funded the separation. They tried to pull these things apart without any resources to create an infrastructure at the community college. So the UH-Hilo was controlling classroom space at Hawai‘i Community College. When you look at all that, you say, “There isn’t going to be any more money.” If you separate Mänoa from the system level, you’re going to have to break up offices and have a chancellor, and that chancellor’s got to have a staff. But you’d have a centralized state- level budgeting system. So I estimated it would cost somewhere between a half a million to seven hundred thousand dollars to create a chancellorship. I didn’t have that money, and I wasn’t motivated to do it anyway because I didn’t think it would work.

I did an analysis, and found that Mänoa was overextended with a student-faculty ratio of eleven, twelve to one. At most research universities, it’s around twenty, twenty-two to one. You have a campus of twenty thousand students in seventeen schools and colleges. That’s more schools than institutions twice our size. We are overextended, as a campus. But because we’re here in the middle of the Pacific, we try to be all things to everybody. So, in looking at all of that, I couldn’t see additional layers of administration doing much except sucking up more money, which we didn’t have. I couldn’t imagine myself trying to fix some of these problems with 68 percent of the budget controlled by somebody else. We were in danger of accreditation difficulties at West O‘ahu, so I took three positions from Mänoa and shifted them to West O‘ahu. It didn’t make me very popular, but that’s what had to be done. And I couldn’t expect a chancellor at Mänoa to do that without screaming and protesting in legislative hearings and things of that sort. So I decided that I would remain chancellor and president.

WN: Did you feel you had to compensate for the neighbor islanders to—you know, instead of overcompensate and say . . .

KM: Well, I don’t think that . . .

WN: . . . not partial to Mänoa?

KM: Yeah, well, see, it depends. The other issue on the table at the time was Representative Harvey Tajiri’s bill to create Hawai‘i State University. To separate off . . .

WN: Right, right, right.

KM: . . . the Hilo campus from the university system. And Senator Eloise Tungpalan, I believe, eventually killed that. But I was called to Hilo and was asked my opinion about that. I was trying to persuade people that on the one hand, I would be fair to Hilo, on the other hand, I’m going to be chancellor of Mänoa as well. That didn’t sell very well in a variety of places. It’s just a difficult argument to make. Harvey was an active legislator, and he was, you know, he was Mr. Hilo College. All he would say, “All the construction projects have been here the last ten years because I got them, and Mänoa would never pay attention to us.” And the community at Hilo believed that. And I am not, in this case, analyzing; I’m telling you what the issue was when I went there. And it was the same at West O‘ahu—you’d go over there, and they’d tell you that you can’t commute to Mänoa. So what are you supposed to do?

I got the Hilo bill sidetracked or defeated. I shouldn’t say “I” got it. We were successful in persuading the legislature to not even hear it. But it was part of this expansionist era where everybody could seem to have everything. The facts were that there wasn’t much ability to do that. I’m a professor of higher education. I’ve consulted with dozens of institutions about these problems, and I come here, and I see a student-faculty ratio of eleven or twelve to one, and small schools, six faculty members in the library science school [School of Library and Information Sciences], and on you go. You cannot sustain an administrative structure like that. So that led me into, again, some difficulties because I said that. So when the budget cuts really came—and it was the Kosaki plan that was on the table when Ben became governor—I said we needed a new strategic plan in order to guide the university through these difficult times. That became very unpopular because I needed to get it done in a year. Because my statement to everybody was, “I have to cut the budget. If I have a strategic plan to do it, I will be aided in that. If I don’t, I’m just going to have to slice away. So it needs to be done.” And we took a lot of heat that it wasn’t properly consultative. We have documented the track record that it was, but it doesn’t matter. People perceived that we shoved it down their throats. There was a lot of that charge in the Mänoa accreditation report. The facts are otherwise.

Another issue was people were complaining mightily about the fact that academic credits from the community colleges didn’t transfer well to Mänoa. You could get a degree— associate degree and still have to go through an articulation process at Mänoa. I had been a vice president of a multi-campus system with two-year campuses—there were seventeen two-year campuses at Penn State. I made the mistake of saying that this is a “no-brainer” and we needed to fix this. And of course, a no-brainer to the Mänoa faculty is a red flag. (WN laughs.) Linda Johnsrud was chair of the faculty senate at that time. But we worked with the faculty senate to get an articulation policy so that credit from the campuses had to be accepted as general education credit at Mänoa. And that was a tough sell. It died twice in the Mänoa senate. Once, for a technical point. The second time—I was there—for lack of a quorum. The third time, they finally voted it up. And then five years later, when the accreditation visit came, they complained that their qualifications on

that plan hadn’t been met. But I believe that if we didn’t fix the articulation problem, the legislature would do it for us. They said, “My constituents go and get a degree over there at Windward Community College or Leeward Community College, and now they can’t transfer that credit to Mänoa?” You know, and the legislature’s taking a lot of heat.

I’d been a national voice about things of that sort, and I knew that that was not an acceptable thing for a university system. Had I not been chancellor of Mänoa, I don’t think it could have happened. The other issue was to remake the private funding staff at the UH Foundation. Al Simone had more of an adversarial relationship with the director, so we needed to make some changes. Then we recruited a provost and then made some changes in the administration. David Yount wrote a book about it. The issue was what people you’re going to have around you, and how you’re going to move ahead. And I adopted the rationale of a chief executive officer of Mänoa, and gave that responsibility to the Vice President of Academic Affairs.

WN: Prior to that, it was Paul Yuen. Paul Yuen was sort of . . .

KM: Paul—yes. And that’s what I wanted him to do. Paul wasn’t that comfortable in that role. Another issue I should have talked about—we were engaged in a bunch of very controversial lawsuits, mostly about personnel matters. Michelle Gretzinger was suing us for sexual harassment—the Ramdas Lamb case; the Maivan Lam case in the law school. And I was very critical of the time that major executives were spending on those issues. They’re important, but you have to manage your time differently. So I began to look at that issue and realized to my surprise that those cases were going to be settled by the state attorney general—not us, you know. The law school faculty was split on the Maivan Lam case. The Michelle Gretzinger case eventually ended up in courts, and Mr. Lamb was found not guilty. I got involved in that case because I refused to pay for his defense. We ended up paying his legal fees because he was acquitted. So we were embroiled in cases like that, which I knew was not the way the executive staff in Bachman Hall ought to be spending time on. So we needed to get some way in which those things could be handled fairly but with style and grace. But you can’t get overly caught up in individual grievances and lawsuits.

WN: These are, in essence, inherited issues?

KM: Yeah, all these were on the table when I arrived and . . .

WN: Which helped sort of lead to Al Simone leaving . . .

KM: Yes.

WN: . . . the presidency, right?

KM: Well, Al solved a lot of problems, but before he left, he did things like give honorary doctorates to people. They were the ones that I had to then award in my first year as president. I came to believe they were being handed out as political favors rather than for any academic purposes. That is no disparagement on the people that were getting them, but they were Bob Oshiro, who was a bigwig in the Democratic party; Monsignor Charles Kekumano; Thomas Yagi, a labor leader from Maui; Richard “Dickie” Wong on the [Bishop Estate] Board of [Trustees]. . . . And when you look at the composition of the Board of Regents, you could understand that. There were certain members of the Board of Regents who felt that was inappropriate. So I stopped it, with some consternation and set up a process whereby these things could be handled. The next one we gave was five years later to Lech Walesa, labor leader from Poland. There was no academic reason for

these things; they were honorific titles. We developed something called the Regents’ Medal that they could give out as however they wanted to. Understand that the standards for an honorary doctorate were much different than for a Regents’ Medal. And so that was worked through with the board. I got good support from the board for that because they didn’t like the political aura that surrounded these things.

So that was on the table. The other one was the naming of buildings. I was of the opinion that buildings should be named for major donors, not for honorary purposes. You do other things for people you want to honor. So we needed to develop some policies for that.

Another important issue came up when I came to believe that board was spending too much time on individual personnel cases. So I had to work that through, and it cost me some goodwill, I guess you’d say. But again, the question of, “Why is the board resolving those matters?” And you need to show that proper procedures are being followed, and academic standards are being met. So we got a protocol whereby I would report every year to the board about what our tenure ratios were—how many people came up for it, how many people got it, et cetera. And then they could get away from deciding individual cases. I think that was a major thing because the board was spending a lot of time on things like that. And again, I thought that they should be spending time on other things, and they agreed. It wasn’t that I was muscling these things, it was, “How can we pay attention to what we need to pay attention to?”

WN: On a scale of one to ten, how would you have rated—when you first came here—how would you have rated the UH in terms of politicization?

KM: Ten. When you move around the country, and you can see it’s pretty bad in Louisiana, and sometimes Maryland, and occasionally Massachusetts. I mean, Billy Bulger got appointed chancellor. So there are other examples, but in the politics of small states, things tend to be more personal. You have to understand something called a “coconut wireless” here. You can’t speculate out loud too much because you don’t know whose cousin you’re talking to, it might turn up tonight at the family table. You just need to understand that. The legislature was very supportive of me in my time here. The only one who had a public bad word to say about me at all was Rod Tam, and that’s because we did get in a heck of an exchange once. Other than that, they were very supportive. I, on the other hand, adopted the practice that I’d never criticize the legislature publicly. I tried to get folks to see it was not because the legislature wouldn’t fund that that we can’t do something. It’s because it’s not high enough on our priorities.

WN: Did you know right away that it was in your job description that you would have to, you know, work closely with the legislature?

KM: Of course, I did. And I liked that process. I mean, I understand it, and I understand politics. I believe that working behind the scenes was better than picking a public fight. There’s nobody you could have a better public fight with than Ben Cayetano; he loved it. I was severely criticized because I wouldn’t take him on publicly, since I didn’t believe that was the way to be effective with the governor. I said many times, “Look, I will roll an egg down Kaläkaua with my nose if I think that that will get me what we need to have.” For example, the legislators were used to getting tickets to football games. Some were selling them or giving them to their family members. So I told them that I thought it was inappropriate and had the ethics commission rule that it was inappropriate. So I stopped giving them football tickets, and there was no problem about that. Some would deliver tickets for political fundraisers to my office, and I’d send them back. But I went around and talked to the major legislative leaders and said, “I don’t support or engage in

partisan politics.” I remember Representative Joe Souki, the speaker of the house at that time, said, “There won’t be a problem unless you go to one [i.e., fundraiser]. If you go to one and not the other, then you’ll have to deal with that.” Al Simone did go to some of them and when I talked to Al about it, he told me that he went when he was vice president and then he just kept doing it when he was president. I met with each candidate for governor and said, “I don’t support political candidates, I’d be happy to tell you whatever you need to know about the university,” et cetera. The message that I put out was, “I will not let you tell me who to hire. That’s an academic matter; we’ll follow process. Don’t ask me to do that because I can’t do it, and I won’t.” So that was pushing out, making room, that I knew, in this culture, needed to be done.

WN: And so, you know, you’re talking, really, about the differences between yourself and Al Simone.

KM: Well . . .

WN: Right, there are differences, and David Yount . . .

KM: Obvious---sure, absolutely.

WN: . . . talks about it in the final chapter, the differences, . . .

KM: Sure.

WN: . . . and you’re talking about it right now. I’m just wondering, I mean, was that a reason for you to be hired—to be a contrast to Al Simone?

KM: Well, you know the answer to that. I have made these comments about they always hire somebody unlike the last guy, and I believe that. I read some of Harlan Cleveland’s oral history and he talked about it was time for a local president. Why was Harlan a five-year president? Well, he wasn’t local, and he had a patrician atmosphere about him, and that offended a lot of people. After him, what did they want? Somebody who had more local roots so the governor appointed Dr. Matsuda [in 1984], who was in the governor’s cabinet at the time. Later they hired Cecil Mackey. I met with Cecil when he was in town a few times when I was president just to talk about it. When Bobby Fujimoto was chair of the board, I went to a social occasion at College Hill right after a board meeting. And Al took me to breakfast at the Rainbow Lanai the next morning. And so, yes, I knew the history, but it did not enter into my decision to come here. I also knew the circumstances of Al’s leaving. And I also knew Harold Enarson, who had evaluated Al for the board. And so I had checked all that out as a professor of higher education and somebody who has run a lot of searches.

My mentor, Lester Anderson, told me, “You have to keep prodding until you find out what’s wrong.” And that’s what I do when I was hiring. And all they’re going to tell you is the wonderful things about Warren Nishimoto, you know. And I say, “Well, I’m going to find out more about that. What does Warren not do well?” So it wasn’t a factor at all. I mean, I knew Al, yes, but not a factor. When they hired Evan [Dobelle], of course, they hired somebody much different than I am. And when they hired David [McClain], the contrast was obvious. I don’t know much about President [M.R.C.] Greenwood, so I can’t comment. But you got to go back to Tom Hamilton who quit over the Oliver Lee case. And then Harlan Cleveland, who was former ambassador to the UN, who served as UH president for five years. Then Dr. Matsuda for ten years, then Cecil Mackey from Michigan State.

WN: Right, right.

KM: I knew that history. I’ve met all of them except Tom Hamilton. “This is it for me. The swan song.” I’m fifty-six when I took the job.

WN: And what advice did Al Simone give you?

KM: Not much. I called Al because he was out as president of Rochester Institute of Technology. So I never met with Al because he was not around when I was chosen.

WN: Oh, that’s right, because Paul Yuen was interim president.

KM: That’s correct. During his last months the board asked Al to stay at College Hill and not come to the office. So during that time, he was looking at that RIT job. While looking for jobs, he was also not coming to the office because the board had appointed Paul as interim. So I didn’t get a chance to talk to Al. I did call him a couple of times to ask whether or not what I had heard was true. And people would say Al made a deal or something like that, and I would say, “Okay.” And I’d call Al and ask him whether or not that was the case and so forth. We’ve been cordial, but I haven’t interacted with him very much. But I kept most of his staff.

WN: Yeah, let’s get into the staff next time.

[To MK:] Do you have any questions in closing? One last question. Your reputation, when you came here and somebody used the term, “Hatchet Man,” and does that go back to the Three R’s of retrenchment, . . .

KM: Well, I first made my academic reputation in the ’70s as an expert on faculty governance and specialized in unions, et cetera. When we started into a modest downturn nationally, I got money from the Lilly Endowment to do a national study of how universities were cutting and reducing budgets. We did a survey—you know, random sample of 329 provosts on the telephone. We sent them an interview schedule in advance, then went through it on the telephone. We gathered a national data set on how many tenured faculty members had been released and things of that sort.

So I started to write about managing budgetary decline. I wrote a paper called, “Budgeting Strategies under Conditions of Decline.” I said things like, “You have no friends when you cut the budget.” Tomorrow, we will talk about the four-four-four system, which Dean Smith and Alan Teramura were sold on, and I said, “It won’t work; it’ll kill you because I’ve been through that. Read what I wrote.” Three R’s of the ’80s in 1979 and it projected what was going to happen in the ’80s. It was a play on the “Three R’s”: reductions, reallocations, and retrenchments. And as I mentioned to Warren the other day, if I had known I was going to be a president, I wouldn’t have called it that. (WN and MK laugh.) Because it really got me a reputation.

I published a book in 1978 with T.R. McConnell, called Sharing Authority Effectively. I made the argument that systems of academic governance embodied in the Wagner Act did not fit higher education. It assumes a conflict of interest between the employer and the employee. It assumes a binding arbitration and a legally binding separation between management and labor, et cetera. That doesn’t fit the dynamics of the university. And so that tainted me. “He’s not in favor of unions,” which was not the case. I took consulting money from both sides. I was neutral on unions. I did studies of academic governance on six institutions with faculty unions. Our book was cited by the majority in the Yeshiva case of the Supreme Court. The Yeshiva case ruled that the faculty at Yeshiva University

were essentially management, not labor, and did not have the right to bargain under the Wagner Act at private colleges. So I got to be the guy that killed the union movement in private schools. It was just an analysis of an academic saying, “There is no conflict of interest. The only way you can gin it up, is if you narrowly define faculty employees without professional interests.” If you talk about fringe benefits and the amount of money you make in your retirement system, okay, you’re an employee in every sense of that word. If you talk about your participation in policy committees—to design curriculum, to give grades, and to evaluate colleagues with tenure—that’s a professional responsibility and has no parallel in the Wagner Act.

I participated in seminars in New York City with Ted Kheel, the arbitrator of the baseball dispute, and they all thought I was nuts. And reasonably so, I mean—so collective bargaining laws were being passed in all these state governments at the time. I got a reputation as a scholar who was not afraid to say this stuff. There’s a marvelous piece in the Phi Delta Kappan by Mike Lieberman, who was a faculty member at NYU—or maybe City University of New York. The title of the piece is, “Eggs that I Have Laid.” Mike was a proponent of labor laws for public employees in the ’70s. He finally came around to my view—he didn’t cite it, but nonetheless—we never anticipated that the unions would elect the people with whom they bargained in the public sectors. What was happening was that the unions who were in negotiation with management were choosing some of the members of management, and that’s an inherent conflict of interest.

When we were negotiating here, Cayetano was settling issues; we weren’t. And I’ll talk about that. That was part of getting our own lawyers. Well, all the people who had been studying the Wagner Act for thirty or forty years said, “Well, it’s just another industry. If it works in baseball, it can work here.” And I was of the view that substantial accommodations would have to be made, and that meant articulating a bargaining philosophy that would work.

WN: But Hawai‘i has sort of a history of sort of bending the Wagner Act, right? .

KM: Well, Hawai‘i passed its own . . .

WN: . . . the sugar workers, right?

KM: Yes. That’s true, and there was a very active labor movement here. Harry Bridges and all those guys. In fact, one of my great successes was to get a million dollars from Unity House to endow a chair for Art Rutledge.

WN: Oh. Yeah, that’s right!

KM: But yes, there’s a rich history of it here and in New York. That’s how I got in touch with Harold, and then Ken Lau got in touch with me. Hawai‘i passed a bargaining law and identified the University of Hawai‘i faculty as the thirteenth bargaining unit. I did a piece for the Education Commission of the States in which we reviewed bargaining experiences in the states and their laws. I testified before the legislature in California and consulted with both universities there—the University of California and the state university system. I met with the chancellors and all about these things. They drafted a law in California, which made governance not bargainable. So there is a special statute for the university system. And all around the country, I was involved in debates about what these things should look like. I edited a series of papers for the Education Commission of the States on bargaining in Montana. Ken Lau and I wrote one on Hawai‘i. It was eight states, I believe. So I had a reputation. I didn’t mind the one reputation, but the Three R’s stuff was a real killer.

WN: (Chuckles) Okay, let’s continue tomorrow. Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW

Tape No. 25-48-4-11

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

with

Kenneth P. Mortimer (KM)

Honolulu, O‘ahu

February 17, 2011

BY: Warren Nishimoto (WN)

WN: Okay, this is session number four with Kenneth P. Mortimer, University of Hawai‘i Presidents Oral History Project. Today is February 17, 2011, and we’re at the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa.

Ken, this is session number four, and we’re into the University of Hawai‘i and we’re going here and there, but I wanted to ask you how did you assemble your staff? What were some of the issues in getting a good staff together?

KM: A long-term problem at the university was that our salaries were deflated. And that’s particularly true for administrative salaries. I was only being partially facetious when I responded to Ed Kuba’s question, “What’s the difference between here and the Penn State presidency?” and I said, “About a hundred thousand bucks.” We did have depressed salaries. One of the things that Evan [Dobelle] did, of course, was to jack his own salary. He was able to pay the people he brought in more competitive salaries. I met with the board and talked about it, but there was really no sympathy for changing that process at the time.

WN: Of course, at that time, pre-autonomy days, the board really didn’t have that . . .

KM: Oh, yes, it did.

WN: It did?

KM: It did. Actually the board set salaries of the executives of all non-unionized people and could have done whatever I recommended, but there was not an attitude in the state that would support such a matter. And there was the old practice—I think Al [Simone] was making less than a hundred [thousand] when he started. So, in this morning’s paper you saw the article of President [Greenwood] defending her housing allowance. Things like that are enough to sink a president because they get to be public issues. Obviously, the public feels it is like Enron or Exxon. They don’t know why these guys are making billions of dollars.

Presidential salaries was a national debate. Could there be a rule that a president of a university didn’t make three or four times more than a full professor? Or something like that. But that’s all over now and we are paying top administrators at UH more competitive salaries. The staff I inherited was Paul Yuen, who was actually interim chief academic officer when I came, but had been acting president. That was the first major appointment I had to make. And so we did a search and appointed Carol Eastman, who had been dean of the graduate school at the University

of Washington. But it still was a constraining factor, the amount of money to pay these folks was not competitive. Another major regret at the University of Hawai‘i was that I was unable to get the legislature to allow us to change the retirement system. You cannot vest any retirement benefits until you’ve been here ten years. For an academic, that’s a lifetime. It was a real barrier to recruiting top quality. Most places, you get an option of the state retirement system or the TIAA-CREF [Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund] option. I tried many times, even through all machinations, we’ll talk about later, to get that changed, but I was unsuccessful, largely because of the opposition of the unions. I got a hearing, a sympathetic hearing, but I couldn’t persuade Russell [Okata] or anybody else on the union side about it. In fact, we had a few public confrontations about it when one union leader called the faculty “itinerant workers.” I mentioned that if he continued that language, I’d have to take a public position on it. I don’t like to do that with other public officials.

So Carol Eastman was my first major appointment. Also we made a change in the director of the University of Hawai‘i Foundation. That largely was attributed to me, but that decision had been made before I got here. I urged the foundation to make that decision before I arrived. But they didn’t, so we had to make that change and brought in Donna Howard, who at the time was development officer at University of California-Irvine.

WN: Now, before you arrived, was the head of UH Foundation considered a big position? You know . . .

KM: It was the director of development for the University of Hawai‘i. It had the title, I think, executive director. Now the title has been changed to president of the University of Hawai‘i Foundation and executive director. And again, we were only raising seven or eight million a year. And there was a history of why that’s the case and some feelings that needed to be smoothed over, some animosity to past practices. There was within the culture here a club called the PC Pau Club. Presidents Club Done, pau.

WN: P-A-U?

KM: All pau. All done. (WN chuckles.) And apparently during Dr. Matsuda’s reign, in order to get this foundation stabilized, I guess, they went out and persuaded a number of people to put up $10,000 with the argument that they would never ask them for another donation. That’s called PC Pau. We needed to get past that because the best donors for any university are those who have already given money. So it was things like that when we started to talk seriously about the fundraising efforts. To raise serious money, you have to have an infrastructure underneath it. For example, we started a call center. Now we employ students to call our alums. We started planned giving and an annual campaign. So there are four or five things you need to put in place to do major fundraising. We put someone in charge of major gifts of over $50,000, or something like that. And somebody was responsible for the President’s Club campaign.

And we were discussing yesterday, whether I would be chancellor. And I decided for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, I didn’t think you could do what was necessary if you were not the chancellor. I had studied that issue all over the country. Penn State didn’t have a chancellor. The University of Minnesota did not. There were a half a dozen such multi-campus systems without a chancellor for the largest campus. It almost never works that a dominant campus can have a chancellor and a separate president. And when I say that, that’s a judgment call, if you will. The president of the University of Minnesota runs the Twin Cities campus, and then there are five other campuses. University of Houston, likewise. So I didn’t see how that would work. So then going after Carol [Eastman] was really to have the chief academic office and a principal administrative officer for the Mänoa campus. So that’s the change I made there.

Obviously we were stable in the community college area. Joyce Tsunoda was an icon in town and had done a heck of a job. And David Yount’s book talked about I paid her off, but that’s ridiculous. She was competent beyond all understanding. I made her director of international programs, yes, because that wasn’t organized well anywhere else and she had an interest there. Ralph Horii [Senior Vice President for Administration] retired a year or two after I got here.

Later on as we went through things, other changes occurred. Chris Gulbranson was dean of the medical school and he was making just a little bit less than I did. And you just can’t get a medical school dean for that kind of money. And Barry Raleigh, I believe, was the highest dean being paid at the university. He was making more than I did. That never bothered me. That was not a criterion, but that was a really big issue for how well we could recruit administrative talent.

And of course, it was an issue for Hawai‘i to recruit faculty talent as well. Eventually we negotiated a procedure with UHPA [University of Hawai‘i Professional Assembly] that we could give merit raises. It was an extensive procedure, but we couldn’t do merit raises at that time either for faculty. There was a hidebound structure, that is from an academic point of view.

It was a previous tradition on the business administrative side, that you would hire local people for those jobs. And you can go back in the board of regents minutes where that had habitually been an issue over the years. Why aren’t we promoting from within? And yet it is customary for universities to conduct national searches for your major administrative positions. And so that was also part of the culture here at that time that was . . .

WN: For example, which positions? Is this like . . .

KM: Well, administrative---when Ralph retired, I wanted to run a national search, and you know why. Then you go back and look at the records of the regents. For anybody that the regents had to approve on the administrative side of the house. The hard question was why can’t you get a local person? Very seldom did we bring in any community college provosts from outside. Some of them, yes, but not often—it usually was promoted from within. And that’s an important part of the local culture. The first resignation that we had was Ed Kormondy at Hilo. Ed had lost one battle about separating Hawai‘i Community College from UH-Hilo, and he decided it was time for him to leave. So again, you’re back into how do you do the recruiting for that when your salaries are so low. And the story of bringing Rose Tseng to UH-Hilo is an interesting one because she was, at the time, I believe, a chancellor of a community college in San Jose and had been a dean of a college at San Jose State.

WN: This is who?

KM: Rose Tseng.

WN: Oh, okay.

KM: And that Ed was chancellor of UH-Hilo he was also chancellor of UH-West O‘ahu.

WN: That’s right.

KM: So he had dual responsibilities. How do you sell that to the world? The Hilo community was not at all happy about that.

WN: It goes back to the Ralph Miwa days, I think.

KM: Precisely. Well, you go back a long way on that, and you know, Ed Mookini—I ran into him one time, and Ed lived in Honolulu and commuted over there during the week. That incensed the Hilo

community. They wanted somebody to live there. There was this Hawai‘i State University bill in the legislature to create a separate state university at Hilo. We appointed a committee and did a national search and hired Ken Perrin. When he left we hired Rose. She didn’t want to leave the California system due to the retirement benefit. It was really a very creative thing that—aided and abetted by Stan Roehrig, the regent from Hilo, because he just wouldn’t take no for an answer on Rose. The community wanted Rose. She was the top candidate, and I can’t tell you who the second one was, but the second one was on the Mainland but was a local boy, however, and is now employed at the university. So Stan got everything organized; we were able to negotiate an arrangement with the California retirement system that we would send them a check every year for her fringe benefit retirement package. And that’s another mold that was broken. So we were paying Rose’s retirement to the California retirement system. Now that’s a creative deal if I ever saw one.

WN: (Laughs) And of course, with the promise of her—if she came, she’d be eventually vested into this [i.e., Hawai‘i state retirement system]?

KM: I can’t remember the details except I know that we had to guarantee that she could continue in the California retirement system, and that made it possible for us to get Rose Tseng, who just retired in 2010. I mean, she was the community’s and the faculty’s first choice. A Chinese woman whose family, I believe, was raised in Taiwan. She was the people’s choice and a very good chancellor for Hilo. I was happy to get her.

WN: Perrin, right.

KM: And I should’ve mentioned Ken Perrin first. Ken, I knew as president of Westchester State College in Pennsylvania. I had done evaluation studies of Westchester in my scholarly studies and had been a consultant to Ken when he was president. So he was also the people’s choice but only lasted three years. It wasn’t a good fit. Ken went on to be president of Indiana State University in Terre Haute. But then we also decided that when Ken left, we would separate the West O‘ahu job, which the Hilo people gave me a standing ovation for. And we hired Bill Pearman, who was the chief academic officer at Hilo, to be chancellor at UH-West O’ahu. But all of those financial [issues] were exacerbated when recruiting deans at a research campus like Mänoa. There was the fuss about four deans of arts and sciences. But then two or three of them resigned after a year or two that I was here, not because of any pressure from me. And you start talking about a national search, but the board would not fill those positions until I brought a recommendation of whether I should merge those colleges or not.

(Telephone rings. Taping interrupted, then resumes.)

WN: Okay.

KM: So just continuing, salaries became an even bigger problem when we began to recruit deans. The board was the big barrier to this, of course. It approves all executive appointments. There were always questions and salaries were always the biggest thing. Other matters included the qualifications of the candidates, all of which are legitimate questions. So I looked at the issue of whether we should merge the four colleges. There wasn’t any support for it. In fact, when they heard we were discussing it, we got letters from all the chairs of the departments saying how important it was to keep the four colleges [in the College of Arts and Sciences].

WN: When you say merge, you’re just talking about the merge of four arts and sciences . . .

KM: Well, there was a debate here that went on in the ’70s. It used to be one college.

WN: Arts and sciences? Oh, I see.

KM: Yes . . .

WN: Oh, okay.

KM: And they split it into four colleges.

WN: Right, which is how it is today.

KM: That’s correct. And so that debate was part of the record. We reviewed that record. It had extensive memoranda in the files on why they broke it up in the first place. I had dealt with that problem many times before in my previous consulting activities. The history of it in the nation is as institutions grew in the ’60s, they began to specialize much more, and these large arts and science colleges split up into units, e.g., colleges of science—there’s a college of chemistry at Berkeley. (WN chuckles.) And there’s a political history at Berkeley. The major state universities that are among the most prestigious, kept the arts and science oligarchies together. UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin-Madison, Washington—they all kept that oligarchy. So it was the dominant structure of those universities, the dominant value structure of their campuses. Penn State was a professional school-oriented place. There were small arts and science colleges—the college of science, the college of language and social sciences, and that sort of thing, and an arts and architecture college. And as I said, at Penn State, we were worried that half of the undergraduate enrollments would be in business and engineering. Merging the four colleges at Mänoa was not an issue that I felt was important enough for me to take on, but it went on for a long time. I mean, we had an interim dean, in one case, for over a year because the board didn’t want to move on that appointment until they were convinced that I had done my homework on issues of that sort.

Judith Hughes became dean of the humanities [College of Arts and Humanities], Cornelia Moore of the language group [College of Language, Linguistics and Literature], and Chuck Hayes was an acting dean in science [College of Natural Sciences] for probably a decade. And I knew the market well enough to know that salaries would be an issue in doing national searches. When we got to the law school issue—we’ll talk about that later—but that’s the same issue. The medical school was a big issue when Chris retired. It took us two years to fill the medical school deanship. The deal that Dean Smith, who was then executive vice chancellor at Mänoa, cut with Ed Cadman involved deferred compensation. Dean got the hospitals to kick in some money. So Ed came for somewhere around $350,000, but he had another $150,000 per year if he stayed five years. So he was getting around a half a million a year, which is what medical school deans get. So that nut was broken with Ed, but it wasn’t broken for anything other than the medical school. And the same issue was in the law school where those salaries are, you know—I mean, they’re twice what we were paying. So that was a big issue in putting together an administrative team.

I was impressed with the talent that we had locally on the administrative side. They were well versed in the bureaucracy of the state, and it’s probably something you need to know in order to be effective here. Evan broke that mold when he got rid of most of my senior staff and brought in administrative vice presidents and so forth from elsewhere. Ralph Horii retired in about a year or two—right after Ben Cayetano got elected governor. Ralph was a longtime civil servant here and a good man. I started to look around for an administrative vice president, eventually settled on and hired Ben’s director of DAGS [Department of Accounting and General Services], Eugene Imai. But again, I looked pretty much locally for that. I mean, I tested the waters about whether we could do a national search, and that wasn’t in the cards for the reasons that I’ve mentioned. Again, you’re working with a situation that’s handed to you and how many of these dragons you can slay at one time.

WN: Well, I think, traditionally, the director of administration has always been pretty much local, . . .

KM: Yes.

WN: . . . somebody familiar with the state bureaucracy and so forth.

KM: Correct, right. And I mean, I didn’t---well, my point simply was, certainly on the academic side, that was not an appropriate standard. On the administrative side, you can bow to local culture. When Ben Cayetano became governor, he wanted to know why Eugene Imai made more money coming to work for the university than he did as the director of DAGS. And Ben wanted to know why Rodney Sakaguchi, the budget director of the university, made more money than his budget director. Those were not friendly questions, let’s put it that way. You see that raising its head in this morning’s paper about why does the president get a housing allowance? She [M.R.C. Greenwood] explained it quite forthrightly, “My partner can’t climb the stairs at College Hill.” You know, it was a condition of her employment. But, you know, again, I have seen presidents go down on issues like that, because they get to be such public fusses.

WN: So how would you answer a question like that? Is that a creature of history or some kind of . . .

KM: Well, just the way she did this morning. I mean, what I read in the paper—I don’t. . . . I have not talked to the president about this, so I mean, I’m not telling stories. I was impressed with her answer. She said, “My partner can’t climb the stairs.”

WN: Mm-hmm [yes]. No, but I’m talking about the questions that Ben would ask you about why is the budget director . . .

KM: Well, I mentioned the marketplace conditions and other matters. But he wouldn’t ask me directly; it would be in the newspaper. (WN chuckles.) So then it was why you’re doing these things. So the administrative salaries were always a difficult thing because of the amount of salary you could or could not pay.

We did a lot of equity studies to make sure that our women and minority faculty and so forth were being adequately paid and had to make some adjustments based on that—equity money— Mie Watanabe’s people did that. I had done this at Penn State as well. You need to do it almost annually, so you can explain any differences. You know, salary difference can be explained by experience, ability, and merit, but they can be due to the fact you can hire women cheaper than you can hire men. That’s been the practice. But once you get on that salary schedule, you can’t change it. So we conducted a series of studies and made some changes to try to reflect the reality of the world. So that was the administrative milieu.

We made a lot of changes, particularly in the deanships at Mänoa. In terms of my time here, some of them just turn over regularly, and Chris Gulbranson—the medical school dean—left on his own recognizance. So did the language and literature dean and the humanities dean and so forth. As you know, we decided that when the library school dean retired—that we would not keep that school; we’d put it in the computer program. And eventually, the retirement of [Dean] Jerry Michael in the School of Public Health caused a consternation that lasted for five or six years.

WN: This is prior to [Jerome] Grossman coming or is that. . . .

KM: Yeah I’ve forgotten which—Jerry had been dean there for twenty-five years. And the School of Public Health—when Jerry retired—couldn’t agree on a mission. Before I arrived they had done a search and had a candidate for me to interview. I said I’d like to have more than one candidate to talk to. My rule of thumb was, the committee could bring me not fewer than three and not more than five names, all of whom they recommended, and I would make the choice. That was a change in procedure, too, but I felt that there had to be some degrees of freedom in my choice. In this particular one, there wasn’t. They brought me one candidate for dean, I interviewed him, but

his salary demands were far in excess of what I could meet. I’ve forgotten the real numbers, but it was something like thirty thousand dollars more than I could ever pay. And so that didn’t work, so we went back to the associate interim dean stuff for a long time.

I asked the faculty to bring me a plan for the evolution of the school. They were in accreditation problems. And we lasted for five or six years without a resolution. I decided not to spend $800,000 on that school to solve its accreditation problems. It was a very controversial decision, if you remember. The board was reluctant to do it, so we had public hunger strikes, et cetera.

The board eventually asked me to appoint a special committee to analyze what we were proposing. Kenji Sumida, former East-West Center president, was chair, Julia Frohlich from the Blood Bank was on it. And they said the university ought to have a school of public health, et cetera. The accreditation folks told me, “We’re going to probably revoke accreditation unless you do something.” And I said, “Thank you.” Because I don’t believe we had the cadre of people that would allow me to justify reallocating that kind of money to that school with the same people who were already there. And, you know, it’s very difficult—and they had been there for quite a while. The major critique in the accreditation report is they weren’t meeting the standards of a graduate faculty to offer Ph.D.’s, and that’s not a problem you can fix easily. And then the faculty themselves were not able to come to some understanding of what the school ought to look like. So first part of it, I would have had a permanent dean, but I couldn’t afford him, and I couldn’t get that appointment done in my opinion because of his salary demands. And so, we did merge it into the medical school. I don’t know where it stands today.

WN: Mm-hmm [yes]. I think it’s still there.

KM: The highest paid guy on campus was the director of the Cancer Center of Hawai‘i, Brian Issell. And we aspired at Mänoa to be a first-class research university, but we couldn’t develop the infrastructure necessary to meet that goal.

WN: So merging the School of Public Health into the School of Medicine, was that a significant cost- savings?

KM: Well, the cost-savings was in avoiding the expenditures that would be required to keep it fully accredited as an independent school. There are different criteria for a program. So we suspended, I believe—I had the details of this, of course, ten years ago—but we suspended their enrollments in a Ph.D. program, I believe. I can’t remember the details. When Dave Bess decided to step down as dean of the College of Business Administration, again, you’re looking at the same salary issue. We persuaded First Hawaiian Bank to endow the deanship in the college of business. And that allowed us to recruit David McClain because we had the endowment—a million-dollar endowment—to supplement the salary of the dean of the College of Business Administration. That’s now the Shidler College of Business, but the deanship is the First Hawaiian Bank Dean. So there are ways to, quote, “skin that cat.” For example, the medical school dean, the hospitals put up a lot of money because their residency’s program was built around the university medical school. So the law school problem I’d like to talk about when we talk about tuition.

WN: Okay. You know, there are other programs that were sort of on a certain block. One was public health, of course, the other was the [School of] Library and Information Sciences. So you were able to move the school of library studies into . . .

KM: Well, we consulted with the faculty there and believed that the future of library science wasn’t in the Dewey decimal system any longer; it was in the automation of libraries. As a vice president of Penn State, the last deal I managed was with three institutions in Philadelphia: Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore. Penn State had gotten into the automation of its libraries in previous decades and had developed a system with Honeywell that it was marketing. We were converting a

lot of these colleges to automated systems from card catalogs. And Penn State had used Honeywell, and Honeywell went out of the business. So I had to go down and negotiate our way out of those three contracts because the software from Honeywell was obsolete. So I’d had some experience in that, and when we talked about it, the future of library science is in automation and other matters.

Another big issue was why Hamilton Library wasn’t being expanded. I found out it was twenty- third or so priority on the list of construction projects. So I put it on the top five, and it eventually got done. So the library problem was related to Hamilton Library but also to the school. When the dean there retired, that was an opportunity to modernize and get into the future of library science.

WN: Was that Ira Harris or . . .

KM: I forgot . . .

WN: . . . Miles Jackson?

KM: Thank you. Miles Jackson, yes. I developed a language that we needed to learn to live with our resources. It’s nice to aspire, but I kept saying I’m responsible for delivering. I can’t tell you that you’re going to get things that I don’t think are possible. Another example of savings is the money for remedial education when students get out of high school needed remedial education. It was the responsibility of the DOE. In the community colleges, we were spending well in excess of a million dollars on remedial education for students who had just graduated from high school. So I talked to Chancellor Tsunoda and she got rid of those programs. We said it was a DOE responsibility, and they could teach it on our campuses if they wanted. If somebody had been out of high school for more than five years, then we would do it. The university decided it could not be all things to all people. We were not funded for remedial work. It’s an important social obligation, but the money is in DOE. So the legislature would repeat this language all the time— the university has to stop trying to be all things to all people.

WN: Also to eliminate repetition, right? Duplication, right?

KM: Well, there are some limitations. We don’t have a physical therapy graduate program in the state. And the rationale for the law school and the medical school when it was funded under Harlan Cleveland was our kids have to go to the Mainland. And that’s not right, so we created new options. We don’t have a dental school, you know. What don’t we have that other major universities have? The problem, of course, is we have to do it in a small way, so our costs for doing those things are high because we live in Hawai‘i, and all of our units are small. So when you’re looking like an outfit like SHAPS [School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies], it’s a very small school. School of Social Work was ten faculty members, I believe, and public health and library science were very small units. At Penn State, with 30,000 students at the main campus, there’s only ten colleges. These things proliferated here into a bunch of professional schools. That was, of course, the history of the ’60s and on through the ’70s.

WN: So was consolidation high on your agenda?

KM: Well, managing the budget was. When I looked at the resource pictures, I said the Mänoa campus was overextended. The campus had a student-faculty ratio of eleven, twelve to one, which is half of what most research universities have, and a series of very small professional schools, and by the national standard we had about every school you want to mention. The council of academic deans was seventeen people. So I couldn’t have an off-the-record discussion. Some of the deans sent their surrogates to meetings, so, you know, you couldn’t say anything at a council of academic deans meeting that was confidential because all these assistant deans were taking notes, and they’d read them into the faculty minutes of their colleges. This was a challenge because we

were just at the point where the budget had fallen through the floor, but there were few opportunities to have private conversations.

WN: So priority was not so much eliminating programs, but it was more consolidating programs into bigger units?

KM: The priority was dealing with the resources that we had available in a quality way. And so when we were discussing strategic priorities—again, for the community colleges, as opposed to the Mänoa campus, you did have a focus, and you can say Maui Community College is different than Kaua‘i and certainly different than Honolulu Community College. And why is that so? Because it’s the differentiation of their mission within the community college system. And it’s hard not to get everybody doing the same thing, but you did develop some culinary expertise at Kapi‘olani, and technical programs became Honolulu Community College’s identity. Whereas the neighbor island community colleges had broader missions. They had to serve the island, if you will, and they had to be much broader in their scope but also, therefore, less deep in their programs. So on Hawai‘i island, we tried to cover breadth. Quality usually comes somewhere in the depth of the argument, so how deep are you? We were very deep in the history department in Chinese history at Mänoa, but we still couldn’t match Berkeley, et cetera.

There were big debates about internals of the campus about the emphasis on certain programs. We attempted to look very carefully at the Mänoa campus and what are we really good at, and tried to invest differentially in those programs. The danger was, differential investment means taking it from somebody else because there’s no new money. Reallocation is the name of the game, and the toughest thing to do is to reallocate money in a university. I wrote another book about that, our pamphlet on academic personnel issues—before I got here, by the way. (Chuckles)

In fact, the most controversial thing that we did here was to reallocate money. You can take the public health thing and all of that, and the public fuss about tuition, et cetera, which we’ll talk about. We identified the priorities. For example, campus maintenance was in the tank. In the early days of the budget cuts, we had stripped the library book budget because we didn’t have much time to plan for cuts. I mean, we were told that when the legislature ended in Ben’s first year in ’95, that the budget cut was going to be $14 million. I got a call from Ben on July 14—I can remember well, “I’m sorry, but, you know, the budget doesn’t work. Your budget cut is $28 million.” The academic year had already started. What are you going to do about something like that? And you can’t legally run a deficit, so you need to do all the obvious things. You stop spending money anywhere that’s not involved in people because those are the things you can’t manage very well. So in doing that, we did things we knew to be unwise in the long run but that we needed to do in order to meet that target. And then we kept getting further cuts during the year.

The personal part of that that was so distressing is the faculty got to believe that I wasn’t telling them the truth. And the fact is, the scene changed every month. And so next time, I’d be before the faculty senate or somewhere, you know, and giving new numbers. “Last month, you told us this and now you say that.” I finally developed a way to say we’re operating on three budgets at once: the one we’re in, the biennium budget that we’re proposing and then the longer-term budget, and those things are never the same. And we have to manage our way through the year, depending on current information, which often changed rapidly.

I haven’t said this publicly either, but this is an interesting thing for people to read. Sometime during my early years with Governor Cayetano, he called for a meeting of the regents in his office and invited me. I was not aware of what the meeting was going to be about. So I’m there with maybe ten of the regents in his office. And his budget director went to the board and said, “We think the university is misappropriating money.” And I’m, you know, blood begins to drain from my face. And then he explained why we were the only state agency that didn’t give back money

at the end of the fiscal year. I was relieved because I said, “Governor, I have about five different sources of money, including research funds and special funds and all of that, and I spend every one of your pennies before I touched one of mine. How much did we give you back last year?”

He said, “Like a dollar sixty-five.”

And I said, “Well, I told them to give you nothing, and if I weren’t doing this, the regents ought to get rid of me.”

It was a cordial meeting when it ended, but I didn’t know what it was all about. They didn’t understand in the governor’s office how the university operates. Now there’s a downside to that because when they found out we have this other money, they began to cut us further. They just weren’t aware of the complexity of our situation. I’ll talk when we get to tuition about what a big change that made in the culture of this university and the way in which we handle money.

WN: Misappropriating money—that’s a pretty serious . . .

KM: That’s a pretty serious charge. And again, by statute here, you’re not allowed to run a deficit in state funding. But you see, when I retired, we were somewhere around an $800-million to $1 billion-dollar operation, and only $250 million of that was coming directly in state appropriation. We used to run around at Penn State, using this X sign, like this. Well, X meant the amount of money from tuition and Y was the money from the state. And when I was a vice president at Penn State, we passed that line—we got more money from tuition than we did from the state. That was the nature about what’s happening in American public higher education.

So it’s difficult to overestimate the importance that resources play in all of this while you’re supposed to be an academic leader and pay attention to academics, the issues that people care about, et cetera. Are our kids getting educated well?

Another big decision I made was not to restrict access. In California and in a lot of other states, when they don’t receive the money, the community colleges don’t let the students in. My decision here was we’re not restricting access. We are going to continue to be open-door colleges. Mänoa’s different, you have to have admissions standards at Mänoa and Hilo. That got to be a controversial issue as well, together with my unwillingness to fund remedial education in the community colleges. All those were driven by, first, what I sensed about access was important to the kids of Hawai‘i. I was the one who could keep that going and make sure we didn’t do what they did in California and Washington State and a whole variety of other places. And the other big problem was to make sure they taught the courses necessary to get degrees on time.

When once I was in Nashville, Tennessee, visiting my sister while I was president here, and I got a call from Joyce Tsunoda, who was acting president of the time. And I heard noise in the background.

She said, “We’re having demonstrations.”

I said, “Where are you?”

“I’m in your office.”

I said, “Are you on a secure phone?”

She said, “No, the students are in. . . .”

I said, “Call me back when you can find a way to talk privately.”

The issue was Hawaiians were demonstrating against the cutback on Hawaiian-language programs. When I heard that, I said, “They’re right. Tell them we’ll fix it because we’re not cutting back on Hawaiian-language programs. I don’t know what the dean is doing over there, and I’ll solve that problem when I get home, but that’s a priority for us, and we’re just not going to do it.” I mean, that was an easy demonstration to solve. The problem is—and I had to tell the students later—“Don’t regard that as a sign of weakness. You happened to be right, and there’s no sense in dragging you or me through a knothole, when you’re absolutely right. That was never intended and isn’t going to happen.”

But again, resource kinds of things get you in all kinds of difficulty and is similar to the debate about the national budget or all these entitlements—e.g., cut everybody else but don’t cut me.

Later, then, the most controversial thing that executive vice chancellor did with my acquiescence is come up with cuts of 4 percent every year for three years, for all academic units. It was called the four-four-four plan. And that money was going to be used to reallocate into high-priority needs.

WN: Now who came up with that plan?

KM: Dean Smith and Alan Teramura. They proposed that to me, and I argued with them for quite a while that it was not a politically smart thing to do. I had written an article years ago on budgeting strategies under conditions of decline. You have no friends when you cut the budget. If you cut the budget selectively, you’ll have a few friends, but they’ll never speak up, but you’ll at least know that they’re getting . . . We had identified libraries and maintenance and some academic programs that needed to achieve their potential as priorities. Maintenance was a big problem. It’s an even bigger problem today. So that four-four-four plan went into effect at Mänoa and the deans were just livid. Everybody had to cut 4 percent every year, and Dean Smith, to his credit, did the things that we needed to do at the Mänoa campus. But you can understand how there wasn’t anybody who would support that plan. Delegations would come to see me and tell me cut it out and that sort of stuff. It’s one of the things I wrote about in our 2007 book about the difficult relationship between presidents and provosts.

So managing resource issues dominated the public calendar. You’re trying to manage the strategic, competitive advantages, particularly at Mänoa, but in the community colleges as well. Mission differentiation became a big deal. Hilo wanted to expand into graduate programs, and I didn’t feel they had the resources to do it. So that was another issue that we had to deal with. They now have a pharmacy school and a Ph.D. in Hawaiian languages, and other matters of that sort. That’s a typical problem: where are you going to get the money to do those things? I’ve given several national speeches on this. I never saw a proposal for a new program that anybody would admit costs money. That’s the kiss of death when you submit a request for a new program. So we developed a practice where there always had to be cost estimates. The proposal would go to the budget officer to estimate what the costs are. The thing that caused me a lot of problems—I was to get an understanding that the principal resource we have is faculty time. That’s 70 percent of an academic budget. And so if you take that off the table and say, “We’re not going to discuss that,” what else is there to talk about? Travel? (Chuckles) You know, it just is not part of the game, so that’s where I got my scholarly history of looking carefully at these problems. How do you explain to somebody that they’re not a high priority when that is their life?

WN: So what were the high-priority items?

KM: Well, we invested in oceans, earth sciences, astronomy, Asian theater, some languages, not a lot—and differentially in Asian studies. One of the students told me that there’s no professor of African history on the Mänoa campus. I said, “We can’t cover the world. I realize that’s important, but I’m not willing to do anything about that. If the history department came forward,

that would be different.” But we were very deep in Asian history. So we were trying to take advantage of that. A major blow to the university was the demise of federal funding for the East- West Center and our graduate programs. At one time, the East-West Center had like 200, 250 fellows. That was major support. All those people who got degrees, of course, got them at the University of Hawai‘i. That was a major boost for our graduate programs, particularly in economics and Asian areas. So there was obviously an Asia-Pacific focus on the Mänoa campus.

So those strategic priorities were supported differentially—where did the money go when Dean Smith took it back? It went to those kinds of things. We got into the real deep stuff about “close the law school” and all that. When you look at the history of faculty committee reports to the university about what to do about the budget cuts, it was always to close the medical and law schools.

WN: Right.

KM: And that’s not advice you can use casually. I mean, it is a reasonable thing to think about, but the basic message there was, “We can’t afford those expensive professional schools. And that’s what we should do in order to protect our core.” I could not disagree with that, in principle, except we’re here in Hawai‘i, and we’re not starting over again. So, the medical school thing was fixed in a variety of ways. I did say at the executive conference on Big Island—executive conference in April or May, some time like that, where all the CEO’s in Hawai‘i go over to the Mauna Kea [Beach Hotel] and have programs for two or three days. And it’s a getaway to shmooze, but also, you bring in big speakers like David McCullough. I sat with a couple of hospital executives and said, “You know, it looks to me like I’m going to have to close the medical school,” because I was in a kind of a time when—“What am I going to do about this problem?” And the medical school was only costing the university $13 million a year. Where was the rest of the money coming from? The hospitals and the community, and they’re supporting the residency program, the medical library, and all of that. And when the hospitals began to feel the pinch, they started wanting to renegotiate those old contracts.

WN: Well, we didn’t have a university hospital, also.

KM: That’s correct.

WN: So . . .

KM: We are teaching—yes, exactly . . .

WN: The hospitals were . . .

KM: And I gloried in that. I had some experience in watching at Penn State, which had a very successful medical school. But in my oral history with former president Jack Oswald, he explained the evolution of the medical school at Penn State, so I knew it was a black hole into which you poured money.

WN: (Chuckles) Was there a university hospital there? Teaching . . .

KM: Yeah, in Hershey. Funded by a 50-million-dollar gift from the Hershey Foundation—Hershey chocolates is in Hershey. When Jack Oswald became president, he started talking about the health of the medical school. He was sending money down there from University Park. So if you didn’t have a teaching hospital, you were lucky. There’s a lot of problems in medical schools, such as special practice plans and things of that sort; who are your core faculty and who are the practitioners, and there is a residency program funded by the hospitals. Ben Cayetano, to his credit, got interested in the medical school particularly because one of our big issues was the

cancer center and its relationship with the medical school. The governor invited M.D. Anderson out to town to talk about a cancer center and maybe we could do it in cooperation with M.D. Anderson. This caused a lot of internal problems because the medical school faculty got the message from the governor that they weren’t good enough. I mean, that was the message to them—he wanted to deal with M.D. Anderson in Houston. That discussion went on, and it was terribly difficult for me and caused great anguish on campus.

We eventually arrived at an accommodation; Ben came to believe that the medical school was a crucial thing for the people of Hawai‘i. So then we started to look for a new location, and Ben’s the one that came up with the Kaka‘ako plan. But there were all kinds of plans being discussed about where to put it because the space issues were so severe. And Evan Dobelle, to his credit, got the money to build it. The land was given and the planning money for the medical school was obtained when I was here.

The law school became an issue when Act 161 gave us control over tuition, but we’ll talk about that more comprehensively. I had a conversation with the law school on a whole series of issues and I did ask the dean to step down. Everybody was saying the same thing, “We don’t need more lawyers, you know. We got to get rid of the law school, too. It would save us a couple million bucks if we closed it.” When we got control of tuition, we developed a plan with the law school leadership, that we would raise tuition in the law school so it was 80 percent tuition dependent, except for facilities. And the law school faculty agreed to increase enrollments from seventy-five to ninety—another fifteen students—and increase tuition substantially over a period of time so that the law school would really generate most of its own money. And that took it off the public agenda. So that was a good plan. Last year, when I was here, I ran into the law school dean and he said, “The plan is working very well.” So that’s the way we answered the question of all these professional schools.

We merged public health, we merged library science, we decided to go ahead with medicine, and we put the law school in a self-supporting mode. We also raised tuition in the nursing school. I don’t know where it stands today, but we started saying some of these cost us more, and therefore, we have to charge more for them. So I believe engineering got a technology fee that allowed them to update their labs and things of that sort.

WN: So to be able to raise tuition for certain schools, is that an Act 161 result?

KM: Yes, actually, let’s go back a little bit, and let’s start talking that.

WN: Yeah, let’s start talking about Act 161.

KM: I mentioned in my inaugural address in 1993 and in my conversation with people, one of my three top priorities was that we needed to develop a different relationship with state government than we have had the first eighty years. Now, I have a history with that. My family was very close to Governor [John A.] Burns. And I can remember stories that Ken Lau and others would tell me about how Burns would have a stack of paper on his desk, and there’d be a university appointment. And he’d pull ’em out whenever he wanted to pull ’em out. So there was great control over the details of the university. I began to work with the board and the legislature and talk about, “No great university can be run like a state bureaucracy.”

WN: Now, you were not comfortable with the thought of the university president being one of the cabinet members of the . . .

KM: Well, I thought that it was an awkward position, both for me and the governor. Because they are responsible for getting him reelected, and I am not. And they would have political meetings about how they were going to do it.

WN: Right.

KM: And so I asked [Governor John] Waihe‘e if I could absent myself from those meetings. He says no problem. And Cayetano said the same thing. He actually came up to me and said, “You don’t really need to be here. When I want you in a meeting, I’ll call you.” And he would call me from time to time. For example, in 1995 when they were sitting down among their first meetings, and realized they had to cut the budget, somebody said, “Mortimer’s the only guy who has gone through that.” So he asked me to attend a couple of those meetings about how to go about cutting a budget. And I told him the same thing Jimmy Takushi, his personnel director, did. I said, “You got to read your collective bargaining contracts.” And here I’ll talk about reducing this. And I said, “If you fire somebody in the health department—you know, they’re going to bump all the way through the system. You have no idea what’s going to come out the other end because they have seniority, and they’re statewide contracts. That makes it very difficult to manage things that you’re talking about. The first thing you do is read your contracts and talk to your lawyers.”

Well, I had done a lot of work on that in the past, intellectually, as well as practically. When I was a trustee at Wilson College, the president asked me to sit with her when she closed the music performing group. I’d written about reductions, reallocations—and studied how many tenure dismissals had been around the country, the dynamics of that and the case law on financial exigency. So I knew a lot about that, intellectually, and had gone through some of it at Western, though not as severe.

So I began to make the argument about flexibility and autonomy when we began to cut the budget. Donna Ikeda was chair of the [senate] ways and means committee. She started to query me about what I was going to cut. We had among the lowest tuitions among research universities in the country. So the legislature began to play around with that. The history of it was, the legislature set tuition, and it went to the state general fund. It was never a factor in the university’s appropriation. So there was no incentive for the university to do anything about it. And the history of it over time was that, sometimes, there’d be a period of three or four years where there’d be no tuition raise. So then, when they said to me, you know, “Why don’t you raise it?”

“Well, you guys control tuition, why don’t you do it?”

And the response to that was, “It’s a difficult, political thing to do.”

Well, at the same time, we were also trying to solve the problem of how to spend state money to raise private money and put it in a private foundation. My second priority was to raise private money. The principal argument when I would ask somebody for money is, “Dr. Mortimer, if I give you $100,000, what guarantee do I have that the legislature won’t cut your budget by $100,000?” So I needed to fix that problem.

WN: How did you answer that?

KM: Well, I’ll tell you. I said, “No, the money’s going to go to a private foundation, and it has its own board, and I’m on that board, but it’s a separate corporate entity. It’s a 501(c)(3). But I needed to find enough money—again, reallocated money—to spend on raising the fifteen cents it takes to raise a dollar. Aloha United Way fundraising costs about fourteen cents on the dollar. And so you’re looking at all this—if you’re going to raise $30 million, you know you’re got to raise 3 or 4 million dollars in order to pay the fundraising costs for that $30 million. Where are you going to get that kind of money in today’s world? I had a proposal that I wanted to expand the foundation by a million dollars because they needed to staff to do this campaign.

So were talking to the legislature about all of this. I said, “If you give me [control over] tuition, I’m going to have to raise it. I’ll have to take that heat. On the other hand, don’t keep giving away tuition waivers like it’s your money. When you give away tuition waivers, if you’re going to give the tuition to me, you’re going to steal my money. So when this package comes forward, you got to—if you’re going to [be responsible for] tuition, then you’ll have to [be responsible for] tuition waivers as well, and put it under the control of the board. That caused me a lot of problems because the view got out that I was going to get rid of Hawaiian [student] tuition waivers, which was not the case. It was just the case that you needed to make a complete package of the authority to set tuition and grant tuition waivers. So we testified against the bill, saying only that if that’s the case, then there are a bunch of things we tried to argue about. We needed to be assured that our budget won’t be cut by a like amount. And we got all those assurances, which of course doesn’t last one session of the legislature. It really doesn’t.

So that year [1966], Act 161, I believe, was the first act on eventual autonomy. The autonomy talk I told you had gone on since the 1978 Constitutional Convention, and the words were “as provided by law.” And of course, “as provided by law” is the proverbial barn door. So they went to lump-sum budgeting for the university, as opposed to line items. There’d been some progress on that issue. Act 161 in 1996 gave the university authority to set its own tuition and was part of our budget. And they extracted $38 million in general funds from our budget. That was the amount of tuition at the time—$38 million. We got control of tuition waivers; and the legislature agreed not to hand out tuition waivers. And the legislature pledged not to use tuition as a factor in our appropriation.

WN: But, in essence, they did, right? I mean, $38 million . . .

KM: Well, I mean, you can argue about that. Well, they took the $38 million because that was a substitute for the state general fund. In all this deal, Senator Milton Holt and I were trying to figure out how we could spend money on the UH Foundation and without all the state bureaucracy. Many legislators were unwilling to give that same authority to other state agencies. Milton Holt’s idea was, let us use tuition dollars. Nobody else has that, so that was in the act as well. We were allowed to actually control tuition dollars.

WN: Tuition dollars are—they were not, quote-unquote, “public money,” that’s why?

KM: That’s correct. They are not appropriated funds. They were the only special source of funding that wouldn’t lead to all the other agencies asking for the same thing. That was Senator Milton Holt’s idea, and it worked very well. The problem we ran into, and we should’ve fixed, and it has been fixed, was we couldn’t use tuition dollars on personnel because they didn’t carry fringe benefits with them. So every time we would try to hire somebody on tuition dollars, we’d have to absorb the 28 percent of their salary for fringe benefits. So that got me into that question I raised earlier: “I spend all your money, Governor, first, before I touched one of my own, and I put all my employees on general funds. I don’t use any tuition dollars for personnel.” David McClain got that back. When Linda Lingle became governor, they covered that. But I tried, for years, to get that changed and was not successful.

So two years later, Act 115 was along the same line. When Governor Cayetano was up for reelection in ’97, ’98, he appointed an Economic Revitalization Task Force, co-chaired by Joe Souki, speaker of the house; and Norman Mizuguchi, president of the senate; and the governor. And I was the only public employee appointed to it. Nothing came of that except the autonomy bill. I think most people would say that. I mean, there were a lot of recommendations about how to improve the economy. It had people like Walter Dods, [John] “Doc” Buyers, Russell Okata, on the commission. And I can remember because about that time, I’d been in town for a while and knew a bunch of these guys. I got to meet them in a lot of ways. And part of the thing I’d like my legacy to be is people trusted me. And they were confident that I was going to do what I said.

When I said I could raise a hundred million, they didn’t believe it. But we did it. Other things of that sort. I never criticized the legislature in public, and I wouldn’t get in a fight with the governor in public. Though privately, even with his staff present, he and I had some pretty severe confrontations, I guess. The mayor of Maui stopped me once and said, “I heard you had it out with the governor.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

And he said, “Well the staff were there, and they were all reporting—there’s Ken down at one end of the table and feisty Ben down the other end and going at it!”

Ben was a man you could disagree with, but it didn’t make sense to disagree publicly because the job of the university president is to get along with the governor. And if you can’t do that, you best find yourself another job. I used to say I never met a legislator I didn’t like because it isn’t your job to correct their short-fallings. Your job is to be the best advocate you can. So Ben and I, I think, got along with each other all right.

WN: And that job, you just said—that getting along with the governor—is that more pronounced in Hawai‘i, or is that a universal thing?

KM: It’s always a universal thing, but it is more so here because, I have always said, the president of the University of Hawai‘i, next to the governor and the mayor of Honolulu, is probably the most visible person in the state. Nobody’s ever challenged that, but I think that’s the case. What is the value in having a public fight with the governor? It helps with the faculty because they believe you’re manning the barricades for them, but it doesn’t help politically, and then you’re also taking sides—you remember, the legislature is always split on who supports the governor and who doesn’t. Senate was split thirteen to twelve among the Democrats in the Senate—they had twenty-five Democrats and thirteen to twelve. Thirteen guys were with the governor, and the twelve against him. (WN chuckles.) And of course, later, when UHPA [University of Hawai‘i Professional Assembly] endorsed his opponent in the 1998 election, it was a major political problem for the university.

So the Economic Revitalization Task Force was meeting out in Hawai‘i Kai one day, and I walked in late. And they were all sitting around the table, debating the university’s role in all this, and they had three models on the board. And, “Ken, what do you want to be? Do you want to be king or you just want to be. . . .” You know, and they were kidding me about that, and I walked up to the board, and I said, “I don’t want to be king, I want to have constitutional autonomy.”

“Why don’t you want to be king?”

I said, “Because you guys can’t deliver it.”

WN: What do you mean, “king,” what does that . . .

KM: Well, it means, you know, be the czar of higher education in the state and be completely independent from everybody . . .

WN: Oh, I see.

KM: . . . and all of that—to be like . . .

WN: Full autonomy.

KM: A fourth branch of state government, . . .

WN: Okay, okay.

KM: . . . if you will, and I said, “You guys can’t deliver that.” And that would be—that’s what’s in California—fourth branch of state government. But I said, you know, “Let’s not go too far down there because I. . . .” And they laughed at me, and I said, “But you can deliver this. And that’s— we need constitutional autonomy.” Why is that?

WN: What was the third?

KM: Oh, state agency kind of stuff and the benefits of being . . .

WN: Oh, it was . . .

KM: Yeah.

WN: Okay.

KM: Or some aspect of it. But in Act 115 in 1998, there were substantial flexibility built into that law, which were remarkable changes for the state of Hawai‘i. We got the right to hire our own attorneys and become exempt from the state attorney general. So one of the big things I did was to set up a legal staff. Walter Kirimitsu became the first university general counsel. The problem was they didn’t give us the money. Nonetheless, I felt it was worth the trouble, so I reallocated the money. They did not shift any money from the attorney general. Ben did that as an act of leadership. Marjorie Bronster, the attorney general, was diametrically opposed. She, at one time—not a threat, Marjorie and I were good friends—she said, “Don’t ask for it—you may get what you’re asking for, and you know, it’s worse than what you. . . .”

I said, “Marjorie, I really came to believe that the attorney general’s role is both prosecutor and defendant, and you can’t be both.” The major reason you send people to the Board of Regents’ executive sessions is so we won’t violate the open meetings law. You’re in charge of prosecuting us if we do.” The board was very upset that the attorney general’s office had been settling major lawsuits without consulting the board. That was very controversial in executive sessions of the board, where they dealt with legal matters, and they were very, very angry about it. In fact, those meetings were among the most vitriolic meetings that I’ve been in, in my time in Hawai‘i, where they were questioning an assistant attorney general about why they had done X, Y, Z. Of course, we had some good lawyers on the board, and they liked to develop the merits of the case.

The second thing that was important at that time was we also got exemption from state procurement codes and increased flexibility in the use of special and revolving funds. In one of the speeches that Senator [David] Ige read at the time the senate was honoring me as I left, he cited the fact that because we had our own control of the purchasing authority and special flexibility and some funding, we handed out a hundred and sixty credit cards to major administrators in the university and allowed them to purchase anything they wanted, anywhere they wanted up to $2,000. The limit on the card was $2,000 a purchase. So if you needed pencils at Costco or whatever, you go get them, without going through the state purchasing code. We raised the inventory requirements to $5,000. We didn’t take inventory if it was worth less than $5,000. And the argument was, let them steal it. It’s cheaper than taking inventory. And it is, it actually is. It’s pennies chasing dollars when you pre-audit things. So it was more efficient to say, “Look, we’ll prosecute somebody if we find them stealing.” And we can do selective audits later on, not pre-audit where you stop people from doing things. Post-audit, you take a look on a random sample to find out if there are any things that you need to pay attention to. When the sample turns out difficulties, then you do a more careful examination.

WN: Well, there was a time when a tape recorder like this would’ve been a part of the inventory . . .

KM: Precisely.

WN: . . . and we’d put the university sticker on it and so forth.

KM: That’s correct.

WN: Now, you can go out to Costco and buy it with a credit card.

KM: Right, and that was necessary. Now, the major opponents to that were the APTs [Administrative, Professional, and Technical employees at the University of Hawai‘i] because they were the keepers of the purchasing manual. And they were not at all sure how that was going to work. You get accountants to come in and say people are going to steal computers and laptops, and I would say, “It’s cheaper to monitor that problem, than it is to take inventory.” We weren’t filing inventories with the state, and it was mostly due in the first of the year, and we filed eight or nine months later because we didn’t have the manpower to count all that stuff. And then you couldn’t be sure that they were accurate when they were filed.

So the point of all that was we got Act 115—we’d already gone far along to flexibility. The lawyer thing was a big deal. Flexibility in special funds and revolving funds was another very big deal, as was this exemption from state purchasing codes. So when the 1998 ERTF [Economic Revitalization Task Force] report came out, constitutional autonomy was on the table as a recommendation from that report. To some extent this was election talk. “Whenever you’re up for reelection, you do these things. Things are going to be better if I get reelected and all that.” But everybody was wondering, “What the heck are we going to do?” And Ben Cayetano became convinced that the university was an important factor as an economic driver of the state, and his attitude about us changed during that two- or three-year period. I mean, he became more supportive and less critical. Although, again, he would say in public, “I wish they would do more serious things than they’re doing.” That was always a problem for me. I went to a breakfast meeting at Washington Place one morning, I walked in about seven o’clock in the morning, and I hadn’t seen the morning paper. And the guys all started, “Hey, Ken, have you read the paper yet?” And Ben had been vocally critical of me in the morning paper, and I hadn’t read it. And when he came in, he said, “Ken, I didn’t really mean all of that.”

WN: (Laughs) I was just going to ask . . .

KM: Our relationship was much more cordial after we got through the original give and take, and whether or not he could trust me and other matters of that sort.

WN: So Ben was pretty much consistently in favor of constitutional autonomy . . .

KM: I wouldn’t have got it without him because you had to get two-thirds of the legislature to put it on the ballot. Now, but that was a gradual process. He supported, for example, our exemption from the attorney general’s office over the advice of his attorney general.

WN: Right, right, right.

KM: And there were very helpful people behind the scenes that were close to the governor and on my board—Joe Blanco and Bert Kobayashi. So Ben had confidantes that he could talk to about what’s going on here. One time, we had a personal thing, and he thought I had been a little out of line on something, and he asked me to call him. I did, and then I said, “Well, Ben, I just don’t know where you get that kind of information, but I don’t do that sort of thing. And so I don’t even remember any incident like that, but I know—and you can ask anybody. But you have two guys that you trust that are on my board, and you can ask them whether they ever heard me

engage in behavior like that.” And that seemed to get past it all, and he got so that he could tell me political things.

So he and I worked out a rapprochement. He never was a strong advocate of my presence here, I don’t think. I mean, you’d have to talk to him about that. But my job was to find out how I could help him help the university. And an incident, again—we were on one of our trips. I was part of the governor’s entourage when he went on some of these economic development trips. I went to Taiwan with him once and Silicon Valley. And at the time, one of the departments at Berkeley had signed a $25 million arrangement with the Novartis Corporation to give Novartis preferential access to the research results of the plant pathology faculty in exchange for $5 million a year for five years. In that meeting, Ben learned a lot about universities. And then at dinner that evening, we were sitting around with the staff, and he said, “Ken, why don’t we do that?”

And I said, “Governor, in the last contract, you gave away control over patents, that the faculty member gets half of the royalties on a patent.” And that’s something I never would have agreed to. That whole deal was made without me in the room. In fact, I was called into the governor’s office and with two union leaders sitting there, telling me they had a deal with Ben. Ben was there and Alex Malahoff and J.N. [Musto], and they told me what the deal was. They didn’t consult me about it. We were opposed to that. So at that meeting in Berkeley, I said, “Governor, you gave that away.” And his staff was there, and they’re all chuckling and laughing. But that was how candid we could be with one another. You know, the part of the giveback in the strike was that particular clause.

WN: Was this the start of the [Ryuzo] Yanagimachi and the cloning mice . . .

KM: Yeah, well, all of that gets on, yes, where you begin to think about what can you do, and that was a very important ingredient in getting people to understand. Yana had been researching away in that lab for thirty years, but he couldn’t get test tubes and all that sort of stuff. So we built him a new lab in a short period of time because everybody got interested in that. When I first met with Yana, we were talking about the poor facilities. So Yana began to tell me all of the stuff he would need to take advantage of the situation. And I said okay. And he kept talking, and I said okay. But he didn’t believe me, and I said, “Yeah, you know, the governor and everybody’s interested in that.” So we built him the lab, but Yana didn’t believe you could get these things done.

And we also got into lawsuits over patent infringement. And so the whole intellectual property thing was an emerging piece. I wrote about this later, and the fundamental problem for the university is whether your intellectual work belongs to the university or to the faculty member. If you’re doing a new computer program, and you’re using university time, and you’re paid by the university, and the software comes out of that, who owns it? It’s the same with the labs and it’s the same with the history professor writing a book. Those are difficult issues because they get at the core of the academic enterprise. You know, “I’m here, and I write these things on my own, not because you guys . . .”

“Well, wait just a minute, the principal subsidy for you is you only teach two courses a semester.”

And that’s another smart-mouthed remark I got off. For example, the only difference between being a faculty member at Mänoa and the community colleges is you teach less and get paid more. (WN chuckles.) Well, that sounds good, you know, but I mean, that’s the research university environment. So explaining that and then negotiating the collective bargaining agreement—well, who’s going to own the patent?—is a very difficult issue. But UHPA had negotiated 50 percent of the royalties go to the faculty member—and it just is well beyond what anybody else was doing. And eventually with the Yanagimachi thing, we did get into a lawsuit with one of his staff, who claimed that he had some proprietary interest. It was true; there were businesses around town that were running off with university capital—university intellectual

capital. So that’s all a very difficult problem for universities to handle—particularly with medical schools and in biotechs, et cetera.

There’s a marvelous book my colleague wrote called Academic Capitalism. It talks about every major biology-bioscience faculty member at a research university has a contract with a pharmaceutical company. And it’s not far from the truth, you know. We were emerging into that area. We had a technology transfer group up in RCUH [Research Corporation of the University of Hawai‘i]. So in conjunction with this flexibility from Act 115, we also needed to remake, because of the federal thing, the RCUH capabilities. And so we eventually mandated that all federal contracts would be handled through RCUH. That’s because, again, it was a non-state agency, and the employees there were under TIAA-CREF retirement systems. Jim Gaines told me last year, that was a major change and one reason why we’re doing 400 million a year now. But we had to set that up, and it was difficult. It took a lot of time.

Harold Masumoto eventually took the RCUH job and developed a very creative way of figuring that out. I tried to get the RCUH law changed to make it a creature of the university, but I was not successful. Nonetheless, it was a question of how you’re going to handle federal research money. Of course, the unions were opposed to that because they [i.e., RCUH personnel] are non- unionized employees. But Russell Okata—again, to his credit—never really went after that issue, even though his members wanted him. We persuaded him that it was in the best interest of the state and the university. As you know, soft money comes in and dissipates, and you can’t have seniority kinds of things and tenured employment on money that doesn’t exist or ends in three years. So you know, I had done studies of that before I got here. I was a co-investigator in a national science foundation grant in the ’70s, and we ran around the country, talking about the organization of research universities—particularly centers and institutes and why they’re there and why they’re an alternative to departments and so forth.

So Act 161 and then Act 115 were major changes in the administrative culture of this university. Because I began to say, “Look,” to the deans and provosts, “You have at least five sources of money. Now, you have general funds. You have tuition dollars. And if your enrollments go up, your tuition dollars will likely go up. And if they go down, they’re likely to go down. You have private money. You have research overhead return and special and revolving funds.” And we’re looking at all the money, not just the general funds money. Let’s argue about it all. The community colleges figured out in a hurry how many students they had to have in a class in order to be able to afford it, and pay for it out of tuition dollars. Mänoa never figured that out and always fought—I mean, they probably have today, but I mean—always fought that. So why did money for one college go up and one go down? Because their enrollments went down. And we sent a portion of that tuition back to them, and the same when Dean Smith eventually revised the RTRF. The Research Training Revolving Fund used to come mostly to central administration, covering overhead. Now Jim tells me—I think half of it goes back to the units that generated it or whatever it is.

WN: Prior to that, it was all general—right back to the general fund . . .

KM: Well, actually, it went to cover some of the maintenance and overhead for the university, but we kept it, but it was a factor in our budget.

But when I said to Ben, you know, “The state gives me $200 million, and I’m running a billion- dollar corporation, you know.” This is not rocket science; there’s only five sources of money. And if your enrollments go down, so is your budget, but we could never match general funds money with enrollments because it’s just too—the match wasn’t right.

WN: Prior to autonomy, did general fund money go down if enrollment went down?

KM: No, there was no rational basis.

WN: I see.

KM: In most public sectors, when you go down to the legislature, you are arguing about how much more you’ll get.

WN: Regardless of enrollment going up or down?

KM: Well, again, the principle I mentioned yesterday, is I went around saying, “Don’t give me money to hire your cousin, I can’t do that.” Don’t give me a position for the Maui campus. The name of the game changed because it used to be positions: you got money for positions. With this change, you got money and you had positions you couldn’t fill. So I had 500 vacant positions at one time, but everybody was arguing about positions, and I said, “Your eye is not on the ball. It’s money; we’ve got more positions than we can ever use.” So the legislature lost a lot of control over us because they didn’t have control over positions. So one year, they lopped like 200 or 300 positions off our allocation—it didn’t make any difference—we didn’t have money to fill them anyway. So the name of the game—resource game—changed in these five years, and it’s a very significant change in the way in which the university does business.

There’s a professor at Vanderbilt University, [Michael] McLendon, who came out and did an analysis of the autonomy situation here and reported about the two laws: Act 161 and Act 115. But that [i.e., Vanderbilt] is a substantially different university administratively, when you are trying to explain to people that students are money. And that is the case all over the country, and we got to it very late here. Private universities where I have consulted at and know pretty well always worry about where the money is coming from, whereas public universities used to worry about how to spend it. When [Nelson] Rockefeller was governor of New York in the ’50s—I have friends over there—he used to ask the universities, “Are you sure you’ve asked for enough money?” And they would buy books and stack them in the library on the floor because they didn’t have room for them.

WN: Right, and they’d always buy it at the end of the fiscal year (laughs).

KM: Oh, those tricks that—I mean, one of the colleges in Pennsylvania, the guy would buy coal in June. (WN chuckles.) The fiscal year ended on June 30th, and he piled the coal in his parking lots. As soon as the kids left, he’d order tons and tons of coal, and that was the first stuff they burned to use it up. So by the time the students came back, the coal piles were down. So, I mean, all of that stuff was in the culture of public universities—not just here. I was on the board of United Way here and in Whatcom County as well. They had an allocation committee. The rest of us are raising the money, and they decide how to spend it. (WN chuckles.) And I would say, “I want to be on the allocation committee; I don’t want to be out there raising money. That’s the toughest job. I don’t need you to tell me how to spend money.” But that is a big change, and I can’t stress it enough in terms of a culture of public higher education in the 1980s and 1990s.

So in my 2007 book, I talk about the changes in the external environment that dictate internal governance. The punch line in that book: when the issue’s really important, politics trumps collegiality, and the higher the salience of the issue, the less likely the internal government’s processes are going to work. So I mean, you could go back to the Oliver Lee case and say, you know, when it gets too important, the tenure process fades because of the political significance of it. And then you can talk about the rest of this stuff that we’ve been talking about. But on a small island and a culture like ours—where everybody knows everybody, and a lot of things are personal. So that autonomy deal was a pretty big—those two acts. But then, things ripened in other matters, and I proposed that we needed a constitutional amendment. And I had to get the

approval of two-thirds of the legislature to put it on the ballot. And I had resigned around that period of time

WN: About 2000?

KM: The spring of 2000. It went on the ballot and in order to get it on the ballot, I walked around— this is not generally known—and tried to persuade people it was the right thing to do. UHPA came out against it. The University of Hawai‘i Professional Assembly said it wasn’t enough, and I happen to agree. It could have been more except we weren’t likely to get more, and this is what we could get.

WN: UHPA wanted the king model?

KM: Yes. Well, because the language just said, in here, in the constitutional amendment, removed the language “as provided by law” and substituted the language “except for matters of statewide concern.” So that’s an important change in the constitution. It gave “as provided by law,” it gave the regents exclusive control over internal affairs, except “as provided by law.” So what—the debate was going—to be provided by law—is that the same thing as statewide concern? As if that’s the same thing? Well, first thing is, the legislature has exclusive jurisdiction to decide what that is. (WN chuckles.) Second, I had to agree that collective bargaining was not part of it so the unions would not oppose it. So no, we are not seeking to change the collective bargaining law. We had to acknowledge the legislature’s right to appropriate money, and we had to agree not to fool around with the ceded lands issue and the ethics code. We were not exempt from the ethics code. So I made those kinds of assurances to the legislature.

WN: Were any of those a problem with you?

KM: I didn’t really have any problem—the other one was the governor’s power to restrict. There were five things; I mentioned four. I forgot the governor’s right to restrict the budgets during the year. Well, they weren’t realistic for me to insist that those things had to go, and I wasn’t looking to be king. I mean, I didn’t think that model would fly here. That’s what I told ERTF, but that this one would. So when I met with the legislative caucuses, after the constitutional amendment passed when I was on the way out, I said, “The university is looking for a conversation, not a confrontation.” It should be a consultation about what’s wise and appropriate. That respects how you’re going to create a first-class university with all of the special nature of what that was and what that is, as opposed to: “I’m going to take you to court to challenge X, Y, Z.” And it would be a big mistake for the university to get crosswise of the legislature on issues like that because you’ll always lose. I mean, if you get their dander up, they can do essentially what they want, which is the reason that I think that UHPA—Tony Gill wrote that brief for them—opposed it because it didn’t go far enough. So that’s my first political campaign, if you will. We did some surveys and so forth and determined that I need to be the spokesperson for it, not the board of regents and not the governor. And I couldn’t spend state money on it. So I went out and raised a hundred grand from private interests to hire a public relations consultant, Ruth Ann Becker. And I hit the stump. And that was my only political campaign—doing videos and all that. And I couldn’t say, “Vote for constitutional amendment,” because that’s not appropriate. So all I could say was, the reason this is necessary and should be done. Autonomy is a work in progress, and its meaning will always change based on the governor, the legislature, the faculty administration, and the culture of the state, but what is it about it? It’s a recognition that the university isn’t like most other state agencies.

WN: So in your speeches and so forth, contact with other people, what kind of support or resistance did you get?

KM: Not much.

WN: Support?

KM: I went to see . . .

WN: Not much support or not much resistance?

KM: Not much resistance. I went to see Russell Okata, and I went to see Gary Rodrigues and other union leaders and assured them of my goodwill and I wasn’t trying to be an anti-union guy. It wasn’t directed at them; it was directed at a variety of other things. I have some numbers here— anyway, yes. So the amendment went on the ballot, and again, it caused me some conflict with UHPA because they were against it, although we did get John Radcliffe to come out and support it.

WN: Was John with UHPA at that time?

KM: Yeah, he was associate director of UHPA.

WN: Right, that’s right.

KM: The chief lobbyist.

WN: Right.

KM: And we met with Perry and Price and got them to talk about that on the KSSK radio show, and they interviewed J.N. [Musto] on the phone, and I had told them that, you know, John was supporting it—what’s his problem? J.N., again, no animosity in any of this, said, “This is Mortimer’s folly. It’s not enough.” Et cetera, et cetera, and so my question—“Well, why is John supporting it?”

WN: (Chuckles) Yeah, that’s a good . . .

KM: He said, “John’s on sabbatical; I don’t know what he’s doing now.” So it was an embarrassment for him. But anyway, the vote went on, and 78 [percent] of the voters said yes. So that’s a landslide in politics, as you should know. The number of bills about UH in the legislature, the next year declined by almost 300. From 300 in fiscal year 2000 to less than 100 in fiscal year 2001. So what do we get? Fewer bills in the legislature. That was the first indication that somebody was listening. I met with leaders of the legislature and said, “We’re looking for a conversation, not a confrontation. The next president will,” et cetera, et cetera. I also told internal university activists, “We’ll need to settle the disputes internally. Stop running downtown. When you ask those guys downtown to solve it, they will, but you won’t like the answer.” So we tried to get every. . . . And there were other deals that never happened.

I was in town last year, and I saw [Vice Chancellor for Research] Jim Gaines, and we talked a little bit about the research enterprise. And he allowed as how the seeds sown by Harold Masumoto at RCUH and Dean Smith at Mänoa had borne great fruit, and we were now at around $400 million in research as opposed to $100 million or so when I left. There’s a series of comments about that if I’m asked about my legacy, I’d say that’s part of it. Doing the fundraising stuff was another part of it that I thought was terribly important and brought us in to what I believe to be the mainstream in that regard. My last year here, we raised $40 million. When I came here, we were raising about $7 million or $8 million a year. I don’t know how that’s gone either, except they just finished a campaign for $250 million.

WN: Well the culture has definitely changed, you know, in terms of the need to raise money. The capital campaign was pretty much unheard of, I thought, before then.

KM: Yeah, it was. And when I started that, I went around and talked to thirty or forty of the major executives—business people—in town and the governor and said we need to start to do that. And I said, “There’s no reason that we can’t get to that magic figure.”

And they all said, you know, “We don’t do that here.”

And I said, “I know that.” The story just needs to be told because you needed to focus here on the leaders of the community and get them committed to it.

And there are two or three stories that are appropriate for an oral history. As you know, my father-in-law was well known in town. He’d been dead for thirteen years when I got here. I went to see Maurice Sullivan, who was the owner of Foodland, et cetera. He already had a deferred gift hanging around in the foundation that had never been finished. So I went to see him, and he had been in ill health, and I couldn’t get in to see him early. But I eventually got there, and he wanted to know how I got in to see him, and I told him, “I know some people.” And he—bright, twinkled blue eyes—and after we talked for a half an hour, he said, “I like you. You’re a salesman.” So the next meeting I had with him, he had his lawyer with him, Ed Chun. And I said, “Mr. Sullivan, you should complete that pledge and make a million-dollar chair in the cancer center.” And he turned to Ed and said, “Give him the money.” So that’s Sully and Foodland.

I went to see K.J. Luke, who owns half of the town. K.J. had made some modest pledges. When you walk in K.J.’s office, and there’s monuments erected to him by Harvard University for all he’s done. And so I had several lunches—K.J. was in a wheelchair at the time. And we became whatever, talked local talk, talked story, and other matters of that. And he told me about his history at the university and how he had taught for nothing in the old days and things of that sort. And then I started to talk about this pledge that hadn’t been fulfilled, and we started to talk about it, and I told him I needed a million dollars. And he topped the pledge to a million dollars, and when he did that, he brought in [son] Warren and his daughters, and there was a family lunch, and he gave me the money. I said, “I’ve never seen a check that big in my life.”

WN: Now what was this for? Was this for . . .

KM: I don’t even remember. I’ll have to remember and go back. Dai Ho Chun was a Korean professor—a Korean person in the college of education who was a retiree. His estate had come to the university.

WN: I think Dai Ho is Chinese, actually.

KM: Dai Ho?

WN: Yeah.

KM: Okay. Okay.

WN: K.J. was . . .

KM: Chinese as well. Yes.

WN: Chinese. Right.

KM: I met with Dai Ho several times. He was in a wheelchair and all of that. When he passed away, it was two million bucks, and there was a big fight about who was going to get it, and I had to resolve that because people thought they had their dibs on it. Dai Ho wrote a will—you know, wrote how it was to be used. But that was a two million-dollar bequest when he passed away.

And I tried to get in and see Hung Wo Ching. And Mr. Ching had nose cancer at the time and— but my in-laws are buried in his Nu‘uanu cemetery, which Hung Wo Ching owned at one time. And my father-in-law bought those crypts from Hung Wo. So when I finally got to meet him, I met him at a reception out somewhere in one of those Kähala condos beside the [Kähala] Hilton Hotel. It used the Kähala Hilton. And I introduced myself, and he said, “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to see you, but you’re a lucky man,” he said.

And I said, “Well, why is that?”

He said, “Well, I’ve given all the money I’m going to give to Utah State, my alma mater. Now I’m going to start giving money to you.”

And the last story I’m going to tell about these kinds of stuff because what I was looking for was leadership from the community, not from me. I’m willing to do the spadework and the digging, but I need people in this town—and I used the word—to “adopt me” because I’m not local. In that, I’m not part of these networks. For the good of the university, it has to happen. In one of our meetings, the governor asked me about all this fundraising stuff that’s going on, and I told him that I thought I could do it. And we needed to get some of these legal things out of the way so that we could make sure that I could assure people that it would go in a foundation and not be part of the state’s budget. And then further, I went to say that I am going to eventually approach some people to co-chair the campaign, and I’m working up to it because I can’t take no for an answer.

And he said, “Well, I’ll call him.”

And I said, “Please don’t. I will work on this, and I don’t want to ask the question till I know the answer.”

Well, one of them was the chairman of one of the banks, and he happened to be coming to dinner at College Hill that evening. When he came in and he asked me to step into the anteroom with him, he explained to me that the governor had just called him, and he turned the governor down. And my plan was for the chairmen of the two banks, plus Senator Inouye, to be co-chairs And by the time I got through the day, the governor had called both Walter and Larry, and they’d both turned him down. So I had to work to get that changed, and I did. But I mean, it was, you know, a communication problem with the governor. I didn’t want it to be a political kind of thing, and they had reasons they could, you know, say they couldn’t do that for business purposes and all that, and I gave them reasons later on why they had to. You know, how it goes in local culture. And they were very supportive of it, and they eventually—both banks gave us a million dollars.

So we were able to get that moving with some local leadership with prominent people making donations. In that time, it was very interesting. The Wo family gave us a million dollars, Paul Honda gave us a million dollars. Donald Kim was on the board of regents at the time. We sent a consultant to see him, and he called up later and said, “I want to be the first million-dollar donor.” We didn’t expect that. By the time we finished, there were twenty-eight donations of a million dollars or more. When I decided to resign later, I cut the campaign off from five years to four years because I thought the next. . . . So when we finished, it was at $116 million in four years. I’m sure we’d have gone to a 150 if I’d stayed another year, but it doesn’t matter. And we’d set in place the fundraising structure—got the laws changed to allow a foundation to operate, started a call center—so we’re calling all our alumni and build our databases, you know. We had a hundred thousand alums but nobody knew where they were, and we had no data from them. So we created a data set—major giving, President’s Club giving, annual giving, all that stuff. And then development offices in each of the major colleges. All of that infrastructure did not exist when I arrived.

WN: Did Donna Howard report to you?

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KM: Yes. She also reported to the board of the [UH] Foundation. And eventually, I made her vice president at the university, but her salary was paid by the [UH] Foundation. And eventually, Donna became president of the foundation, for whatever reasons that was. I didn’t particularly like that, but I didn’t oppose it.

WN: Right. Now, we should be stopping. One last question before we stop for this morning. The constitutional amendment actually passed in, what, 2000?

KM: Yes.

WN: So prior to that, were you operating under the assumption that it would pass or. . . . You know what I mean? Your term went from ’93 to ’01 . . .

KM: Yes.

WN: And it was passed in 2000, so what—between ’93 and ’01, you were operating under the . . .

KM: The state as it was handed to me. And the basic thing is, getting Act 161 and Act 115 were major steps forward to make constitutional autonomy a slam dunk.

WN: I see.

KM: I mean, there was no way you could walk in, in 1991, and say, “I need constitutional autonomy.”

WN: Okay, so . . .

KM: I mean, you’re just—you know, you’re not going to get away with that.

WN: So you’re operating under Act 161 and 115.

KM: Well, I was operating under existing statutes. Remember, I think Act 1—the tuition bill didn’t come until 1996.

WN: Right.

KM: And then the next one was—Act 115 was 1998. So I was operating under the state law at the time.

WN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm [yes].

KM: One other story before we close. I was accused, another time, of violating the state procurement code because I wanted to get a brand for the university. We had no recognized brand. Nobody knew what we were; we didn’t have a standard—athletic people have their own branding, et cetera. I wanted to get some standard logo. I’d done that twice before. At Penn State, we did it, and it was done very centrally. And the president—I mean we—I was part of that game—we hired Downey, Weeks, and Toomey from New York to do a branding study. We found a woman gymnast in Sports Illustrated that had “Penn” across her chest and “State” on her back. You know, Penn is an ivy league institution in Philadelphia.

WN: (Laughs) That’s right.

KM: So here was a lot of confusion, so you know, we developed a standard logo. Even got the athletic people involved in that. They changed. And I did the same thing at Western. It’s very controversial to do because everybody’s got an opinion about what it ought to look like.

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WN: Right.

KM: I didn’t want to use state money because I didn’t think it would stand the test of the sunshine. So I used private money to do it, and I hired a consultant—local guy. The contract was for about $40,000. After we hired him, he had trouble delivering the product. Then they found out that he owed back taxes to the state; he wasn’t paying his business taxes. Then they found out he had a contract with—not me, you know—with private money. So people accused me of violating the procurement code. And it got quite intense behind the scenes, and I was very upset about it because, you know, I was very careful to be Mr. Clean-Skirts. I mean, I had people poring over my expense accounts to make sure there were no minor errors. Jean Imada and Claire Nakamura were responsible for telling me what could and could not be done because of, you know, travel regulations or whatever. Al [Simone] traveled first class; I traveled economy and used private funds to upgrade, if I could, but I never would travel first class.

So I’m Mr. Clean, and I was then, of course, very upset because that was. . . . The board recommended to me privately that I get a private lawyer to see whether or not that was the case. And that got back to this argument about these five sources of money. I have a whole different kind of money to do that, and that’s not a violation of the state statute. And of course, I was right about that, and my attorney advised me there’s no violation of procurement codes here. I was able to diffuse the issue by simply saying to the board, “I have, as you suggested, consulted a private attorney, and he advises me that there is no violation of the law. Now I’m sorry I brought this to you in this way because it’s an embarrassment for us all, but we have a lot of different sources.” There was a mindset that to do something, you have to use the procurement code to use special and revolving funds. It’s a large fund in the executive education program in the college of business. It’s a special revolving fund; it’s not appropriated funds. It can be used a variety of ways.

I mean, for me, it was an upsetting incident because I was being accused of breaking the law. And my statements are, “I don’t lie, I don’t cheat, and I don’t brutalize people. That’s inside here. I just don’t do those things.” And you know, there are people who disagree with me, and I will fire people and all of that. And if they don’t comply, then they are in difficulty, but I mean, I. . . . So that’s the last story about this autonomy stuff. I understand that the legislature rescinded some of the procurement code after I left in response to my successor. Some of the stuff that happened, David McClain got fixed, and that is, got the tuition dollars to be supported by fringe benefits monies and things like that.

The last thing I would mention is this: the payroll lag issue. It caused me great trouble with the governor because the governor, in order to balance the state budget again, wanted to delay all state salaries till about after July 4th. So that would balance the budget—and UHPA challenged that in court.

WN: Right.

KM: The only one of the unions in the state that did so, and they won. And the governor was hot about it, and so he just cut our budget by that amount of money: $6 million. Every year, I went back to get the money back—the $6 million payroll lag money—and I never got it. So I had to eat that $6 million, but that, of course, increased the tension between faculty organization and the governor, which was a constant problem for me. And when we get around to talking about that strike and other matters, we can.

WN: Okay, let’s stop for this morning.

END OF INTERVIEW

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Tape No. 25-49-5-11

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

with

Kenneth P. Mortimer (KM)

Honolulu, O‘ahu

February 17, 2011

BY: Warren Nishimoto (WN)

WN: Session five with Dr. Kenneth Mortimer, former president of the University of Hawai‘i, and interviewer is Warren Nishimoto. Today is February 17, 2011, and we’re at the Social Science Research Institute conference room at the University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa.

Ken, this is session number five, and I was just wondering, do you have any loose ends that you wanted to tie up, talking about autonomy?

KM: Not too many. I was rather prepared for that conversation in terms of the timeline and others because it took place not in one event but, as I say, started back in 1978, at the state constitutional convention. It was sort of lost after that. I really would like to know, ten years after I left: how has it worked and to what extent has it benefited the university? I have information from the vice president for research that it’s been crucial in the increase in their funds. I had a conversation with Senator [Daniel K.] Inouye in August of 2000, after I had already resigned. He wanted to know what the future of the university was. I wrote it out into talking points. One of them was that the research infrastructure and communication technology will have modernized, and our funding would have gone from a hundred million to two-hundred-fifty million by the year 2010. So that was my ten-year projection, but it’s closer to four hundred million now.

So all the little things I talked about—changing the nature of the accounting systems, the RCUH [Research Corporation of the University of Hawai‘i] move, special funds, returning RTRF [Research and Training Revolving Funds] money back to the people that generated it—or some of it—and decentralizing the flow of money so that people had to take responsibility on how they could raise it, as opposed to just spend it. These were big changes, in my opinion, and I’d like to know how they have worked. And I said I could see certain places that it worked, bang, just like that, and other places were resisting it all the time.

It’s not going to change; it’s a national development. I was consulting in South Dakota, on the same issue. Students are money: you are getting more money directly from the students than you’re getting from the state of South Dakota, when you put in your auxiliary enterprises—residence halls, dormitories, and all of that. I was on the board of a private prep school in Maine, my alma mater. All the independents are, you know, 90 percent tuition-dependent or dependent on how much money the students bring in.

WN: Good segue into the next subject—and that would be tuition. Of course, it’s related to autonomy . . .

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KM: Mm-hmm [yes].

WN: . . . but if we could talk specifically about tuition and need to increase tuition.

KM: As I mentioned earlier this morning, before Act 161, tuition was part of the general funds. The board of regents set it, but it went into the state coffers, and as far as we could tell, there was never any relationship between the amount of our appropriation and our enrollments. We looked at that pretty carefully and talked to a lot of folks about it. So in the budget-cutting period, particularly when Governor Cayetano took office, and things began to really go in the tank, there was this, among the legislature and the public: “Why is tuition at the University of Hawai‘i so cheap? Why are we the lowest among our peers?”

WN: This is in-state, as well as out-of-state?

KM: Yes, it’s not just inexpensive here, but why does it cost less to go to college here than it does in California or Washington or all of these comparable states? Those data are available, first from the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Ed, and they’re reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education every year.

So it’s fairly public, and the data show that some years, there were no tuition raises whatsoever. And as long as there was no incentive for the board to do it—“incentive” means consequences—the predominant view was keep it low. And that is true about a lot of public universities in the ’60s and ’70s. It didn’t really begin to skyrocket till budget crunches. And again, nationally, public universities began to move in that direction. So when Act 161 was being considered I testified that there’s no incentive for us to raise tuition. And it’s a lot of bother---the state bureaucracy requires that you do public hearings on every island. We publish a schedule in October for a vote in March. So then the legislature came to believe that they could “step aside and force the university into it.” And that’s the compromises I talked about this morning.

When Act 161 was passed, I made a proposal to the board for a two-year tuition schedule. Fifty percent the first year and 20 percent the second year—that’s about a 72 to 75 percent bump in those two years, differential to the campuses—Mänoa, Hilo, West O‘ahu, and the community colleges. But then within Mänoa campus, we started a process of differential tuition by professional school. The argument I made there and before I came here was that the state endowment—I mean, the endowment, which is the public funds, it’s not an endowment, but—state money really ought to go to the core undergraduate education. And professional schools have constituencies to which they can appeal for other sources of funding. And so they ought to pay more of the costs of their education. That was the argument.

In fact, as I told you, I took the law school off the public agenda just by making it almost self-supporting. We did raise tuition in the medical school, but that was a small problem. And I think the nurses did as well, and we may have put in some technology fees—things like that. I can’t remember all the details. But Act 161, again, in 1996, made the university responsible for tuition and fees. Then, as I mentioned this morning, there came a series of internal discussions about what’s going to happen to that money: tuition dollars, state appropriation, etc.

We got in real trouble later on when all the special funds money became more public. It was always public, but I mean, really, nobody knew about revolving and special funds. Since we couldn’t carry state appropriations over, from one year to the next, we would carry the money in other funds. There was an immense amount of money in special

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revolving funds, and some deans were holding onto money because they intended to do something. That’s good management, you know. If you have to zero out every year, you can’t really figure out what you can do next year. But, the more dire the straits of the state, the more of a panacea that became. So . . .

WN: Well, we’re going through that right now, where you have Malama Solomon . . .

KM: Precisely, Precisely. And there’s a lot of money in those things, but I mean, I don’t know now. But I mean, the residence halls generated a lot of revenue. Not necessarily profit, just revenue. For example, a tradition here was to subsidize the residence halls with state funds. At most other places, they’re self-funding. So you float the bonds necessary, and they pay themselves off from student revenues. We had refinanced the residence halls at Western [Washington University] when I was there because of the changes in the bond market. And we’d done a somewhat similar thing at Penn State and built new buildings— research buildings. So what happens to the overhead money? Well, RTRF, half of it used to go to the state. And we only got half of it. Well that has changed, too. So we got all the RTRF money.

WN: Right.

KM: But all of that is what I think is a basic change in the way we did business during that time.

WN: You know, things like the residence halls, the law school, the medical school—did you have some kind of a philosophy regarding the potential for these areas to be self- supporting? For example, like the law school or the medical school, you know that they’re going to come out—graduates are going to come out—with a fairly well-paying job.

KM: . . . not in legal, but in medicine, yes. But, again, the medical school’s a special problem unique to Hawai‘i, without a teaching hospital. And as I said, only a thirteen-million- dollar-a-year budget when I was here—not counting the cancer center in general funds. And yet it was spending about eighty or ninety million a year. Where’s the rest of the money? Well, it was coming from support from the community. So tuition was a very small part of the medical school issue. I mean, they only let in—I’ve forgotten what— how many students a year? Twenty to fifty or something like that? So it wasn’t a—they only had two hundred students in the medical school. You could double the tuition and really not significantly deal with an 80- or 90-million problem. Now we did increase tuition. But the future of the medical school hinged on other issues than that. And it really came to be my opinion that the state of Hawai‘i was a significantly better place to get sick because we had a medical school. So I just hung tough on that and then realized, of course, we could reorient the medical school to be more research-oriented and begin to generate some of the economic driver that’s inherent in biological patents and intellectual property and cures and all that. Other medical schools were very significant fundraisers because the best thing you can do is heal somebody and then go ask them for money. But we weren’t doing that because we didn’t operate our own hospitals. And we had the University Health [Alliance] running off with—Max somebody or other, I’ve forgotten his name—with their own private practice.

WN: [Dr.] Botticelli.

KM: Yes, Max. And, you know, that didn’t—redound to the benefit of the school itself. I’m sure it did if the professor’s in it, but the typical way you support medical schools is through all that stuff, and it was not available to us. So the tuition thing was

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controversial, and we took the heat for it because we had to go to the public hearings, and suffer all the approbation that goes on: “I can’t afford it,” and so forth. Then the last, in 2000, I guess it was, when we were preparing for a new round of tuition, I wanted to get a system whereby tuition was predictable and not a factor downtown. I would announce five years in advance what tuition was and take it off the table. The tuition’s already set. And it was a modest 3 to 5 percent a year for five years, and so that went through the public hearings.

Unfortunately for that proposal, the Rice-Cayetano decision was made, just about a month before the board was to act on tuition, and a number of the people in town, of course, were very upset about that decision and looking for a place to make their dissatisfaction known. The first public event up was the board’s meeting to approve the tuition schedule for five years. It had already been heard in every island of the state. But, it got to be a very controversial issue even more so because it was influenced by other issues that were not relevant to the university. So, in getting prepared for the meeting, we were informed there were going to be substantial demonstrations and things of that sort.

WN: This was led basically by the Hawaiian activists . . .

KM: Well, some of them. I mean, it wasn’t just the Hawaiian activists, so I’ll just say, the people that were opposed to it—student groups and others in the community. I mean, we think the Hawaiians were motivated by that Rice-Cayetano decision to participate actively, and they wouldn’t have been so active if it weren’t for the timing of it. Because there were always people who came to that final meeting and wept salty tears and said they couldn’t afford another increase in tuition and all of that. Those meetings were usually long and tiring for the regents, since they were not used to that kind of public scolding, if you will.

So we consulted with the board, and there were some reservations, particularly as we were talking about this special funds problem. “Why do you have all this? Why do you need to raise tuition because of this?” You try to explain how that money was necessary to operate things, but it’s not easy to explain. But it is, in my opinion, a fact of running a very large enterprise. You can’t zero out every year, and you certainly can’t zero out when you’re running auxiliary enterprises like residence halls, cafeterias, the inter- collegiate athletics funds, and funds for the art museum, and ticket sales at Kennedy Theater. I mean, you can run on and on. This kind of stuff is very complex when you’re dealing with universities. A number of people have said, “Being head of a campus like Mänoa is like being head of a small city.” And it is that complex, in terms of the details of it.

So I can understand the confusion, but I was persuaded that it was in the best interest of the university to get tuition stabilized so people would know. And then we wouldn’t go down there every term and have another issue-based tuition hearing. I was opposed, for example, to using tuition for faculty salaries. I didn’t think we ought to be doing that— that it was the state’s responsibility. A lot of arguments like that, I lost eventually, but nonetheless, what was in my mind? I was trying not to do that. But I was under a great deal of pressure to use some of our money to pay the raises negotiated by the state out of university funds. Up to that point, it had always been—you know, once it’s negotiated, the state appropriates. But they were down there saying, you know, “We’re going to take some of your monies.” So all I could see was, once we went down that slope, which would be always in our face. And every year—as it is in other states, by the way—and I’m not naive about this. I’ve guided some of the tuition problems at Penn State when I was a vice president. And unfortunately for a lot of folks there, but fortunate for the university, we didn’t set our tuition till July, after the legislature had already adjourned.

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And then, we would set tuition. The same with the constitutional autonomy in California, there used to be a negotiation. The governor would say, “I will only cut your budget by 3 percent if you agree not to raise the tuition by X.” So those deals are common between states and—you know you’re going to get into it.

WN: Did that happen here?

KM: Well . . .

WN: Any kind of deal?

KM: No, because most of the politics. The whole thing with the budget cuts and all that changed the culture of the legislature and the executive branch’s willingness to intervene because they were all unpopular decisions. And that’s not politically salient, so why do you want to be accused of cutting the budget? And I just mentioned, I’ll take the heat for this, as long as it is my heat to take. I don’t criticize political figures in public. So those were persuasive arguments to a number of the people involved in politics down there. And we talked privately about it.

One of the most successful meetings I ever had was when I was invited to a weekend retreat of the Democratic caucus of the senate out in Kapolei. I sat there for the weekend and kidded and moaned, and when they couldn’t spell a word, I said, “What you got to do is pass a lemon law so I can take all your degrees back.” (WN chuckles.) I could be trusted to keep my mouth shut if I needed to. So there was a lot of trust from people who took me inside and said, “I’m going to help you,” and things like that. So that’s the way things work here, as you know. So I had a lot of credibility, in my opinion, at the legislature. I mean, others can comment on that as they please.

So I made that proposal—we made that proposal—and it went through all the hearings without too much fuss. There was a very controversial meeting that day in March. Student leaders could not tell us how many demonstrators to expect or how violent the demonstration might be. So we needed to, here I am, back to Berkeley again, saying we need to get ready for disruption. Our consultations with the Honolulu police uncovered that it was not their responsibility to get to campus in the case of that; it was the county’s—it was the sheriff’s responsibility. In our conversations with the sheriff—they could not promise us any less than a four-hour response time to any crisis on campus. That, to me, was unacceptable. So I arranged what I thought was appropriate coverage to protect the board of regents and campus safety by asking my people to work with the sheriff’s department to get police protection available, should we need it. And I suggested that they be billeted down in the Varsity Circle area. I did not know that that didn’t work, and they billeted them at the medical school.

So we’re into these controversial hearings, and the students blocked the entrance to the room in the student center, and so the campus police had a wrestling match with a big fellow and carted him off. For the first time, in my time here, the regents were walking between lines of hissing protestors. And they filled the room with placards and things that people do.

WN: Is this the 2000 tuition increase, or is this before that?

KM: Two thousand.

WN: Two thousand, okay.

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KM: So we had a proposal of 3 to 4 percent a year, for each of the next five years. A big problem in tuition is if you don’t raise it, you get farther behind. And when they didn’t raise it for three years in a row, well, you’re not keeping up in anything. So halfway through that series of meetings that lasted three or five hours or something like that— testimony, kids hissing, physical threats—some of my staffers told me they were afraid. They had to stand up there and read testimony, and the students were hissing them and harassing them, so there was some real tension there, especially with getting into the room in the first place.

So we took a break, somebody came to me in public and said, you know, “We hear there’s an armed SWAT team on campus with dogs.”

I said, “Impossible.”

I asked my administrative vice president, and he said, “Yeah, they’re up at the medical school.” So I met with the board—in a non-executive session, just in their break time— and said, “I’m sorry, but I need to put your safety at risk because we can’t have that.” So I ordered the SWAT team off campus. And so when I left that—when we’re back into that meeting, I don’t remember that I apologized to the group, but I said, “That problem’s been taken care of; they’ve been ordered off campus.” And that’s fine, but what was I standing there, in my shorts, with no protection for any physical harm that came to anybody? And that, to me, was the riskiest thing I did during my time because it was potential for violence.

Now, these are real. Somebody shot a BB through a window at College Hill one evening, so you’re not ginning this stuff up. When I was in these crowds, campus forces would always be around somewhere to make sure no physical violence occurred. I really was very strong about that. So then, when we got back in public session, each of the regents began to talk. By the way, in the executive session, I was not allowed to go around the room and ask the regents how they felt because that would’ve been a violation of the open meeting’s law. So I couldn’t . . .

WN: Even in executive session?

KM: It was not an executive session; it was not legal to have an executive session to talk about that.

WN: Oh, okay.

KM: So for somebody like me, who always likes to know when they’re going to come down, that’s a big disadvantage because—what I should have done was pull the proposal and say that, “We understand there’s many valid questions that have been raised and so forth, and we’ll reconsider the matter.” It would have blown over in a month, and we’d done it at the next meeting. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened after that, when the regents began to speak about their concerns. And they voted that proposal down.

One year later, I brought essentially the same proposal back, and they passed it.

WN: After you had announced your resignation?

KM: Well, yes. I was questioned about the reasons for my leaving, but I never responded. One time I was speaking at the Quarterback Club. Jim Leahey was in the audience. Jim was a pixie—he has this lilt about him—and he asked me this reporter’s type question: “Dr. Mortimer, after you did this, and after you did that,” and all these kinds of. . . . “Why did

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you resign?” And Jim thought he had me because he told me later, you know, he really had me in the corner.

I said, “Jim, since I’ve had this job, I’m beginning to lose my hair, and I’m gaining weight, and I’m beginning to look like you!” (WN laughs.)

So that’s the way I sort of didn’t answer questions of that sort. Of course, it brought down the house at the Quarterback Club, and Jim told that story at my retirement banquet. But I didn’t think that it had benefited anybody to discuss it. Personally, I thought that I should have probably left the university at the end of my first five years. I thought we were moving through in the right direction, and I just sort of felt that you have to think—the old story is, never take a job when you don’t know how to get out of it.

And so I had discussed that with the board at that time, and we discussed it for quite some time. They discussed why I should leave and I told them a few things that I felt had to be fixed, mostly having to do with the behavior of the board, and that I thought I had done about as much as I could. Well, I was persuaded otherwise, and so that’s when we did sign another five-year contract to stay till 2003. Well, then these problems really got more serious. Not my problems, but funding and this tuition problem and other matters. And gee, we got Act 161, Act 115—what more do you want? How much farther can you go? I really didn’t anticipate too much the ERTF, the Economic Revitalization Task Force. When that opportunity came along and I grabbed it because it was time to do it and the only thing they had to run on after the end of it.

WN: When did it really sink in that you weren’t going to win this, in terms of the regents’ vote? Did you have a notion that it might pass?

KM: Not at all till we went back in session, and after the first regent began to talk and then the others began to chip in, the chair of the committee leaned over and said, “This isn’t going to work.”

WN: Now, did you have, in your mind, that if it didn’t go your way, you were going to resign?

KM: No, it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t go my way. The regents have never reversed me in public. We tried to work things out. I don’t think you can serve. . . . Let me back up. One of the functions of a board is to settle internal disputes. They were the final arbiter in all things. On the other hand, the president should never bring something to them that is not well vetted. And if there’s going to be a negative vote, it would be because there was a just a basic disagreement and, “I have to do this, and you have to vote me down.” Those kinds of things reinforce leadership. When Tom Hamilton resigned, it was over a debate about a tenure issue, Oliver Lee. So in my case, I felt that this was—I’ve forgotten, spring 2000—that it was time for me to get on my white horse, ride out of town.

WN: So you actually had it on your agenda, prior to all of this?

KM: Well, no, what I had on my agenda was how long I was going to be president. And I had agreed to be the president through 2003.

WN: Right.

KM: Lorrie had agreed or decided that we were going to move back to Bellingham in 2003. She found a house that she liked there, and she bought it in the summer of 1999. But we had no thoughts of leaving before that; we’d rented the house out. We had a good

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location, and that’s what she wanted. I had committed to the board and others to see it through and take it really through the next election. There was going to be an election, and usually, that’s a good time to change presidents. So anyway---I mean, I had really intended that I would serve ten years, and—but as I told you, there weren’t too many people that lasted ten years here. Fudge being the only one in modern times. I think Paul Bachman died in office. Then you go to Tom and on and on it goes, so those mortality factors are in every president’s mind.

In my case, I thought I could build an active consulting career, and I did. I didn’t know all of that at the time. I knew that when I was done, I would be doing these other things, and I probably would not go back to be a tenured faculty member but I could be a consultant. And it so happened I got appointed to a corporate board in Seattle when they heard I was coming back. And at the end of it all, it paid me an immense—almost three figures a year to be on that board. I didn’t have those offers before I went back, but we knew we were going to move back to Bellingham at the end of it all. Lorrie’s mother was in a rest home, and so we had to manage that and all of the personal stuff.

And of course, Lorrie had cancer. She contracted Waldenstrom syndrome, a blood cancer, which is not curable and has a progressive life. And mortality rates, well, you figure out, was about seven years after diagnosis. You’re never confident about those kinds of things. But she was being treated with mild chemo when we were here and getting these Procrit shots.

I think it’s important to have a sense that the board wanted me to stay and didn’t leak the fact that I had suggested giving them my notice. And we did negotiate an arrangement for an orderly transition. The chair of the board was directed to come and see me twice to persuade me to stay. Individual regents came to see me, and a number of them told me, “We’re not going to let you do it.” So there wasn’t any sense at all that I was on anybody’s hot seat.

WN: So what became of the final two years of the contract?

KM: Well, I agreed to serve through a time they found a replacement for 2001 and that’s when I left. So I announced in May that I was leaving and next year would be my last year as president.

WN: And then the following year, the regents voted for the same tuition . . .

KM: In March of 2001.

WN: What happened in that one year that changed their minds?

KM: Well . . .

WN: Is it because the intimidation wasn’t there?

KM: You have to ask them about that. In my opinion, I’m terribly embarrassed by that, but I don’t know the answer to why, except I was on the outs, and there was no tuition raise that year. Governor Cayetano was publicly critical of the board for voting it down in 2000 and called them all kinds of names, personally, etc.

WN: He was critical for them . . .

KM: At them for voting, “No.”

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WN: The 2000 vote.

KM: That’s correct.

WN: Okay.

KM: It was a surprise to them as well because we had thoroughly vetted it from October through March, and it was on the agenda at every meeting of the board during that time. The progress reports were being made about where the hearings were being held. The regents had questions that they asked us, and we tried to answer to the best of our knowledge. We had questions in advance of that meeting that there were going to be asked, and we prepared answers for them. None of those questions came up at the meeting. So what are the next steps? I do have a regret that I was not able to inform the chair of the board about my decision before—I told the rest of the board—because I felt the meeting in which they were engaged in executive session the next morning at Windward Community College would have gotten pretty nasty. So I short-circuited the conversation by saying, “The issue is the leadership of the university, not yesterday’s action, because we need to debate how to replace me because I’m leaving.” I was prepared to leave then, but I wanted an orderly transition, and so I agreed to serve another year.

WN: Okay, probably on our last session, we’ll revisit the resignation and what you did afterwards and your reflection and so forth. I wanted to get into another subject, and that is athletics.

KM: Yes.

WN: And, you know, I’ve been told that athletics is an issue that presidents are not fully prepared to deal with, especially with a huge state university and with such a presence in the community athletics has. I was just wondering, where did athletics fit into the grand scheme of things in the Mortimer administration? In terms of time, energy. . . .

KM: Well, one of the reasons that I believe you ought to stay chancellor at Mänoa was because of the athletic issues. Stan Sheriff [athletics director] died when I was president-elect, right after the Holiday Bowl in San Diego. Hugh Yoshida became acting, and I conducted a search and appointed him. I mentioned earlier in these tapes that I got one of my first lessons here when I arrived and took office on March 15, and everybody was screaming that the Wähine basketball team had not been invited to the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] and wanted me to do something about it. And I’m hemming and hawing because I don’t think that’s something a president ought to use a lot of his goodwill on, but [Governor John] Waihe‘e had a letter off to the NCAA on the front page of the Advertiser the next morning. So you know, that’s how integrated into the community that is.

Of course, we talked a bit yesterday about my involvement in the athletic program at Penn State because of the strategic study group on the status of women, but also because it was a thing regularly—not weekly—but regularly talked about in executive session of the kitchen cabinet. A lot of the fundraising events went around football games. I mean, all the senior staff went to New York City when we played Texas in the Meadowlands. And there was a big Penn State function in New York City around a football game. And football weekends were big social events where a lot of the schmoozing was done. One of the big issues on the board of trustees there—a thirty-two member board—was football tickets and who was going to use them. So it’s an issue which you know is going to cause

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some controversy because you get criticism from the academic side of the house, and then the community forces think that’s all there is.

WN: Right.

KM: And even members of my own family were giving me the raspberry because they didn’t want to pay for tickets because that’s what their taxes pay for, and I just had to say, “No. No.” So it gets that far integrated into the culture of the community. I didn’t believe, with the nature of the budget situations handed to us, that we could afford to support athletics in the way to which they had been accustomed and that they had to be part of the solution, not always part of the problem. And as chancellor of Mänoa, I could do that. Hugh was very angry with me about it, but I looked at the proportion of the general funds budget, which covered facilities down there because some of those were academic facilities. I said I would exempt that, but the rest of the general funds over a period of, I think, three years would revert to the university general funds. You need to go raise it in the community. Well, then that was dealing with the Koa Änuenue because they were in control of many of the tickets, etc. So it was a problem because ex-governor Burns’ son was president of Koa Änuenue, and they were responsible for handing out the goodies: preferential tickets and parking places and that sort of stuff. The issues with the stadium came up because we weren’t making any kind of revenue off our football programs that other universities could make because, of course, we had to rent the stadium. All the concession profits were part of the Aloha Stadium Authority, not the university. So those issues got to be difficult issues to see your way through.

Hugh Yoshida and I are good friends to this day, but I had to throw him out of my office a couple of times because he was so argumentative about his situation. I’m sure he was just representing the coaches.

WN: And the situation being what . . .

KM: The cut in his budget.

WN: Oh. He had to raise private money . . .

KM: Well, yes.

The first year I became president in 1993, it was the president of the University of Hawai‘i’s turn in the chair as president of the WAC council of presidents.

WN: Oh, okay, so you didn’t actively seek it.

KM: No, I went to the June meeting, and they say, “You’re up.”

I said, “Wait, can’t it wait a year? I’ve got. . . .”

Joe Kearney retired. So the first job is to find a new commissioner, and the second issue was the Southwest Conference dissolution. Texas took Baylor and Texas A&M and Texas Tech and rode off into the sunset and left TCU, SMU, Rice, Tulsa, and Houston out. We became convinced as a group—the presidents’ council—that all this television money was going to become due at the end of the decade, and we needed to get positioned to compete with the major conferences in sports because that’s where the money was going to be. So we had the discussion about expansion, and I managed that. That got me a lot of visibility. For me, it needed to be done well, but it was not why I was president of the University of Hawai‘i. So we did hire Karl Benson as commissioner, and

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I managed the switch from eight schools to sixteen. And after meetings in Salt Lake City, I was told to go and negotiate the deals, which I did. I had consultations with each of the presidents and all that. Each of the presidents of the institutions was invited in. And it got down to whether we were going to be twelve, fourteen, or sixteen, and a lot depended on the order in which the chips fell, and I was responsible for managing that.

WN: These are the Texas schools that you mentioned—Rice University was another, right? Okay.

KM: Houston chose not to come with us. We approached them. Rice, TCU, SMU, Tulsa—we brought in.

WN: UTEP?

KM: They were already in. UNLV and I’ve forgotten—well before Boise. Tulsa, TCU, SMU, Rice—that’s four. UNLV. Well, okay, I’ve forgotten the other one. It might’ve been San Jose State, I think, San Jose State, I think.

WN: In addition to the existing WAC members.

KM: We had eight members, and we went to sixteen.

WN: Right, okay.

KM: Something like that—whatever it was. The numbers, I’m happy to forget it now. I guess five years later, the Breakaway Eight left, but I wasn’t in the chair then. When we met after that meeting, they wanted me to become the chair because Fresno wasn’t sure he would stay in the WAC if he was offered the chance to join the Mountain West. He couldn’t promise us that he wouldn’t. So they said, “Ken, you got to do it.” So I was the one that managed that situation, too. The Breakaway Eight, it was called, I guess.

Now, we were right on the cusp of getting our own attorneys. So I got the news like on Monday or Tuesday—that they were breaking off. I read it in the newspaper, and I was really angry about that. They didn’t bother to call me. They tried to call me, but they didn’t get through.

WN: Who’s “they”?

KM: The Breakaway Eight’s presidents.

WN: Okay.

KM: In retrospect, Dick Peck, president of the University of New Mexico was supposed to call me. He did, I wasn’t available, and he didn’t call back, and he didn’t leave a message.

So I heard from Hugh Yoshida, “Did you hear about this?”

“No, I didn’t.”

And it’s in the newspapers the next day. Then I was on the cusp of getting my right to hire my own attorneys. And I, in the process, had been consulting with some of the boys downtown, and I had a firm downtown do a legal analysis of the breakaway action, and they did it in three days.

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So when I went to the meeting that weekend—it was a previously scheduled meeting of the WAC council—I had a legal brief. And those of us who were in, I started—and I’m the only one that had done that—so I walked in with more knowledge than anybody else about the legal status. The details of this are not important, except to say that we were a corporation incorporated in the state of Colorado. And a number of members of the corporation had got together and conspired to do harm to the other members of the corporation, and that’s a violation of the racketeering act. That’s a federal offense. So of course, I wanted to sue and all the rest of that. And we went into all of that, but I couldn’t manage that because San Jose and Fresno were not allowed to sue one of their colleagues, and that was San Diego State. (KM and WN chuckle.) And the Air Force was maintaining, as a federal agency, they couldn’t be sued. And how are you going to get a suit against Colorado State in Colorado? (WN chuckles.) So I said, “Well, we can get BYU because that’s a private institution.” (WN chuckles.) At any rate, the legal analysis was sound. The legal expenses would have been about a million dollars, and then we were debating what would the damages be. I said, “If it’s a violation of a federal act, we’ll throw them in jail.” (Chuckles) Well, you don’t do that. So that’s when I get back to that—run rough, you know—when I lose my [temper]. But I’m the only one, at the end of it all, who really thought we should pursue the lawsuit.

But we anticipated turmoil in the collegiate infrastructure. Had the WAC persisted with the sixteen teams, it would’ve been a football powerhouse. It would have had Boise State, TCU, Hawai‘i—all of them played in BCS bowls. The point about it all is, we . . .

WN: So the Breakaway Eight broke off when it was still at sixteen? Is that what happened?

KM: Yes.

WN: When did Tulsa and those other schools—did they leave after the Breakaway Eight left?

KM: No, they were not part of the Breakaway Eight. Wyoming, Colorado State, Air Force, San Diego State, UNLV, BYU, Utah, and . . .

WN: New Mexico?

KM: Yes, New Mexico, that’s correct.

WN: Those were the eight.

KM: I am fuzzy about the details.

WN: Those other schools like TCU were still in the WAC when the Breakaway Eight . . .

KM: Yeah, they went with the Breakaway Eight.

WN: So there were—there’s eight plus the Texas schools went. Because they went to Conference USA, right?

KM: Later.

WN: Yeah, later, okay.

KM: Later.

WN: Right.

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KM: This is the first Mountain West Conference. After that, a lot of it has been broken up, and the Texas schools have all left the WAC and joined the CUSA—the Conference USA.

WN: Right.

KM: TCU has now gone with the Big East, just this year. And apparently Hawai‘i is now joining the Mountain West in football only.

WN: Only.

KM: All that stuff changed. We anticipated a lot of turmoil because of the television money and so forth, but the deal never held. For a variety of reasons. The vote to expand to sixteen was close. Actually, I mean, New Mexico wasn’t in the room because they couldn’t make the meeting, and we had a vote—a rule—that nobody who failed to attend the meeting could vote in the council of presidents.

WN: Vote for what?

KM: Anything.

WN: Oh, okay.

KM: The president of the University of New Mexico missed the meeting about expansion and the hiring of a new commissioner. It was the same meeting, and it took place in Salt Lake City. So New Mexico didn’t have a vote, and the vote was five to four to expand to sixteen. So the reticent folks and all of that had good reasons for that, and so did we, on the other side. I voted for it, of course, and I was chair of the council. And then I also had to hire a commissioner. I called Karl Benson and said, “You’re our man. By the way, we’re expanding to sixteen.” (WN laughs.) Karl was athletic conference director of the Midwest Athletic Conference at the time. So yes, I mean, that consumed time and got me a lot of public attention, which just rains on you when you’re in these jobs. Not anything I sought, but the responsibilities of the president are to sit in the chair, and you can’t get out of it, and then after a while, the second time through, “Ken, you’re the only one we can really trust to stay in with us.” Now, the newspapers reported—in preparation for these interviews—there was a newspaper article that said, “Mortimer offered $500,000 subsidy to the Mountain West if they take Hawai‘i.” And that is not true. I did not . . .

WN: You mean, at the time . . .

KM: At the time.

WN: You mean, the Breakaway Eight time?

KM: Yes.

WN: Oh.

KM: When we went to the meeting, they had said they were not sure whether that was the end of their breakaway. They might invite another institution or two. The candidates publicly reported that they were most interested in University of Hawai‘i and Fresno, and I thought their act was a heinous act and immoral. Not that they couldn’t do it, but the way they did it by the secret meetings. To me, they were a violation of trust as well as a violation of the law. And so I wasn’t about to join them, and I would’ve had to come back and consult with everybody anyway. But the papers reported that I was offering a

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half a million dollars in travel subsidies if they would take us. That’s not true. I offered nothing to them. When Al Yates [president of Colorado State University] and the president of BYU asked to meet with the president of Fresno and me, they sat John Welty and me down and said, “We’ve decided not to expand any further.” Well, they never even mentioned the topic to me.

So I said, “Well, you guys can do what you want, but I want to tell you how personally offended I am that I read this in the newspapers.” And [to] Merrill [Bateman], who was president of BYU—“You’re supposed to run an institution of principle, and this isn’t an act of principle.” And they apologized and said Dick Peck was supposed to call me and tell me. And that would have been a courtesy, which I would’ve appreciated. As it was, I was thought to be a liar, when I was being asked about this because I said I never heard anything about it.

WN: What reasons did they give for the breakaway? Was Hawai‘i a part of these reasons? Or.. .

KM: Well, the geographic dispersal of the WAC was truly amazing, from Tulsa to Hawai‘i.

WN: Right.

KM: And they were concerned about travel costs and their traditional rivalries. So it was all this . . .

WN: And it wasn’t just football. You’re talking about . . .

KM: All sports.

WN: How do you get your women’s golf team from Hawai‘i to Tulsa?

KM: Precisely. That’s what the travel . . .

WN: Using subsidies—I mean, there’s no income in that.

KM: Yeah, I mean, well all of that. And now you have to have a complete range of sports so they could cut their travel costs and build a stronger sense of rivalry among those Mountain West states. They took in UNLV and San Diego State because the Holiday Bowl was played in San Diego State at San Diego, and they thought that that would lock up the Holiday Bowl for them. And then it was Wyoming, and that’s right down the Rocky Mountain chain—Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, and etc.

So I mean, they were protecting the interests of their institutions, which presidents are supposed to do. I only objected to the manner in which it was done and the trust that was broken by that. I felt it could have been discussed with everybody, and they could have left at their pleasure. But there was no—they made their decision, and sought to do harm to the rest of us.

So I was incensed about that—as angry as I can get—as I let myself get, as they say. But I was thankful to the lawyer downtown, Kobayashi’s firm that put together that brief for me and didn’t charge me for it. It gave me the ammo, but the end result of it was nothing. I mean, nothing happened. We consulted with our attorneys and decided not to do anything, which I expect was a wise decision, but it wasn’t my decision.

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WN: Now, you were involved in some high-profile hirings, you know—Hugh Yoshida, of course, was hired when you first came on. Bob Wagner was fired.

KM: Yes. You know, the only thing I regret about that was the way in which Bob Wagner’s situation was handled. It wasn’t a pleasant thing. The athletic director came and wanted to make a change in the football coach. Now, you might ask, “Why does that involve the president and the chancellor?” I listened to it and the financial figures the current AD, Jim Donovan, had put together, he was associate AD at the time. . . . So I said okay. But the way they arranged it down there was a clumsy kind of thing, and I regret that Bob was put through that kind of a public exposure. It wasn’t necessary. I brought Bob to that meeting . . .

WN: Yeah.

KM: And Riley Wallace got up and lost his temper at me. And Riley and I then had to straighten that out over time and eventually told them, “Forget it, it’s past us.” But later I did have a conversation with Riley about the caliber of recruits he was bringing in—not their athletic abilities but their academic credentials. So Bob Wagner was let go, and as I say, the only thing I regret about that—it was Hugh’s decision—but I don’t think it was handled well. Bob was embarrassed and that was not necessary. I saw him a few years later, and I told him that. I just am embarrassed for Bob and that the university treated Bob that way. There was no character issue. There was no integrity issue. There was never any of that.

Then Fred von Appen was hired, and I took no role in that. I was consulted, you know, as it was going on, but he and Hugh were buddies from Linfield. That appointment caused the university a lot of problems. Fred was very outspoken and made statements about Hawai‘i, which just don’t fly here. He needed to have charter planes; we were under- supported, etc. The governor was under a lot of pressure, and he called us down to talk about what we could do about the program. I said I was unwilling to spend a million dollars to fix a locker room when I had all these other problems.

WN: This is with general funds or . . .

KM: Well, it was going to be a construction project. I said I got 200-million-dollar maintenance problems around here, and the locker room is not very high on my list. And Alex Waterhouse gave some money to fix up the weight room. So Fred lasted three years— the governor held a reception for him at Washington Place, and he didn’t even show up. We’re all there, “Where’s the football coach?”

WN: While he was still . . .

KM: Well, he was coach.

WN: Okay, so the coach.

KM: I mean, you know, brand-new guy. I mean, he didn’t bother coming to the reception.

WN: Oh, okay.

KM: I mean, it’s the reception—the governor was fundamentally embarrassed, in my opinion. I mean, I’ve never talked to the governor about it, but Ben was governor at the time. And so Fred didn’t have the social graces that would be successful to survive here. When we let him go, we owed him a year’s salary. The powers-to-be forced him to negotiate about

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that and to have it almost litigated. And it was clear as day, he had a contract. A contract is a contract, and he had another year’s salary coming. I regret we put Fred through that, but it was not my doing. But again, I’m the chief, so—and that’s a regrettable thing. I have very few regrets about my time. Usually, it’s when issues weren’t handled with style.

I mean, I never regretted firing somebody, but I always regretted that Jeremy Harrison, the law school dean, went public. I had his resignation; I asked for it and got it. And then he went public later and said he didn’t resign; “I was fired.” I couldn’t say anything about that. I had announced that he was resigning. I regret the handling of that—not from my fault, but because Jeremy decided a couple of days later, that he needed to make a public statement about it. I gave him every opportunity for a gracious withdrawal, and I gave him a year-and-a-half sabbatical. I regret that those things happened.

There are very few things I regret doing, very few. But those kinds of things—because they were personal—I mean, they damaged the individuals. I tried to say these are tough enough jobs without that kind of a fuss. So then the word came that June Jones was interested. I insisted that Hugh get more of a structure to get a football coach this time. Ed Wong was close to Alex Waterhouse and former president of the UH Foundation board, and Ed Miyawaki who was a part owner of the Cincinnati Bengals helped. Hugh Yoshida organized the three of them to go out and interview. And you need to get it done in a hurry; you can’t wait six months. And so the names came in, but they decided they could get June Jones. That’s when we started dealing with the big time because we were dealing with his agent Lee Steinberg. But a package was put together that involved some general funds, but the rest of it was other money.

WN: Did athletics salary issues—was it similar to faculty issues in terms of salary . . .

KM: Well, yes, they are the same kind of thing appropriate in that we couldn’t pay Mainland rates. Also the fact that our athletic program, while a Division I program, had not really become big time yet. I mean, it was big here, but the WAC is not one of the major five or six conferences, et cetera. This goes back to time of Governor John Burns. He wanted athletic teams, as a pride statement for people of Hawai‘i. That they could compete with anybody, as a part of our culture: “We’re going to show those guys that we are capable of big things here.” And so that was part of it, and I understood that and supported it. I mean, it was necessary. It doesn’t take a long memory to understand the plantation culture and the Big Five. My father-in-law would not join the Pacific Club when he became director of customs because they wouldn’t let Japanese people in before, et cetera. In Ben Cayetano’s book, he’ll talk about those matters. That’s real in our culture, and if you don’t understand it, you don’t belong here.

So yes, we had that problem; we needed to find a way to resolve, and it couldn’t be done with public money, in my opinion. So again, the private fundraising thing comes in. So Hugh, to his credit, put together a package that got June. My favorite statement is we went from worst 0 and 12 to first in the WAC in that one year. And the program was on its way, etc.

I was very pleased with Dave Shoji and Vince Goo and people like that, who ran first-class programs. I had a little problem with Riley because I didn’t believe the suspensions they were handing out to these kids that lied to the NCAA were severe enough, but that’s the athletic director’s problem. So all I could say was, “If you guys don’t fix that, we’ll be dealing with your contracts, not theirs.” We’re going to have a program that’s competitive but that’s clean. When some kid lied to the NCAA about falsifying his community college records, and they didn’t do anything, they suspended him for a game

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or something, I was not happy. I’m a hanging judge, as you can tell. (WN chuckles.) Well, I mean, you don’t need to warn people not to cheat. You know, why---don’t cheat. I learned that in the first grade or kindergarten maybe.

WN: Now where did the athletic director fall in your . . .

KM: Continued to report to me as chancellor.

WN: As . . .

KM: Chancellor.

WN: As chancellor?

KM: Not as president—another issue, you see.

WN: But in terms of flow chart or an org chart, was that director like a dean?

KM: I don’t know the answer to that. He had the title, “director,” but I met with him at least once a month. And my style was to keep a file on everybody that reported to me. I tried to meet with senior people weekly, and I didn’t have to deal with them every day. Every time something would come up, I’d slip it into what we call, “Talk Files.” The night before they were scheduled, I’d be looking through the talk file to see what we needed to talk about. Hugh and I met maybe about every month or something like that—it wasn’t every week. I went through his issues and so forth and through my issues, too.

At the end of my first year as president, the board conducted an informal evaluation, which we had agreed would be the case when I arrived. I signed a three-year contract, and every contract was rolling. Every year, they’d renew it for another year or so—I was two years ahead of the jump, and I was also a tenured faculty member in the College of Education.

In that first year, they had a conversation with me, and one of the things that they had said was, “You need to be more visible in the community.” Well, I thought I was pretty visible, so I told Hugh, “So one of the things I ask you to do is every time I go to a basketball game or a volleyball game, I want to sit down where people can see me. And when the television cameras pan, I want to be seen.” That’s how I’m going to be more visible. Well, it sort of solved the problem. It really did because I never got that comment again from anybody. Lorrie became a staunch women’s volleyball fan, so we were at a lot of those games. We were right there on the floor. In the basketball game, we had to duck guys diving for loose balls and things like that. (WN chuckles.) So when you saw the action, you saw the president! (WN chuckles.) I mean, it’s the symbols that need to be managed as well as everything else. I mean, you do try to be more visible, but there’s only so much time.

And of course, we were entertaining. We were entertaining quite regularly at College Hill. But I took Sundays off. I wouldn’t schedule meetings on Sunday. We had a family, right here in St. Louis Heights, and we used to have family dinners on Sunday so Lorrie and I tried to keep that free. Other than that, we were available.

WN: Well, you had to follow Al—I mean, Al set a precedent for like breakfast every day (chuckles).

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KM: Well, see I had done this community work at Western and so that was part of what I thought our responsibilities were, especially with an edifice like College Hill. So yes. But I will tell you that the changes in College Hill were interesting to make because the staff that were waiting on people didn’t know how to entertain. Lorrie wanted them to be in white shirts and a black tie, and they didn’t know how to tie neckties. None of the kids knew how to tie a tie. So we had to teach them all how to tie neckties. Or bow ties, we’d get them clip ties and things like that. So there are always differences when a new president comes on board. Lorrie was the mistress of College Hill, and she set the standards for what we’re going to eat and what was going to be served, and how things were going to be done. So the athletic thing was part of that. We had receptions at College Hill for the athletic coaches. I’d try to make them feel they’re part of the university.

So athletics is part of the environment here. If you don’t learn how important the community thinks it is, how balkanized the community is about it . . . The function of a Koa Änuenue had to be dealt with to get to the point where you could generate sufficient revenues to support a program. I would not allow them to run deficits. But when I left, they ran big deficits.

WN: Did Act 161 affect athletics?

KM: No.

WN: Because they were already . . .

KM: The special revolving funds and flexibility did, but you still had to have public hearings on ticket prices for football games. And that, to me, was a real bother—what are we spending our time on hearings about what the price of football tickets could be? David Trask, the former HGEA [Hawai‘i Government Employees Association] director, showed up at one of the hearings. He was retired—came out of retirement to testify about football ticket prices. So, you know, you have to understand that our culture here for those things is very community-involved. So it was always an important issue to be aware of and to be sensitive and cognizant of and to try to make sure it was being done well.

There was another big issue that was played out here, and that’s the Mauna Kea Observatory.

WN: Right. I was just going to get to that.

KM: Well, that started during Governor Burns’ time. When I arrived, there was the best, world-based astronomy observatory in the world, with thirteen different scopes from all over the world. They were setting all kinds of world records—that’s the days before Hubble and all of that. But it was clear to me as I listened to it, that the technology would wear out soon. And in fact, the National Science Foundation was in debates about the future of the next land-based astronomy installation. And it was either going to Chile or here because the Azores were too polluted and so forth. And so there was going to be a competition five to ten years down the road for that new generation of telescopes. I came to believe that we needed to be positioned to do well in that competition. We were running and administering the mountain, but then we got control of the facility. There needed to be an environmental impact statement, and that got the board very much involved.

The two Hawai‘i regents were intimately involved in those debates because that’s what was demanded from that community. And it really wore them out because they had to go

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to meetings and listen to pretty emotional testimony. But we did see it through. There was a lot of wild stuff floating around, e.g., the astronomy program has to move to Hilo, and the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. We were building our astronomy base right next to the Hilo campus. Well, the land next to Hilo campus is part of that now. We opened a Subaru facility there—that’s the Japanese telescope land base, and it is quite a complex now.

That was very difficult for me to manage because of the intensity of the feelings about Mauna Kea as a sacred place. And yet, I had to say, “We’re looking at billion dollars worth of development and driver for this economy.” Senator Inouye was help in getting an appropriation to build an education center at Hilo in astronomy. We got the administration of that facility transferred to the chancellor at Hilo and other matters of that sort to try to ease the pain of the Big Island folks that they were being raped. Alan Teramura, senior vice president for research, managed it, and they punished him for it, in my opinion. You know, because there was no way to manage it in a way that would dampen those kinds of concerns. The Mauna Kea plan was very difficult to put together. So it took up a lot of energy and also put the board in a difficult position, particularly the island of Hawai‘i members—because it really wasn’t fair. Because they were members of that community—they really couldn’t avoid it. So, it was a very difficult issue. I think we got it done in the best way we could, and it did move ahead.

I have a couple of other—do you have others? I do have some other notes, but. . . .

WN: No.

KM: I wanted to talk a little bit about the Pauley Laboratory on Coconut Island. There’s been a book published about that, and the history of the island and so forth. When I arrived, Phil Helfrich was emeritus director of the Hawai‘i Institute for Marine Biology. The godfather had really been Bob Hiatt, acting-president here before he became president of the University of Alaska. So I called Bob and I had him back for dinner at College Hill.

Phil was tight with the Pauley family, and they had been funding summer programs at the island. Phil had a proposal to build a lab—a marine biology lab—on Coconut Island. And so on one of my first visits, acting- president Paul Yuen asked me to handle that. So one of my first visits was with Phil to the Pauley family and Mrs. Pauley in Beverly Hills. When I was there, I went through all of the stuff about the lab and all of that, and Steve Pauley said to me, “Would you rather have the lab or the island?”

And I said, “Both.”

We had a lease on half of the island, and the rest of it was owned by the Pauley family before they sold it. A Japanese firm had paid 8-million or so for it. They were now in bankruptcy in Japan, so we went through about a year or two-year period where we got Pauley to commit to give us the money to buy the rest of the island. So the important part of that was the kind of behind-the-scenes management that needed to occur because we didn’t want anybody to know the university was the buyer. There were all kinds of rumors that they were going to sell it for a gambling casino. The governor was kind enough to put out a note, saying he wouldn’t allow any gambling in Coconut Island or anywhere else in the state. So we shut off others, and we answered in a lawsuit in Japan about where the money would go if we paid it. So basically we paid 2-million dollars and bought half of the island.

The important part—and the reason I’m mentioning that—is because that’s the first time, in the history of the University of Hawai‘i, we constructed something with no state

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involvement. The money was given to the University of Hawai‘i Foundation, and we leased it from them for a dollar a year. I don’t know if that’s still the deal or not. Howard Hamamoto agreed to manage the project for us. Senator Inouye agreed to get the marines to barge the material from Käne‘ohe Marine Base. And so the Pauley Lab was built on the budget and on time. And it was the first crack in that armor, when you’re talking about: Could we do things without state involvement? Could we be on budget? Could we be on time? Could we do all that? So that was a real significant change, and it also established the fact that the University of Hawai‘i Foundation could do things that the state can’t do, and that the money, if given there, was sacred.

WN: What about maintenance of the facility?

KM: Well, then, of course, that was the university’s responsibility—as part of the lease—to maintain the facility.

WN: So that would be with the special funds as well?

KM: Well, whatever funds the university—first you get . . .

WN: But not general funds?

KM: No—well, return on overhead, whatever. It could have been with general funds because it was part of the budget of SOEST—School of Ocean and Earth Science Technology. So that was, I think, an important development.

Second issue that needs to be discussed because it was serving the neighbor islands with something other than associate degrees. The School of Social Work had developed a way in which they would take a cohort—if they could get twenty students on Kaua‘i, they would offer them a master’s degree in social work there. So that became a model and Mänoa would do those things.

There was a big issue when Linda Lingle was mayor of Maui. She put an ad to Wall Street Journal to try to get some private university to start a four-year campus on Maui. And of course, I got all kinds of calls from my friends on the Mainland: “If we agree to talk to her about that, what will be your posture?”

And I said, I mean, “It’s up to you. I mean, we’re a public institution, and we can’t stop anything like that.”

But I met with the mayor, and we talked about it, and I agreed that Maui citizens needed to have access to baccalaureate degrees. But I was unwilling to make Maui a college— which it now is—but I was willing to change its mission. So we started a university center on Maui. The mayor got the county council to put up, I think, two hundred thousand dollars. I matched it. That’s how we started University Center on Maui. And it became a model. We eventually started one that was a Kona Learning Center. There was always a debate about who was going to service that—the University of West O‘ahu or the University of Hawai‘i-Hilo? And I said, “It doesn’t matter to me. Compete for it.” And West O‘ahu was very aggressive in offering courses in Kona.

So that, again, was another manifestation of the access issue. Things needed to be changed to find ways to do something that you could afford to do because you got the tuition. You could figure out how much it was going to cost and how you could afford to do it. I think somebody started offering an M.B.A. in that way, too—I think, in Maui. You know, we were already heavily into distance learning and other matters in this

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technology, but the neighbor islands needed to have access to something other than community colleges. I agreed with that. A decision to live on Maui should not be a decision to forego a baccalaureate degree.

WN: Well, that’s the forerunner of what they have now, right?

KM: Yes . . .

WN: It’s sort of a four-year—it is a four-year . . .

KM: It is now. Evan [Dobelle] did that. I was unwilling to go down that road at the time. And I think, probably, I was shortsighted. Same with the four-year technology degrees. A lot of the community colleges are getting into that now, but in the sixties and seventies, the big problem was mission creep. You don’t have to do everything. You know, community colleges do this, state colleges do this, and research universities do that. For an institution, there was always this upwardly mobile drive, e.g., we want to get the next level. I felt that that was mission creep and it threatened the basic mission that you were originally founded to do.

It is amusing because years later, I was hired as a consultant by the Utah Board of Higher Education to chair a three-member commission to decide a recommendation of whether Utah Valley College ought to become a university. It had started as a community college. It was now giving four-year degrees. It’s the first recommendation that I ever made as a consultant that they adopted in entirety. We said, “Don’t do it unless you can come up with an additional 10-million dollars to solve these other problems.” Legislature appropriated another 10-million dollars, and it’s now Utah—UV—Utah Valley University.

So that’s an old issue, and it’s been all the way back when Weber State in Utah started as a community college. And I was sort of [cautioning]: Don’t diversify their mission such that they can’t do things well. The last thing we need is more research universities. They’re the most expensive things we have, and we’ve got a hundred of them. And you know, let’s concentrate on making them good, as opposed to creating more of them because they’re very costly.

So there are issues like that that I had on my agenda. When I arrived, Senator Inouye’s staff got with me and said, “You have to get the requests to the federal government under some umbrella because all we’re getting is everybody coming to Washington D.C. and wanting whatever they want from all over the university system.” So after a while, we developed this system, where annually, we would send the senator a list of our priorities. He and his staff were free to say, “That’s not on the university priority list. You’ve got to work through that mechanism first.” So that helped us in the relationship with the federal government, and we eventually got that 50-million-dollar boat for the SOEST. The senator did the heavy lifting on that. I gave him a list of these things when, after I resigned, what was going to happen in the next ten years because he was always very interested in the future of the university.

I look at this today, and think, “Well, yes, some of it happened, some of it didn’t.” But he was always a big factor in some of the things the state could no longer afford to do. So I want to thank him for that. And I also want to thank him for supporting the university to get its act together in ways in which would make sense for the board and the president to be articulate about what the university really wanted from the federal government and how we could get that organized. So there were a lot of projects that came through that were a result of that, and he was particularly helpful to me, personally, in that regard.

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WN: Did the university have a lobbyist?

KM: We had hired Cassidy & Associates to lobby for us. Cassidy & Associates’ principal was Henry Giugni—the senator’s ex . . .

WN: Sergeant-at-arms . . .

KM: . . . fundraiser.

WN: I mean . . .

KM: Yeah, he was sergeant-at-arms in the senate, but he was consigliere—whatever words you use—he was the senator’s principal fundraiser and staff man and all that. Part of the deal in the U.S. Senate was Henry would become sergeant-at-arms.

WN: Well, Senator Inouye was also instrumental in keeping the East-West Center going.

KM: Well, yes. And I was on the board of the East-West Center and was involved in Michel Oksenberg’s leaving. Not involved in it but managed some part of that with the second- in-command, Kenji Sumida. And it was a difficult set of issues because, as I mentioned earlier in this interview, it was really devastating to Mänoa when those fellowships disappeared. I mean, it went from like two hundred, two hundred fifty, down to fifty a year. The social science faculty had really no way to replace that kind of graduate support. There was always that issue of where the East-West Center should reside. Once it was part of the university, and then, you know, it became independent with its own board. Pretty eminent people—Ratan Tata from India, I met, and he was on the board with us. David. . . .

WN: Murdock.

KM: Murdock and people from all over the world—eminent leaders in their own right. Most of the time I was on, former governor, George Ariyoshi, was the chair. He was working very hard to keep it independent from the university. I was in a difficult spot in that regard. After breakfast one time with the governor, among others, the governor came out with some statement later that he was in favor of merging the East-West Center with the university. Because it wasn’t really sure how much of the federal money was going to be left. And nobody wanted the East-West Center to die. But that really got ex-governor Ariyoshi mad at me and the senator. And thank God, Walter Dods was at that meeting and was able to say, you know, “That’s not Ken’s proposal.” But that was a tough time. Kenji Sumida became the president of the East-West Center, and he was successful and led the transition to Charles Morrison. It sucked up a lot of my time, on the one hand— but it’s a great treasure for the University of Hawai‘i to have the East-West Center here. But there’s always been a little tension on how it ought to exist, but that’s all behind us now, I believe. And Charles Morrison and Kenji have both been excellent presidents of the East-West Center, and it’s flourishing. I don’t know any longer what it gets and so forth, but at the time, the issue was, is it going to last at all? That was a big deal.

WN: Anything else? You have other . . .

KM: Well, when we . . .

WN: . . . for today.

KM: Yeah, let me just review a bit. I do want to . . .

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WN: Why don’t you review, and then we’ll get into some of those tomorrow.

KM: Okay.

WN: How’s that?

KM: I’ll do that. Thank you.

WN: Okay, why don’t we stop right here?

KM: Okay, that’s good.

END OF INTERVIEW

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Tape No. 25-5-6-11

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

with

Kenneth P. Mortimer (KM)

Honolulu, O‘ahu

February 18, 2011

BY: Warren Nishimoto (WN)

WN: Okay. This is session number six with Kenneth Mortimer on February 18, 2011. And we’re at the University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa. The interviewer is Warren Nishimoto.

Ken, this is probably our last session.

KM: Yes.

WN: It’s been a nice marathon week for us.

KM: Yeah, it’s been useful for me to go back through these things and—almost cathartic, in some sense. Particularly since when I’m back [in Hawai‘i], usually people talk to me and I ask questions of the people who used to work with me and ask, “How did that work out?” There is joy and disappointment, both, depending on how it worked out. Last night, I sat beside the president of the University of Hawai‘i Foundation, Donna Vucinich, and she was very complimentary about the structure that we had put in place. I remind people that we had to change laws to do that—not just to make administrative decisions, but get the governor and the legislature to agree, and the board of regents to agree. And it took quite a while, as you’ll see in this narrative. I was here for eight-and-a-half years, and the constitutional autonomy thing didn’t come till the last year, after I had already announced my resignation. My advice to the people I consult with now about all these budget cuts is to find a way to make lemonade because when the budgets are in decline, the politics and the willingness of people to change differs substantially.

That was part of my statement: “Look, folks. We are responsible for whatever money we get, and we’re also responsible for raising some of it.” And as I mentioned earlier, that’s a different perspective for a lot of people in public universities. And I do regret the national tendency to shift more of the costs for higher education to students. I don’t believe that’s a healthy societal direction. But I understand that I am no longer—I’m a voice in the wilderness on that.

In my writings, I have made statements like, “The social contract between the people and its universities has undergone substantial revisions since the early ’70s.” And after World War II we were founding a community college a week. Every decade, enrollments were doubling. The doubling stopped in the ’80s, but they still continued to rise. And I don’t think that’s a healthy direction for the country. We used to lead the world, nationally, in the number of degree holders, et cetera. Now, we’re somewhere around eleventh or twelfth. I don’t believe that’s healthy for the country. I really believe higher levels of education are direct indication and support for the economic drivers of these economies.

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So I regret that, but I was in the saddle during those times. My job was to find a way through all that to—not to preserve but to enhance and prepare. The biggest problem we had was explaining to people that it’s not going to be over. It’s not a temporary decline. Usually you come back, and you make it up again. But as a scholar, and three R’s of the ’80s, taught me that it isn’t coming back. Attitudes changed in the ’70s with the Kent State shootings, and we became a litigious enterprise. Things that used to be settled internally were now settled in the courts. With the public bargaining laws, people became advocates and adversaries, rather than the reverse. That’s all going through the newspapers today, with the governor’s confrontations. In my last book, we made a great statement—I hope, articulate statement—that internal governance has become a system of advocates, people are appointed and unions advocate for their—and it doesn’t matter what the other fellow thinks. For example, my job, like a good lawyer, is to get the most for my client. But who is responsible for saying what’s good for, quote, the institution or society? I always thought that was my job.

WN: Is higher education more democratic now than . . .

KM: I don’t know what you mean by “democratic” . . .

WN: Well, there’s much more opportunities to get a higher education. You know, at the same time . . .

KM: Well, it’s more accessible. It’s more accessible now than it might have been in the ’60s, and certainly in the pre-war eras. An academic degree of some sort has become sort of the ticket of entry into professional work, et cetera. But most of the newer institutions do not have traditions of shared governance anyway. Most community colleges evolved out of the public schools. Gary Rhodes’ marvelous book argues that faculty are now managed professionals. I had made the argument that a system of adversary relationships in dealing with qualitative, professional judgments does not work because what goes by the wayside is professional judgments. And so unions protect a tenure denial at any cost and seek to find procedural irregularities, some of which don’t matter in the basic decision itself.

I am an advocate of free speech and protected open and accessible campuses as far as I’m able to. I have to develop terminology like the term, “quaccability.” What is quaccability? The dilemma that’s being played out in all of this is quality, access, and affordability. You can’t talk about one without talking about the other. If you raise class sizes to thirty or forty to one, that has an impact on quality. While you want to have access, you don’t want to water the soup. And you want college to be affordable, so all of our citizens can benefit. And that’s, of course, the dilemma facing higher ed: quaccability.

I wrote a paper about that for the WICHE [Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education]—actually, for the Lumina Foundation, in which I coined the term, “quaccability.” (WN chuckles.) And I developed another term, “ATFA”, which stands for appropriations, tuition, and financial aid. It’s the same when we were discussing tuition yesterday. I was saying, “Well, you can fool around with tuition. You don’t want to talk about appropriation, you don’t want to talk about tuition waivers—well, that’s financial aid.” But you can’t talk about one of them alone. Now you can analytically, because you can say there’s no incentive for us to raise tuition because it doesn’t affect our appropriation, and you give away tuition waivers, but that’s appropriation money. So I’m not happy with that direction in the country. I can be a “John the Baptist” in the wilderness, but as the president of the University of Hawai‘i, my responsibility was to find the answers to difficult problems and protect quality, access, and affordability.

WN: Mm-hmm [yes]. What’s your view of online universities?

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KM: Oh, I was a great advocate of them. I began to look at that issue back in the ’70s when I was a shavetail—assistant professor. When I went to Penn State, David Gardner was, at that time, vice president for continuing education in the University of California system. He was a former graduate student of T.R. McConnell, my graduate professor. I was hired to spend a month in California and walk around to all of the nine university campuses and make recommendations about the organization of the extended university. Britain’s open university was a big deal at that time. So I had to answer, “What are we [i.e., the University of California] going to do about that?” And David hired me for a month, and I visited every campus of the university system, and looked at their operations, and made a recommendation. I said that they really should start a tenth campus. The traditional campuses are not interested in that kind of a product. Of course, he couldn’t do that, but nonetheless, the other recommendations were useful to David, who eventually became president of the University of Utah, and then president of the University of California system.

So that got me involved in extended learning. I then visited the State University of New York, where they had the regent’s external degree program. You could get a degree entirely by examination. Then they founded Empire State College in the system in New York. Empire doesn’t teach any classes. It has faculty mentors. Students make an agreement with the faculty mentor as to what they need to do. They can use any of the resources in the university of the state of New York, which includes all museums, libraries, and all of the sixty-nine campuses of that state system. They would assess you for life experience, as you came in. If you had two years of college somewhere else or you’d been managing a volunteer organization, they would assess that experience and give credit for it. I was a big advocate of this. I studied it several times over the next fifteen or twenty years. After those visits, I was called back as a consultant to Empire State College and so I was able to watch it evolve over time.

I was pleased with our situation here in Honolulu. The access argument on the neighbor islands was a powerful one, even though, in a small state, we were limited as to what we could afford. I admired the social work program on Kaua‘i, the university center in Maui, the university center in West Hawai‘i, and tried to translate and move baccalaureate programs around the state. Mänoa started a baccalaureate program at Maui Community College before it became Maui College. My belief that living on Maui or Kaua‘i should not be a decision to deny yourself access to a baccalaureate degree at a public university cost. There were about thirteen private institutions from the Mainland offering degrees here on military bases and places like that. So not only was I a great advocate of it, I organized and did a few things about it.

WN: Is that the trend? Is it an emerging trend or is it . . .

KM: Well, the emerging trend is the rise of for-profit universities. But there is now a Western Governors University, which is a complete, online institution. I was with Governor Cayetano with the governors in Las Vegas when that was being discussed. They thought the big barrier to it was going to be accreditation, so the governor leaned over to me and said, “What about that?”

And I said, “I know a lot about that. I’ve chaired accreditation teams and things like that and serve on the executive committee of the Western Association of Colleges.”

So the governor says, “Well, Ken knows a lot about that.”

I told them, “It’s not a problem. We accredit everything—assessment for life learning, as well as online courses. Penn State’s been doing that since the ’50s with television.”

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It’s an attack on the traditional method of delivering services. If you concentrate on what a person knows and certify that, as opposed to counting credits they’ve taken, your mind changes. In the best Ph.D. programs, there’s few credit requirements. There are residency requirements. You have to—at Berkeley—spend six quarters in residence. That is loosely defined. It can be, in six quarters in residence while taking at least six credits, which can be directed research. After I finished my qualifying exam, I took directed research, under the professor who was paying me to do these studies. The ultimate form of assessment is an oral doctoral committee, where five faculty members sit down with one student and say, “You’re going to lose. The only issue is, how long can you stand it?”

With assessment of life experience, and college-level entrance exam and all of that, you can get college credit. Why should you take basic chemistry if you’ve already had three years of it in high school? I was part of the national discussion about this. I was the first president in the country to start a division of Campus Compact into statewide Campus Compact in two states, Washington and here. The compact encourages student involvement in service learning under the mentorship of a faculty member. So when they tutor kids in mathematics somewhere, that can be done in a variety of ways, but it can be done for credit. Service should be part of your life all the time. And some of those experiences should be worth college credit, depending on whether the faculty members can organize a learning experience in that regard.

So in Washington state, as president, I was on the national board of Campus Compact. It has over five or six hundred campuses now. But statewide chapters were new then, so I visited with some of the presidents of the private colleges in the state of Washington and all of the public university presidents. We organized a statewide Campus Compact, which meant that some of these issues can be put together in collaborative ways. When I arrived here, I visited with HPU [Hawai‘i Pacific University] and Chaminade [University] and BYU-Lä‘ie [Brigham Young University-Hawai‘i]. For example, I had a dinner at College Hill for the three presidents of those institutions. That was the first time that they remember anybody getting the presidents together. And then we started statewide Campus Compact here as well.

So those kinds of non-traditional things were always something I thought was important to help with the question of access, and particularly when we were dealing with middle- aged women re-entering the job market, et cetera. As you know, a lot of them went to college for a year or two, got married, had babies. Now they needed to go back to work.

In the early study on the University of California system, the fundamental concern there was faculty quality and the quality of the programs. At all world-class universities, the faculty question was, “How can you possibly do a quality program if I’m not there to teach it? Well, at Penn State, we put Management 101 and Accounting 101 on television. You take it, and if you know the material, why do you have to sit in a class? You can proceed at your own rate. Well, that threatened faculty prerogatives, but it gets in the way of student learning and student access, et cetera. So you asked me a simple question, but it’s part of my intellectual history and something that I participated in for thirty years.

WN: And you know, you’re a higher education scholar . . .

KM: Yes.

WN: . . . and you’re probably the first higher education scholar that ever served as a University of Hawai‘i president?

KM: Yes.

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WN: Right?

KM: I think so, I think so. I mean, Harlan Cleveland was a well-known scholar of public policy.

WN: Right. But is that a trend where the job of a university president has changed to the point where it needs to have some kind of undergraduate and graduate training before taking on a job? I mean, there was a time when the university president was a Ph.D. in history, for example.

KM: Yes, and that’s still . . .

WN: You know. How has the job description of a university president changed?

KM: Well, we have grown larger and the size of the enterprise has become more like New York City than it has like Peoria, Illinois. You’re running very large operations. And remember, we expanded rapidly in the ’60s and the nature of the enterprise changed substantially. I mentioned that in my decision to pursue a Ph.D. in higher education, I intended to be a faculty member, not an administrator. There were three of us in the country, I believe: Marvin Peterson at Michigan, Jim Morrison, now at North Carolina- Chapel Hill, and me—and maybe Larry Leslie, but he was really in teacher education, who became among the first assistant professors in the field of higher education.

My last academic appointment at Penn State was as a professor of Higher Education and Public Policy, where I taught courses in public administration and personnel. It’s just a different kind of public policy. You can study agriculture policy or health policy, for example. Agriculture policy tends to be in schools of agriculture, and health policy in public health or medical schools. So I managed the creation of the Association for the Study of Higher Education [ASHE]. It now has independent conferences, which are attended by over a thousand people. We started our own journal, and did all of the things that faculty members do.

Then, people began to ask, “Who are these guys? David Gardner became the president of the University of California via the University of Utah. Stanley Ikenberry became president of the University of Illinois. People who had been trained in higher education began to emerge in leadership positions. David and Stan never taught very much. Stan was a faculty member for a couple years, but they were scholarly administrators, and they knew the history of higher education and were experienced in it. And as we began to turn out graduates, a lot of the community college presidents came from those programs. I used to have a list of people who had come up to that route—presidents and leaders of academic institutions. Now there’s a goodly number who were trained that way. Some of them became faculty members; others followed the administrative route.

So anyway, it was quite a movement. We thought we were plowing new ground. It was an interesting time because the great pressure on higher ed faculties was to take old administrators when they retired and bring them onto the higher ed faculty. My response to that would be, “Well, I’ve got a broken down professor here. Why don’t you make him dean?” (WN chuckles.) Because we were the hard-nosed guys. You can’t just come in and tell war stories. You needed to have some disciplined background—political science, sociology, even philosophy.

So yeah, I’m a professor in higher education and public policy, and that affected immensely my role as a president. My critics might say I might be too didactic, or my staff would complain when I’d tell them, “Go read something I wrote about that. Don’t

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bring it up until at least you read that budgeting strategies like that don’t work.” (WN chuckles.) It got to be a joke in staff meetings. Being a president relies on something other than personal experience. It helps to be knowledgeable about the issues; the other parts of the job are probably more important on whether or not you’re going to be a success.

My argument was and continues to be that most of the issues in higher education are not debates about what to do; they are debates on how to get something done. When I went to Western Washington University, we needed to change the admissions process. It was not a “what.” I mean, that was clear. The articulation problem at the University of Hawai‘i had to be fixed. That was a no-brainer. I used that word, and Linda Johnsrud, who was chair of the faculty senate, said it’s killing her. And you know, it was unwise to say that but something had to be changed. That’s never an effective way to get something done— to trivialize an issue. That was a big mistake.

The struggle on the part of the faculty academics side is to make sure that whoever’s in the office [of president] has academic sensitivities. In fact, I met with the Mänoa faculty senate executive committee after I resigned. They had been pressing me to create a chancellorship at Mänoa. I was asked by the board, “What should be the recommendation about that now?”

And I said, “You probably should make the decision before you hire a new president.”

And so I asked the Mänoa senate executive committee whether or not they believed that the president of the University of Hawai‘i system needed to be qualified to be a tenured faculty member at Mänoa. And of course, the answer was, “Yes.”

And I said, “But, as a president of this system, he or she—if tenure is a factor at all— could be tenured at one of the community colleges just as well.” And I said, “It will make a difference to the kind of person you recruit or who feels qualified to take the job.” I never would’ve taken a job, frankly, as president of the system. I shouldn’t say “never” because you never know (chuckles). It’s a very different job now, as I learned lunching with David McClain a couple years ago. I would ask the question, “What the hell do you do, now that you’re not chancellor of Mänoa?” (WN laughs.) It’s a different job than the one I held, you see. It does require different skills. Evan [Dobelle] was not an academic, you know.

WN: What is the quote-unquote, tougher job?

KM: Well, I’ve always thought the toughest job in the university was either department chair or dean because you are managing personalities and very important issues to faculty members, like office space, travel money, graduate assistants, and teaching schedules. Those involve you in personal kinds of conflicts and debates because we faculty are pretty egotistical. We think we know how to run things. So, I always thought those were the tougher jobs. And the closer you get to having to make individual decisions like that, the more difficult the choices are. And when you’re an analyst like I am, the easier choices are whether to have a medical school or not. I mean, you know, it’s a big deal, and I used to kid Lorrie, my wife, that I can’t make decisions for less than a million dollars, you know.

WN: (Chuckles) But that’s a “what” decision. But what about the “how”—you know, how you’re going to get the medical school built?

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KM: See, that’s the question. And even when we talk about does Hawai‘i deserve a law school? The answer to that is “Yes.” Now what’s the next question?

WN: Right.

KM: How are you going to get that done? And yes, we should have a system-wide perspective. “Yes.” What’s the next question? How are you going to create a sense of system in an amorphous institution like this?

So most of the things in admissions are straightforward. If you talk to admissions people, they crunch numbers to a fare-thee-well, and you make adjustments about enrollment trends. You know that if you don’t have a demographic blip that lasts at least a couple of years, you don’t have a change because annual things vary. In the very large public institutions, you can project enrollments based on graduates coming out of the state’s high schools.

For example, in our conversations here, it was always, “The legislature won’t let us do something,” or, “We can’t do it because. . . .” And I would say, “Well, we already have 98 percent of the money we’re going to have next year.”

That was the conversation. It has been historically nice to be able to say you can’t do anything unless you’re going to get new money, but that game’s over. That was the ’60s. It’s not the ’80s. And it’s certainly not the ’90s. “Well, everybody believes we ought to fund the library. . . .” You can get agreement on the more general issues. But the next issue is who’s going to do it and how?

(Taping stops, then resumes.)

KM: So I began to develop a language that talked this, even at Western, but it was particularly true at Penn State as well. Would it be a good thing to . . .? And then the answer is, “Yes,” except you can’t get it done. And therefore, it’s not a good thing because you can’t do it. The simple question: “Do you need to begin to raise private funds?”

And the answer, of course, “Yes.”

“All right, who’s able to do it?”

“I am.” You know, “I know how to do that.”

“You’re crazy, Mortimer,” you know. “You can’t raise a hundred million in this town.”

And I said the version of, “Trust me. I know I can do these things, and I know this community will respond if we get our act together.” So that became an important part of my self-identity of not taking on things that I didn’t think could be done. Another phrase that I used to use often is, “That’s a bad idea whose time has come.” (WN chuckles.) And because sometimes, it’s a freight train coming down the street, and you can’t do a lot about it except lay down and let it run over you or get out of the way. Some of the developments that occurred in this state were, in my opinion, based on political reality, rather than educational demand. When I did the consulting job for the state system in Utah, I sat down with the chancellor of the system, and I said, “Well, what you’re saying is you have a political reality, and you want me to make it educationally appropriate. And I can do that.” But it’s going to happen. The question is whether or not you can get people to pay attention to increasing the mission and not further “water the soup” at Utah Valley State College, since legislative mandates often don’t come with new money.

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Legislative mandates in Hawai‘i were a big problem. I would say, “A mandate lasts as long as the budget bill, for a biennium.” There’s a whole series of things that I have eliminated that were, at one time, legislative mandates. Calvin Say was chairman of the house finance [committee] at the time. He asked me to give him such a list of mandates I was no longer funding. And I did. I never heard another thing about it.

I read this morning’s paper about Governor [Neil] Abercrombie taking heat on all these proposals. He has to cut the budget. That’s not rocket science. And it would’ve been rocket science if, ten years ago, they said we’re going to be in hard times, and I’m going to make these hard decisions now. It wouldn’t be sustainable because you can’t tell people four years in advance you’re going to cut their budget. “In the year 2015, we’re going to do X, and they give them all that time to, not get used to it, but to fight it.”

WN: Mm-hmm [yes]. I’m going to read some quotes that appeared in the papers right about the time you resigned. And I just want you to—you have the luxury of hindsight . . .

KM: Yes.

WN: Here’s one, “He was in a box and was never able to climb out of that box. That box was the budget and very poor morale. The other problem he had was a governor that was not favorably inclined towards the university.”

KM: Well, the box was the budget situation, and nobody could climb out of that. You cannot operate as though you were in an ivory tower, and nothing that happens outside matters. You can talk about faculty morale. Linda Johnsrud, who’s currently a vice president, was a faculty member in the [College of] Education and was doing surveys of faculty morale. She came to me and asked for support, and I said, “Why would I want to do that?” I mean, we know, on a scale of one to ten, morale is never better than a five. The budget is directly correlated to things like the attitudes and morale. I could never answer questions about how to improve faculty morale. I would get asked that question several times, and I would answer with a question, “What do you think I should do about that?”

“Well, you’ve got to be our advocate and stand up and fight the governor.”

I never believed that that was an effective way to go about it, or I would’ve done it. I said that. But I don’t believe that Ben Cayetano loves to have those public exchanges. He would say publicly, “The university’s not doing what I want it to do. They’re not making this kind of serious changes I think they ought to be making.” So I think it’s fair enough to say there was a box. It was a box handed to me. And not of my doing. There are those who believe that I could have been a better advocate for the university and got more money, I do not think they are realistic, because the state had gone into the tubes. It was difficult because the rest of the country was on a boom. And so the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that, over that period, we lost more state support than any other university in the country.

Governor Cayetano’s attitudes changed in the time that I was president. I don’t think it’s because I was president but because he came to realize the economic potential in a university. He was also a victim of the ’60s, where he had to leave Hawai‘i, since we had no community colleges. He left and went to a community college in California and stayed away for, I think, a dozen years. So he always held that up as the model, “You need to go away.” In the meantime, the community colleges were founded, but he still had that go to California mentality, and he said things like that in public. There are some other attitudes he had about academics in general. But then he came, in my opinion, to understand what a crucial resource the university could be to the things he wanted to do for the state of

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Hawai‘i. So we worked together. Yes, we had some private set-tos, and that’s the way it ought to be. They were private, for the most part.

I took a lot of heat because I wouldn’t take him on publicly. But for me, that is how you get things done. If you’re at odds with the governor, it is bad for the university. You’ve got to work with them all. So I understand why people are critical but I just go back and say, “Yes. You think it’s my box that I couldn’t get out of?” or, “You think I manufactured that box and what I’d like to be?” Again, the governor and I used to talk about, “Boy, we didn’t expect that we’d be taking these jobs in order to cut and slash.” (WN chuckles.) We both had grand visions of the things you could do.

WN: Right, right.

KM: So the major accomplishments had to come out of the hide of the rest of the place. And I said we did a lot, in that regard. But it did require the reallocation of money, and that was very difficult.

WN: Okay, here’s one from the Mänoa Faculty Senate president, “For his sake, I hope his legacy improves. It’s not particularly positive now. It’s not something he could have helped. I’m very sympathetic to him. Being a university president is not a popularity contest. But you have to ask, ‘Is the university a better place?’ Unfortunately, one has to say, ‘No, it is not.’”

KM: Yes, I know the quote and I know the individual who made it. And it’s a fair quote. You always ask, “Is the university better?” If the response or the standard is, does the university have more resources, the answer is no. And if that’s my fault, I accept it. I took the heat, and I’ll take whatever credit there is. “Did we position the university for greater things? ” The answer to that, I believe, is yes. But that’s a history lesson.

Part of this conversation for the last few days has been my trying to explain what I was trying to do. I hoped I explained that when I was here, but the main problem was, in my opinion, you know, communication. Do people believe what you’ve said? When I kept saying, “The money we have now is most of the money we’re going to have next year,” it never registered on too many people because they were so used to the whole idea of that money comes from downtown. You go down there and argue for it, and they send it to you, and then you spend it. And the whole private fundraising thing, I think I can say is a contribution I made that—not unique to me because it was in the game at the time, but I did it, as they say. And then the flexibility/autonomy stuff is a significant development. I suspect I had some local ties, so I could get some of those things done because of my behind-the-scenes style.

WN: Well, here’s one from a [state] representative, “He’s really laid the groundwork for the new president to take the university to another level. I think he had one of the toughest ten years. He had to deal with shrinking resources and increasing demands, especially at UH-Hilo and the community colleges. He was, though, perhaps the right man for the time.”

KM: My friends say that I was the right man for the time. I’d like to have had some money to see if I was the right man for that time. (WN chuckles.) Because I don’t believe that when you agree to do these jobs that you can anticipate what is going to happen. They try when they recruit you to tell you all the rosy things that are going to happen. A friend of mine was interviewed for the presidency of the University of Texas, about twenty years ago. They promised him he’d never have to worry about money again. And that’s just before the oil market went into the tank. So you are a creature of the society which supports you.

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The chief change in the nature of the university today is the integration of it into society. Because when you take the public’s money, then you are subject to the vagaries of the public accountability.

People believe that because I had studied reduction and reallocation strategies in England and the U.S. and written about it, that I was somehow well qualified to do that. Again, I say, it’s not the what, it’s the doing, and whether or not you have the courage, if you will, to say that access needs to be preserved, even at the expense of your critics. And to say that school is not simply of a quality sufficient to be at our university, and we can’t fix it, and so we need to do something else. You can’t make a lot of those arguments public because it’s offensive and because it enflames. It’s the same—the University of Hawai‘i Law School is worth preserving. The question is how. So we did those things, and we preserved the medical school, et cetera. Yeah, a lot of things, I deserve most of the criticism I took but not all of it.

WN: One last one here, “Mortimer came in at an awful time and is leaving in an awful time. No one could have been a successful president when Mortimer was here.”

KM: I guess that’s sort of a backhanded compliment or something like that. (WN chuckles.) But first, those comments usually come in the newspapers. The newspapers have favorite people they call for the kind of pithy quotes they get. I used to be fond of saying, “You send for students, and they’d go to student leadership.” I said, “You could string five guys in suits along that wall, and most students couldn’t pick out who the president is.” (WN chuckles.) And that’s right. I mean, they don’t need to know who the president is. They’re not here for that.

WN: Well, the less controversy—you’re probably doing a good job, right?

KM: Well, (WN chuckles) probably. I was on a radio talk show here and answering questions. Somebody called and it was a student complaining about something in student affairs all the way down to the department level. And they asked, “What can you do about this, and what can you do about that?”

I said, “You know, other people handle those things.”

She said, “What DO you do?” (WN chuckles.)

And I couldn’t answer that question either!

(Laughter)

“What DO you do?”

Well, sometimes I would handle specific things. For example, the dean is not going to cut Hawaiian languages. That’s just not in the cards, so let’s fix that problem because it’s not the right thing to do, given our priorities. I wanted to mention when answering these questions about controversy, whether accreditation or the articulation debate, particularly at Mänoa, that there are varying perspectives on them. They made the argument in the accreditation process that the governance process wasn’t complete. In our book, it was written rather extensively about how that consultation process evolved in both cases. But when folks don’t agree with the output, you’re going to take the heat. The first thing they always talk about is process, was the process appropriate?

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Again, the goals of the university are ambiguous, and not everybody agrees with the priorities. The goals of the enterprise are in deep conflict. Should we be paying attention to undergraduate education, to service, or to research? That’s the simple trichotomy, but it’s not simple.

So it is inherently controversial. In politics, a landslide election is 52 percent of the vote. In academics, what’s consensus? Fifty-two percent is absolutely not a consensus. And even when you get 75 percent, there are always those 25 percent who disagree. We wrote that the decision is never over here. The articulation question was never over. Its opponents brought it back again and again. Eventually, in the accreditation report, it cites non-consultation. And I just believe that was not accurate. And we could document the process. I do believe that not everybody agreed with the results. And that was obvious. On the other hand, on that particular issue, I believe that if we didn’t do something, the legislature would do it for us.

You may go on with those, if you like, but I do have one or two things to say about the board of regents. So you can ask me.

WN: Well, in relation to what you just said, here’s a quote that you said: “I am an academic. I didn’t take this job to become a personality. I’m not a walk-across-the-room-shake-hands kind of a person. I’m a stand-back analyst.”

KM: Yeah, I told you about the stone-faced stories earlier. Last night, I was at a dinner for a foundation board, and we had some scholarship students there that we were supporting— UH students and HPU students. My wife accused me of “working” the room. (WN laughs.) And I was . . .

WN: (Chuckles) “Accused you”?

KM: Well, we were laughing about it afterward because she, as you know, had never seen me in that context. Yes, I was raising money and moving around and talking to a few prospects that were there that hadn’t yet come up with their donations. And I had, in my pocket, a pledge sheet and a pen and all that sort of stuff.

WN: This is raising money for the University of Hawai‘i?

KM: Yes.

WN: Oh, okay.

KM: Well, I was raising money for the scholarships for the Fernandez Earle Foundation.

WN: Oh, all right, yeah.

KM: My endowment at the university—the Mortimer Endowment—goes to the Fernandez Earle scholars. And so there is somebody from Hilo studying at Mänoa on the Mortimer Endowment. So I’m on that board now, Kane Fernandez was a good friend of mine and chair of the UH Foundation board at one time. So I was working the room and raising money, and I did raise some money. There is no book on how to work a room. You never get caught in the middle of it, because then you can’t get away.

So yes, my strength as a scholar was in an analytic capacity. That’s what I say. I don’t know what others would say. And over the time, that’s how I identified my intellectual strengths: to see things people don’t see. I’ve used the words, “My job as a president is to

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see around corners when nobody else can.” There is no significant literature that I know about, about the presidency trying to position the university to get better. Everybody seems to think like a politician. You’re in for two years, and you start running for reelection. You’re always raising money for reelection. My view of the matter was that these things take a long time to accomplish if they’re going to be significant. So you need to have your eye on the ball five and ten years down the road.

So in my reduction, reallocation, retrenchment analysis, I said the principal problem is that universities are zigzagging. There’s no consistent direction when they make these reallocation decisions. They just take the first in, first out. And that results in academic chaos because you’re getting rid of the new expert in quantitative economics while you’re keeping five people in social theory. And that’s inappropriate academic balance. This zigzagged administration just doesn’t work for the future of the institution.

So I had an excessive concern about where we’re going to be when I finish, as opposed to where we are now. I said that we got to raise more private money, we got to have a different relationship with state government, and we need to set priorities. And I’m not going to do all this in one year. But I am going to do it. Getting the autonomy package required you to have the trust of the legislature and the governor. And you don’t gain that trust by opposing them in public or becoming a factor in partisan politics. And you don’t raise private money getting people’s enthusiasm up. It just takes a lot of slogging through. When I got here I interviewed some forty executives in Honolulu and the state about private giving. Personal one on one—“I’m Ken Mortimer, I’m—” et cetera, et cetera. And there’s no other way to do it here. People give money to people they know here.

So yes, I was an analyst and an academic. I used to call myself a bureaucrat to try to articulate that I had the chief bureaucratic responsibility here. So you might call me the chief bureaucrat, but don’t tell me I’m not an academic. I spent nineteen years as a vanilla faculty member. And did all the things faculty members do.

So yes, people want to know, who is the real Ken Mortimer? I would say, there’s nothing there, folks. I’m just an analyst. And I’m a terrible guy to deal with when I find out that something must be done because then I get tenacious. When I was a child, they called me stubborn and tenacious; later, they called me courageous. I’m not sure there’s a difference between any of those words. (WN chuckles.) I really am not. So many of the things I did were controversial. But I can’t think of any big decisions—I can think of decisions that I made that I would make different today—but I can’t think of anything at the time that I would have said, “No, I shouldn’t have done X.” I can say, “I shouldn’t have hired Jane Doe because that didn’t work out.” But I can’t say, at the time, that it was a bad decision. It just didn’t work. And some of them worked far beyond my expectations.

WN: Okay, did you want to say anything about the board of regents . . .

KM: Well, I had two . . .

WN: Before we get into your after-presidency affairs.

KM: Oh, all right. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm [yes].

I mentioned a few days ago that one of my concerns about coming here as president was the history of the board of regents and its involvement in state politics and the extrapolation of that involvement into the internal affairs of the university. Historically, I

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don’t need to wax eloquent. People will remember all of that. I didn’t feel that under those circumstances, I could do a lot here. But I did a lot of consultation with people I knew and was persuaded that the board had changed a lot. I regret that I was unable to persuade all the regents that they were a deliberative body and not a legislative body. And the way, of course, they’re set up is to represent some of the neighbor islands is “almost political,” And so the job of the board, from Ken Mortimer’s point of view, was to keep the interest of the whole university at heart and not to be too detailed in its parts. The culture of the state does not support that. I mean, if a student from one of the neighbor islands got a bad room assignment at Mänoa, the local regent will get a call. They behave almost like a legislator. And then they feel that he or she has to do something about that. I couldn’t really change that. And it wasn’t realistic, given the nature of personal relationships in our islands. The regents and I very seldom got crosswise of each other in public until the latter stage.

WN: Keep talking. (WN adjusts KM’s microphone.)

KM: One of the responsibilities of the board is the evaluation, hiring, and firing of the president. But another one, almost unwritten, is the care and feeding of the president as a person. Nobody paid attention to that here. And it was a disappointment for me. I couldn’t really complain about it, but I did ask, at the end of my first five years, that I have a mini-sabbatical because I felt it was time to sit back a little bit and ask, “What are you doing?” And I had great difficulty explaining that to the board, and even though they approved it, I never really got so I could take it. I did take some study time during the month of August, once, to stay at home more and think more. But I was really unable to take a break.

And so the stress of the job was a concern of mine, but it is not something you can say much about while you’re in the office. Evaluations by the board were unpleasant. They brought me in to an executive session and went around the room, where each of them criticized my performance. Only one regent spoke up and said, “Ken, I think you’re doing a hell of a job.” Well, that’s kind of devastating for president. I never felt any fear for my job at all because right after that, they came back and asked me to sign a five-year contract. (Chuckles) But it was the personal aspect of it that I felt was missing. And a lot of them became my good friends.

So that part of it, I understand, has improved substantially with David McClain with a new method of appointments, et cetera.

In the ’80s, I did the staff work for the National Commission on Trustees Selection. I interviewed sixteen different boards, asking, “How did you get appointed?” I became an advocate of the screening process so that a governor had to consider qualifications, other than his fundraising colleagues or people that he owed things to. I interviewed one of the governors of the state of Washington, and he told me that he had over seventeen hundred to two thousand appointments to make when he became governor. And the most prestigious was the University of Washington Gaming Fish and Life Commission. (WN chuckles.)

When I came here, the secretary of the board of regents reported directly to the board. It set up a situation where the board would get information that the president didn’t have because when somebody would complain about an activity at the university, the secretary of the board would go find out about it and report back to the board. So several times, I went into meetings, and they began to question me about something, and I would say, “How do you have information I don’t have?” This was an embarrassment for me to have to ask, but those things made the job more difficult. Why would you let whether a student

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from a neighbor island got an effective roommate in the residence halls become a board matter? So then I also came to feel that the board wasn’t spending its time on the right issues. Time is our most important resource here. And so, in that discussion with the board over time, we evolved to different pattern and practice. And they were, again, very supportive of me in my job as president. In spite of all the rumors, I was never in danger of being asked to leave. They asked me to stay for another five years. So they were very supportive of my presidencies but not so much of me as a person.

One other troublesome thing was to determine what is an effective presidency and how do you administer the university through the chief executive officer? In an environment that’s dominated by our local culture, where everybody knows everybody, the coconut wireless operates and one of the most visible people to talk about is the university president. Everybody sees him or her on television, et cetera.

When I got here, I tried to change some things. First, the secretary of the board system is not an effective way to support the president. I don’t believe that system is a good one, but that’s just a disagreement with the way in which things operated here. Some regents believed that they ought to receive information independent of the president. I did not agree. But, you know, if you don’t trust the president, get rid of him! Or, if you find that the president is not giving you the information you’ve asked for, then you know, you have a way to handle that. But why would you think you need information that the president doesn’t get as well?

WN: So sort of an adversarial kind of a . . .

KM: Well, I think the structure sets that up. I’m not talking about the people. But I think the structure sets that up, and a network develops. I worked with three secretaries of the board, so it’s not a personality thing either. They were very helpful in letting me know what the temperature of the board was on certain issues. So there is a real plus to some of that except, in my opinion, the president needs to have the confidence and trust of the board in visible ways. You can’t work if people don’t trust you, especially if there are constant questions about whether you’re being honest or forthright. I ran into some current regents, and they told me how wonderful things are. But the nature of the board is different because they had to go through a public screening process. There are still regents from the neighbor island and all of that, but things seem different—some have not been politically active. They’ve been socially active, but not politically. So I believe it is a structural impediment to this particular institution that is not going to be fixed. But I venture my opinion on it, and it’s not a criticism of any individual board member or any of the secretaries with whom I worked. They had an office down at the end of the hall and their own staff and their own this and that. And we had an office up at the other end of the hall, et cetera.

WN: So they looked at it more like a checks-and-balances kind of a situation. You looked at it more as a working relationship type of. . . .

KM: Well, I think an effective presidency depends on it. In my subsequent work as a consultant, I was hired by a research university to negotiate a rapprochement between the new president and the board. They had removed the previous president, who had gotten involved in things they didn’t think were appropriate for a board. So I interviewed all the regents individually over a period, and sat with the president. Then we had a meeting about it with everybody in the room, and we developed an understanding about this matter of trust between the president and the board. They really wanted the president to be the spokesperson for the university. Six years later, they asked me to come back and do the same job. Same president—he’d been in office for six years. And I did. Nothing

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had gone wrong. It was just the details of the procedures and the processes, and people forget things. So we wrote protocol guidelines that were used to orient each new regent. This covered the authority of the individual regent as opposed to the board. Regents do not speak for the board as individuals; only the chair of the board can. The president has jurisdiction over these issues, et cetera. Those are important issues because in a small town, the regents run into all kinds of people at cocktail parties and family dinners and all of that. And they get all this information, some of which is just an opinion about X, Y, or Z.

So that troubled me a lot during my time here with the board. We worked on it behind- the-scenes a good deal among people of goodwill. There were a couple of incidences which, in my opinion, people were protecting the interests of their constituents rather than of the whole university. Those were difficult issues to manage. That’s why I get into it was more of a legislative than a deliberative body. An illustration is the kinds of honorary doctorates that were given out when I got here. So that was the downside of working with intelligent, committed people who had a lot of work to do. We gave them mounds of paper to read, and ten meetings a year.

But I did want it to be part of the record for anybody who’s looking at this in the future. There was a lot of speculation that when the things got tough, that I was on the verge of being fired. That was never the case. There was never any conversation or even thoughts about we needed a new president. And as I’ve indicated to you after I did resign, at least half of the board talked to me personally and said, “Please don’t go.” As a body, they instructed the chair to come and see me two different times to try to persuade me that I should remain. So I always had the confidence of the board. And I worked hard to earn it.

But then there were a few times in which the issues got so hot that we had to do other things. And I don’t believe, in today’s complex world, you can be as effective as you might be if there’s any kind of an adversary relationship between the board and the president. You are their employee, and you need to understand that. And they do have the right to fire you at any time. And I believe that they should have that right. But you still are an employee, and you need to know that. So my comment about the board is that I have a lot of still good friends, and any time I see some of them when I’m in town, I get a big hug and a handshake and, “How’s it going?” So there’s no animosity in my remark— I want that to be clear. But I do think there’s structural and other issues that ought to be addressed in comprehensive ways. So that was something I wanted to say and make part of the record, if you will, on the assumption that somebody in the future might read it.

WN: Mm-hmm [yes]. Great. Okay, well, let’s talk about what you were up to after you left the presidency. Bring you up to the present day.

KM: I was sixty-four when I left the presidency and really had no intention of doing another. After a search firm manages you once or twice, then they try to get you to move again in a few years because that’s the way they get paid. And so I just made it clear I was not interested in doing another presidency. We had decided, for personal reasons, to reside in Bellingham, Washington. Up to that time, I’d been chair of the board of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, NCHEMS, since the early ’80s. So they asked me if I would join them as a senior associate. So I began to do significant consulting, mostly on problems of governance, and had clients at the University of Tennessee, University of Washington, Western Washington University, the University of the Pacific in California, Monmouth University in New Jersey, et cetera. And with state commissions like South Dakota and Utah. Last year, I gave remarks to a group that hired me to evaluate the board at WICHE [Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education]. I did work in ten or eleven of the fifteen Western states.

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WN: And where was NCHEMS . . .

KM: It’s in Boulder, Colorado. But I was allowed to live in Bellingham, but they did all my billing and set up all the contracts, et cetera. So electronically, you don’t have to be where your office is. I was not on a retainer. I mean, it was specific to the consulting arrangement.

Then, I was approached by ACE, the American Council on Education to write another book, which I did with Colleen Sathre. I got appointed to several boards. I served on the board of Puget Energy, the utility company for Western Washington, the Puget Sound Blood Center, et cetera. I did a number of volunteer boards, including foundation boards and became a trustee at Hebron Academy. And I wrote in a few things for WICHE and did other scholarly things—and then the book.

Of course, the biggest situation was Lorrie got ill. She was ill when she was here, and she passed away in 2005. And I didn’t do much the year that she was really ill, say from October of 2004. She passed away in February of 2005. So that was, of course, the most significant event of my post-presidential life. It was a devastating blow for everybody. But we knew that it was a progressive disease, and its results were predetermined—not curable.

I had a productive and active consulting, scholarly career, and served on boards, and other matters of that sort. Then of course, when Lorrie passed away, you know, I met and married Kay Nagle. We married about a year-and-a-half, two years after both of our spouses had died from different forms of blood cancer. So I’m happily married to Kay Nagle. I’ll dedicate this oral history to both Lorrie and Kay. So it’s been a useful, productive life. We now have two grandchildren.

WN: What is your daughter doing?

KM: Lisa lives in Edmonds, Washington. When we moved back to Bellingham, Lisa was living in Los Angeles with her husband. And they eventually got a chance to transfer to Seattle, and they grabbed it. They’ve never lived in Seattle before, but they moved to the Northwest, where Lorrie and I were. So that’s been marvelous. Kay had four children that are still alive. She had five kids—one passed away when he was very young. One of them lives in Tacoma. Two of them are in L.A. And another’s in Connecticut. So they are spread around the country.

We get back to Hawai‘i pretty regularly, where we rent a home in Kailua, normally, the last four years in a row for a month. Frankly, I stayed away most of the time when my successor was here because I really didn’t feel that it was appropriate for me to comment on what was going on. And I didn’t want to get asked questions about my successor. But when he left, I felt much freeer to come here.

When Kay and I were getting married, not all of our children were enthusiastic. (Chuckles) So we rented a home in Kailua, and we agreed to manage separate households for a while. But then I said, “We’re going to Hawai‘i in February and renting a large home, and you all come. And after that, we’re merging households, so that’s it.” (WN chuckles.) Well, it was a marvelous experience for our kids, none of whom had been here except Lisa. And four out of the five of them showed up. And each year, for the next three years, four out of the five of them showed up. So they’ve all been here at least twice and spent time with us in Kailua, right next to the beach. So that was a wonderful way that Hawai‘i culture bonded my extended family. They didn’t know me from a hole in the ground. We were in a restaurant with my family, and somebody came over and picked up

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the tab for the whole family. I couldn’t have accepted that when I was president because you couldn’t take those kinds of gifts.

(Laughter)

Because he recognized me and also recognized me as a trustee of Hebron Academy, where his son was a student. He’d seen in the magazine where I’d been appointed to the Hebron board, so he came over and introduced himself, and paid the tab. The kids were gaga about how somebody would pick up a tab for a whole family. And of course, I would be noticed on the streets but the kids didn’t know my history very well. Although, they could Google me and get great fun out of Google-ing me. (WN chuckles.) They heard things and asked, “Were you really that bad?” (WN laughs.)

“Yeah, probably.” I certainly was controversial.

I remember one time in a little store in Kailua, that I went in with my son and then I left when he was still at the counter paying some bills. And the clerk asked him, “Is that who I think it is?”

And he said, “Yes.”

And she said, “He was very controversial.”

So he came back to the dinner table—“How controversial were you?” (WN laughs.)

I never regarded myself as controversial, but a lot of people did. But that is part of the problem we already discussed. That is, my demeanor. I have, over the years, developed a real sense of confidence in myself and things I can do and not do. I say these jobs teach you what you do not do well. And sometimes, you don’t understand that about yourself but you need to, if you’re going to be effective. You need to know that I shouldn’t be the one to talk to Joe because he doesn’t like my mannerisms. So send somebody else to see him.

WN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm [yes].

KM: You have to understand that if you’re going to be a president. So I got pretty confident over the years about some of my weaknesses, as well as some of the things I could do well. And then I would say, “Look, people will get used to me because I don’t lie, I don’t cheat, and I don’t brutalize. Basically, I’m a good person internally.”

You may not agree with me, but. . . . When I was trying to explain to a regent why I couldn’t do something on his island or why it wasn’t going to get done because it wasn’t right for the university—he said, “You and I are not going to get along.”

I said, “I don’t see any reason for that. I will never lie to you, I’ll never cheat, et cetera. I will always be honest with you.” And that’s where I come down. And yes, there may be some things—if you can get the entire board to tell me to do that, I would have to do it, as their employee. But I don’t have to do things I think are not appropriate because an individual approaches me.

We became trusted friends—that regent and I—but his early thought was, “We’re going to have trouble because you won’t do what I tell you.”

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I said, “Well, you know, what you’re telling me or asking me to do is simply not appropriate.”

WN: Mm-hmm [yes]. At what point in your presidency did you feel comfortable wearing an aloha shirt?

KM: I always felt comfortable wearing them on Friday.

WN: Oh, okay. So you did wear one on Friday?

KM: Yes, in my first visits here in the ’60s Aloha Friday became a part of the culture.

WN: Mm-hmm [yes].

KM: What is Aloha Friday? You dress in aloha attire on Friday. And I’ll tell you about an amusing mistake. When I arrived here as president-elect in one of my interim visits, the legislature was in session, and they asked to see me. I went in an aloha shirt. And on the floor of the house, I was the only guy in an aloha shirt because you had to put a coat and tie on when you’re on the floor of the house. (WN laughs.) I mean, what am I supposed to do? But you remember back probably when George Ariyoshi was governor, they made the change. Then the whole world got more casual. I went to Puget Energy board meetings, and the CEO would be in a turtleneck sweater, but we’d all be dressed in suits. Lorrie was adamant about the dignity of the office and required that I dress appropriately, and I was quite comfortable with that. I mean, it’s East Coast stuff. But I know I took a lot of heat for that, but my point is when you support diversity you learn that some people like to wear suits. But it was, that’s just stubbornness, I think.

WN: (Laughs) Now, did your mother force you to wear a coat and tie—is that true? I read the story somewhere.

KM: Well, yes, it is. “Forced” is right. She used to send us to school in those kinds of things. I was a roughhouse kid, and I’d come home with torn pants or fall in a mud puddle. The teachers would call my mother—“You got to come and get your son. He’s filthy. He’s soaking wet.” (WN laughs.) But yes, that was part of our early upbringing. So, that got to be part of the lore about, you know, how do you explain this nut—“Beast from the East”—who insists on wearing suits. Kelly said, “Eagerly waiting for them to make a fourth piece for a suit.”

WN: Right, right. (Laughs)

KM: But the atmosphere in the East Coast is quite different. California and Washington are more laid back. For example, academically, I believed that the semester system wasn’t a good thing for Western Washington University. They wouldn’t start till late in September and go all the way through mid-June. So students could not get summer jobs because of the calendar. But why wouldn’t they change? Because the best month there is September. That’s the month when the fish are biting.

WN: That’s the summer, yeah . . .

KM: And the sun is shining. So when I tried to change the calendar, I ran into the culture of the state of Washington. “I don’t care if the kids don’t get out of school till June 15, and they miss out on all these summer jobs. I go fishing in September.” So that was the culture. A bad idea whose time will never come.

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WN: You’re a fly fisherman, right?

KM: Yes.

WN: Did you give that up when you came here?

KM: I gave it up in a variety of ways but not really. When I used to go, I’d go for a week at a time. The first month or so I was here, I was giving a speech to some club in Hilo. And I knew that Mike Sakamoto lived in Hilo, who had a television show.

WN: Right.

KM: And so, when I was addressing them, I said, “For example, I’ve been in town for a month, and Mike Sakamoto has not asked me to go fishing!” Well, he wasn’t there, of course, but he got the word, and he gave me a call. And he even wrote a column, “Fishing with the Prez.” (WN laughs.) He took me fishing at a reservoir in Kaua‘i, and we entered a päpio tournament together in Käne‘ohe Bay. Lorrie began to fish when Mike persuaded us to join in for Mike Sakamoto Week at Whale’s Lodge in Alaska. And Mike was at the house, staying overnight, and he persuaded Lorrie that his wife, Kat, was going and that it was going to be a great family time. So Lisa, and Lorrie, and I went to Mike Sakamoto Week in Whale’s Lodge in southeast Alaska, and Lorrie really got into fishing. That wasn’t fly fishing; that was salmon and halibut fishing. And then after that, we used to vacation in the summer—Lorrie and I—and fish for a week in Alaska. She took up fly fishing with me.

And then there was the headline here when I got stranded on Christmas Island. We went fishing on Christmas Island with the president of HPU, Chatt Wright, Dick Gushman, and Jim Romig, president of Hilo Hattie. I’m not sure that was the trip with them. I think it was with my Bellingham colleagues. The plane only comes once a week on Tuesday, and it got broke for some reason. So we go to the hotel to go to the airport and, “Well, the plane ain’t coming.”

“What do you mean, it isn’t coming?”

“It’s broke.”

“Then when’s it coming?”

“Next Tuesday.”

WN: (Laughs) Oh, boy.

KM: So, yeah. (WN laughs.) So we were able to get a message that I was here, but it so happens that the supreme court justice of the Kiribati Courts was on the island with us, and they had to get him off. And so they did get us out on Thursday. But the Honolulu Advertiser’s front page story was, “President Stranded on Christmas Island.” I arrived at College Hill in the middle of a reception for about a hundred people. The Education Commission of the States was having its annual meeting in town, and they were all friends of mine. Frank Newman was chair. He was giving this marvelous speech about how Ken would have us believe that he is stranded on Christmas Island. And then I walk in the door in fishing clothes with a fly line and a silly hat, you know, and dirty clothes from a week of fly fishing. Well, what a . . .

WN: Well, that sort of humanized you, probably.

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KM: Oh yeah, well, when Mike [Michel] Oksenberg was president of the East-West Center, he happened to drop that he was going to have to take his son fly fishing, and he’d never been fly fishing before. So I said, “Mike, I have some gear, why don’t you come over to College Hill, and we’ll practice casting on the lawn.” Well, when Mike got over there, he had PR people with him, and they reported that he was teaching ME how to fly cast. (WN laughs.) Well, you know, gee whiz. I used to go out on the lawn at College Hill and practice fly casting.

WN: Mm-hmm [yes].

KM: So yeah, I stayed with that, but I couldn’t afford to go regularly, so—not “afford” but have the time. So when I vacationed, Lorrie and I would typically try to take like a whole week and be in a lodge somewhere in Alaska, normally, or British Columbia. And that was a great release for us, and of course, a lot of humor about family matters. You don’t have to record this if you don’t want to.

WN: Well, why don’t we end it right now?

KM: Okay, thank you.

WN: Thank you very much. It was fun . . .

KM: My pleasure. I enjoyed it.

WN: Thank you, I enjoyed it, too.

END OF INTERVIEW

GLOSSARY

The following words and phrases are non-English terms. Non-English is here defined as any lexical item not found in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam Webster Inc., 1986).

The language family of each word or phrase is indicated by a letter or letters in parentheses:

(H) Hawaiian (HCE) Hawai‘i Creole English (J) Japanese

References for the definitions used in this glossary include: Koh Masuda, ed., Kenkyüsha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary, 4th ed. (Tokyo: Kenkyüsha, Ltd., 1974) and Mary Pukui and Samuel Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary, rev. and exp. ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1986).

In some instances, the spellings and definitions were provided by Center for Oral History staff or the interviewee. Such items are asterisked.

The following definitions apply to the lexical items as they appear in the context of the transcript.

aloha (H) greeting aloha shirt (HCE) Hawaiian dress shirt* haole (H) Caucasian hapa (HCE) a part-Caucasian person* päpio (H) young stage of jack fish pau (H) finished, ended sashimi (J) sliced raw fish

A- 1

Index

Abercrombie, Neil, 132 Chait, Dick, 34 ‘Ahahui Koa Ānuenue. See Koa Ānuenue Chamberlain, Owen, 26 Allen, Claude, 6 Ching, Hung Wo, 99 American Association of Higher Education, Choe, Martha, 41 32 Chun, Dai Ho, 98 American higher education Cleveland, Harlan, 71 accessibility, 126 Coconut Island, O‘ahu, 120. See also Pauley appropriations, tuition, and financial aid, family 102, 103, 126 Cole, Craig, 41 Campus Compact, 128 changes in, 134 Davis, Bud, 40, 42 extended learning, 127 Dobelle, Evan, 71, 87, 130 funding, 85 Dods, Walter, 123 governance, 72, 126 Donovan, Jim, 116 accountability, 32 chancellors, 76 Eastman, Carol, 75, 76 financial aid, 36 East-West Center, 86, 123 presidents, 130 Economic Revitalization Task Force, 89, 90, 92 history, 25, 79, 126 Involvement in Learning, 32, 34–35 Fernandez, Kane, 135 online, 126 The Fourth Corner Economic Development Ph.D. programs, 128 Board, 54 standards, 35, 36 Freiday, George, 5 structure, 79 Froderberg, Al, 42, 53 Three R’s, 135 Frohlich, Julia, 81 trends, 125, 127 Fujimoto, Bobby, 31 unions, 31, 73, 74 Anderson, G. Lester, 29 Gagne, Robert, 24 Ariyoshi, George, 123 Gaines, Jim, 94, 97 Asbury, Bill, 46 Gardner, David, 127, 129–30 Association of Governing Boards (AGB), 40 Gerberding, Bill, 48 Association for the Study of Higher Goo, Vince, 117 Education (ASHE), 30, 129 Greenwood, M.R.C., 75, 80 Astin, Sandy, 35 Gretzinger, Michelle, 69 Guigni, Henry, 65 Becker, Ruth Ann, 96 Gulbranson, Chris, 77, 80 Bell, Ted, 35 Bennet, Bill, 36 Hamamoto, Howard, 121 Benson, Karl, 114 Hawai‘i Government Employees Association Berdahl, Robert, 22 (HGEA). See University of Hawai‘i:unions Bess, Dave, 81 Hawai‘i State Legislature, 77, 89, 90, 95, 97 Blanco, Joe, 92 Act 115, 89, 91, 92, 94, 100 Botticelli, Max, 104 Act 161, 87, 89, 94, 103 Brandt, Gladys, 60 mandates, 132 Bronster, Marjorie, 91 Hayes, Chuck, 79 Bryce, Jordan, 33 Hebron Academy. See Mortimer, Burns, John A., 87, 117 Kenneth P.:education: Hebron Academy Helfrich, Phil, 120 Cadman, Ed, 79 Heyns, Roger, 28 Calvin, Melvin, 25 Higher Education Students’ Association Cancer Center of Hawai‘i, 81 (HESA), 24 Cartwright, Carol, 38, 47 Hodgkinson, Harold “Bud,” 35 Cassidy & Associates, 123 Holman, Lisa, 29, 140 Cayetano, Benjamin, 52, 70, 73, 79, 83, 86, Holt, Milton, 89 92, 99, 127, 132 Horii, Ralph, 77, 79 and Board of Regents, 109 Howard, Donna, 76, 99 and payroll lag, 103 Hughes, Judith, 79 and University of Hawai‘i, 132 See also Mortimer, Kenneth, P.:Cayetano, Ikeda, Donna, 88 Benjamin Ikenberry, Stanley, 30, 31, 129 Cazimero, Momi, 63 Imai, Eugene, 79

B-1 B-2

Inouye, Daniel, 121, 122 as consultant Issell, Brian, 81 National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, 139 Jackson, Miles, 82 University of California, 127 Johnsrud, Linda, 68, 130, 132 Utah higher education, 131 Jones, June, 117 Western Interstate Commission for Jordan, Bryce, 34, 36, 38, 55 Higher Education, 139 Jordan, Jonelle, 55 early jobs, 5, 12, 13 education, 3–4, 6–7, 14, 17–19, 22–23 Karlovitz, Les, 54 California State at Hayward, 19 Kheel, Ted, 73 Hebron Academy, 5–7 Kim, Donald, 99 Middleboro School, 6–7, 14–15 Kirimitsu, Walter, 91 music instruction, 11 Koa Ānuenue, 111, 119 San Francisco State University, 19 Kobayashi, Bert, 92 University of California at Berkeley, Kormondy, Edward, 77 20–21, 22–28, 29 Kosaki, Mildred, 62 University of Pennsylvania, 6, 12, Kosaki, Richard, 62, 67 The Wharton School, 16, 17 Kubo, Ed, 60 as educational researcher, 21 equity studies, 80 Lam, Maivan, 69 ethics, 70 Lampe, Bill, 45 family, 12, 29, 140. See also individual Lassner, David, 51 family names Lau, Ken, 73, 87 siblings, 7, 11 Leahey, Jim, 107 family farm, 7, 10 Leslie, Larry, 30, 129 first marriage, 13 Lieberman, Mike, 73 fishing, 143, 144 Lingle, Linda, 89, 121 Hawai‘i visit, 19 Luke, K.J., 98 job interviewing, 62 living in a cocoon, 51 Mackey, Cecil, 71 local culture, 65–66, 77, 80, 117, 138, 142, Malahoff, Alex, 93 The Mortimer Endowment, 135 Martorana, S.V., 30 as National Commission on Trustees Masumoto, Harold, 60, 94 Selection staff member, 137 Matsuda, Fujio, 66, 71, 76 nicknames of, 15, 72 Mauna Kea Observatory. See University of organized sports participation, 8 Hawai‘i, Mauna Kea Observatory at Pennsylvania State University McClain, David, 71, 81, 89, 101, 130, as assistant to president, 31 137 as associate secretary of the board, 38 McConnell, T.R., 21, 23, 29, 72 as higher education and public policy McLendon, Michael, 95 professor, 32, 129 Michael, Jerry, 80 legacy, 44 Middleboro, Massachusetts, 3, 4 as provost, 33 Miwa, Ralph, 77 as vice president, 37, 39, 44, 81, 105 Mookini, Edward, 77 See also Pennsylvania State University Moore, Cornelia, 79 personal qualities, 15, 16 Morrison, Charles, 123 politics, 28, 69, 70, 106 Morrison, Jim, 129 post-UH presidency, 139, 140 Morse, Karen, 56 presidential contract and salaries, 51, 52 Mortimer, David, 3 reputation, 73, 141 Mortimer, Kenneth P. as research training fellow, as 23 administrative jobs, 130 research universities and community as analyst, 135, 136 colleges, 122 as Association for the Study of Higher as salesman, as 19 Education director, 31 as University of Hawai‘i president, 19, as author, 26, 33 118 The Art and Politics of Academic athletics, 49, 66, 110. See also Western Governance, 95 Athletic Conference Sharing Authority Effectively, 72, 73 and community, 118 at Boys State, 5 contract, 108 as budget-cutter, 33 fundraising, 98, 99, 135–36 business attire, 142 legacy, 89, 97, 133, childhood, 8, 11 Mänoa chancellor, 67, 69, 118 Christmas Island stranding, 143 on past presidents, 71 B-3

priorities, 83, 122 Center for the Study of Higher Education, reflections on presidency, 135–37 29 relationship with Board of Regents, extended learning, 128 138, 139, 141 faculty, 45 relationship with faculty, 83, 132 fundraising, 45 relationship with governor, 88, 90, 92, medical school, 86 133 school of communications, 37 resignation, 107, 109, 110 strategic plan, 32 selection process, 60, 61 structure of, 79 staff, 54, 75 student demonstrations, 46 ten-year UH projection, 102 Title IX, 47 Three R’s, 72 twenty-five–year chair, 38 travel, 101 University Park, 34, 37 values of, 7, 9, 47 See also Mortimer, Kenneth P.: at university as corporation, 28, 105 Pennsylvania State University See also University of Hawai‘i Perrin, Ken, 77 as Western Athletic Conference Peterson, Marvin, 129 chair/president, 111, 114. See also Western Athletic Conference Radcliffe, John, 97 as Western Washington University Raleigh, Barry, 77 president, 27, 50, 51, 55 Reagan, Ronald, 35 boards, 54 Research Corporation of the University of Hawai‘i legacy, 57 (RCUH), 94 selection process, 41 Rice-Cayetano case, 105 as WWU Foundation trustee, 51 Richardson, Bill, 36 as Wilson College trustee, 88 Rockefeller, Nelson, 95 Mortimer, Lorraine Murai, 10, 13, 16, 18, Roehrig, Stan, 78 20, 35, 42, 61, 62, 63, 64, 118, 130 Ross, Robert, 53 illness, 109, 140 at University of Hawai‘i, 61, 119 Saalbach, Ray, 17 at Western Washington University, 50, Sakaguchi, Rodney, 80 51, 54, 55 Sakamoto, Mike, 143 Mortimer, Mary Patricia, 2, 5, 7, 9, 10 San Francisco, California, 29 Mortimer, Richard Paul, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9 Sathre, Colleen, 140 Mortimer, Robert, 3, 13, 14, 15, 18, 117 Schraer, Rosemary, 34 Mountain West Conference, 114 Schreyer, Bill, 57 Murai, Ernestine, 13 Sheriff, Stan, 110 Musto, J.N., 93, 97 Shiramizu, Pepper, 60 Shoji, Dave, 117 Nagle, Kay Burton, 4, 12, 16, 135, 140 Simone, Albert, 59, 69, 71, 72, 75, 101 Najita, Joyce, 59, 60, Smith, Dean, 79, 85 Nakamura, Claire, 65 State University of New York, 127 Nantucket, Massachusetts, 5 Steinberg, Lee, 117 National Center for Higher Education Sullivan, Maurice, 98 Management Systems, NCHEMS, 34, 139 Sumida, Kenji, 81, 123 Neff, Charlie, 62 Tajiri, Harvey, 68 Okata, Russell, 76, 94 Takayama, Roy, 62 Oksenberg, Michel, 123, 144 Takushi, Jimmy, 88 Omnibus Personality Inventory, 23, 28 Tam, Rod, 70 Ono, Ruth, 62 Tanimoto, Larry, 41 Ostar, Alan, 40 Tatibouet, Jane, 3 Oswald, Jack, 31, 38, 86 Teramura, Alan, 85, 120 Toombs, Bill, 30 Paterno, Joe, 46 Topham, Jack, 5 Pauley family, 120 Trask, David, 119 Pearman, Bill, 78 Tseng, Rose, 77 Peck, Dick, 112 Tsunoda, Joyce, 65, 66, 76, 82, 84 Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Tungpalan, Eloise, 68 Universities, 39 Pennsylvania State University, 26, 31 University Health Alliance, 104 athletics, 46, 110 University of California at Berkeley automation of libraries, 81 faculty, 25 branding of, 100 Free Speech Movement, 26, 27 B-4

University of Hawai‘i student demonstrations, 27 accreditation, 134 Hawaiian programs, 85 admissions, 84, 131 tuition increase, 106 articulation process, 68, 130 SWAT deployment, 107 athletics, 110, 112–117. See also student-faculty ratio, 67, 68 Mountain West Conference; Western tenure of presidents, 109 Athletic Conference tuition, 87, 88, 89, 89, 103–105, 110. See autonomy, 89, 92, 95, 96 also student demonstrations: tuition Board of Regents, 69, 75, 81, 83, 91, 92, increase 108, 119, 136, 137 unions, 72, 73 as legislative body, 139 Hawai‘i Government Employees Association and neighbor island campuses, 127 (HGEA), 94 role of, 137 University of Hawai‘i Professional Assembly secretary, 137 (UHPA), 77, 90, 93, 96, 97, 110 structure, 138 See also Mortimer, Kenneth P.: as University of branding of, 100 Hawai‘i president budget and finances University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, 77 accounting system, 66 University of Hawai‘i at West O‘ahu, 77, budgets, 83, 101, 132 121 procurement, 91, 100, 101 University of Hawai‘i Foundation, 69, 88–89, 121, reallocation of resources, 83 125 revolving and special funds, 84, 101, 103 executive director, 76 building names, 70 Presidents Club Pau, 76 campus site selection, 66 University of Pennsylvania, 12 changes, 102, 104 Utah, 122 College Hill, 119 College of Business Administration, 81 von Appen, Fred, 116 community colleges, 69, 76, 77, 82, 84 Vucinich, Donna, 125 Hawai‘i Community College, 77 mission differentiation, 83, 85 Wagner Act, 72, 73 faculty and staff Wagner, Bob, 116 Administrative, Professional, and Technical Waihe‘e, John, 66, 88 (APT) employees, 92 Wakefield, Massachusetts, 3 recruitment, 78, 80 Wallace, Riley, 116, 117 federal government requests, 122 Watanabe, Mie, 80 four-four-four plan, 72, 85 Waterhouse, Alex, 116 Hamilton Library, 67, 81 Western Athletic Conference, 111 honorary doctorates, 69 Breakaway Eight, 112, 113, 114 intellectual property, 93 commissioner, 114 law school, 87 Western Washington University, 27, 40 lawsuits, 69, airplane accident, 53 maintenance, 85 appropriations, 58 Mänoa faculty senate, 130 branch campuses, 48 Maui University Center, 121 campus police, 43 Mauna Kea Observatory, 119 Center for Minority Affairs, 57 medical school, 79, 81, 86, 87, 104 and community, 54, 55 mission, 122 diversity, 57 neighbor island campuses, 68, 121, 127 fundraising, 44, 55, 56, 57 priorities, 85 presidents home, 50 Regents’ Medal, 70 selective admissions, 44 remedial education, 82 strategic plan, 54, 55 Research Training Revolving Fund and University of Washington, 43 (RTRF), 94, 104 Vehicle Research Institute, 56 retirement system, 75 See also Mortimer, Kenneth P.: as salaries, 77, 78, 80, 105 Western Washington University deflated, 75 president increases, 75 Western Washington University Foundation, payroll lag, 101 51 School of Library and Information Sciences, Wilder, Chuck, 56 81 Wong, Ed, 117 School of Public Health, 80, 81 School of Social Work, 121 Yanagimachi, Ryuzo, 93 strategic plan, 68 Yeshiva University, 72 structure, 80, 82 Yoshida, Hugh, 110, 111, 112, 117, 118 B-5

Yount, David, Who Runs the University?, 76 Yuen, Paul, 69, 75