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Pat Hayashi
And so I became a mail carrier for the campus. That’s how I started my career. And I did that for about a year and a half, delivering mail to campus departments. And that actually turned out to be quite a wonderful experience. I liked the people I was working with, I learned a lot about people. Some people were very polite, and very appreciative. Other people thought I was a servant, and not worthy of their attention or their courtesy. And so you learned a lot about people. And a lot of times I’d be carrying these heavy boxes, and you learn about students, so some students will open the door for you and hold it open. And other people will let it slam shut in your face. And so then you start paying attention to things like that.

Mamta Accapadi
Welcome to Student Affairs NOW the online learning community for Student Affairs educators, I’m your host Mamta Accapadi. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays, find us at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is sponsored by Leadershape. Go to leadershape.org to learn how they can work with you to create a just caring and thriving world. Today’s episode is also sponsored by Symplicity. A true partner Symplicity supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make data driven decisions. Stay tuned to the end of the podcast for more information about each of our sponsors. As I mentioned, I’m Mamta Accapadi, my pronouns are she her hers and I am broadcasting to you today from Austin, Texas. Austin Texas is situated on the unseeded ancestral homelands of the peoples. Today I have the honor of sharing space with one of my mentors, Dr. Pat Hayashi. Pat has an expansive constellation of lived experiences, some of which we’ll hear about today, as we continue to think about our duty of care to equity and inclusion in higher education. I’m especially moved by how his professional experiences model living the life of courage in support of the dignity of others. In 1988, he became the highest ranking administrator in the UC system. In 1999, he joined the UCs office of the president, where he served as associate president under President Richard Atkinson. After retiring in 2004, Pat took up art. If this brief introduction hasn’t piqued your excitement, about the stories that Pat has to share, you just wait. This is going to be a beautiful and amazing conversations. Okay, So Pat, thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Student Affairs NOW, and welcome to the podcast. I’m so excited. This is gonna be fun. So, you know, as as we start, and, you know, you’re somebody who I’ve known, I’ve had the opportunity to know, for quite some time. And so I don’t know how we contain an introduction of your journey. But we’re going to try so if we could start. Can you tell me a little bit about you, and how did you end up in higher education?

Pat Hayashi
I went to Hayward High School. And there was a class of 500. And I, my class ranking was 250. And so I was very proud of that. I think it’s relatively straightforward to be number one, or number 500. But be dead center. That takes. Obviously, I was not academic material. I went to San Jose State, mainly to play tennis. I was on their tennis team. And that’s how I thought about myself, mainly as an athlete. And that’s what I love doing. And I’m not exactly sure how. But one semester, I did very, very well. And I knew a lot of people who went to Berkeley and mainly through tennis, and I decided to try to transfer Berkeley So I transferred in my junior year. And I was a pre med student. And and I ran into chemistry one A, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on in that class. And I just rushed and also physics. And I didn’t flunk out, but I did very, very poorly. I withdrew and went to work at Western Electric as a mail carrier. And after nine months, I decided, well, I really should go back to school. But I’m clearly not going to go into medicine. So the only thing I really liked to do was read. And so I decided to transfer to San San Francisco State and study English literature there. But they turned me down. Because at the time, temp Cisco state was very strong in English. And this is one a lot of, you know, the beat movement was in force and, and a lot of people like to go to San Francisco State to study English. But because I had withdrawn from Berkeley on good standing, I could go back into Berkeley, and I majored in English. That was a huge mistake. Because I had two years, I was returning as a junior, and I had two years to make up for years of work. And so I was taking classes for oftentime, three LIT classes, you know, a semester, and I’d have to read five or six novels in a week, it was really hard, I had no idea what I was doing. And then they didn’t tell me that if you’re an English major, not only you have to read, you also have to write. Yeah, and I didn’t know how to write. And, and so it was hard. And so I graduated, I if you counted at all my physical education courses, I graduated with about a 3.0. And that wasn’t enough to get you anywhere. And so I became a mail carrier for the campus. That’s how I started my career. And I did that for about a year and a half, delivering mail to campus departments. And that actually turned out to be quite a wonderful experience. I liked the people I was working with, I learned a lot about people. Some people were very polite, and very appreciative. Other people thought I was a servant, and not worthy of their attention or their courtesy. And so you learned a lot about people. And a lot of times I’d be carrying these heavy boxes, and you learn about students, so some students will open the door for you and hold it open. And other people will let it slam shut in your face. And so then you start paying attention to things like that. Um, one afternoon, I was in the social sciences building, picking up mail, and, and I was walking down this corridor, and I hear and I said, I couldn’t believe it. Someone was whistling at me. And, and, and he keeps whistling and I ignore it. And I walked down a runs up and he catches up with me. And he says, didn’t you hear me? And I looked at him. And I recognized him. He was a very well known radical sociology professor, young guy. And he is, he says, didn’t you hear me and I said, you’ll do whistle and dogs and mailman. And he looked at me, looked at me up and down and said, Should I have called you sir? And he drops in my mail bag, about 50 envelopes that were stamped with his own stamps and handwritten. And they were clearly invitations to a party. And, and so I’m walking along, finishing my route, saying Don’t let it bother you. You’re a better person than he is. But after you say that for an hour, you realize that it is bothering you. So I went through I picked out his his packet of envelopes tonight. There were 50 and I took 25 and I threw them away and and it made me feel wonderful. Yeah. Oh, and I don’t know why I’m sharing this but I guess it gave me a sense of how it feels to be at the bottom of the pecking order and and how you can screw people up the people are there. So I then the campus opened a management training program And it was a brilliant program, the idea was that they would take young people. And, and I was in the first class or two of us selected out of several dozen. And the idea was we would rotate in the core programs such as accounting, purchasing, contracts and grants, human resources, to get a broad understanding of the basic administrative structure, and then, and then after that, departments could bid on you in order for your job. And it was a wonderful experience. And, and I learned a lot. And the first job I took was as a contract and grant negotiator, and, and in the contract is Sponsored Projects Office. And the it’s typically it’s more or less a routine clerical tasks, you check to make sure that the salaries requested or ridin, overhead rate is right and so forth. And, and, and there were different overhead rates for different agencies and the like. And, but I did something more than that, I actually read the grant proposals. And so for me, it was a form of continuing education and, and the grant proposals were wonderful they, they explained the state of the academic discipline, and where they fit in there, and why this proposal would advance the knowledge. And sometimes I had an opportunity to talk to some of the people, you know, one guy was studying petrified scats Oh, petrified feces in Peru. So he comes in and, and I, I said, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why would anyone want to study petrified scats? And he said,

Pat Hayashi
because you learn a huge amount about a society. If you study their scouts, you know, what they ate. And you will know whether they were a fishing community, agricultural community, hunters and gatherers, you know, they’re nomads, if you know what they ate, you’ll know if they cooked and how they cooked. And if you know what vessels they use, you know, what kind of technology they had evolved to, if you know, all that, then you then you know quite a lot about their social structure. I said wow, that’s really nice, you know, and so then I started meeting these proposals even more carefully. And then I went, I started working for the budget and planning office. And one of my jobs was to review proposed faculty appointments, and also proposed merited increases in promotions. And at the time, now, this was in the late 60s, at the time, the personnel form would come along with the complete personnel file. And, and so I was, I was just supposed to check the numbers, but I read everything. And these are the highly confidential person personnel reviews that are done secretly, you know, if a person is put up for tenure, that person’s file is set out to other faculty, and they give their secret candid assessment, and they were really candid. And so I got a look at the faculty appointment and review and promotion process like no one else ever would get, you know, who’s not privy to that. And that was a huge education.

Mamta Accapadi
It sounds like your English it sounds like your English major paid off all the reading.

Pat Hayashi
Yeah, yeah. Well, I just found it fascinating, you know, because I got a look behind the scenes. that were just that was rare. And as you know, you know, this stuff is in bank vaults now you can’t read stuff. And I wasn’t supposed to read it then. And then what happened was, in 1969, there was something called the Third World Liberation Front strike. Yeah, it started at San Francisco State, but it quickly spread to Berkeley. And one of my responsibilities was to set up the Ethnic Studies Department, the faculty agreed to have an ethnic studies department, partly because it was an extremely violent strike. The Wheeler auditorium for the largest lecture hall in the campus was burned down. A lot of the students on campus were armed. There was a lot of Black Panther involvement. And so the campus essentially said, Well, let’s try this. And so my job was to set up their budget. And there was African American Studies, Chicano Studies, Native American studies, and Asian American Studies. This was this was the moment where the term Asian American was coined. You know, we thought that the term oriental majority of colonial, you know, implications. And so I met with the student leaders, they were all students, grad students, undergrads. And they were very, very friendly. They were extremely militant, but they were very friendly to me. And, and, you know, they said, What did you study? And I said, Well, I was an English major. And he says, Well, we could really use you. Because we would like you were teaching this class on freshman Reading and Composition. And we’d love it if you taught. And I said, Geez, I barely graduated, you know, and I can’t do that. But I went over there. And I started working as a teaching assistant in one of their freshman composition classes. And then within, you know, one, ordered, we were ordered, then I became an instructor at my own class, develop my own syllabus, taught my own students in my own way. And that was fascinating because, as you know, the best way to learn something is to teach it, you know, and so I in the process, destroyed hundreds of students, but I came away learning how to write. And, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. At the time, there wasn’t any Asian American literature to speak of. There was very, very little Hispanic literature. Some Native American literature deaths got mamady for examples on the Berkeley faculty and, and so there was a lot of black literature. And, and so I ended up teaching on some Chicano literature and a lot of black literature and a James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Stokely Carmichael, you know, and and I found that it resonated with me. And, you know, their experience there were a lot of similarities between the black experience and and the Asian American experience, the racism. But, for me, the part that resonated most with the what I learned from James Baldwin, which was the helplessness and an accompanying rage that develops when you grow up in white society. And so I learned a whole lot about that. And then, because I had worked in the administration, I was the only one there who knew anything about how the campus worked. So within about a year, I became head of the program. By then I was 26 or 27, and head of an academic program, which was a joke, but, but because we’re mainly student run Institute Didn’t taught, we thought that we were preparing students for the revolution. And which would come momentarily. There were two black studies faculty were murdered. You know, in the Asian American studies, we held a court trial of two people who we thought were undercover agents. And the question was, should they be executed. And so that was the kind of atmosphere I grew up in. And all of it scared me because I’m scared of guns. I don’t like them at all. And, and but everyone, all my friends were armed, on campus in armed, heavily armed as well. And one of my one of my friends was guy named Richard, okie, Richard was the most militant of Asian Americans. He was the one who gave the Black Panthers their first weapons, and taught them how to use them. And he was a black panther. And he was always armed. And, and nearly always drunk. So that wasn’t a good combination. And he was a scary guy. Much later, it turned out that he was also an FBI informant. This was 30 years or 40 years after that he became legitimate. He joined the Alameda community college faculty became chair of their academic senate. And, you know, live this life of this former radical is now an academic leader at a good community college. And a an investigative reporter was doing research on that period. And he found through the Freedom of Information Act that Richard was an FBI informant. And he got his FBI files, and, by a mistake, they did not redact his name. So there was all you know, when he gave his reports and his name, and he was confronted by it by this by this journalists. And and I think his response was, Well, those were difficult times, complicated times. And then he, after a while, went home and killed himself. Because it just, you know, just couldn’t last.

Mamta Accapadi
Well, you know, as I would say, as I hear you reflect, I mean, there is a lot to be, I really appreciate you taking the time to paint the picture verbally, I know that you’re an artist, but to to verbally paint this picture for the rest of us who didn’t live during this time to understand what the climate and environment and sacrifices people made, but also, right, I mean, these are conversations that are that we are still having today about, you know, people’s sense of safety, whether they feel they should, you know, we that they should be armed or levels of trust, across dimensions of power. And so there’s, it’s just you paint the messiness so well, to just demonstrate how complicated and intense those times were and what it means to navigate through that and the grief and the price that people paid along along that journey.

Pat Hayashi
It was a tough time. One of the reasons I mentioned it, is because I’ve noticed that in a lot of student services leaders that I’ve met over my career, many of them have had a similar journey where they have had to deal with racial issues, usually by themselves. You know, I was fortunate enough in a movement and and it it points you in a certain direction. It makes you a little bit some your colleagues. Yeah, for sure. True. You know, I found out that one of my closest friends, a white guy was really involved in the anti war movement. You And, experienced similar things to what I, but it’s just not something that you shared.

Mamta Accapadi
Yes, or you openly talk about. So how do you get? I mean, I mean, you know, again, our conversation could go on for days, and we have limited time in this podcast together. How do you get from ethnic studies to the highest rank, Asian American administrator in the UC system? And you know, what, what did it mean for you to be in that position?

Pat Hayashi
What happened is, oh, in Asian American studies, I got burned out, I then my wife and I went to Japan with our daughter lived there for two years, I ended up being a grad student there. And I started to read about American higher education, and I read all the classics. And and I started to get a larger context of my experience. And so I wrote to public policy I wrote to a professor, I had Marty Trope, and Marty Trope was one of the was probably the foremost expert in higher education internationally, in the world. And so I wrote, and I said, I had taken a course from him. And Clark Kerr, that was interesting. Clark Kerr had been the president of UC. And, and someone noticed that after he had been fired, in, he returned to his economics chair that he had been taught a course in two years. So they, they had to put together a secret course. And they, and I was asked in public policy, if I wanted to take it, it was restricted to 12 students are all grad students. And we sat in this round this seminar table. And then outside of us, were about 20, faculty wanted to Clark Kerr and Marty tro have a conversation about higher education. And I thought that Clark Kerr would mail it in that, you know, he would just go through the motions, but that’s not Clark. He, every, every week, they came in with their latest thoughts, in well developed, and they had this amazing conversation between them. And so then I had the privilege of just hearing people talk and think, paper and so forth. And, but I, that was the first time I got to know, Marty. Marty, ended up being my dissertation chair. And he taught, taught and treated me very, very well, he spent a lot of time with me, introduced me to be leaders in higher education, like he would take me to lunch when he had met with Clark Kerr, in turn, treated me very, very decently. And so for some reason, you know, I was suddenly off talking to the top people in the world. And I said, wow, that’s interesting, you know, and, and so that’s, that’s, you know, after I got back from Japan, I went to work in Student Services. I headed up student conduct.

Pat Hayashi
And I remember thinking, how am I going to get out of this job? Because I, rate work with rapists, demagogues and cheats, you know, that’s kind of your client. And, and I said, Should I do a really bad job, a really good job. And but what happened is, or a lot of anti apartheid demonstrations at the time. And so I got involved in protests management. And I’m sure you experienced this when, when there’s a crisis on campus and student services, personnel come out. There kind of two types of people, people who show up and move to danger. And people who disagree, you know, and go, you know, I thought that, yeah, yeah. And I ended up in the group that showed up. And, and so I got to know some people. And I was there was a protest management group that those chaired often by the Chancellor more often by his assistant and we became close friends. And so one of the things I learned is that in a crisis, the hierarchy flattens, and if you’re there, people get to know you. And you get to know yourself under, under difficult circumstances, scary circumstances sometimes. And then you have to, you have to kind of keep a civil hand and budget and eat, and I’ve seen some terrible things, you know, that was students were build a shanty town around the Chancellor’s building. And it was a fire hazard. And so then, after a couple of weeks, they decide that they have to go and arrest the students and the buses come in at the middle of night. And then they start to arrest they make this announcement they start to arrest but and then the students protesters are passively resist. But another group, which are much more militant passive students were passively resisting, well, this, police handcuffed them, this more militant group starts throwing bricks and rocks over the police line into the demonstrators. And the police go crazy. And they broke legs and everything. And so you’re there and you’re watching all this and you just learn a lot about what can go wrong. And then, because of that experience, I was made the assistant to the chancellor, and special assistant to the chancellor that’s like right hand person that and, and, and then there was a controversy over Asian American admissions, in 1986. Asian admission was going up steadily. 1986 is drops in and, and the community leader is accused campus of using illegal racial quotas. And, and which the campus was essentially doing. The they were worried about the rap of it becoming an Asian campus in the accompanying decline in white students. And so, so there was a four year controversy over this and it got national attention international attention in the because people in Hong Kong and Singapore and China, very interested in this and, and for Berkeley with with us, you know, reputation of being a progressive University. Chancellor was just mortified by this. And so it went on for four years. And then finally, largely at my urging, I suggested that he apologize. And he didn’t have to say that we intentionally discriminated. But he could say that we were not as sensitive as we should have been, which is what he did. And so then that broke the impasse and legislators were really joyful that he had done this. I got a lot of kudos for doing this, a community leader said Thank you, Chancellor Hayman, we appreciate this. We can’t help but notice that there is zero Asian Americans in leadership positions. And if you mean what you say your point at least one so I would meet with my first thing in the morning as soon as he came in, and and we would go today and you know, and he was he was a big man and he wouldn’t want to upset he would pace around and he said you know, pat the right should appoint an Asian American that were in the hell could I find one? That’s how my sales, record missions and find it in enrollment And it was a political?

Pat Hayashi
That’s when I became the highest ranking API and in the system. well, appointment was covered Newsweek, new times of wall, Asian Wall Street Journal is in your eagle and the Economist.

Mamta Accapadi
Yeah. So as I’m hearing you reflect, you know, as I hear you reflect on, you know, this journey, I mean, there’s so much of sometimes we think we have agency of our journey, and we do, but sometimes the journey chooses us. And as I kind of see, the moments, you know, these critical life moments, I feel, in retrospect, it looks like, like, there were, there was a moment that chose you, you know, whether you want it to be part of it or not. And you know, we haven’t necessarily unpacked that. But even as I think about now, so here, we are now, in the snapshot in time, you’re the highest ranked Asian American administrator in the UC system. I fast forward to today. Right. And, you know, just in October this past October, once again, the US Supreme Court, you know, was hearing arguments, you know, challenging race based considerations in admissions, right, with the students for fair admissions group, versus one versus USC and one versus Harvard. And, of course, the arguments are this, you know, are are the same arguments that we’ve heard as it relates to challenging and race based admissions, you know, that, that it’s a divisive across communities of color that, you know, there’s disproportionate benefit to black students and Asian American students are disadvantaged in the process. As you see this happening today. What comes up for you as you reflect on your own, because you’ve been part of these conversations throughout your career.

Pat Hayashi
In 1996, a group of people led by Ward Connerly, who is a Sacramento businessman, and also a regent of the University of California. He and a group of his co colleagues initiated proposition 209. This was a proposition that, if passed, would prohibit the use of racial preferences in college admissions. And, and it got a lot of support initially and a lot of opposition. And, and it got strong support from white and moderate support from Asians. And it was opposed by Hispanics, and blacks. I debated Ward one evening. And I said to this audience, I said, let’s take a vote. How many people here believe that it’s appropriate and valuable for Cal Berkeley, to have a football team? And everyone vote yes. And I said, How many people think that it’s important and valuable for Berkeley to have a competitive football team? And everyone vote yes. And then I said, How many people believe that that it’s appropriate to give high caliber athlete preference in admissions so that we can have a competitive football team? Everyone votes? Yes. Then I said, let’s stop and pause. We, as a group, have just established the policy principle that sometimes is necessary and proper to give admission preferences in order to meet an important institutional goal. And then I said, so the question facing us now is, is racial integration, an important institutional goal? And if it is, then it’s necessary and proper for us to give admission preferences to students from groups that are underrepresented. And then Ward Connerly, at that time, he was there. He jumped up here. said, he said that’s not fair. That’s not the question, you know, and then we went into it. But that’s what I believe most people say, well is this is unfair fair to individuals. And in a way it is on some level. But there are a lot of things that universities do. For example, preferences for legacies are done for the institutional purpose of getting money. And, and I’ve always thought, since well even before Brown versus Board of Education, that racial integration was an important goal of higher education. And so that sometimes means that you lead in someone from a certain group that doesn’t have the same qualifications as someone else. But it has every probability of doing well in the university and contributing to it and know, in the court case, that that part of the argument is being most compellingly by the the armed forces. Look, you know, the armed forces, academies are saying, we need, you know, racially integrated, or officer corps, because look at the diversity of our of our troops. Yes, we need affirmative action.

Mamta Accapadi
Have you ever found yourself? I know that sometimes when I engage these conversations, particularly, you know, I mean, sometimes we’re not exposed to the history, this systemic history that you talk about, right. And so we view the world kind of in our own singular lens, our own singular families experience not understanding the broad historical context. So have you ever found yourself in groups of communities of color or in your case of Asian Americans, you know, that that would disagree? Right?

Pat Hayashi
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots, lots of people disagree. But I tried to frame it, like I did with the debate with word economy, about that are larger goals. Yeah, you’re on the individual. And, and I also, you know, proposition 209. And so there are no racial preferences. And so then I was tasked with dismantling affirmative action. And one of the things that, that one of the beneficial aspects of that defeat was a you also, I believe that you also had to examine what we thought were the meritocratic criteria. Yes. And, and the principle one was the SAT, and we got into it, and I, and I was a call a trustee of the College Board, which owns SAT. And it’s a terrible test. Terrible. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, which is predict first year grades, that’s the only thing it says it predicts and, and yet people take it as some sort of important metric of merit, but it’s not. It’s history is in the eugenics movement in it had a lot of aspects about it that are terrible. It’s better now than it was before. The University of California because of a lot of work by a lot of people has, has abandoned the SAT forever. You know, and, and it just, we’re not confused as this is all an awful test, and we don’t need it. It doesn’t lead to better classes. It just is a convenient way to, to exclude people. So I think that’s one of the things the and I think, first of all, that the Supreme Court will strike down and formative action, and it’ll force good universities. To look at how they evaluate people at Berkeley. What we did is we moved to holistic admissions where we looked at the entire the whole person. We thought I thought that that would provide us cover to use surreptitious racial preferences. But it turns out that if you’re charged with acting, you know administrating a program lawfully people behave the law behave, you know, adhere to the law, so, so didn’t use racial preferences and black admissions drop precipitously, there’s no way of of, of, of there’s no alternative to racial preferences. If you use income, you get it, you get a lot of poor whites and Asians, so it can has a reverse impact. You know, on average, the black and Hispanic applicant, the average Black and Hispanic applicant is poor than the average white and Asian applicant. But there are a lot more for white and Asian applicants who tend to have higher grades than the poor black and Hispanic applicants. And so it backfires. If you use rank in high school, which people thought that? Well, let’s, let’s automatically admit the top 10% of each high school thinking that you’d get these are black high schools? Well, it turns out that there are urban black high schools in California there, they’re integrated in at the top of the poor high schools, or Asians. Or if you, you know, in in the rural area, there are whites. And so those those preferences, benefit whites and Asians and and so it’s tough.

Mamta Accapadi
Yeah, and it doesn’t, I guess, you know, as I hear you talk, at the end of the day, these processes don’t get to that core goal of systemic change, right, if we’re not going to understand that systems are set up in certain ways for certain communities to not have access far beyond it even before K, you know, if we’re talking in K through 12, and then you’re going along a pathway of the system, then, then certain communities are situated in a way that the opportunity is not available. Right, we’re accessible because of the metrics that we put in place, the infrastructures that we put in place.

Pat Hayashi
I agree with that. I think that Berkeley is doing a good job under under his current chancellor Carol Chris, to find other ways, really outreach, early intervention, special recruitment programs in the light, you won’t make up racial preferences, but it will mitigate it to a great deal, you know, no heightened awareness on campus about the importance of racial integration.

Mamta Accapadi
Well, we’ve talked, you know, so so far, we’ve talked a lot about kind of your work and your higher ed journey. And I know that it’s a very meaningful passion for you to talk about the journey that you’ve taken after retirement, right. And a lot of that is connected to personal well being for you. And I would love for you to share with us, you know, I just think so many of us, myself included, I just, you know, especially when you do identity based work or justice based work, there’s just so much heaviness. And you even talked about at a point in your journey where you experienced burnout. And so, what guidance would you offer us and kind of in your journey, your most recent set of journeys, how his well being or how has art played a role in your well being? What does wellbeing look like? What advice would you give us just, I’ll put a whole set of questions out there for you.

Pat Hayashi
I’m stepping back a little bit. You described me as courageous, I never felt courageous on I never felt brave. I never had a career plan. I never even had a career aspiration. I didn’t think well I do this and then I’ll do this. And I just sort of took what came my way in my career, I applied for one job. After that mail carrier job, I applied for one job and I didn’t get it. People just asked me to do things. And for example, when I became the highest rank API, and I didn’t apply for that job, it was given to me and and same with associate president of the system. I was just asked to do it. And but I think that one of the reasons I was able to, to handle the responsibilities was, first I was motivated throughout my career by this deep seated rage, that came from being born in a concentration camp and seen my family destroyed by account. And, and and that led to certain kinds of aesthetic and intellectual explorations, principally guided by James Baldwin and black writers. And at the same time, you know, as is clear from the work, I didn’t Contracts and Grants and I, I’m never bored. I find everything interesting. And if there’s something about, you know, petrified scats, I, that’s fascinates me. And so, for whatever job I took, things interested me. And so that kept me going. Never really quite understood the rage. But I knew it was related to race. And and I knew what kept me fighting. Now, I think, well, that’s too bad. Because I think I could have done what I did, without so much cost to me. And and I think that when I retired and took up art, and also simultaneously singing, that opened up riches for me, that if I had done that, for years earlier, it would have been, I would have been not only a much happier person, I think I would have been a nicer, kinder person. And I think I would have been more creative, politically, and organizationally. And so that, you know, I don’t have many regrets. But one regret is that I didn’t start singing and drawing a lot earlier. And there is one thing I’d like to talk about, micro aggressions, When I became, got my big appointment, jumped way up, I was suddenly at the cabinet level. And so at the beginning of the semester, there was a senior cabinet retreat at Bodega Bay for three days or so. And I go there, and I’m nervous. And, you know, I don’t think I belong there. And, and so some guy, for there, we’re talking about the new student body president. His name was Jeff Chang, who, incidentally turned out to become brilliant, you know? Yes. and stuff. And Time Magazine named him one of the 50 brightest young people in the United States. So, but they said, What do we know about the student government and the Student Body President Jeff Chang, and no one knew. And so the Vice Chancellor for Student Services, a guy named Mack Latch says, Well, I guess he’s inscrutable. And, and I’m sitting there. And I’m thinking, Oh, here it comes. Someone’s going to slap them down for using this racist stereotype. And, and no one says a word. You know, they’re 20 people. 24 people there no one says a word. And, and I’m thinking here at progressive, liberal, Berkeley, people let that kind of bullshit go. Finally, I’ve raised my hand and my voice is just trembling. And I say people out asked me what it’s like to be the only Asian in an executive level position. And I said, for that I tell them for the most part, it’s wonderful. You know, I get to work on really intriguing issues, policy issues, political issues. And I get to work with very, very talented, dedicated, hardworking people.

Pat Hayashi
But I find that it’s like walking across the stage, chatting with people on both sides of me. And we’re having a good time. And then some fool will make a racist comment. And it’s like a sandbag on a rope coming out of the rafters and knocks me head over heels. Just knocks my head. But no one else notices. So when I say that is dead quiet, right? No one says a word. And Chancellor Heyman calls for a recess. And during the break, a couple of people said we don’t understand why he why Mack Latch behaves that way. And but they didn’t say it in public. They didn’t say it in public. You know, and I’m thinking it’s a public statement. That’s important. It’s not the private commiseration and support. And then, a week later, the highest ranking woman in the UC system. Doris Callaway, who is the vice president, who is the provost for professional schools and colleges, invites me to lunch. And she was a world famous expert on nutrition. And she had in her office, a big poster that said, hunger is violence. And so she was talking. And she said that when she was appointed to be the highest ranking woman in the system, one of her first meetings when she was invited to the College of Engineering by the Dean of the College named Karl pistor. Really good man. And, and they’re about, I think, Tandy, departments in the College of Engineering. So she’s meeting with all the department chairman. And they were all chairman. And, and Carl introduces Doris as the professional schools and colleges, Old Mother Hubbard. And, and, wow. And she says that she really respects Carl knows he’s a good person, and didn’t want to make an issue there. But when she got back, she sent him an immediate note about why this is hurtful, inappropriate, you know, and so forth. And as she’s telling me this, and I said, Well, what did Carl do? He said, she said, He immediately called me and apologized and thanked me for helping him learn. And so I realized it later that the reason she invited me to lunch, if she was telling me that as sexism has always been part of her career, and always will be. Racism will always be part of my career. And, and it would be wise for me to develop a repertory of responses. And as you know, oftentimes, you get blindsided, when you least expect it from people you don’t expect it from, right. And in situations where you’re kind of, it’s hard to be articulate hard, just speak up. And so she was saying, that’s the way it’s going to be. But you can’t be silent. You have to find ways to respond. And so I started to find different things. And so, you know, when things happen, I remember what doors did and I would write a letter and give it to the person right away. And you know, and so I actually thought that that was a good thing that because it not only did I experienced it, I actually got real genuine support from a colleague.

Mamta Accapadi
Yeah, I think it’s interesting, right, as I hear you reflect on this, too. And I, I don’t know how I feel about the term microaggression? Because that’s such a it’s, they’re not they’re not micro.

Pat Hayashi
I know exactly. Yeah.

Mamta Accapadi
There’s nothing micro about it. And I think about, you know, as I think about you and me, for example, generationally, and I think, you know, there are sacrifices that you have made that I shouldn’t have to make, because you’ve made them. Right. And so, you know, and so I think, when I, when I experienced micro aggressions, I sometimes have a different response, because I’m like, we’re in 2023. Now, right? And so I get, you know, not that not that I’d give it a free pass in 1993. But we’re in 2023. So, like, what responsibilities have shifted what, you know, what should we be expected to know as time has progressed, and, but what really rings true for me, and this connects to an earlier part of something that you said, is the rage that comes from the racism that we experience. So the rage that comes from the racism, we experience, combined with what it takes for us to be effective, when we are in these senior roles, if we’re talking about people, like in your past and my past. And, and that’s not a fair or unfair conversation is just a, it’s a conversation, right? So I’m not suggesting that it’s fair, that I have to find a repertoire or that you should have to find a repertoire to elegantly respond to micro aggressions, but that is the situation we find ourselves in. And the agency we have is how do we, how do we contribute to our own healing, even though we didn’t cause right, the racism that we experienced it, that our own healing allows us to lead a joyful life? Like, as you reflect on if I had taken up these other forms of expression earlier on, perhaps my life would have been healthier, right? Or, you know, I could I could, there are different coping strategies that I could have as I moved through being playing my part to dismantle the isms. But it’s, I mean, I’m so glad you mentioned it. Because it lets people like me know, and the people, the podcast listeners and audience know, we’re not alone, right. This is, you know, as folks experienced that, or if, if we are the one who has committed to micro aggression, you know, that hopefully, we can recognize the impact and take responsibility, you know, for our dismantling of those things.

Pat Hayashi
Well, I think your first statement was very important that micro? Yeah, misnomer, right. Maybe we should find different words. Yeah.

Mamta Accapadi
But you know, I just think over time, right? I mean, the microaggressions over time, right? It is, when you think about series, a lifetime of paper cuts, right? It then really is a different, significant impact on one’s well being in presence, and spirit. And so,

Pat Hayashi
how have you handled?

Mamta Accapadi
Well, you know, I feel like I’m a work in progress. So I don’t know. I like you, I feel like I’ve taken on taking care of myself. Later that I would have liked but hey, you start when you know, right, when you know better do better. So I’m thankful for the significant focus on my own personal well being now I think motherhood has done that for me to where all of a sudden, it’s, you know, what am I what? How am I contributing Joy to the world? Even if I if joy has been taken from me, right? So those are separate conversations still, what is my responsibility to create? And so I think that’s why I was so drawn to your focus on art and music because you found a way to contribute your career, you’ve contributed a great deal to humanity and human experiences, but this opportunity to create something that is more loving. Yeah, even if you may not have experienced that, right. So oftentimes, pain begets pain, right? And that’s the cycle and then that doesn’t, that doesn’t heal anything. But it takes a lot of I’m going to use your word courage, right? It takes a lot of courage to disrupt the cycle because disrupting that cycle. That’s where the significant amount of self worth worth the work is. And that’s the hardest work to do.

Pat Hayashi
There is a black psychologist, I forgotten his name it, I think it might be something like Menachem Rasma who believes that people of color almost from the moment they’re aware of life, start to experience racial violence, and they embody the trauma. We embody the trauma so it’s it’s crippling, it’s explosive. And it’s sometimes for me, it helps explain why I can just go off. And it’s also why it’s important to do kind of physical things that help you get on set. You know, I went to a, a retreat, or administrative faculty retreat, where the heads of the different academic Senate’s about different campuses, along with administrative, there was a large retreat. And the topic was gender equity and racial equity. And I don’t remember much about it. But I remember being in small groups discussions and people talking, and I was with two other Asians. One was ahead of the academic senate. Indian man, and my colleague, young Chinese woman and me, were sitting there. And sitting close to us, were these two women, white women, one of them was the head of the academic senate. Incoming head of the Academic Senate, the other was a high ranking Senate member from the Berkeley campus, both social scientists, and and they somehow were talking about Asian male faculty. And they just said, Oh, they’re no different from white male faculty. Now, and the and the only Asians in the room were us that day. So I called them on it.

Pat Hayashi
And they, they became chagrin, and, you know, flustered and apologetic and, and then I wrote to them after saying, saying, why it was so offensive? And, and, and also, how could they say something when the only Asians in the room were in here, you know, earshot of you. And if you don’t have a lot of friends who are Asian, and you don’t get a beggar. And so because I was the associate president to, to Dick Atkinson, I had to I tell him about it, because, you know, in some ways I represent him. And then I wrote a letter to the head of the Academic Senate, to let him know what had happened. And the there was a Vice President for Health Sciences. He was a black man, who is now the president of the UC system, Michael Drake. Michael and I were not close, but but we had some warm interactions. He he asked me if I would have been in a in a internment camp. And I said, Yes. And I explained it to him. And, and I said, Why don’t you ask? And he said, because my son is writing a paper on it. And I said, Geez, that’s nice, you know. And so then he brought in the paper, he said, You know, I’d like to share this with you. So I read his son’s paper. And so, you know, I have a library of books related to the camp, so I gave him an art book related to camp. And the son wrote a thank you note. And so I showed because we had talked about race has come friends. I showed him the letter I wrote. And he comes down to my office. And he said, I just want to suggest to you, Pat, that if you ever experienced something like this I’m here to talk to you. Wow, what a kind thing to say. And I’m thinking, I don’t think I’ve heard that very much in my career. You know? So though, you would think that at a certain level, yes. You would hear that a lot. You know, what other people are struggling with? You know how hard it is? You know, how lonely it is? When I said, Wow, so when he became the first black president of the UC system, I said, I’m so glad.

Mamta Accapadi
Yeah. I mean, it’s all about the energy, right? I mean, just in that very simple, I’m here to talk to you. I mean, that that is open. It’s an invitation. There’s nothing value laden about that invitation. There’s nothing with a positive, over overtly positive tone or an overtly negative tone, but it’s, it’s just that, that I’m here, and we are connected. And I think it’s one of the greatest gifts that we could give each other in community overall, right. But even across race, I love that this also happens to be in across race interaction, because I think sometimes we think we have to carry our things only internal to our own communities, right, when there’s a lot of partnership across community. So I get these, you know, I just really appreciate your time and your spirit. as I as I expected, our time would fly. And so here we are, sir, time is flown by. I want to thank you so much for for this conversation, I feel like I need to have another conversation, and so many more to kind of just continue to I can talk I can talk with you and listen to you for days. So I’m just so grateful for your time and wisdom and just for your spirit today as a guest on Student Affairs NOW. And, you know, your commitment to educators like myself and those people like, I feel like I’ve had this opportunity to get to know you over time, a little bit over time. But even for, you know, to share this gift with so many people who will now you know, get a tiny insight into you, I just think is really, really exciting. So, with that, I’m going to now to take a moment to thank our sponsors again, Leadershape and Symplicity, we totally appreciate your support. Leadershape partners with colleges and universities to create transformational leadership experiences both virtual and in person, for students and professionals with a focus on creating a more just caring and thriving world. Leadershape offers engaging learning experiences on courageous dialogue, integrity, equity, resilience, and community building. To find out more, please visit www.leadershape.org/virtualprograms or connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Symplicity is the global leader in student services technology platforms with state of the art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals. A true partner to the institution Symplicity supports all aspects of student life, including but not limited to Career Services and Development, Student Conduct and well being students access and accessibility services. To learn more, visit symplicity.com and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And much love and a huge shout out a shout out to Natalie Ambrosey, the the producer for the podcast. Nat does all of the behind the scenes work to make us look good and sound good. And so Nat, thank you so much. And finally, if you all are listening, or if you’re listening today and not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at studentaffairs now.com and scroll down to the bottom of the homepage to add your email to our MailChimp list while you’re there You can also check out the archives which are very rich. Finally, I’m the Mamta Accapadi. Much love and gratitude to everyone who is watching and listening. Please make it a beautiful week that honors your soul and spirit and ancestral wisdom. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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