Category Archives: Education

Another vintage memory restored: Somewhere near Whitman College c.1967

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I’m sure you’ll spot me immediately. I was a sophomore at Whitman College at the time the photo was taken during the Spring of 1967. Location-somewhere near the Whitman campus in Walla Walla, Washington. I can place it because I spent the next academic year at UH trying to build my grades and my confidence before returning to Whitman to graduate. By the time of my senior year, several people in this photo had graduated. So best guess–late Spring semester 1967.

The photo captures a group of Delts–members of Whitman’s Delta Rho chapter of Delta Tau Delta fraternity during a “kegger”–an outdoor gathering somewhere out in the countryside centered on a large keg of cold beer–in a “secret” location we all referred to as “Delt Island.”

The location was passed on each year to the few Delts who had cars and would be called on to ferry groups out to the island for these occasions. I recall that a man known as “Orville” would approach in his truck to check on our gatherings. A cold beer would be thrust into his hand as soon as he exited the truck. I doubt he was the owner, but he might have been. Or perhaps just an employee in charge of maintaining order. But, for whatever reason, the Delts were invited to party there. Must have been some history, which would have been interesting to know.

I suppose my grades for the first two years at Whitman might have been better of I had picked up books more regularly than I picked up beer mugs!

This photo was restored from the scan done years ago of an old B&W print from one of my stashes of photos. It was done by Google’s Gemini after ChatGPT refused to process the photo, saying that it could violate the company’s policies regarding teens and children. I tried to reassure ChatGPT that these were college friends, but to no avail. But Gemini processed the photo without delay.

Okay, to be honest, there are a lot of underage drinkers in this photo, including myself. But officialdom seemed to look the other way and ignore these common infractions. And we all thought it was perfectly normal. As I recall, I became a regular at the Green Lantern, a popular college hangout, before my 20th birthday. I think my claim of legal age had been vouched for by someone trusted by the management, and after that I just walked in and ordered another beer without being carded. I guess it was good for business, although beer cost almost nothing in those days. A dollor or two per large pitcher, as I recall.

The bold colors in this restored photo are unnaturally strong and bright. That’s really kind of a problem. But I’ll have to experiment with prompts that direct Gemini to tone them down in a reasonable manner.

Time to be giving back

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Well, there’s nothing like close brush with one’s mortality to remind that it’s time to start letting loose of the purse strings.

Meda retired from the University of Hawaii in 2020 after a startling 50 years on the university payroll, starting when she was still a grad student and continuing through her years teaching at Honolulu Community College and on to the Manoa Campus. At that time, we followed my mother’s lead and created an endowed scholarship fund in College of Social Sciences by initially contributing just enough to establish the fund, which provides scholarships to students in the UH Women’s Studies Program. We’ve added to it modestly over the past several years, with the plan that it will eventually be boosted with a larger infusion of cash from our estates.

Using funds my mother inherited as a beneficiary of the estate of George Galbraith, she had previously established two different scholarship funds to benefit University of Hawaii community college students, one in her name and one in her mother’s name.

And we are just wrapping up the process of setting up the Chesney Lind Scholarship Endowment at Whitman College, where we both graduated in the Class of ’69. This will be the first scholarship intended to benefit Whitman students from Hawaii. We took advantage of an offer of matching funds to establish an endowment they expect to generate nearly $10,000 a year for scholarship aid.

Now we’ll take a breath and hope these scholarships will make a difference in the lives of future students at both institutions!

Judge blocks Trump administration attacks on California universities

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U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin issued a preliminary injunction on Friday prohibiting the Trump Administration and its agencies from cutting or blocking current or future funding or grants to the University of California system or its faculty and staff “with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.”

“Plaintiffs have submitted overwhelming evidence” in support of their claims that Trump’s actions have violated rights guaranteed by the First and Tenth Amendments, and failed to follow legally required administrative procedures in the process, Judge Lin wrote in her order.

“Defendants do not deny any of this,” she found.

“The undisputed record demonstrates that Defendants have engaged in coercive and retaliatory conduct in violation of the First Amendment and Tenth Amendment,” Judge Lin wrote. “It also shows that they have flouted the requirements of Title VI and IX and cancelled funding in an arbitrary and capricious manner while ignoring required procedural safeguards.”

Here, I’m including the full text of the introductory section of her order granting a motion for a preliminary injunction.

INTRODUCTION
Plaintiffs have submitted overwhelming evidence. Across 74 declarations and more than 700 pages of supporting documents, Plaintiffs show that the Administration and its executive agencies are engaged in a concerted campaign to purge “woke,” “left,” and “socialist” viewpoints from our country’s leading universities. Agency officials, as well as the President and Vice President, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune. Universities are then presented with agreements to restore federal funding under which they must change what they teach, restrict student anonymity in protests, and endorse the Administration’s view of gender, among other things. Defendants submit nothing to refute this.

It is undisputed that this precise playbook is now being executed at the University of California. Defendant Leo Terrell, who heads the Administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, publicly stated in a news interview that the UC had been “hijacked by the left” and vowed to begin investigations. The Department of Justice and Department of Education have
opened a series of civil rights investigations into the UC. On July 29, 2025, in one of those investigations, DOJ issued a Notice of Findings to UCLA concerning its handling of antisemitism during 2024 student protests. Defendants did not engage in the required notice and hearing processes under Title VI for cutting off funds for alleged discrimination, nor did they
mention the remedial steps UCLA had already taken to address the issues described. Instead, within 72 hours, the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy abruptly froze $584 million in research funding to UCLA, citing alleged civil rights violations. And at least one of those agencies, NSF, has acknowledged that it is under instructions not to approve any new grants to UCLA. About a week later, on August 8, 2025, DOJ proposed a settlement to restore funding, which would require UCLA to review its DEI programs, change its handling of student protests, and adopt the Administration’s views on gender, among other things. The UC has not stated whether it will agree. However, UC President James Milliken called the situation “one of the gravest threats in UC’s 157-year history.” The UC receives more than $17 billion per year in federal funding. Defendant Terrell has vowed to take “every single federal dollar” from the UC and similar universities, if they do not accede.

Defendants do not deny any of this. Instead, their principal argument is that the UC might not agree to the proposed conditions for restoring funding, so Plaintiffs’ present case is too speculative to be heard. But Plaintiffs’ harm is already very real. With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratchetting up Defendants’ pressure campaign. And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how Defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system. They describe how they have stopped teaching or researching topics they are afraid are too “left” or “woke,” in order to avoid triggering further funding cancellations by Defendants. They also give examples of projects the UC has stopped due to fear of the same reprisals. These are classic, predictable First Amendment harms, and exactly what Defendants publicly said that they intended.

The undisputed record demonstrates that Defendants have engaged in coercive and retaliatory conduct in violation of the First Amendment and Tenth Amendment. It also shows that they have flouted the requirements of Title VI and IX and cancelled funding in an arbitrary and capricious manner while ignoring required procedural safeguards. None of the jurisdictional hurdles raised by Defendants prevent the issuance of preliminary injunctive relief to stop the ongoing and imminent harms that Defendants are undisputedly causing. Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction is GRANTED, for these reasons and those further explained below.

At the conclusion of her order, after spellling out the evidence of constitutional violations, Judge Lin point to specific examples of actions by the administration that would violate the First Amendment rights of plaintiffs in the case.

To be clear, examples of conditions on the grant or continuance of federal funding that would violate the First Amendment rights of Plaintiffs’ members would include, but are not limited to:

• Requiring the UC to make hiring, firing, or funding decisions on the basis of Plaintiffs’ members’ protected speech or freedom of assembly.

• Requiring the UC to restrict its curriculum, scholarship, or research based on the Defendants’ preferred viewpoints.

• Requiring the UC to screen international students based on “anti-Western” or “anti-American” views and/or “socialize” international students to favored “norms.”

• Requiring the UC to institute reporting requirements concerning Plaintiffs’ protected speech or freedom of assembly.

• Requiring the UC to adopt specific definitions of “sex,” “male,” and “female,” or adopt Defendants’ favored views as to gender or gender affirming care and disallowing inconsistent speech by its faculty, staff, or students.

• Restricting how the UC decides scholarship awards, hiring, or admissions, beyond what current constitutional or statutory law requires.

The full text of Judge Lin’s order follows.

The attack on Kamehameha admissions reflects an outdated viewpoint

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Now that a conservative group is preparing for a legal assault on admission policy of Kamehameha Schools, which favors students with “Native Hawaiian ancestry,” I thought I would share my own perspective.

The phrasing of the group’s challenge makes it sound as if Kamehanmeha uses the “Native Hawaiian ancestry” criteria to create an ethnic barrier to entry for those with other ethnic backgrounds, a sort of educational apartheid.

In reality, that is simply not the case. And Kamehameha’s student body confounds attempts at categorization that rely on traditional understandings of ethnicity and race.

I went searching for a statement of what “Native Hawaiian ancestry” means. In my day, I remember being told you needed to claim something like 1/32 Hawaiian blood, based on genealogy. I couldn’t find any statement on Kamehameha’s website about a current blood quantum.

Apparently that’s because this metric is no longer used, if it ever actually was, according to Google’s review.

Ancestry requirement, not blood quantum. Applicants must submit documentation verifying they have at least one ancestor who was Hawaiian before 1959. Unlike the Hawaiian Home Lands program, which has a 50% blood quantum requirement, Kamehameha has no minimum blood quantum.

What does this mean?

Recall that Hawaiians had a very high out-marriage rate of any ethnic group going back 200 years, meaning that a large percentage of Hawaiians married non-Hawaiians beginning soon after western contact. Hawaiian women married or had childrfen with non-Hawaiian men at a high rate.

Hawaii’s census originally categories were simply “Native” and “non-Native.” Early in the 1800s, outmarriage by Hawaiians quickly gave rise to the term “hapa-haole” to refer to those of mixed Hawaiian and European or American ancestry. This later was turned on its head and “part-Hawaiian” became the term for a mixed family background.

Whatever the terminology, the result of a century of dramatic decline in the Native Hawaiian population as a result of introduced diseases, coupled with high outmarriage, has left painfully few “Hawaiians” today who are not also a multitude of other ethnicities, with Hawaiian often being a relatively small part of their overall ancestry.

In high school, I had a girlfriend who graduated from Kamehameha. She looked Hawaiian, but would proudly chant down her heritage, and I recall it went like this: “Hawaiian, Indian, Dutch, Scotch, English, Irish, Chinese, Portuguese, German.”

I’m guessing this is relatively typical, although the specific ethnicities might be different today.

When you look at Kamehameha students as a group, visually they are as multiethnic as you can imagine. There are haole-looking blonds, those who appear asian, and Hawaiians, both those who look stereotypically Hawaiian and those who do not. If you had a large group of Kamehameha students and asked, “How many of you are [fill in the ethnic group]?” a lot of hands would go up. Call out any ethnicity, the response would be the same.

So it’s just wrong to look at Kamehameha as being based on some kind of ethnic segregation. In practice, it is quite the opposite, it’s hard to find any group that has been excluded. Kamehemeha has created probably the most diverse group of students to be found anywhere, rich in a variety of ancestries. It’s a mix that confounds traditional ways of viewing and understanding race and ethnicity, inclusion and exclusion.

The big question remaining, I suppose, is whether the law can accommodate such an understanding.