 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. One. Okay, bingo. We're back. This is Think Tech on a given Tuesday. I'm having lunch with my partner Ed Bendett today. As I have for the past 50 years, hi Ed. Shout out to Ed. This is Peter Hoffenberg, Peter H. Hoffenberg, who was a history professor, or shall I say, an associate history professor. Associate professor? Yes. Thank you. You know, we talk to a lot of science guys, but we don't talk to people in history and civics, and in my view, that's really important in our time, and we haven't been teaching that much history to the electorate, and they may have issues about exercising the franchise because they don't know about history. So this is like a peek into something at UH that we need to know about. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Great to have you here. Thank you. Nice shirt by the way, too. Thank you. Great minds think alike. We didn't plan this. I want to be clear. It's like you're going to Las Vegas with the slot machine, and it comes up bingo. Can we win something? Well, mine's a little tight. Maybe you won something. Switch? Yeah, sure. So Peter, you know, what's it like at UH Manoa from, you know, the point of view of a history professor. It's different than doing, you know, research on the stars, the moon, on chemistry, on plant, you know, plant science, or physics, what have you. This is different. And somehow in a way, this is more mainstream to the future of our country, isn't it? I think that they're both mainstream. And I would say being humanities or arts and humanities professor is a very good life. It is a very secure life. The scientists often depend upon soft money, governmental money. We don't. So we have a great advantage to be able to teach students honestly. There are no, at least in my department, there are no pressures about what you cannot research. It's essentially an exercise in good, open scholarship. And you have the opportunity to share it with your students. All worlds are imperfect. But I think that sometimes we think of both what is good and what is bad and why is being unique. So a lot of the difficulties with humanities and social sciences are shared throughout the country. Yeah. And at the same time, we have some unique opportunities here. Yeah. Well, first, you know, I do want to talk about Minoa and UH. And I want to offer a disclosure thing or a disclaimer thing that you're not speaking for UH here today. You're speaking for yourself. These are your views. We're going to be talking. Right. I have many personalities. I'll just say I'm speaking for my personalities. Right. Fair enough. So what's it like? What's it like teaching history and related subjects at UH Minoa these days? You've been there a long time. 25. 20 years. So you were baskin that. Right. I mean, Riley Wallace's days. Yeah. It's way back. Right. You've seen a lot of action, too. Oh, I have. I mean, you waited. Some good, not so good. Yeah. I remade all we've done a number of shows about some of the historical protests and controversies at UH. You've seen a lot of that. I think I've been part of those pretty much all the sniffing at ones since Professor Lee in the Vietnam War. I was going to mention this. I think Lee, though, is still, I think, the mountain of protest. And obviously, the Supreme Court, the most significant protest here. But no, we've had some tumultuous times, although in general, the union and the university and the legislature, unlike the federal government, have generally gone to the cliff and not leaped off. So closures are rare. Why does this remind me of a certain photograph that Professor Lee showed us? Because we covered him when he talked at the Harvard Club about a year ago. And a remarkable photograph of some student hanging off the side of a building and the students below sort of catching him as he fell. Right. It was an example of the, oh, I don't know what you want to call it, the violence, if you will, of those protests. Well, I think it's an important reminder that amidst all this talk about American society disintegrating. I think any historian who's spent more than one semester in a classroom will remind you that comparable to the American Civil War, comparable to the violence of reconstruction, I'm sure your parents, like my parents, live through the Great Depression. I know we have our difficulties, but actually the disintegration of society is not comparable to those. And in a way that picture reminds us that the Vietnam War colliding with civil rights, colliding with some rather horrific racial behavior in this country did bring us pretty close in the late 60s. And that, of course, the two assassinations. And Oliver Lee is really unchanged after all these years. Well, I think it happens, you know, and my parents were unchanged by the Great Depression. I mean, these are momentous affairs. I think much of what we're going through now will pass, will be changed. But I'm not so sure it's going to be quite as transformative as either those who want the transformation or those who want to stop the transformation will be. You know, a fellow named Richard Hornick spoke at the China seminar maybe three weeks ago, and he talked about mind control in China. And little by little, I have seen that seeping into the press. And the worst aspect of it is that before, say, five years ago in China, there was a kind of academic freedom in the universities. But now Xi Jinping is closing that down, and you are penalized if you go off track when you speak or engage a class in China, any university right now. And some universities are favorite universities for him because they only do the party line. But I wonder if you see that kind of process happening here. I mean, what's the state of freedom of academic speech in your classes and on campus? OK. So again, it's only my personal view. Of course. Knowing my colleagues and talking to my colleagues. And to be honest with you, at least in our university, I have never experienced official repression in any way. So no dean, no chair, no administrator. I think like much of life, colleagues and public opinion shape you much as much as the government. John Stuart Mill worried in the middle of the 19th century that what would suppress free speech would not be the government. It would be the need to get along or the need not to offend or the need to be accepted. And I think that at least at UH, that's much more likely to be an issue than David Lassner, our current chancellor and president, or Dean Peter Arnaudy, our current dean. We may have lots of financial disagreements. But I have never, in my 25 years, I don't think I've ever seen a university superior tell somebody you can't assign a book or you can't lecture about that. We are given relative freedom to teach. Now, that means responsibility, though, right? It means to address what our students need and their particular needs for our students here coming out of the school system. I think it means appreciating, particularly in Manoa, the political history of Manoa. You don't have to go to one extreme or other. But I mean, Manoa has a different kind of political history than, say, UCLA as a large public university. I would say that at times there are organizations or groups who may or may not put pressure on certain people. But again, usually at UH, people do as they did in East Germany. They walk with their feet. They just don't show up to events. So probably many of your viewers or listeners have seen pictures of certain student groups being shut down or people being attacked. I cannot remember that, to be honest, in my 25 years. Well, this is good. This makes, in my view, this makes- But again, that's my personal. Somebody else might have experienced it, but I don't remember that. This makes University of Hawaii superior in that way, I think, because there are schools on the mainland that do not enjoy the same level of freedom. Am I right? I would say that don't enjoy the same level of freedom. I think it's a matter of certain issues have become lightning rods, where students may be in a classroom which is not censored, but ideologically bound in one direction or other. And certainly there are certain groups that have felt threatened on campuses. And those things are not from what I can see happening here. I mean, there are groups that are underrepresented at UH. We should, there's certain efforts we should make, particularly, I think, with local high school kids, to reach out and build a stronger relationship between Farrington and Manoa, or Kahuku and Manoa, and shouldn't just be the football team, or it shouldn't just be training kids to pull towels for hotels. And we have a real opportunity, maybe one of the few opportunities in their lives, for a kid from Kahuku to come and learn about French poetry. But those are also issues that are not just under our control. They are under the government's control as far as, for example, financial aid. Funding, yeah. Right. And there's a lot of pressure, I would say, if you ask sort of the restraints on kids, I think at Manoa, perhaps the single most significant constraint is to pay for and get a degree in four years. So the federal government, in fact, doesn't encourage people to change majors. It doesn't encourage people to go to school for more than five or six years. And those are all things which are more amorphous, I know, but are very important, many of our kids work. It means you'd be able to do that. To be able to come to Manoa, to afford to be able to go to Manoa, most of the kids work, or at least many of the kids work. Interesting. And people like musicians, athletes, lab scientists, students, spend a lot of time outside of the classroom having to do something. To pay for their education. To either pay for their education or to fulfill their degree. And it's become very difficult to fulfill that degree in four years and at the same time do at least what liberal arts education is supposed to do, which is expand your horizons. Yeah, and is history a required course? So there are courses, and again, I'm not the most well-attuned to this, and some of my colleagues would be able to answer you directly. So let me answer you indirectly. We have some social science requirements, and I believe that, and somebody perhaps should correct me, I believe that history 151 and 152 as world history can be included as one of those requirements for education. Used to be you had to take 151 and 152 to get a degree. So I will be at Costco and some student from the 1960s, and I will start talking. And they'll remember when the lecture was at Varsity Theater or Spalding. You remember a conversation students, and they remember you from the 1960s? Well, they don't remember me. They remember my colleague Herb Siegler, superb lecturer, who was known for being a wonderful lecturer and for taking a smoking break. Every lecture. But people remember, he's very bright, very articulate. He has a real passion. So they talk about having to take those two courses to get a degree. So now you don't have to take those two. I think you may have to take one, you might. But you could take, for example, world philosophy or world religion. And then the other half of that requirement is supposed to be something related to why you're the Pacific. So you do not graduate from UH without the opportunity to understand the past. So it may be the philosophical past or the religious past. But you still, it'd be difficult to sleepwalk through four years. And not know something that we would think of as historical or in the realm of the past in that sense. And plenty of disciplines approach that. I mean, we historically approach it differently. But plenty of the disciplines do cover the past, just as we talk about film and we talk about literature the way that English and film schools do. When I went to Queen's College, just for a reference now, this is 1958. There were several required courses in this area. And they were all called contemporary civilization. And they were really, I remember the readings till today. I remember the teachers who changed my way of looking at things till today. I was 16, 17 years old. I was very impressionable. And it changed my view of the world. And I'm wondering if we're missing something by not making it required. And I'm wondering how important you feel it may be to exercising the franchise, to being a responsible informed citizen, to take these subjects as a requirement. As a potential Temudic scholar, I'll give you on one hand and on the other. Sure. Okay, I agree. And I think most of my colleagues and I think many folks on campus would agree that a history course or contemporary world course should be required. Then we run up against what I just mentioned though. Four years, limited funding. So Columbia, for example, still has its great books requirement. Columbia can do that. It's a private, well-endowed university. Reid has its requirement, which made the news this year. We live in a very different world here. We live in a world that's closer to a lot of public universities that don't have a tremendous treasure chest of money. And kids who, remember part of schooling is for social elevation and social mobility, we have kids whose parents never went to college, kids whose parents went to UH, and they want them to do better than they did. So I know it sounds, but no. That means economically do better. But also have more opportunities. I mean, they may make the same amount of money, but maybe grandfather started an auto shop, and dad had to work in the auto shop. And now the son or daughter wants to do something else. They may not make any more money, but they might have a choice and opportunity. But it's difficult to say that to kids when the pressure is to finish in four years. So if we rethought everything, people talk about a paradigm shift. I think if you want to talk as if this is after Habdallah and we're having the non-sacred conversation. Okay, I would say make college more than four years. I would say certainly have public funding in one way or another. And then make the requirements. But if, for example, you're in engineering or pre-med, there are certain plethora of requirements. And then, I think very importantly, UH requires a foreign language. That opens your horizon. Yes, exactly. So I have to say yes to both. Yes, it should be required. And yes, we need to make changes to allow it to be required. Well, you mentioned earlier that you have a certain amount of gratification, but being where you are, doing what you're doing. Absolutely. And I would like to explore how you got into that. I mean, why did you choose this area? Was it happenstance? Or was it something that you decided at the age of 16 or earlier? Why did you study this? I wanted to play center field for the socks or dodgers or be a sports writer. For about three days, I thought about being a rabbi. And then I am heavily influenced by Vietnam and Watergate. So I wanted to be a journalist. All right, and then I went to college and I want to do all those other things. And I somewhat fell in love with academia. I must also say, and anybody who's listening knows my family history. My father was a professor. So this is kind of a family business. But having said that, there were other choices. Why I study, why I study is I had some very good teachers. Unlike Professor Schwartz, who was here before, who was a brilliant linguist. I am not a brilliant linguist. So you can usually tell if somebody does British or American history. We like the archives. We like history. But we're a little linguistically challenged. So that's one of the reasons I do British and American issues. It's all English. No, I will really confess. And it makes me a poorer scholar. If I knew more languages, I'd be able to be a better scholar. And then when it came time, push came to shove. The Reagan administration did not accept me in the Peace Corps. So I then went to graduate school. Interesting. So a lot of choices here and there. Your life would have been different had that gone the other way. Now, the way it would have most radically been different is I spent time, and I'd encourage any students who are listening, I spent time a year off working on Capitol Hill. And I'd really encourage any students who want to take time off, or even do something before graduate school or their career, spend a year in a political situation. So we're going to do that now for one minute. We're going to take time off. Sure. And we're going to have a little wee break. OK. We're going to come back, and then we're going to ask you about your specialties, and your activities on campus. We'll be right back. Peter Hoffenberg. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. My name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 AM. Please join us. I'd like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. OK. We're back with Peter Hoffenberg, and we're talking about his life in times as a history professor at UH Minoa. And I wish we had more time. That's one of the families. We only have 28 minutes, and I wish we had a lot more time. We have to do this again, Peter. We will. Absolutely. So your specialty, I mean, I really want to examine the specialties and the areas of research and writing that you do, and how that changes your view of the world, how you see the world. I want to know. Let's talk about your specialties. Of course. So my specialty, I suppose, on my epithet, my obituary would be a student of World's Fairs and Exhibitions. So it was very big and narrow. Well, it's narrow, but it covers a tremendous amount of people, and a tremendous amount of geopolitical territory. Yeah, because all that feeds into it. Right. So we have to go back, and for your viewers, go back to a world, remember, no TV, pre-radio. There was travel, but limited travel. Obviously no social media. So we go back into a world where the exhibitions and department stores, which were connected to them intimately, brought the world to you, or you got to see the world. So out of that, I've developed interests in Roger Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling. And if anybody read Kim, he's introduced at the beginning of Kim as the head of the museum. I have interest in travel. I do some work on Australian travel. At this point in my career, I'm finishing up two books on exhibitions and looking forward to moving into new areas at my late age. But with the cost of living here in three children, I expect to write and research until I'm 140, at least. Yeah. So if you merge exhibitions with American history, I guess you have to do that, global history, actually. I wonder where the Chautauqua idea fits in. Because that was kind of an early exhibition kind of process, wasn't it? Right, I would say the Chautauqua idea fits in with what we're known as Mechanics Institutes, or what were very popular, Public Lecture Series. And those were very popular for years and years. Chautauqua brought people to a place for those to proceed rather than having the wandering lecturer. Chautauqua exists to this day. And you could see there were many Chautauquas in the exhibitions, so particularly if you were interested in art or science. Say some of your viewers again might be scientists. There were great debates about evolution at exhibitions. There was the display of new scientific technology. So they're complementary. The Chautauqua, though, demographically was more limited. Whereas, for example, some of the exhibitions could have over a million visitors, particularly the biggest ones in London and those in Paris. The one in Paris around 1900 had probably well over a million visitors. Now, some people visit more than once, of course. Carol Montalie, our Executive Vice President, maybe we went on our own nickel to the National Association of Broadcasters a couple of years already in Las Vegas. It's big. It's one of the biggest. But it has 104,000 visitors. That's not nearly a million, is it? So when we talk about historically these exhibitions, they were bigger than the kind of exhibitions we have today, no? Much so. I suppose what would be comparative. I've never been to NASCAR. Evidently, there are a lot of people in NASCAR. There's really nothing comparative. What you could say is the exhibition fulfilled different functions for today. So it was a department store. It was a botanic garden. It was a museum. It was a lecture hall. It was a place of innovation. So those who study American exhibitions remind us things like hot dogs and Ferris wheels and ice cream. So at the heart was consumerism at the very heart. But unlike a department store, for example, or a museum, when you went to an exhibition, you also observed how things were made. And that gave a certain power to the market relationship between the producer and the consumer. So if I wanted to buy an Indian textile or just know about an Indian textile, I could go to a store or I could go to a museum. But if I went to a London show or a show in Calcutta, I could see the artisans making the textile. One step ahead. Right, very different. Yeah, it started today when you go into a restaurant and the kitchen is open. You can see the chef working. I like to do that for myself. So I'm just wondering if the United States, the evolution development in the United States, provided the world with models of exhibitions that were useful? Or whether it was an idea that came from somewhere else like Europe? Or whether it's an ongoing exchange of ideas, which is a global process? OK, so the easy answer, because those are wonderful questions and open-ended questions, the easy answer is the first exhibitions we think of exhibitions are products of France and Britain. The British one included some American participation. They were a series of relatively small ones on a Napoleon, made perfect sense for Napoleon, like the Louvre, perfect sense of public art. And most folks agree, obviously historians tend not to agree on a lot of things, but most folks agree that the great exhibition in 1851, which is sometimes known as the Crystal Palace, is really the first modern international exhibition, followed very shortly by the US. And I would say there was constant cross-fertilization, although you could tell when you went to a French show. There were certain things privileged in the French show and certain things privileged in a British show. But each of the countries, for example, was responsible for its own court. So what was American architecture at that moment would have decorated the American exhibit, and somebody visiting from Italy would have then seen American art. That's why maybe the World Wide Web, in a way, is the closest, as far as interaction and the resulting bubbles sometimes would also significant interaction. There are important American legacies, like in Chicago, what we think of as modern Chicago architecture. 1898 was it? Exactly. That was 1893, I'm sorry. Sorry. 1893, because it was supposed to honor Columbus. So it's a Colombian exhibition. Some people may be from San Francisco, and downtown where the exploratory used to be is what's resulting from the 1915 Pan-Pacific. You're writing about this. So I write a little bit about the US, but my main interest is Britain, the British colonies, particularly India and Australia. But each book or each chapter usually has something about the US and something about France. So you write your research, find details you were not aware of from sources maybe you didn't see before, and then you integrate all that into an article or a book. Exactly. And you try to publish in a notable journal. What's the best journal for history? The best journal for history? I think, well, again, personal. Person of you. If you live here, or in North America, I think probably the American Historical Review is still considered to be the pantheon. You've been in there. No, I haven't. Well, you're working so hard. No, I'm not that good. You flatter me. You're very kind. Fortunately, I know people who have. Some people I went to graduate school with. And their arguments, their evidence, their writing, which is not to say other journals are not important, but I think you probably, if you live here, that would be the ideal for a general history. In other words, American Historical Review will publish articles about Africa and Europe and the US. And then each discipline or sub-discipline, I should say, has its own journal. So for me, in British studies, for example, Victorian studies or the Journal of British Studies would be the places to publish. But there are lots of venues to publish. And lots of reputable ones. You're teaching these things. You have courses on them? Well, actually, one of the differences between me, perhaps, and some other folks is I don't integrate very well my research in my teaching. Teaching tends to be more general. And I'll talk about an exhibition or something. But if I teach Victorian Britain, the students expect to know about all Victorian Britain. So I would say what I privilege is my previous education, right? What my professors taught me and what I like to read and what I think the students would be interested in. Some of my colleagues are much keener and they've got it down much better. And they integrate their courses with their research. And most major universities do do that. What about in the graduate program? Is there a master's in the graduate program? So we have a healthy master's. One of the consequences of not requiring history 150, one in 152 is that that nest egg, which helped pay for our graduate students, is no longer there. So we don't have a lot of money to offer students. We often get very good applicants in fields that were very strong in like the Pacific or Southeast Asia. And Cornell will be able to offer a better package. And you can't fault a graduate student. I mean, you're talking about potentially eight years for a PhD. That's a lot of money. So we have a good healthy master's program, which I think serves a very important civic purpose, which is we have a fair number of people who either want to go and teach, including DOE, or are already teaching and would like to enhance their education. And my colleagues and I have talked about, I think that's one of our objectives should be at a master's program to take care of the needs of the teachers and those teachers students. Very worthwhile for a rounded university. I think we need to have that. I think so. So let me go to one other topic. We don't have a lot of time left. But you mentioned that at one point you were thinking about becoming a rabbi. I was thinking about becoming a teacher. For 48 hours there, but my voice wasn't coming up. When you're in your teenage years, these are real possibilities. So can we talk about Judaism, your Judaism, and Judaism on campus? Of course, OK. So Judaism on campus, we have made, I think, great strides. And not anything that I've done, but we as a community, we now have a Halal chapter, which we did not have before. And Halal allows the students to at least, and young adults, recent graduates, at least once a month do something together as young Jews. And that includes Jews from across the spectrum, from Chabad to atheists. And it's a chance to see a movie, go to Shabbat dinner. We sponsor there going to the Jewish Film Festival, which is coming up. So that probably is one of the notable aspects. We don't have a Jewish history class. Lee Siegel occasionally teaches the Judaism class, but he retired. I don't know if there's even going to be a class in Judaism. There is one class in Hebrew. So if you looked at the catalogs, you probably would not have come here to study Jewish studies. OK. We are, though, thinking about a certificate program, which would bring together various courses which are connected in one way or another, like Mideast politics, for example. Or there are some literature classes, which are either about the Holocaust or Jewish literature. Oh, I'd love to see that. Well, we're working on it. My wife just retired. She's looking for an academic pursuit of some kind. She would love to do that. Wonderful. So I give her my email. I will. OK. And what would be anti-Semitic activities on the campus? Do you see that? And this BDS organization wants to boycott Israel. You see that? So, right, but let me step back a little bit, because they're not necessarily connected. They can be, but not necessarily. I have seen, in my time, my 25 years here, I've actually seen more anti-Semitism off campus than on campus. Painting of swastikas, my boy and I were called Christ killers. I've seen more of that off campus. And not a lot, again, compared to these are the best of times still. In Jewish history, living in the United States, at this time, we are still living the best of time as Jews. So we don't have, I don't think in the community, for example, the Torahs were stolen from Chabad. I want to ask you about that. Right, but there's no evidence that that was a hate crime. The arc wasn't defiled. I mean, if that were a hate crime, and similar things have happened on the mainland, and certainly in Europe, certainly, the building would have been trashed. Somebody would have sprayed a swastika. Somebody would have spray-painted some horrible epithet about Jews. There's no indication of that. There's no indication. It seems to me, and I've only emailed Israel and Pearl, we've only emailed, that Torahs are worth a lot of money. There is a tremendous amount of property crime here. Fortunately, we live in a state where there's not a lot of personal crime, but there's a lot of property crimes. Because economic disparity leads to that. Very much so, and we leave our doors open. Okay, and we leave our cars open, because we're accustomed to it not happening. Interesting. Right, or it's quite possible, and I think itchell and Pearl will have to think about this themselves, whether somebody in the community is really angry. We don't know, I mean, but it seems to me, and we had a discussion, we have a very informal Jewish community relations council group that meets once every two months, and we had a good heart-to-heart discussion about this, and the consensus was certainly not to jump to the anti-Semitic hate crime. Don't jump there. It may turn out to be, but let the police do what they're doing, and I don't think Pearl and Itchell even think that it was necessary. Not from what they've been quoted to say in the newspaper anyway. Right, and they're honest people. If they, you know, and they have experience. And they know what anti-Semitism is, right? I mean, they, the Mubai, Rabbi and Rebbitson, they know what, yeah. Now, as far as BDS, so there is a, I would suppose, relatively active group. BDS is the Boycott and Divestment and Sanction Group. It is housed generally in a couple of departments, and they generally write letters, sponsor visitors, don't attend our events when we try to engage. So they exist. I don't wanna talk about the disparity of news on this. Yeah, I think, and some people who oppose BDS also don't want to talk. So this is not to demonize BDS by any means at all. But in a way, it's a mini version of our country where people don't really want to engage. It is don't engage. And some of us are trying to get an engagement going because I think there's some similarities that we can talk about, very importantly. I think there's some issues that we could probably work together. Then there's some fundamental differences. I would like to cover this in greater detail, and I regret we don't have enough time to do now. I'd be more than happy to come back to talk about it. I like you to come back. And I have some kind of an unusual view about it. I wanna hear that. Sure. I wanna discuss it with you, I think it's very important. Peter H. Hoffenberg, Associate Professor of History at UH Manila. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be able to talk to you. It's been a pleasure. It's been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Thanks a lot.