 so much for joining us on Think Tech Hawaii. Please do support us if you like what we do, if it has interest and value to you. Share it. Spread the link. Spread the word. We're just trying to raise difficult conversations to get people to think about things and get people to learn to take a little bit more comprehensive, even-handed things into account as they deal with each other, as they see each other, as they value each other. So today we have with us two of my favorite people anywhere in the world, Louise Ng, not only one of the best women lawyers in Hawaii, and probably anywhere, and a wonderful protector of women's rights, but also a really respected community service leader in Hawaii for many, many years. And Louise has been a role model for me and many of the others in our community in both her professional work and in her charitable work for many, many years. Besides that, she's just a really, really good person. As is David Larson, a dear personal friend, former chair of the American Bar Association section of dispute resolution, professor at Mitchell Hamlin School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the innovator who took four years of dedicated effort to convince the courts of New York that you could put together an online resolution system that would promote access to justice and quick and inexpensive resolution of small claims and other matters in the New York courts, which we hope other courts will look at and learn from. David Louise, thanks so much for joining us. I wish we had a more optimistic and pleasant topic for today than what's happening with the attacks on higher education, schools, and learning generally, but that's what we're looking at. Are there any bright spots on that horizon at all? David? I hate to say there's no bright spots at all. I might tend to be a glass half full kind of guy, so I think that we're at a point in which we can critically examine what's happening and ask why is it happening and what are the goals here. I think when we begin to do that, we may realize that some of the attacks on universities are the result of universities being perceived as more of a political football, that they're a place where we can gain some political traction and points. It's pretty well established that most of Democrats lean or most college graduates lean Democratic and people that did not attend college lean Republican. That's statistically true. So if you're a Republican trying to gain traction with your electorate, a pretty convenient way to do it is to go after that Democratic bastion, that Democratic birther of the university. I think a little of what's happening now can be the result of that, is the result of that. When we think about our universities, we sure should be critical of them always in the sense that you can always get better, but we also should look closely at where these voices and these critics are coming from and what might be their motivations. That well put. It's disappointing to think that there is an entire political party whose credo seems to be that what they least want is voters who are actually capable of critical thinking and evaluation of thinking for themselves independently or in many cases even voting at all if they happen to be part of the minorities or the urban groups that that particular political party would prefer not vote at all. That's a scary thought, but yeah, we probably have a semantic challenge. We talk about liberal arts schools. Well, I think when people hear the word liberal, they think left. They think it's politically left. Well, that's not really what we're talking about with the liberal arts education. What we're talking about is just exposure to a wide range of different ideas. The goal being that we can think critically, that we can actually have conversations about different ideas come to some kind of rational understanding, but it's about expanding our understandings and our universe. That's what a liberal arts education is. It isn't a left education. It isn't politically left. It's trying to create people who will function in our democratic society. That's a really good point because just a quick example, I remember back when I was in college and we didn't have computers and stuff like that. We were scrolling on cave walls, but we read just as much iron rand as we did John Kenneth Galbra. It was. You see both sides of things. You look at it. You see the strengths and weaknesses, whether it was philosophy or history or politics or not so much in math. There's not a whole lot of opinion over there, but so Louise, where do you see bright spots, if any, in the educational picture, higher education in particular? Well, I feel like even though we're at the very beginning of 2024, this is a year when we, in a way, need to take back and control the narrative or redo the narrative over why DEI is good, why universities and colleges and higher education are good, because it is, you know, the forces of the political forces are trying to control that narrative currently. And to create the impression that these institutions as David and I had spoken off screen, you know, cannot, they cannot be trusted. We can have faith in institutions. And yet all of us remember, and I would think even people of a different political persuasion can remember all the good things that did happen in college, how it does expand your horizons, how ideally it should be a place where there is a free exchange of ideas and the like. You know, I think maybe the hook that the politicizing is hanging on to is this idea of taking sort of the worst of the quotes of college demonstrations. And some of them have been pretty horrific. And it just seems to me, in that case, you know, the sort of the irreducible minimum is that hate speech is always a bad thing, no matter how you try to parse that or maybe try to take a very academic or legal approach. People should feel safe and not feel in danger. That should be whether you're Israeli, Palestinian, Asian American back when I was in college, it was a Vietnam war and Asian Americans were feeling victimized. So, you know, I think that there is always the importance of free speech on campus as well as the job of the administration and everybody there to also make people feel welcome and safe and to air those views in a way that does not make people feel threatened. So that's my ideal vision. You know, you raise a really important point. I was a 60s college guy and probably still am, never really grew up. And you know what they say about 60s, right? If you remember it, you weren't there, but we kept that. But I think one of the points, there's a contrasting factor here. In the 60s, one of the things that happened, Apple did it with computers, but it also happened with the national conscience on civil rights and the war, is the higher educational institutions were the places where the discussion, the voices, the conversation, the information was widely evaluated. It was discussed in great intensity and a great link. And positions were developed and sure they were oppositional, but they weren't violently, except for Kent State, Chicago, they weren't usually violently oppositional. And ultimately, they enabled choice and the choice of the nation led by the higher educational institutions followed at that point by the media and then like the Apple computers into the communities. That was the process. That was the solidarity movement that developed at that point. Is there any chance of that happening again in our lifetimes? I'd like to hope so. You know, I think one thing that's happening now is that there's a pretty broad strategy from the Republican Party to attack traditional institutions and to diminish our faith in them. And Louise and I talked about this also before we began the program, but I think the goal is to discredit institutions upon which we have traditionally relied so that I can turn around and say, believe me instead. You can't believe them any longer, so believe what I'm saying. And I think this is a very intentional approach. And we just need to be aware of that, that there's a goal here and it's a goal of manipulation and don't be manipulated, understand what's happening. You know, and you make a tremendously important point and insight that's really brilliant, David, and I credit you for it, which is they're conflating the ability to be able to convince people to discredit the institutions with in turn saying, and because we were right about the institutions being untrustworthy, so that must mean my implication that we are trustworthy. That is a non sequitur of the first order, but that's the strategy is don't believe these guys, and because you have to believe somebody, believe us. Where do we look for truth, Louise? Well, well, that's a big one. We have to continue to teach people how to be critical thinkers and not, you know, I think that probably what's happening in the news about the Harvard or UPAN or these others, it's just a very tiny part too of what is actually happening on campus and no doubt the good things that are happening on campus. And so I feel like, you know, people need to speak up, they need to talk about what are the positive things. How can speech be used in order to allow the exchange of ideas and enable people to draw their own conclusions without feeling threatened? You know, I think as David said, we do need to see this in the context of it's a political act. This is not something that is going to undermine, you know, so it's not an existential threat to the institutions or shouldn't be regarded as such, but it needs to be seen for what it is and then, you know, the administrators and faculty and students need to focus on just creating the positive environment that the universities are intended to be. Yeah, I kind of following up on that. It's like reminding people that where do we get our medical life-saving drugs? Where do we get our engineering advances? Think of all the output of universities through their graduates that have strengthened and reformed society. It's breathtaking. You know, so I think to kind of, as Louise is saying, remind people about the good that universities have done and are doing and will do is really important. You know, that's a great idea because instead of the negative stuff, what if instead the campaign slogan was not, don't believe these guys, they're a threat to democracy. The campaign slogan was believe us because we are here on behalf of the people who brought you these wonderful things, remedial drugs for these various diseases, education to lift people out of poverty and into work and into job, innovations that enabled us to communicate with each other like we are right now without being able to actually be in the same place at the same time and yet we can communicate just as effectively, just as deeply, just as honestly, just as caringly through this medium. These are the products of what this level of education make possible and we're here as advocates for those advances, for that education, for that process because it cannot happen without the critical thinking, without the exposure to the conflicting information and the conflicting choices and the tests of those information and choices that enable us to find out what really works. And it still means the fact that, you know, education and universities in schools are, you know, there's a way for people to improve their lot and for upward mobility and the like, you know, and maybe there needs to be more, just remind people too about all the programs universities are starting to really help first generation kids get a leg up and have the opportunity for an education. That ties into something recently, I was reading the bulletin for my high school and just reading about some of the retiring people who are retiring from their carpenters and cafeteria workers and the like who all were able to send their kids to that very school and I just thought, yeah, you know, that's how it should be happening, creating a path for opportunity. You know, in one of our panelists, Vernelia Randall, Professor Emerita from Dayton School of Law, back when she saw that happening with kids from vulnerable communities with far less resources, not getting the chance for that higher education level, her remedy was not affirmative action or you got to tilt the admissions procedures. Her remedy was go out to the communities and provide better educational resources before that evaluation of whether to admit them so that then they are qualified and once they get in, they get the help and the support they need to be able to do well. And if you look at those programs, they are literally without exception successful. If you go to the communities that have always been discredited and as unworthy of support and help, those are the communities that have been providing some of the most exceptional leaders, innovation and examples of any of them. So the resources there, the choices are as whether we develop and incultivate it and honor it or waste it, but to deny huge sectors of our population, black, Hispanic, Asian, disabled, LGBTQ, whatever you want to call it. We disable them from having that access, that opportunity when those clearly are a resource of people who add two things. One, individual brilliance, gifts and innovations, but diversity that makes our living and learning process our decision-making process, our choice process work better. There is no question that diversity makes for better choices. It just does. And simplistically, you have more qualified workers given that there is a shortage of workers in a lot of areas and we have populations that could be doing these things, but they're not having the opportunities to do them. So it's kind of a win-win. We can address those shortages and we can also elevate populations that haven't historically had those opportunities. You know, and that relates to two factors I think, David, in a way that the media has not, for which I criticize them, because clearly the attacks that have been leveled on higher education have been focused on exactly the groups and exactly the people, women and non-whites and disabled people and LGBTQ people. Those are the targets. And there's no legitimate legal constitutional human reason, no scientific reason for that. It's pure bias, but that's where the attackers are coming from. The Ron Santises and the Nikki Haley's and the Cruises and the rest of them, they are patently biased against the groups who are other than them and Nikki Haley may be from a non-white group, but hey, in everything she does and says, that would be indiscernible. There is absolutely nothing she's done or said that does not identify her exactly with pretty much every other mega-republican. Yeah, she's a total sell-out in my humble opinion, but I think that gets into a whole other issue we could talk about, which is the attacks on just DEI in general and the workplace and how that whole conversation needs to be reclaimed back from the anti-woke movement, which I actually see as being anti-black, anti-people of color and try to get back to the reasons why diversity is good, whether that's in the university setting, in the work setting, that it really does help everybody. And unfortunately, the media feeds into some of the sensational, creating sensational stories that don't help with developing faith in our institutions either. Speaking of the media, one thing that discourages me so much is that Donald Trump is on the television every single day. Every single day he comes out of the courtroom and on national news, they're letting him rant. They're promoting these rants every day. It's the most consistent source of information for some people, the stuff he's saying every day. It's like, why are you giving him this forum and this opportunity to say these things every single day? It's very discouraging. Just turn off the cameras, let him rant in silence. That's really difficult. And thinking about what we were saying a little earlier about getting the messages out about the positives, one of the big challenges is reaching different audiences. We've got our Fox News, we've got our MSNBC, our CNN, and I watch the latter more frequently than the former, but I try and watch the former sometimes too. And what's being said on them is pretty dramatically different. And I think one of the challenges is how can you reach both audiences? Because right now, you've got two different audiences that aren't crossing over and hearing the other messages. And one of the big challenges with who is in a position to cross over, maybe the president. Somebody who has that kind of output, maybe it's incumbent upon them to focus a little bit more on kinds of things we've been talking about. But that's one of the huge challenges is to get this information and the benefits of DEI and the opportunities that are created and the benefits for not only certain populations, but for everybody, to get that message to the entire country is difficult. If not impossible. But that points to two other things that someone brought up recently and I think may bear mention here. One is I have never found any adult person who does not attribute one of the most important inspiring roles and influences in their life to at least one of their teachers. That can't happen in an educational system under attack where the teachers are intimidated, they're threatened, they're at high risk, literally, physically, mentally, emotionally, personally, and professionally. The second thing is learning for us as we grew up and learning prior to the pandemic is and has to be a collaborative experience. Kids who are strong in one area help kids who are not as strong in that area understand that's how kids work. They learn to function as a community and the more diverse that learning community is, the better they learn to function in life as a diverse learning community. We are losing that the pandemic disconnected us, yes, but the politics have manipulated that disconnection into a truly divisive, truly antagonistic, truly destructive force that is designed to operate at the expense of people who are other than those who are exerting that force. How do we counter that? Well, discussion about public education, which is clearly under attack and enrollment of public schools is declining across the country. It's declining here in Minnesota and this whole charter school movement is a complicated one because one thing you could say about charter schools is that it's another attempt to separate and polarize a society. What Chuck was talking a minute ago about was you've got a diverse population in your classroom and people of the young age are learning to interact comfortably with people who don't look like themselves. That's a huge benefit for the rest of all of our lives. While you start separating out groups into specific kinds of charter schools, that doesn't happen. In addition to that, I think that's something that can happen in public schools. It's the strength of public schools. Well, another thing about the charter movement that's maybe not as clear as that, public schools are places where you have, although union membership is declining around the country in a lot of industries that hasn't in public education. It's been pretty healthy and pretty strong and unions tend to vote Democratic. Again, if you're a Republican running for office and you don't want a strong voting contingency against you, well, let's get rid of the public schools and get rid of the unions and let's break them all into disparate charter schools. It's going to be a lot easier for me to get elected. I think it's really important to remember that one thing that schools can do is bring us together, to let us learn of the young age to be comfortable with each other and to the degree that stops happening, that's a real detriment. Serious thought, I think, can be given. But if you had an elementary school child in front of you, say you've got a second grader in front of you right now, Louise, and they ask you what's the most important thing I should keep in mind when I go to school about learning? What would you advise them? Oh, man, second graders. You can have fourth graders if you want. Yeah. Well, I just remember that we were told in second grade, I mean, as second grade parents that this is the age when kids are really learning how to socialize. So maybe the basic thing for a second grader to know is that to be a friend to everybody, try to be a friend to everybody and listen and be empathetic. How's that? Sounds good. Empathy all the way along. We certainly need some more now. Absolutely. Empathy is connected, not divisive. It completely reverses the needle. David, you've got a second grader in front of you. What should I most keep in mind when I go to school to learn? You sure need the lunch I made for you. You can trade your lunch, right? So no, I really like what Louise was saying, the idea that try to get to know as many kids in your class as you can. That goes back to what I was saying a minute ago. This is a tremendous opportunity to become comfortable with lots of different people coming from different economic backgrounds, social backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, and it's a great opportunity, so let's not waste it and let's encourage our kids to be open to it and to explore it. It's when you know people, like a small community like Hawaii, we know all kinds of people thinking all kinds of different things, some more criminal than others, but we know they've gone to school with them. That basic bond and history is one way to open up conversations or at least to develop empathy and understand where people are coming from. So maybe to finish off, as we're pretty much out of time, I'm going to draw from my daughter who is the best example of learning and she's actually assistant communications director in a very, very wonderful progressive private school outside of Boston, where her first child graduated in June and the second one will in about another couple of years, but her lesson to her kid's work, when you go into the classroom, look for the kids who are left out, help them, belong, make them part of the family. Very wise because there is a lot of mean kid-ism that goes on in school and the efforts to try to create or fully or make people feel like outsiders, so that is a lesson that all of us should learn from an early age. And what I love about that, that's grassroots inclusiveness instead of top-down inclusiveness. It's organic, it's natural, so I love that advice. And on that note, folks, we're going to let you think about that, find the people that you encounter in life who are left out, who aren't included, who aren't given the opportunities and the advantages that you may have or people you know may have. Offer them a way in. Offer them a connection. Offer them understanding, empathy, and support. Think Takawaii. Keep thinking. Allah, and take care. Thank you. Thank you.