Full Abercrombie Interview

INTRODUCTION Name: Neil Abercrombie Age: 72 Education: Masters in Sociology, PhD in American Studies.

PLATFORM AND VOTING RECORD: Civil Unions: Supported HB 444 (Civil Unions Bill) Traffic: Pro-rail and potential super-ferry Homelessness: Calls for an inter-government approach to work with State, County, and the private sector to find solutions. Also wants to rebuild the mental health system.

Hawaiian Sovereignty: Voted to pass Akaka Bill three times, supporter of gathering and water rights, wants to increase federal funding to Hawaiian programs.

Public Education: Wants to make the superintendent of the public schools a Cabinet level position; give more power to individual schools, and focus on early education.

Economy: Plans to utilize federal funding to create new jobs, increase self-sustainability on food and energy, and improve transparency on government spending.

INTERVIEW Ethan Porter: What, in your opinion, is the role of the state government?

Neil Abercrombie: To do those things that need to be done collectively; that the individual by himself or herself aren’t able to complete or, in some instances, even initiate. In order to, for example, utilize the creative energies of an individual you need to reference the recorded history, for example, of the species. That’s what universities, that’s what libraries do, that’s what the whole idea of an education is about is to turn loose ones capacity to think critically. It’s not a matter of passing tests, as such, in terms of mathematics or roped answers to fixed questions. The

proposition is, is that human beings are unique amongst the species in that they can contemplate themselves. They make judgments on themselves. Human beings make judgments about themselves. They reflect, and in order to do that you have to have a fundament of knowledge, some basis upon which to draw on one’s experience and then draw conclusions from it, even sense of direction from it, perspective. It’s all unique to human beings. The two things that a university does is to collect, preserve, and present the accumulated wisdom of the species and expand that universe, create new knowledge. So it’s the role of government, in that context, is clear that by oneself, one is incapable of putting together the institutional foundation for such an activity. Whether it’s extended to roads, whether it’s extended to sewers, whether it’s extended to searching the universe as we do with astronomy, or searching inner space in the ocean, or the micro-world of microbes and atoms and protons and neutrons; all of the requires the facility of government; that is to say the capacity of government to provide a vehicle, a methodology, and a practical manifestation in terms of infrastructure to allow that to happen. You can’t do it without government.

E.P.: What about the governor inside of the state government?

N.A.: The governor should be a vehicle for al this. The governor should be a catalyst. The object, at least this seems to me, of any governor should be to disappear. To provide leadership as opposed to managership, that’s one of the things this campaign is about: people don’t need managers, you hire managers to conduct business, to do audits, to do studies, to move things along, but leadership, you have to have a vision of where you’re going, why you’re going there, how you’re going to get there, what you’re going to do when you get there, what you’re going to do if you can’t get there even though you tried. So I think this election really is a referendum on leadership: that style: having a vision for the future, not being caught in the status quo or the business as usual, particularly political business as usual with regards to the university. So the governor has an obligation, it seems to me, as well as an opportunity to be the medium though which the capacity to think critically and act on our creative capacities is carried forwards.

E.P.: We at UH are feeling the crunch of budget cuts: teachers are being let go, class sizes are

increasing, and tuition is getting higher every year. As governor, how do you plan on helping the University?

N.A.: I’m glad you put it in terms of the budget because you’re making my case for me. The way we’re going at this is completely backwards. You don’t start with a budget and then what you’re going to cut or not cut. You start with your basic values and your values lead you to your priorities. Once your values and priorities are established, then your programmatic outcomes or programmatic avenue will become clear. In this instance, my first thought wasn’t budget when you said about classes increasing and so on, why don’t we redefine what teaching is all about? Why not use the technology; the hardware and the software that’s out there right now to completely redefine the way we teach? And what we teach, and when we teach it. Right now you’re on a five-day week. When I first came to the university, it was statehood 1959, we were on a six-day week, I know because I taught classes Saturday morning 8 o’clock. Why aren’t we on a seven-day week? Why are we on weeks at all? Why do we not have hours and times and offerings of classes that meet the modern world? 50 years ago, people went to school for four years and graduated. How many people go to school for four years and graduate right now? Not very many. And for good reason, socio-economic and political, for that matter, in terms of the dynamics that are out there. So my first thought is: I take the budget as it is, I’m not going to ask the Legislature for a dime more. You’re not going to see me whining and weeping in public about how there’s not enough money. You take whatever the money is and you spend it efficiently and effectively, and the way you get efficiency and effectiveness is you figure out what your mission is, what your values are, what priorities do you have associated with that. In instruction the priority is the education, the capacity to think critically, and the priority is to facilitate instruction. And then you figure out the best way to do that. And if redefining entirely how you do that then go ahead and do it. And do it with what you have, you swim in the water you’re in.

E.P.: Both of you left office to run in this election, which has drawn some criticism. How do you personally feel about that decision?

N.A.: I think it’s dishonorable to run for another office while you hold another one that you’re getting a paycheck for. Particularly if you pretend that you’re not doing it. “I’m listening to

people to determine if I run…” please! You want to hang onto your job as long as you can while you run for something else, “please excuse me while I don’t devote full time to it.” I suppose you can do that, but if you’re going to, then say so. I thought it was dishonorable. I tried, I thought about doing that, but it became very, very clear to me very, very quickly, number one: I had to campaign full-time if I was going to run full-time, and I should because it’s going to take that kind of effort, that kind of expenditure of energy and time to give people the opportunity to have the kind of conversation that wanted to have. And number two: I thought to myself, I was able to do it for a little while, going back and forth, but I thought “No, no, I’m not coming up here just to take big votes and then go back and run.”

Particularly when I saw what was happening back here. There was this “Let’s pretend” atmosphere going on and I thought, “That’s everything that’s wrong with politics. That is why people get disgusted with politicians and politics itself.” So I’m not only content with it, I think philosophically and morally it was the right thing to do, strategically I think it was absolutely the right thing to do, and tactically, the results, I think, are manifest. With Mayor Hannemann pretending to run, and trying to do both things at once, be mayor and run for governor, he really did not devote the kind of time and effort that was required, in order to gain favor among the population and to expose some kind of message with regards to his candidacy for governor that made any sense to anyone. Our campaign, on the other hand, has been able to develop, I think, the deepest and broadest and strongest grass-roots movement since the days of Burns, Arioshi, and Oshiro. And on that roots base, I think we’ve surpassed the Obama campaign, in terms of the depth and breath of facebook, youtube, the website itself, all of the internet connections. We have Internet precincts now that reach out into the thousands. So I think we’ve actually set a standard in this campaign that other campaigns are going to have to emulate.

E.P.: What is the biggest problem facing Hawaii today?

N.A.: Education. I don’t see it as a problem so much as I see it as a challenge. And I’m not trying to be cute with you. Of course. Saying that it’s a problem, it’s as if you’re here and it’s over there, whereas if it’s a challenge, it’s with you. And that’s why I think that education and preparing people for the 21st century in terms of the critical thinking skills they’re going to need. It’s crucial to whether or not we’re going to be able to keep people in the islands without having to leave the islands in order to pursue any dreams they might have of utilizing their full capacity.

E.P.: Where do you see the State of Hawaii in four years, so by the next election?

N.A.: Let’s see…I see well on the way to…can I give you several categories that I think need to be addressed? Starting November 3, in four years, we have to have restored public confidence in education, pre-K through post-graduate. We need to be visibly on our way to energy independence, environmental sustainability with regard to our infrastructure and our flora and fauna, water, land issues. Food security, importing less food and coconmant with that agriculture, what I consider an agriculture renaissance, and a complete redirection away from a plantation mentality. And being stupefied by the wake of the plantation demise; towards entrepreneurial niche-farming that provided realistic opportunities for young people to go into farming as a business. As opposed to merely gardening and providing high end fair for farmers markets. There’s nothing wrong with that but that doesn’t move us towards food sustainability and food production.

E.P.: What is the most important thing you learned in college?

N.A. To think critically. It may sound like such an obvious answer but the obvious, over years I’ve learned, you have to state over and over again to yourself because it’s the obvious you tend to take most for granted and forget first. So it might seem obvious that when you go to college you think critically, or should think critically, or that should be the result of your college experience. A lot of people go through college, including me, for several years, where, in a sense, I was going through the motions. I was passing courses and getting good grades and, I suppose, enjoying myself. By the time I got to be a junior, really it took me that long, through some of the reading I was doing, and the stimulus that I got from the reading, the exposure that I got. To Kirerkegaard to James Jones, to Norman Mailer, to Bertrand Russell, to Lawrence of Arabia, seven pillars of wisdom. Reading great books, beginning to realize that I really didn’t know very much, that I was just getting started. It kick started me when that revelation rolled itself out to me, that I really hadn’t gotten started at all that’s when I thought

about going to graduate school and that’s when I applied to the University of Hawai’i.

Because I wanted to go as far away from the East Coast of the United States as I could get and still be in the United States if I could. Not because I hated the East Coast or anything I where I was, on the contrary, I had an excellent education at the little school that I went to, which, parenthetically, I recommend to everybody, for undergraduate school, go to as small a school as possible, but for graduate, go anywhere that the offerings are the greatest or the maximum kind of exposure that you’re going to get to other people thinking critically in other areas of intellectual endeavor. I thought Hawai’i, it’s going to be a new state, its had this reputation for diversity defining it, and all in this thing called the aloha spirit. I thought it would be fascinating to find out, and it turned out all my dreams in that direction actually came true, that doesn’t happen very often. I landed in paradise 51 years ago and knew it immediately; was overjoyed at the fact that I had been so fortunate and never looked back, and have been grateful for every day ever since.

E.P.: What is your biggest value?

N.A.: Are you asking me to talk about my greatest virtue? Everybody’s virtue is their vice.

E.P.: I want something you tried to stick to in your life. It doesn’t have to be something that you think you have, but just something that you’ve striven for. Something that you think people should value more.

N.A.: Let me explain why I actually wanted to go to college, out of high school. I had a teacher in, high school, named Francis P. Coward, Frank Coward, who just died in the last three months, at 92. I stayed in touch with him all of my life. When I was a junior in high school, I had occasioned through a series of coincidences that had nothing to do with me, ended up as a junior in his English class. He got up in the front of the room and said, as we came in, “I am about to enrich your life far beyond your ability ever to repay me.” Those were his exact words: “I am about to enrich your life far beyond your ability ever to repay me.” I thought “Whoa! What’s that? What’s he talking about?” And then he gave us Julius Caesar to read,

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and I got to read Marc Antony: “Friends, Romans, Countrymen…I come to bury Caesar not to praise him.” I got my first lesson in politics, my first lesson in duplicitous behavior, I got my first lesson in irony, I got my first lesson in “does he really mean that? Is what he saying and what he means the same thing?” All of those things. And the next thing we read was Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience. It never occurred to me that someone could say, “Well, you’re obligated to break the law, if the law is unjust.” Well that will get you thinking about it.

I think probably the greatest value that I got from that, the value that opened itself to me and the understanding that I had, is that human beings have this capacity to think critically, have a capacity to make judgments on themselves, have a capacity to reflect. That is the most precious gift that life can give to you and you need to treasure it, you need to utilize it. The degree that I have of virtue, it’s that desire I have to explore that capacity for reflective thinking. But, as I said, everybody’s virtue is their vice, that can also lead you to perhaps be a little cynical and skeptical about everything you run into, but perhaps a little bit, blasé isn’t the word, I don’t think I’ve ever been that, that you can tend to dismiss everything as having an angle, everything as being a hustle of some kind or another. You have to watch that in yourself that you don’t always look for the hidden agenda in everything or that that becomes the focus of your endeavors intellectually and otherwise. Particularly in a political context. So I’ve never gotten over that idea that there was this vast world out there to be understood and that it was our obligation as human beings to come to the best understanding of it we can and when that is achieved, or your perspective has been established then try to act on it in a just and equitable manner.