Asian Faculty/Staff Association
Aging the Asian American Way
Featuring Dr. Patrick Hayashi
Aging the Asian American Way - Dr. Patrick Hayashi (pdf, 185 kb)
Co-sponsored by: Amerasia, Asian Faculty and Staff Association (AFSA), and the President’s Office
Biography
Pat began his career at UC Berkeley in 1966 as a campus mail carrier. He later worked
in budget, accounting, contracts and grants and personnel. In 1969 he began teaching
freshman writing in the new Asian American Studies program. He served as head of
the program from 1971-73 and appointed Ron Takaki as the program’s first tenured professor.
In 1988, in the midst of a bitter controversy over Asian American admissions, Chancellor
Heyman appointed him associate vice chancellor for admissions and enrollment. With
that appointment, he became the highest ranking API administrator in the UC system.
While overseeing admissions, he initiated Berkeley’s move to adopt holistic review
procedures and to view applicants as more than the sum of their grades and test scores.
In 1999, Pat joined UC’s Office of the President where he served as associate president
under President Richard Atkinson. He was chief architect of Atkinson’s challenge
to the SAT. During that time, he also served as a trustee of the College Board,
which administers the SAT program, and tried to convince the Board to sever its ties
with the National Merit Scholarship Program on the grounds that it advanced a fraudulent,
indefensible concept of merit that unfairly discriminated against students of color
and disadvantaged students. After failing to persuade the College Board, he initiated
a campaign at UC that, in 2005, led all UC campuses to drop out of the program. He
remains a staunch critic of standardized college admissions tests.
After retiring from UC in 2004, Pat has taken up art. At the invitation of the US
State Department, in October 2013, he travelled to Kyrgyzstan where he gave lectures
on the Japanese American concentration camps and master classes at art colleges on
how to paint with smoke and fire, a medium he discovered by accident while nearly
setting his kitchen ablaze. He has also started voice lessons and goes to CrossFit
three times a week (theoretically).