My Advice to Samuel Hayakawa
Dr. Samuel Hayakawa gained national notoriety when he shut down the Black Panthers at San Francisco State University in 1968. He was the one college president who knew how to handle those loudmouth thugs.
By training, he was a semanticist. He was a master of rhetoric as it turned out.
A subscriber sent me this excellent retrospective of the day he yanked out the speaker wires at a gathering on campus that was disrupting classes. He later showed up with a bullhorn. Read it here.
The article neglects to mention his famous symbol: a tam-o-shanter. It made him famous. The media could not resist.
He had backbone. He was not like most college presidents: half chameleon and half jellyfish.
He stood his ground on behalf of education. He challenged a bunch of media-savvy thugs. They had met their match. They either flunked out or shut up.
I think it was after he became famous that I attended a lecture he gave on semantics. I don't recall if it was pre-1968 or not. The room was filled: at least 1,000 students. I think it must have been after his showdown with the thugs. I cannot imagine 1,000 students coming to a lecture on semantics at the University of California, Riverside, with maybe 5,000 students enrolled.
After he gave his talk on effective public speaking, he asked for questions. I rose and told him the story of how Peter Marshall, Chaplain of the Senate -- the character in the Hollywood movie, A Man Called Peter -- had been trained to speak in seminary. The professor made the students write their sermons. Then they had to switch with another student. They could not rely on their own rhetorical skills to sustain their written sermons. He acknowledged that this was a good idea.
Maybe a decade later, he and I were standing at the curbside at Los Angeles International Airport. He had just been elected U.S. Senator. I introduced myself as Ron Paul's researcher. I told him of my idea of using Code-a-Phone answering machines in his district to broadcast a weekly 3-minute message. I said Hayakawa could do the same thing. Of course, a Senator from California had far more voters to deal with. It probably would not have worked because of the logistics. But he thanked me for the suggestion.
There have been few like him, before or since.