The pineapple cannery

How a boy who grew up in the backdrop of racial segregation became a well-known biologist and leader

David Asai has had a celebrated career. He is a well-known biologist and an exceptional teacher who has taught at both high-powered research universities and prominent liberal arts colleges in the US. Over the last decade, however, he has become a national leader in thinking about education and understanding what it means to excel collectively through diversity, inclusion and mentorship.

At a meeting focused on inclusive excellence last week, where David gave a keynote speech, he told his personal story to a group of university professors. David grew up in the backdrop of racial segregation and Japanese internment camps, something his parents experienced first-hand. Despite having a degree from Berkeley, his father, a Japanese-American, could not find work that utilised his education, and had to work very menial jobs. The family, in search of jobs and a stable future, had to continuously move around the country, in places where David was often the only non-white person. From the west coast to the east to the Deep South, the family moved and eventually reached Hawaii where he grew up. Hawaii may sound like a paradise to the tourist, but to someone growing up there, it was anything but. It was racially compartmentalised with the Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese all having their own impenetrable compartments. David, inheriting a work ethic from his family, who despite the odds refused to give up, moved up the academic ladder but remembered the lessons of disadvantage and advantage based on how one looks.

During the course of his talk, David told a story. When he was around 15, he like others his age, started to look for work. He found work at a pineapple cannery, an organised place with conveyor belts, assembly lines and workers, where each worker had a particular task. For some, it was making the first cut, for the person following, it was slicing the pineapple further, and the third group had to cut it even further, followed by those who put the pieces in a can. The pineapple cannery was a hazardous place with an organised structure of people and machines that worked for as long as each person did his or her job. But it was not just each person doing the job, it was doing each job in a sequence. You could do your job very well, but if the person before you did not perform his or her task, your skills were useless.

With David leading the national discourse on inclusion and excellence in education, the lessons of the pineapple cannery have stayed with him. The two lessons are of developing a broad skill set, so that you can contribute even when others are not doing their job and even when the conveyor belts go out of fashion, and second, despite the broad skill set, the need for co-dependence for success.

As David spoke about these, I started to think about our own education system, and how we are not embracing either of these two lessons. In sciences, engineering and medicine, we recruit homogeneous students and expect them to solve problems that are anything but. The institutions expect uniformity and success is defined by archaic singular metrics with little flexibility. The rigid admissions system filters those who are disadvantaged, and fails to recognise that the success comes not from producing clones, but from generating a mosaic. At a higher level, students aspiring to become engineers and doctors, social scientists and humanists, fail to engage with one another further limiting our ability to shape a richer society. More importantly, at times of turmoil and crisis, even in the smallest spheres of our life and work, a rich perspective, reflective of both a diverse and flexible training and an understanding of socio-economic, racial, ethnic and disciplinary inclusion is both a necessity and a requirement for growth, development and survival.

Our own pineapple cannery has plenty of hazards, and the task at hand is more complex than just putting sliced fruit inside a can. Yet, embracing neither co-dependence nor recognition of a broad skill set might make our factory obsolete.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 26^th, 2016.

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