Enduring Ties
By President Michael E. Latham ’86
As a student at Punahou, I was blessed to learn from many outstanding teachers and coaches. They taught me to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems. More fundamentally, they raised my confidence, helped me grow, and became trusted role models for the kind of reflective, compassionate, and purpose-driven life that I hoped I might someday lead myself.
Jay Seidenstein, my teacher for Advanced Placement United States History, made an especially powerful impression on me. In Jay’s class, history was not a static set of names, dates, and facts to memorize and then reproduce in a paper or exam. It instead became a field of competing interpretations about the past, a continuing argument about questions of cause, effect, meaning, and values that directly impacted our choices in the present. Each class was built around a question, and you had to arrive prepared to make your case in open discussions. Was the American Revolution only about independence, or did the idea of natural rights transform society, culture, and politics too? How did the ideology of manifest destiny shape the country’s westward expansion and turn toward imperialism in places like Hawai‘i and the Philippines? Why did the civil rights movement fracture in the late 1960s, and what legacies did its achievements and failures leave for our own time? As we sat in a circle debating the issues, Jay constantly pushed us to listen to and respond to each other, use concrete evidence, and test the limits of our understanding. He also guided our debates with insight, humor, and encouragement, and reminded us that ideas have real consequences – they matter.
To me, this was incredibly exciting, and Jay’s course remains one of the most transformative learning experiences of my life. Jay took a group of curious teenagers and helped us find our own voices.
He taught us to reason, take intellectual risks, and engage respectfully with arguments we disagreed with. He taught us a lesson in humility too. When he got a question he couldn’t answer he would honestly reply that he didn’t know, and that he’d find out. He was a learner as much as a teacher, and I respected that enormously.
Jay’s teaching ultimately led me to become a teacher myself. I majored in history at Pomona College, and after graduating I taught a summer session course at Aiea High School. I loved it. I soon earned a Ph.D. in American history at UCLA and became a professor of history at Fordham University in New York, where I taught and published books and articles for much of my career. I later became an administrator at Fordham and Grinnell College and finally came back to Hawai‘i to become Punahou’s president. After I returned, I also decided to teach Advanced Placement United States History, the same course that originally inspired me. As I teach another generation of Punahou students, I remain deeply grateful for Jay’s mentoring and friendship, and I strive to live up to the high standards that he set for me some forty years ago.
I hope you enjoyed the stories of the relationships, guidance, and enduring ties that fill this issue of our school’s magazine. Of all the institutions that I have ever been a part of, Punahou remains the one that had the largest impact in helping me become the person I am today. I expect that many of you feel the same way, and that you share my love for Ka Punahou.
Main Article: The Punahou Network A Hui for Life