Daniel Kunstler Interview

A Conversation with Just Think’s New Board Chair

We are delighted to announce that Just Think board member Daniel Kunstler recently agreed to take the helm of our Board of Directors. Daniel spoke with Director of Development and Communications Donna Staples about his new role with Just Think. See key excerpts or read details of their conversation below.

Excerpts from the Interview (Full interview below)

Donna Staples: Tell us a little about yourself—your family history, professional background, interests.
Daniel Kunstler: I’m a study in immigrant geography… first generation American with a family background in eastern and western Europe… [My parents] married in Brazil… I worked as a banker for 25 years with J.P. Morgan… After I left Morgan I was at Dominican [University] teaching finance to undergraduates and graduate students… I’ve written a novel and I’m editing it now.

DS: How did you first learn about Just Think, and what interested you about the organization?
DK: I became acquainted with Elana [Rosen, Just Think’s Executive Director] through a friend. Elana suggested I go to the National Media Education Conference in San Francisco that year… Later Elana called me and said, “We really ought to draft a strategic plan…” We set up a group of people to think about that, and we did it. We wrote a strategic plan…

DS: [H]ow did you begin applying the [new] strategic plan?
DK: We’re looking at various strategies to apply growth, to emerge from a pattern of consistent program delivery, which we’ve done, to something which allows us to extend the reach of the mission.

DS: Do you get a sense of the direction we might take in the long term, say in the next five years?
DK: As an organization, we’re definitely motivated to look out further. The impetus for all of this is that a couple of years ago we had a U.S. Department of Education grant to validate the impact of media education on kids in a very negative environment, and that was done. “My gosh, this really does work!” And that was wonderful. But if it’s really that good, as an organization we have to grow.

DS: Why does [media literacy education] particularly resonate with your life? I can see you getting excited about this as you talk about it.
DK: …In this society there is almost a promotion of ignorance… [W]hy do we prefer the ignorance? We don’t live in a totalitarian society, and if we want to know the facts, the facts are available… I’m driven to this idea that everybody should be given the means to discover the truth…

Full Interview with Just Think Board Chair Daniel Kunstler

Donna Staples: Tell us a little about yourself—your family history, professional background, interests.

Daniel Kunstler: I’m a study in immigrant geography. I’m first generation American with a family background in eastern and western Europe, actually in Turkey. I’m very much a child of middle-class immigrants with upwardly mobile aspirations. My father’s family came here at the time of the First World War. They left Antwerp, went to Britain for about a year, and then came over. The immigration restrictions only started around 1920 or 1921. It was sort of a planned westward move. They weren’t fleeing per se, but they might have, given what happened subsequently.

My mother came to the U.S. as my father’s wife. They married in Brazil. Her family was fleeing the Nazis; they were 20 miles ahead of them. They went to Brazil because there was a quota system that they ran up against, and that’s where they could settle. My father met her in Brazil after the war.

I was born in New York, have two brothers, all born in New York, and moved to the suburbs in 1956.

In 1963 we all moved back to Europe to take care of my grandfather after my grandmother died, and we stayed on. We lived in the city of Brussels, a French-speaking environment. School there was a decent education, which was a factor. I came back when I was 30, to California, to New York, then went back to Belgium for awhile. I came back to the U.S. permanently in 1981, having earned degrees in economics and music from the University of Brussels.

I worked as a banker for 25 years with J.P. Morgan. I don’t know how I ended up there, but I did. And it was good—an old-line institution, had been around for a hundred years, a very, very collegial environment and a much more tolerant environment than I actually expected. It was the old J.P. Morgan. They would transfer me around from one posting to another. They tended to be supportive. What happened ultimately was that the financial industry, like many other industries, became more competitive. In order to remain externally competitive, they had to become more internally competitive, and it became gradually less comfortable.

I left after 25 years. September 11 came around, and you had a somewhat toxic combination of fear and greed. It signaled to me that it was time to go. By then I had come out to California in equity research.

While all this was going on, I got married, kids came along, and we started getting really involved in education as a primary concern. I had done several stints lecturing while I was at Morgan, guest lectures at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Dominican University. After I left Morgan I was at Dominican teaching finance to undergraduates and graduate students, and I really enjoyed it.

We got more and more involved in younger childhood education, and I joined the board of Marin Horizons School. I had raised the issue of teachers’ compensation… I walked into a board meeting as a community member—not as a board member— and said, “This is insane. This cannot go on, and even if it means a large increase in the tuition parents pay, it is absolutely intolerable, that a science teacher could be paid $23,000 a year. You’re going to have to adapt your operating model to accommodate higher pay.” That ultimately was quite successful. We were able to make our wages much, much more competitive, and we’ve done a great job retaining teachers. That was my magnum opus at the school, along with their first strategic plan. It was done by committee, by consensus. It had to be because nobody wants to sit down and write the damn thing.

And then I went along and asked what else should I be doing with my time. I’ve written a novel and I’m editing it now— a lot of Jewish geography in there—and also just supporting various nonprofits.

DS: How did you first learn about Just Think, and what interested you about the organization?

DK: I became acquainted with Elana [Rosen, Just Think’s Executive Director] through a friend. Elana suggested I go to the National Media Education Conference in San Francisco that year, which I did, and it got me further along. Later Elana called me and said, “We really ought to draft a strategic plan…” We set up a group of people to think about that, and we did it. We wrote a strategic plan that [now] has to be updated. They’re organic documents. They always have to roll forward. Otherwise they become very stale and somewhat meaningless after awhile.

DS: When did you join Just Think’s board and how did you begin applying the strategic plan?

DK: I was asked in fall of 2006 and actually joined in January 2007. It’s a good group of people. We’ve already done some strategic work. One [measure] was determining whether people on the board were able to live up to the commitment of being on the board. Most were. For some the timing wasn’t right, and they bowed out while remaining friends. We’re [also] looking at various strategies to apply growth, to emerge from a pattern of consistent program delivery, which we’ve done, to something which allows us to extend the reach of the mission.

DS: How do you see your role on the board changing in your new position as Chair?

DK: I wish I knew [smiling]. There’s some immediate changes. I could pinpoint two. One is to have a structure for setting the agenda for the board, so I can sit down with Elana and say, “Hey, this is what we need to be accomplishing, not as an institution but as a board, and this is what should be brought before the board. This is how they should be motivated.” We also have an Executive Committee of the board, so it’s almost like the chairmanship emerged from that endeavor: we ought to have a first among equals or at least a point person to help Elana set the board agenda.

Secondly, it will be the Chair’s responsibility to constantly take the temperature of the Board, to see where they are so Elana doesn’t have to make 18 different phone calls or exchange 18 emails, to say this is where you have good support of the board and this is where they might demur, I don’t know what issues might result in the demurring, but procedurally it’s better.

It’s an interesting time because impressionistically we know where we’re going—in terms of mission that’s not an issue, the mission is stable—but in terms of actual strategy it becomes a little bit blurry. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just a normal thing for longer reaching strategies. The further out you look, the fuzzier things are simply because it’s so difficult to predict.

DS: Could we look out just at the next year?

DK: Sure we can. When [the Executive Committee sees] a strategic opportunity—and it comes in various forms, be it enhanced relationships with complementary organizations or taking on specific projects—we test those against the mission.

We now have a grant from Taproot to help us with things like branding. As we go through that exercise, we’re probably going to be discovering that there are strategies we should be pursuing that we haven’t.

We’re also now involved in educational [video] production on a larger scale than we have for a while. That’s another poke to say, just a second, is there something out there which is nudging us more in the direction of these kinds of productions?

DS: Do you get a sense of the direction we might take in the long term, say in the next five years?

DK: As an organization, we’re definitely motivated to look out further. The impetus for all of this is that a couple of years ago we had a U.S. Department of Education grant to validate the impact of media education on kids in a very negative environment, and that was done. “My gosh, this really does work!” And that was wonderful. But if it’s really that good, as an organization we have to grow. And growth has been the by-word we feel we want to live up to, but that poses a whole bunch of challenges. One of them is a resource challenge—human resources and financial resources. In order to solve that, you have to solve it strategically rather than just say you all have to work harder, because there are only so many hours in a day, and everybody is working hard. Everybody has a lot of ideas, but there has to be a vessel for growth. That’s what we’re working on.

DS: How would you define media literacy?

DK: That’s what attracted me to Just Think in the first place. I define it pretty much as Just Think does, which is two sides of a coin. The first side is the ability of an individual (particularly a teenager, or a tweenager) to sift through all of the media messages he or she is getting and separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s not to reject all media but to extract from it what really could be of value to him or her. Probably just as any form of communication, be it a movie, a television show, a radio program, newspaper, or [an exhibit] at a museum, for that matter, the vast majority is going to be noise with either no value or sometimes detrimental impact.

I say to my children that the real art and essence of marketing messages in America—and most messages are marketing messages—is to try to convince you that something is what it isn’t or is not what it actually is. Media literacy tells you to sift through messages. You can distinguish reality from fiction.

And then the flip side of the coin is that these media messages are out there in the form of technology and the means of transmitting messages from point A to point B. Turn the whole thing on its head and you can use these various techniques, those assets, in order to get your story, your message across.

DS: Why does this particularly resonate with your life? I can see you getting excited about this as you talk about it.

DK: Let me be brutal. I think that in this society we are continually lied to, and sometimes intentionally, and sometimes because… it’s too easy. Somebody sent me an email yesterday that’s supposed to be playful and it asks you a bunch of questions about yourself. One of those questions was: What scares you?

I think the word is ignorance. In this society there is almost a promotion of ignorance, which strikes me as a crying shame. We’ve got all of the raw data. The truth is out there for anyone who wants to pick it up off the sidewalk and look at it. It’s all there. But why do we prefer the ignorance? We don’t live in a totalitarian society, and if we want to know the facts, the facts are available…

I’m driven to this idea that everybody should be given the means to discover the truth… I really would like to facilitate access to the full panoply of what is actually accessible and help [kids] do that. They’ll be richer for it.

DS: How do you see your work with Just Think affecting other aspects of your life?

DK: Well, it will take away a certain number of hours in the day [laughter]. When I left my previous employer, I identified four areas where I wanted to work, besides my own writing project. The four were: education, the environment, performing arts, and civil liberties. I performed chamber music in college and I dropped that one because that’s a profession you really have to start in youth. Education has occupied me more and more. I’m also on the board of the Larkspur Public Library, and I’ll probably accept one more boardship after I leave the Marin Horizons School board.

Just Think fits into [my interest in education] beautifully but also straddles the civil liberties concerns that I have, and you could say it straddles some of the environmental issues as well. It’s a topic that Just Think has covered in the past. The kids tend to focus on civil liberties and political issues and body image issues. What they have done very much is the civil liberties side. It is absolutely astounding!

DS: What’s your novel about? Do you talk about it?

DK: Yes, I talk about it. In fact, I should probably talk about it less and finish editing it. It’s about members of a family who were cast adrift emotionally and materially in the first half of the twentieth century…

BUT THAT’S A WHOLE DIFFERENT CONVERSATION…

up to top

more

Sponsored Projects Just Think E-News February 2008