Island Earth and the 21st Century University
Remarks by President David McClain
Presented to the Social Change and University Development Panel
Nov. 4, 2007, Beijing Forum
Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to address this panel focused on the missions of universities in social change, public policy and university development and cultural diversity and human resource development, all in the context of our much more globalized society.
I have had the privilege of being closely associated with four institutions of higher education, two in the private sector and two in the public sphere. As an undergraduate, I attended the University of Kansas, an excellent public institution in America’s heartland. I received my doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later taught there as a visiting faculty member on two occasions. For more than a decade, I served on the faculty of Boston University, like the MIT a private university. Since 1991, I have been at the only public institution of higher education in America’s only island state, the University of Hawai‘i, first as a faculty member, then as a dean, then a vice president and since 2004 as the chief executive officer.
My remarks will reflect all of these influences, but will focus on the evolving role of the University of Hawai‘i in the State of Hawai‘i in the United States and in the world.
Permit me to start with my conclusion: The University of Hawai‘i’s mission, its connection to public policy and its role in the promotion of diversity and human resource development are a harbinger of the roles all universities will play in 21st century society.
Here’s the reason: Now that comprehensive globalization has produced an "Island Earth" society marked by increasingly extreme interdependence among peoples and nations, island societies provide a roadmap, a guidepost for the direction in which global society will evolve.
One of Hawai‘i’s experts on sustainable development, former AOL executive and current CEO of Maui Land and Pineapple David Cole puts it this way: the small scale of island societies allows new influences to be "expressed" (in a genetic sense) more quickly. So what does the University of Hawai‘i experience teach Island Earth?
First, some facts. This year, 2007, is the University of Hawai‘i’s 100th anniversary. In 1907, the University of Hawai‘i was chartered by the Territorial Legislature, along the lines of other public land grant universities in the United States. During the past century, no other institution in the State of Hawai‘i has done more for social justice, for personal transformation and for economic development than has the University of Hawai‘i.
The reason for this is easy to understand. Our footprint on the Hawai‘i higher education landscape has been, and continues to be, enormous. Every week, 1 in every 14 adults living in the State of Hawai‘i pursues their education dreams on one of our 10 campuses. Our enrollment dwarfs that of the three private universities in Hawai‘i by a factor of 6 or 7 to 1.
To get a sense of the influence of the University of Hawai‘i in the State of Hawai‘i, consider this: if our role were "scaled" to the entire United States, with its 300-million-plus population, we would be a university with 21.5 million students!
As a result of this large and sustained importance of the University of Hawai‘i to the State of Hawai‘i, many of the questions now just being raised about the roles of universities in global society have long ago been raised and addressed in our small island context.
Take for example our mission and role within the State of Hawai‘i and the connection between public policy and academic institutions. The University of Hawai‘i System comprises a flagship research campus, the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, ranked as one of the 25 leading public research universities in the United States; two small comprehensive universities, at Hilo and West O‘ahu; and seven community colleges, four on the island of O‘ahu and one each on the islands of Kaua‘i, Maui and Hawai‘i (the "Big Island").
The University of Hawai‘i System has four goals, all of which serve the public:
- Increasing opportunities for access to higher education with underrepresented groups (e.g., the Native Hawaiians, our indigenous people who populated our island more than a millennium ago) and underserved regions of the state.
We’ve addressed this objective by increasing financial aid to Native Hawaiians and by creating curricula focused on Native Hawaiian issues. Our Hilo campus hosts the only doctorate in the world in indigenous language revitalization. Our Manoa campus features a School of Hawaiian Knowledge combining undergraduate and graduate education in Hawaiian language, culture, history and politics.
We addressed the need for new facilities in the rapidly growing West O‘ahu and West Hawai‘i areas by using public private partnerships to plan for the build-out of new campuses (including, in West Hawai‘i, a partnership with the brokerage industry icon Charles Schwab). - Diversifying the economy via the creation of new knowledge and the development of means to transfer new technologies to the marketplace.
Our research enterprise is one of the most prolific of any university our size. Our astronomy program is ranked #2 in the world, and our oceanography and vulcanology programs are not far behind in their respective fields. UH’s second language studies program is a global leader, and our Asian studies and Pacific studies programs are among the best in the Western world.
Our faculty routinely advise the various departments of state government as well as the non-governmental organization sector on a wide range of topics, from the state of the economy to the best means for keeping our agricultural exports free of disease to the appropriate means for preserving Hawai‘i’s precious environmen, to such cutting edge issues as bioprospecting. - Developing the state’s workforce, responding to requirements in a variety of expanding industries, including healthcare, primary and secondary education, construction and information systems.
Our community colleges have created academies within the public high schools to promote student interest in the construction trades (26 high schools); information systems (22 high schools); and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines (14 high schools). UH systemwide working groups in nursing and teaching focus on maximizing our output in these chronic shortage areas given available resources and in attracting new resources to these areas. - Most fundamentally, growing the educational capital of the state by insuring that high school students are well prepared to enter college, by promoting retention of new matriculants, by facilitating the transfer of credit among the 10 campuses of our system and by producing more college graduates.
Our P–20 Initiative, a collaboration of the Good Beginnings Alliance, the State Department of Education and the University of Hawai‘i, aims to insure effective transitions from early childhood into elementary school, from elementary and middle schools into high schools and from high schools into a university or the world of work. "P–20" means provisions for early learning through grade 20 and is a metaphor for a lifetime of learning.
It is imperative that we increase our educational capital, because Hawai‘i is one of the states in the United States in which the 25 year olds have less educational attainment than 40 year olds. (Indeed, the United States as a whole, along with Germany, now have this characteristic.)
This lack of educational progress among the youth of our state bodes ill for Hawai‘i’s competitiveness (and for that of the entire United States and Germany), and for the vibrancy of a democratic society in an ever more complex world. Democracy depends on an educated populace to function effectively, and the national competitiveness that is something of a precondition for a well-functioning democracy also starts with a well educated citizenry.
These four goals of the University of Hawai‘i System have been developed by the university and its Board of Regents; they also reflect informal conversations over the years between the governor’s office and legislative leaders.
More formally, in the year 2000, the voters approved a constitutional amendment giving the University of Hawai‘i a measure of autonomy, with increased control over its own assets and finances, as compared with other departments of state government. In the years since, the state has given the university additional flexibility in some areas (notably the raising of funds from the capital markets), and taken away flexibility in others (bringing the university back into the state’s more restrictive procurement code).
Most recently, the voters of the state approved a constitutional amendment influencing the manner in which members of the Board of Regents are chosen, creating the Regents Candidate Advisory Council to recommend to the governor a short list of qualified candidates from which the governor is required to choose nominees for senate confirmation. Ostensibly, this candidate advisory council is intended to remove politics from the regent selection process. Only time will tell whether that objective can be met simultaneously with sustaining incentives for the state’s leading citizens to consider volunteering their time to serve as regents.
In this centennial year, informal conversations with the governor and legislature are focusing anew on performance measures, such as improved enrollment, retention, transfer and graduation rates, and the development of a comprehensive, multiyear financial plan designed to provide the resources needed to meet those objectives. These informal conversations, which in some states have evolved into formal compacts between state governments and their public universities, reflect a nationwide discussion in the United States focused on the role of universities in sustaining and increasing America’s competitiveness. At a conference I attended last summer with the Wellington Group, comprised of higher education officials from England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the topic was much the same.
Let me conclude with a few remarks about the role of the University of Hawai‘i in insuring cultural diversity as part of human resources development.
Our strategic vision at the University of Hawai‘i is grounded in the values of island societies generally, of Polynesian island societies particularly, and of Native Hawaiians most particularly. These values include a strong sense of community and mutual respect among members of the society and an enhanced sense of the need to conserve and care for limited resources, in Hawaiian malama ’aina, which means to care for the land.
These values have not received as much prominence in continental societies historically, no doubt owing in part to the relative abundance of resources. In the United States in the 19th century, the call of the western frontier contributed to the culture of individualism; if one wasn’t getting along with one’s neighbors, moving west was an option.
For island dwellers, moving on isn’t so easy, since there’s an ocean to traverse.
In Island Earth of the 21st century, these island values of community, respect and malama ‘aina are essential values for the world as a whole and, particularly, for continental nations thrown closer together by the forces of globalization. We simply must develop a global ethos that we’re all in this together.
In Hawai‘i, of course, we also have the benefit of a rich multicultural history. After the first recorded Western contact in 1778, American missionaries came to Hawai‘i in the 1820s, followed by waves of immigration from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and, more recently, the nations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Our history also includes interest in Hawai‘i by several European powers and Russia.
This multicultural history puts us in the vanguard of a similar experience under way on a much more globalized Island Earth. Diversity is routine in Hawai‘i and has been for nearly all of the university’s history. Still, it must be said that Hawai‘i did not make full progress in dealing with racial discrimination until it became a state in 1959 and the United States enacted civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.
Similarly, the rights of women and other disadvantaged groups only fully developed after movement on these issues at the national level.
That said, Hawai‘i is a place where it’s easier to be different, and to be valued more for one’s talents alone, than in many parts of the Unites States and indeed many parts of the world.
The second nature of this multiculturalism finds one expression in the national and international prominence of the graduates of the Shidler College of Business on the UH Manoa campus. For more than a quarter of a century, Shidler graduates have been recognized the world over for their expertise in international business and their enhanced sensitivity to the complications and opportunities that come with operating in a more multicultural corporate environment. I’m most familiar with the Shidler experience owing to my time as dean there, but I think it likely that this capability carries over to all our University of Hawai‘i graduates.
In conclusion, then, in this centennial year of the University of Hawai‘i I can say to the members of the Beijing Forum and, indeed, to the global community, that our mission, our connection to public policy and our role in the promotion of diversity and human resource development are suggestive of the roles all universities will play in the Island Earth of 21st century society. It’s a complex assignment, with a multiplicity of stakeholders—but it’s ours as university leaders because no other institutions on the planet are more important to our societies.
Thank you for the invitation to the Beijing Forum, and thank you for your attention.