Campus Update
November 4, 2009
Aloha!
Fall is flying by as we pass the mid-way point of this semester — a busy time for sure, especially as we look ahead to finals and the holiday season. I do hope that everyone has a few moments to pause and refresh. Thankfully, being at a university offers many ways to refresh – from attending a lecture, concert, art show, or athletic event to enjoying coffee with a colleague to taking a walk across campus. During tough times, taking advantage of those opportunities is more important than ever.
Most of my updates lately have focused on the budget situation — and it surely remains a major challenge, but I want to be sure that we also share the good news. There is progress regarding our efforts in many areas but today I will focus on Mānoa's steps to help our community, to improve sustainability, upgrade our facilities and communicate the great value provided by our University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa campus.
Helping Our Community
We have the opportunity to provide a valuable service to our community by helping fill the education gap created by "Furlough Fridays" at our public schools. We welcome and encourage "furlough families" to participate in our campus events that can be found on our on-line calendar.
Potential UH Mānoa students can schedule campus tours through the Admissions Office.
UH Mānoa's Art Gallery offers a variety of educational programs on historical and contemporary art, including unguided or docent tours, lectures by artists and scholars, and other activities. School groups are invited to schedule tours by contacting gallery@hawaii.edu.
We encourage more ideas about how we can help families and their keiki have more educational experiences during this time — many campus members are already helping schools deal with this challenge and any learning activity that could assist would be helpful. Send any ideas to our feedback account.
Improving Sustainability
As announced recently, we've launched our new website "Malama Honua" (Caring for Earth). Mānoa's Eric Crispin, Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Planning, is working on coordinating and amplifying the efforts of our faculty, staff and students in sustainability, so we are all hoping that the entire campus will add ideas and opportunities for engagement to the website. In addition, Eric is working on the next step, an initiative informally termed the "Mānoa Sustainability Corps" to advance UH Mānoa's leadership in sustainability. We are looking for ideas, so please share your ideas with him at ecrispin@hawaii.edu.
Our campus-wide initiative to conserve energy — Mānoa Green Days — has already yielded positive results. Last year the campus reduced its electricity consumption by 7%, saving about $1.5M in operating costs. Learn more here at Mānoa Green Days.
This week we celebrate the receipt of federal funding to replace our aging, dilapidated refuse trucks with reduced-emission diesel trucks and a dump truck — these new vehicles are a big step forward in supporting our sustainability efforts on campus.
Upgrading facilities
Our priority in the last biennium budget was repairs and maintenance and we educated many people about that problem. As a result, Mānoa received $97 million — the most we've ever had for repairs and maintenance — that will help us both upgrade our infrastructure and operate in a more sustainable manner by replacing inefficient building cooling systems, moving forward on repairing long-neglected leaky roofs and addressing other needs.
Our facilities folks are currently completing 95 projects and beginning on another 95 much-needed repair projects for Mānoa, which you can learn more about.
Some examples of upgrades — the Art and Architecture auditoriums have been refurbished; windows across campus have been cleaned; major renovations in the Music Department are now complete; and Mānoa Makeovers, in which students play a leading role, continue to contribute in many ways.
We have much yet to do but there is progress!
Communicating successes
This is a great moment to recruit more of Hawaiʻi's accomplished students, because they and their families are examining the great value Mānoa provides. Communicating that great value widely is a major activity for our campus and is critical to recruiting future students, as well as generating support from our alumni and friends. See a recent report to the Board of Regents on Mānoa's contribution to UH system goals (PDF).
Some facts we use to promote Mānoa are:
- Every year we educate more than 20,000 students who become critical members of Hawaiʻi's work force;
- Our campus confers 79% of all UH bachelor degrees, 98% of all UH graduate and professional degrees, and 92% of all UH graduate degrees to Native Hawaiians;
- Our campus members render compassionate public service to our broader community;
- Our faculty, staff and students generate $1 million dollars worth of research each and every day of the year;
- Every $1.00 invested in UH Mānoa produces $5.34 of spending in Hawaii.
Our recent campus-wide open house, the Mānoa Experience, was a terrific success in showing prospective students and their families the tremendous opportunities we offer in learning and research. Thanks to the many students, faculty and staff who contributed to making the third annual event the best ever!
- We've launched a new effort — Mānoa Arts and Minds — to promote cultural and arts events offered by Theatre, Music, Art and Outreach College and to draw people to our campus. For more information, visit Mānoa Arts and Minds. We've already received requests to expand Mānoa Arts and Minds to other campus programs and we're working on that.
- We're making use of electronic communications to magnify our message — we've launched a UH Mānoa Campus Talk blog in honoluluadvertiser.com which I encourage you to read regularly.
- We've also created a Mānoa ‘Ohana webpage for parents and families.
- Many of you have noticed a film crew on campus — and a number of you have even been called on to participate in its activities. A donation I received is being used to film a series of television advertisements that will highlight learning and research opportunities at Mānoa.
This is Homecoming Week — check Homecoming 2009. As we celebrate the 100th year of University athletics, we invite alumni and the community to join us in this year's Homecoming Celebration. Events this week include:
- Opportunities for alums to reconnect with the College of Engineering, the School of Nursing and Dental Hygiene, School of Law, the College of Education, the Shidler College of Business, Kennedy Theatre and more;
- The Grand Re-Opening Concert for Orvis Auditorium (Thursday, Nov. 5);
- Homecoming Pep Rally Friday afternoon (Nov. 6) on the front lawn at Bachman Hall leading up to an evening Rainbow Wahine Volleyball match;
- An alumni tailgate gathering at Aloha Stadium prior to the homecoming football game with our Warrior Football team versus Utah State (Nov. 7). For details, please visit Homecoming 2009.
Honors and achievements
Members of our UH Mānoa community have recently earned recognition for outstanding achievements and they deserve commendation:
Students
- Debate and Forensics Society team partners Daniel Hugo and Benjamin Siegel won the honor of being the top collegiate debate team in Hawai‘i in the annual Pan-Pacific Debate Championship.
- UH Mānoa's Hui Poʻokela chapter was among just 32 outstanding chapters to be honored for excellence with the Golden Torch Award by the 2009 Mortar Board National Conference for outstanding devotion to scholarship, leadership and service.
- College of Education students Tristan Shigematsu and Alisha DeGuair were named Milken Family Foundation Teachers of Promise.
Faculty & Staff
- Peter J. Berkelman, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Yingbin Liang, assistant professor of electrical engineering, received the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award, one of NSF's most prestigious and competitive awards for junior researchers.
- Raymond Yeh, a professor and former dean of the School of Architecture was named one of the nation's Most Admired Educators of 2009 by DesignIntelligence, official publication of the Design Futures Council.
- Music lecturer The Reverend Masatoshi Shamoto received Japan's Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays, one of the nation's most prestigious decorations, equivalent to the degree of European knighthood.
- Dr. Irwin Schatz, former chair of the Department of Medicine at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Mayo Clinic for his major role in helping to expose the injustice of The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Subjects of the infamous research project were left untreated—even though by the 1940s penicillin had been validated as an effective treatment.
- Dr. Naleen Andrade, Professor and chair of the Psychiatry Department of the Medical School, received the 2009 Outstanding Community Mental Health Leader Award from the Mental Health America of Hawaiʻi.
- Planetary astronomer Tobias Owen won the 2009 Gerard P. Kuiper Prize by the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), and Rolf-Peter Kudritzki, Director of the Institute for Astronomy, received the highest astronomy award in Germany - the prestigious Karl Schwarzschild Prize for 2009.
- Brian Bushe, an insect and plant researcher at the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (CTAHR) was named State Employee of the Year at the Governor's Awards Ceremony.
- The UH President's Award for Excellence in Building and Grounds Maintenance was won by Violeta Baguyo, custodian at the William S. Richardson School of Law.
- Two faculty members received the Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching: Joanne Birch, a graduate teaching assistant and doctoral candidate in Botany; and Heather Kurano, a Spanish instructor in the Department of Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas.
- These faculty members received the Regents' Medal for Excellence in Teaching: David L. Callies at the Law School; Sang Yee Cheon in East Asian Languages and Literatures; James Henry in the Department of English; and V. Amarjit Singh in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
- Three faculty members were chosen for the Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research: Milton Diamond at the Medical School; Sandip Pakvasa in Physics and Astronomy; and Jon Van Dyke of the Law School.
Program Achievements
- Our School of Nursing and Dental Hygiene has signed an agreement to partner with the U.S. Army's Pacific Regional Medical Command in researching ways to improve nursing care in the military. And our School of Nursing and Dental Hygiene was chosen by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to participate in a new program that enables us to add about 40 more nursing students and helps improve faculty training.
- UH Mānoa's Army ROTC program has been cited by the MacArthur Foundation and Cadet Command as one of eight top Army ROTC programs in the country out of 272 programs.
- Several graduate programs are recognized among the best in the nation in U.S. News and World Report's "America's Best Graduate Schools 2010:"
- Shidler College of Business ranks 21st in international business;
- Library and Information Science (LIS) program is ranked by its peers 29th nationwide;
- The Geriatrics Program at the John A. Burns School of Medicine ranks 16th in the nation;
The William S. Richardson School of Law was ranked by Princeton Review as among the nation's top law schools in offering the Best Environment for Minority Students and placed second as the school most chosen by older students, and fifth for the most diverse faculty.
Congratulations to all of these folks and to all of you whose efforts continue to move UH Mānoa forward!
Virginia S. Hinshaw
Chancellor
vhinshaw@hawaii.edu