Aloha to the UH Mānoa ʻohana!

December is surely a busy time of the year, ranging from the stress of preparing for finals to the joy of graduation to the celebration of the upcoming holiday season. This update reviews the positive changes we’ve accomplished together here at UH Mānoa over the past year and previews some of the exciting developments for 2011.

Upcoming graduation

Our mid-year Commencement Exercise combines the Undergraduate and Advanced Degree Ceremony on Saturday, December 18, from 9:00 am to noon at the Stan Sheriff Center.

Graduation is such a special time – we open our ceremony with an oli to honor “the place and its people” in keeping with Native Hawaiian protocol and to introduce a tone of honor and celebration.

This oli also recognizes that UH Mānoa is “unique”, a special place in so many ways – its multicultural community, global perspective, diverse disciplines, location, and so much more. Our community truly is like no other place on earth and we honor that uniqueness!

We are excited to learn from our commencement speaker – Nobel Prize-winning physicist and renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Samuel C.C. Ting. While here, he will meet with UH Mānoa Physics faculty to discuss the creation of a data center in Hawaiʻi for his Alpexcitedha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment, which will be launched in February 2011 on the last mission of the Shuttle Program and located on the International Space Station.

I encourage all members of our UH Mānoa community to participate in this very special, joyful celebration, along with the nearly 1,100 students eligible to receive degrees and certificates.

Providing facilities to enhance the Mānoa experience

My major goals over the past three years have been to enhance UH Mānoa as: a destination of choice, a global leading research university and a respectful, inclusive community. An important step in attaining these goals is improving the quality of the student experience here at our Mānoa campus.

A major move forward has been the improvements in our residential halls – half of our nearly 4,000 students living on campus reside in living quarters built or extensively renovated within the past three years, including all four Hale Aloha towers and Frear Hall, and soon to include Johnson Halls, which will undergo improvements in the coming year.

The historic Hemenway Hall has been newly renovated and the expansion of the Campus Center has just begun – both support the special Mānoa Experience our students will enjoy here. When the work on the Campus Center is completed, it will provide a large indoor recreation center and many new places for students to gather and interact.

Some other improvements may not be as noticeable, but are just as significant. We have completed repairs on 37 leaky roofs, replaced mechanical systems and expanded energy conservation, which has made us a Hawaiʻi leader in energy savings. In the last 5 years, Mānoa has reduced its energy usage by 20% and is on track to meet the goal of reducing campus energy use by 50% by 2015. The Mānoa Green Days website contains information on building “power-downs” and other energy-saving information and Malama Honua provides current information on campus sustainability efforts.

‘Like no other place on Earth’

Communication is the key to highlight the value of UH Mānoa to Hawaiʻi and beyond. Earlier this year we began airing five television commercials – the fifth and newest, entitled “Always,” focuses on opportunities for Native Hawaiian students here at UH Mānoa. Our own faculty, staff and students helped create the messages and are featured in these ads which also were produced by our own Academy for Creative Media alumni.

Our campus has been engaged in refreshing our strategic plan “Defining our Destiny” led by a jointly appointed Faculty Senate and Administration committee; the new draft plan has been posted online. Please read and contribute input – this is important for communicating our goals and values.

Many students, faculty and staff contribute to making the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa truly “like no other place on Earth.” Here are a few who have earned recognition in recent months:

• The College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources helped eradicate a highly invasive, stinging pest called Little Fire Ants from the island of Maui. Cas Vanderwoude, with the Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit, developed an experimental ant bait that succeeded in destroying ant nests.
• Architecture’s student team of Frank Alsup, Sanphawat Jatupatwarangkul, Tuan Tran and Ramo Khem was one of only two teams selected nationally to have their sustainable home design come to life in New Orleans, by the U.S. Green Building Council. The team traveled to New Orleans to meet with local architects and community leaders, as well as showcase their design at the 2010 USGBC Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Chicago.

• Mānoa’s Debate and Forensics Society under the direction of Dept. of Speech Asst. Professor Robert Boller enjoyed impressive victories at the Yale Inter-Varsity debate tournament and undergraduates Kyle Dahlin, Keoni Davey, Maria Deguzman, Daniel Hugo, Eliot St. John and Sam Swift went on to compete in Oxford – this team has only been in existence for two years!
• Few link Hawaiʻi with the South Pole, but Professor Peter Gorham is lead researcher for the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment awarded a $4.6 million grant, of which lead institution UH Mānoa will receive $1.4 million. The project is designed to view the Antarctic ice sheet over a wide area using a sophisticated array of 40 antennas that “listen” for sharp bursts of radio waves.
• The pioneering ʻIKE AO PONO program – led by Program Director Nalani Minton - at the School of Nursing and Dental Hygiene received the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Innovations in Professional Nursing Education Award for fostering interest in nursing as a career option to students of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander heritage.
• New deans who joined the Mānoa leadership team include: Robert Bley-Vroman, College of Languages, Linguistics, Literature; Sylvia Yuen, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources; Noreen Makuau, Myron B. Thompson, School of Social Work; William Chismar, Outreach College; Patricia Cooper, Dean of Graduate Division. Also, a new program “Leadership Matters” was initiated this year for chairs/directors/deans.
• Our sports teams have joined the Big West Conference (BWC) and the Mountain West Conference (MWC) beginning with the 2012–13 season. Both conferences are strong matches academically, competitively, philosophically and geographically for UH Mānoa athletics.

Upcoming Activities

There are many more accomplishments than can be mentioned here, so please check the latest news (http://www.manoa.hawaii.edu) on all that is happening at UH Mānoa – and there is really so much. Our university connects in many ways personally with our Hawaiʻi community, such as JABSOM students offering free health screenings for the public to our Super M graduate students providing a series of paper-folding lessons to Hawaiʻi’s keiki. This coming year emphasizes many of Hawaiʻi’s global connections, including the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference, joint International Convention of Asia Scholars and Association for Asian Studies, East-West Philosophers’ conference and many others – all great opportunities to demonstrate the outstanding contributions of our UH Mānoa faculty, staff and students to Hawaiʻi and to the world. And, of course, WASC accreditation for UH Mānoa – the campus just submitted its final report for the Educational Effectiveness Review and will undergo its final stage of review on March 14–16, 2011.

The work we do together truly does change lives and shape futures. Mahalo for all that you contribute! May you enjoy a wonderful holiday season with your loved ones and return feeling energized for an exciting 2011.

Mahalo,
Chancellor Virginia S. Hinshaw
vhinshaw@hawaii.edu