LIFE ON THE MANOA CAMPUS

I arrived on the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii in August of 1972.  The system was founded in 1907 as the College of Hawaii.  Today, there are three primary campuses, two on Oahu and one on the Big Island, plus community colleges, with a total enrollment of 50,310.  The President is David Lassner, who I remember as a post-doc student during my early teaching period.

I'm gazing on the Wikipedia page on the UH System, and I see that our colors are Gold and Black!  Wait a minute, those were my McKinley High School colors.  

Apparently, only Manoa uses Green and White.  Hilo is Red and Black, while West Oahu has not yet selected theirs.  I guess they're waiting for some sport teams.  There is one college campus on Maui, seven community colleges and five education centers.

Since I first became a faculty member at Manoa, our enrollment has not varied much from 20,000 students.  In the early 80's I traveled to the Florida Solar Energy Center, then to their main campus in Orlando.  They began in 1967 as Florida Technological University.

There was an unfortunate name change in 1978 to University of Central Florida.  When I first visited UCF, the enrollment was in the range of 10,000, about half that of Manoa.  Today?  More than 68,000.  In 2017 the World Atlas listed UCF as the largest university in the U.S. by enrollment...63,016, so it's still growing. In addition to our solar relationship, UCF is linked to our campus by having on their football team two quarterbacks from Hawaii, and from the same high school, Mililani.

Not sure if there is a campus enrollment in the world greater than  UCF at Orlando, but Wikipedia lists Indira Gandhi National Open University in Delhi as the largest university network, with 4 million plus enrollees, and the California Community Colleges System at #3 with a bit over 2 million.  At #27 is the State University System of Florida, with 358,522.

So earlier this week, to continue my attempt to Save Planet Earth and Humanity, I drove down Maile Way, where the Rainbow Shower Trees were blooming, to my office in the POST building of the Manoa Campus:

I had dropped by Zippy's for their Zip Pac, which I ate in my office with an appropriate libation:

On the wall of my room are my commendations and a few other highlights and jokes.  Doctors do this to add credibility to their capability.  Some professors exhibit their accomplishments to brag.  

Note to the right are these two, the green one showing my lowest ever golf round:

Note the date:  April 1, 1971.  Yes, April Fool.  However, this Senator Matsunaga press release was never released.  What happened was that a colleague, Harvey Meyerson, and I, were invited to sit-in on a Senatorial campaign committee meeting, and the group proceeded to prioritize the points that Matsunaga would be making on his re-election effort.  #1 was crime.  Neither the Mars Project (which Harvey ghost-wrote) nor energy (for which Sparky made his mark) were even mentioned.  Matsunaga had done nothing about crime, so why?

At this point Harvey and I did not appreciate the reality of politics.  The committee was there to re-elect Senator Matsunaga, and felt that Mars and energy were not subjects of importance to his constituency.  So much for truth and probity in politics.  However, they had something more important, wisdom, and Sparky was returned to the U.S. Senate without much said about space and solar.

Anyway, later that day in our disgust, Harvey (right) and I, as a prank, produced this fake press release you see above.  In hindsight, we would have been fired if it was ever leaked.

I went back to my office yesterday and thought I'd walk around the Manoa Campus.  I spent most of my professional career in Holmes Hall.  I don't think the building was yet ready, but Alexander Liberman's Gate of Hope was erected in 1972:

They recently re-painted it at a cost of $150,000 or so, and, I think, purposefully or not, changed the color.  Here is the original orange:

I wonder if Liberman's trust was ever informed.  I remember a long time ago me recommending that we re-paint the sculpture with each pipe segment a different color of the rainbow, for, after all, we are the University of Hawaii Rainbows.

Right next to this piece of art is the Manoa Campus sign on Metcalf off Dole:

Can't imagine why they placed this sign away from the main entrance, which doesn't have much of an introduction at the  gateway on the corner of University and Dole:

You've probably never even noticed the UH symbol.  To the right on the wall is MALUNA A'E O NA LAHUI APAU KE OLA KE KANAKA:

I'm probably one of the very few who knows that this term stands for ABOVE ALL NATIONS IS HUMANITY.  But that's because I went to the Hawaiian dictionary.  If you drove up to the UH, nowhere is there a sign about where you are.  In the background is Bachman Hall, the office area of our university president, named after our 5th, Paul S. Bachman (left).

The academic system in the USA just can't get its leadership terms straight.  Depending on the institution, sometimes the Chancellor is the big boss, and on others, it is the President.  At the University of Hawaii, President David Lassner is the top head, and postponed the Manoa Chancellor search for two years, but that was 2.5 years ago.  Not sure what is happening, but we really don't need a chancellor.  In my experience, there are too many redundancies with two offices, and a lot of in-fighting.

I'm knowledgeable about this disfunction because I forty years ago worked for Chancellor Douglas Yamamura, then, followed by Marvin Anderson, and we were housed in Hawaii Hall:

This was the first building at Manoa, built in 1912 over a pig farm.  I chaired the monthly deans' gathering and provided the summary.  One lesson I learned was that deans have no freedom nor independent funds.  They are in constant battle with faculty, students, the administration and rest of the world.  Around that time the major heads were made equal in stature and salary scale with deans.  As a research director, I later learned that we are hired to be pirates, using creativity to develop new programs.  What a different world.

Walking around, in keeping with the earlier orange/red theme, here are two flowering trees:

If you think all I do on campus is take flower photos and eat, you'd be mostly right.  However, since I've retired I have published three books, written more than a hundred articles for The Huffington Post and maintained my daily blog, now in year eleven.

I then found my way to Suntory in Waikiki for the best lunch I've had since my last trip to Japan:

This restaurant has been here for more than 30 years, and I've had a bottle of Japanese scotch and some kind of gin there since year one.  At one time there were Suntory restaurants around the world.  They have largely all closed, and I wonder how long the Waikiki one will be around, although lunch traffic was brisk.

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