Tom Apple

The sun was shining on Saturday morning before Tom Apple’s inaugural, honeymoon first week as the new chancellor for University of Hawaii-Manoa.

Answers to tougher questions — about the athletic director’s contract future, about which programs will rise and fall over the inevitable budget shortfalls — won’t be forthcoming until after he gets more face-to-face meetings behind him.

Even before he landed, Apple, 57, knows the questions have been asked, mostly about what’s in his own pay packet — about $439,000 annually. His counter: The figure is roughly in the middle of the pack for top officers of state flagship campuses, he said, and the job is paying less than what he would have been getting to stay put as University of Delaware provost. When the cost of living is factored in, Apple said, the UH leap was not a lucrative one for him.

His faculty work took him to the University of Nebraska and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before he became arts and sciences dean at UD.

“I think I have experience that’s very varied and complex and somewhat unique,” he said. “I hope to prove my worth.”

Leaving UD was like leaving home. It was the campus where, as a student, he found his academic passion in chemistry research. It’s also where he met his wife (still back east, trying to sell the couple’s home).

Apple’s aims for UH include boosting its research programs to enhance revenues. Grants and other opportunities have favored sciences and business, but he asserts that they’re becoming more available across the liberal arts and social sciences, too. Collaborations with business will become a big part of the UH financial portfolio, he said.

To underscore his own interest in balancing his left-brain orientation, Apple said he took a drawing class and celebrates athletics as an important part of education (running is one of his passions; he ran in a Maui event last year).

“I tell students, take intellectual risks. If you’re an engineer, take an art class. If you’re an art student, take a math class,” he said. “When students are challenged, confronted, that’s where real growth is.”

QUESTION: What interested you about this position?

ANSWER: I was very fortunate to have some great faculty who took an interest in me and got me excited about research, and I got to see how they approached problems as a researcher. That whole approach to discovery, and finding out things about our world that moves the world forward, was really a transformational time in my life and really made me passionate about something for the first time.

The opportunities for that here are amazing. This is without question the most unique university in the U.S. You can’t even make an argument that that’s not the case.

Q: In what way?

A: Well, first of all, we’re here on an archipelago in the Pacific Rim. The makeup of the population in terms of diverse cultures that passed through these islands and have taken home here is remarkable. So we have a mix of so many different cultures, many from Asia, some from Europe, that have mixed here, and I’m a real believer that this gives many unique perspectives. …

The other thing is, I think the university has done a remarkable job in being either the best or among the best in the world, at exactly the areas you’d expect them to, being on an island. They have incredible marine expertise, incredible expertise in astronomy and earth sciences, in pan-Asian social sciences and economics, and Asian business.

What University of Hawaii has is unique and incredibly strong. To be honest, when I first applied, I didn’t realize how good it was. That, therein, is one of the jobs I have to do, is get the reputation of the university to the same place as the reality is, thinking about branding the university on the mainland so that people understand just how incredible this place is.

The university has done a great job of becoming among the best in the world in certain areas and therefore very competitive in those areas. And when you are that way, you also attract the best post-doctorals, you attract the best graduate students in those areas. I think the real key is focusing on what they’re really good at.

Q: These areas have a high success rate, but they’re compensating for weaker ones?

A: I’m sure that’s a good assessment. I’m still new here, so I don’t know what areas are maybe transitional, that can be turned into great areas. But I think it’s really important for us to figure out what we can continue to grow and excel in … and then there may be some areas that we should decide that we don’t want to continue in, so we can focus our resources on those we can be really good in.

Q: What can you say to UH undergraduates and their parents, who see a university’s main focus as providing a degree?

A: For me, the transformation, the thing that made me who I am, was engaging in research, but for a student … that could come about from a project. … It’s experiential. It’s about combining the theory you learn in a classroom to real-life experience. … It can happen in a study abroad, it can happen in service learning projects, it can happen in a classroom where you’re doing problem-based learning or studio interactive learning. Of course, for me it was the research lab. And it can happen by writing.

I actually am a huge believer in intensive writing for students, because to really write a good paper really requires a student to become a scholar. They have to do a literature survey, they have to find out what’s known. They have to propose a hypothesis; they have to defend that with good arguments.

Those kind of skills … I think are not only essential for success, but I do think they’re transformational. I think they make students passionate about something — and I often think if all we do is a student finds their passion during those four years, then we’ve done our job. Because somebody who’s passionate about something is going to be good at it. …

Q: How do you see the land-grant college mission of UH changing?

A: I think the land-grant mission of the university today is to help with the teachers. We train the teachers, help with the educational system … pre-K all the way through 12, and then all the way through higher education and, for a research university, through the graduate programs. Health care and the health sciences: nursing, nurse practitioners, doctors, physician’s assistants.

Of course, agriculture is still important. Agricultural sustainability, especially for Hawaii, is incredibly important. But how about energy sustainability? I think that’s a fundamental, core, absolute must for the land-grant and sea-grant, space-grant university that Hawaii is.

Q: Are you wanting to ramp up the existing interplay among educators going on in the Hawai‘i P-20 initiative?

A: Absolutely.

Q: Any particular strategies?

A: I haven’t had the sit-downs with the people here, but one thing (the University of Delaware) has been in is the Yale nationwide initiative. … This involves bringing teachers to campus for seminars … to work with our faculty to come up with stimulating material … that encourages students to think critically. …

We’ve had a particular focus on the STEM disciplines — science, technology, engineering, mathematics.

Q: How are you going to approach the managerial part of your job, the more nuts-and-bolts things?

A: I think it’s really important to get people excited about where you want to go and then build teams. As the chancellor, I think I have to kind of set the agenda and try to help set expectations for where we want to go, but also be, quite frankly, a cheerleader. …

With faculty and staff, it’s really important that they know that they’ll be rewarded for moving forward the vision of the university. … We need to set out some clear goals, and then make sure that we have the incentives for people to pursue those goals.…

Q: Your fiscal approach as UD provost, “responsibility-based budgeting,” was sometimes in the news, and some faculty had criticisms. What is it?

A: What it really is, is a system where you try to grow new revenues. So you’re trying to grow the pie rather than share the pie.

One of the problems that you can confront at a university is what I sometimes call “fixed-pie mentality,” that there’s this pie of resources that we’re sharing.

Q: Like, “If I get more, you get less”?

A: Exactly. … Our competitors are not within our own system, or within our own campus. Engineering is not competing with business, and Manoa is not competing with Hilo. We’re a system, we’re teammates.

We’re competing with Berkeley; we’re competing with University of Southern California. We’re competing for faculty, for grants. That’s our competition. What we’ve got to do is figure out how we grow our pie and how to beat those guys.

Q: So what are the revenue sources you’re trying to grow?

A: Grant support is probably Job One. Become very competitive for federal funding. Work very hard to find friends in industry, our alumni and try to get more support through philanthropy and through involving corporate entities who want to invest in us. …

If you buy in as a company, you invest in this translational research project working on, let’s say, nanoscience — you not only get access to the intellectual property and the licensing possibilities of that research center, but then you get the talent, and the people who have just spent their last five years working on those projects, that you can then hire into your company. So kind of getting that kind of support going forward in addition, I think, is really important.

Another area is professional education. … When you’re the very best at something, people will pay a lot of money to be part of that. … We could do that kind of executive education and professional education here in those areas where we’re the best. And we have those kind of areas.