Column: Gutting Hawaii’s major research university would hurt us all

These are difficult times for universities. We read about budget cuts, harassment and free speech, tuition increases and explicit attacks on tenure from politicians.

Here in Hawaii, those issues are particularly significant as we are one of a handful of states that have only one Ph.D.-granting and major research public university. Our state is not dotted with private universities that can substitute for a major public university.

We are also physically distant. Students cannot get in a car or take the train to the neighboring state for research and advanced degrees.

I mention the above because there are major changes proposed to the University of Hawaii system and to UH-Manoa.

The following is a plea for UH-Manoa in particular, but what happens with the flagship campus cannot but influence UH-West Oahu and UH-Hilo, as well as our community colleges.

The university and the state Legislature have floated many ideas, some of which echo what is happening on the U.S. mainland: termination of departments and degree programs, more online courses and courses taught by part-time faculty, abolishing traditional tenure, evaluating research on the commercial value of results, and the list goes on.

These are measures that will change the very nature of a major public university. That fate is not reserved for UH-Manoa alone, but it is a fate and a consequence in a state where no other institution can pick up the ball.

Cuts at Manoa trickle down and ripple out to the entire UH system — and eventually to K-12 education. What happens in Manoa affects what happens throughout the state Department of Education.

Abolishing research monies and tenure in selected fields? Expect no public research and teaching in the state of Hawaii in those fields.

Cutting advanced degree programs in the Humanities and the Arts? Expect no advanced degree programs for those students in the state of Hawaii.

Those changes get to the heart of the matter: What is the purpose of a major public research university?

Let me suggest a few as a second-generation professor at such a university and after teaching here for nearly 30 years.

We hear that UH-Manoa “cannot be all things to all people.” In fact, that is exactly what a major public university can and should be. The kid from Kahuku who matriculates and wants to take a degree in the fine arts, and then continues to perhaps get an advanced degree and teach the fine arts, should find their home university a welcoming and fulfilling institution.

Students would like to learn languages from Asia, the Pacific, Europe and elsewhere.

Public universities ensure that students can learn those, particularly if we want to have globally engaged graduates.

Ph.D. and M.A. programs across the board in public universities not only teach subjects. They also teach the next generation of teachers of and researchers in those subjects.

Public universities provide the intellectual heart, soul and mind of communities. Diminishing UH-Manoa diminishes our intellectual life. That life includes programs for kupuna learning from professors studying and adding to the knowledge of the subject. That intellectual life includes the celebration of literature and music from around the world.

In many ways UH-Manoa is a far better university than when my family and my colleagues arrived in the 1990s.

UH-Manoa was on an upward and outward arc. I now worry about that arc.

Some of the proposed changes are the result of the pandemic. Everyone understands that.

But the pandemic cannot be used as an excuse to gut the heart and soul of our only major public research university.

That would also gut the heart and soul of Hawaii.

Peter H. Hoffenberg is a history professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, faculty adviser of Hillel Hawai’i and affiliated faculty at Haifa University, Israel.