Our Second Century: The University of Hawai‘i, Doshisha and the U.S.–Japan Relationship
Remarks by President David McClain
Symposium on Doshisha, Hawai‘i and Japan: The History of An Unknown Japan–U.S. Relationship
October 26, 2007, Doshisha University, Japan
President Hatta, members of the faculty, students, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
Aloha, good afternoon and konnichi wa. Thank you for the opportunity to address this symposium on this fascinating and longstanding relationship between our two countries and our two universities.
I’m very much looking forward to this afternoon’s presentations, and I want to express my gratitude to President Hatta, Vice-President Kuroki and all those at Doshisha responsible for organizing this symposium during the University of Hawai‘i’s centennial year.
I imagine we all remember the characterization several years ago of the Japan-U.S. bilateral relationship by former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield, who described this relationship with Japan as "the most important bilateral relationship the U.S. has, bar none!"
The University of Hawai‘i has some 200 relationships with universities around the world, including more than 70 with universities here in Japan. Yet it gives me great pleasure to say, on this day here in the beautiful city of Kyoto, following former Ambassador Mansfield, that the University of Hawai‘i’s long and fruitful relationship with Doshisha University is our most important, "bar none!"
This afternoon’s papers focus on several interesting dimensions of the historical relationship among Doshisha, Hawai‘i and Japan, including the relationship between Doshisha and the University of Hawai‘i.
Accordingly, I thought it most useful in these keynote remarks to address the century ahead and how the relationship between our two universities and our two countries might evolve and flourish.
One hundred years ago, the United States was a relatively new economic power, and Japan was even newer. Today our economies are the largest in the world, and the standard of living of our citizens is among the highest.
In the century ahead, our economies will almost certainly be eclipsed in size. We’re hopeful that we can sustain our ranking of a standard of living among the world’s best, though we both have to deal with fairly rapidly aging populations. Questions of immigration, social cohesion and productivity face us both, as we search for ways to encourage the innovation that is essential for the welfare of our populations and, indeed, for their economic and physical security.
At the same time, because of our wealth, Japan and the United States are expected to take a lead in addressing the challenges of the new global commons, or, as I characterized it yesterday in my remarks, of "Island Earth," with its extreme interdependency among nations.
These issues, ranging from global peacemaking to climate change and environmental preservation, are forcing our governments to consider ceding ever more sovereignty to international institutions or to develop alternative mechanisms for joint collaboration.
In this setting, universities are assuming greater importance within the societies they serve. We are seen as the wellspring of fundamental new knowledge, the antidote to declining competitiveness and the locus of expertise to address a wide range of society’s current ills.
Greater attention is being focused on the missions of universities in social change, public policy and university development and cultural diversity and human resource development, all in the context of our much more globalized society.
Expectations are rising for public institutions, like the University of Hawai‘i, and for private colleges and universities as well.
I have had the privilege of being closely associated with four institutions of higher education, two in the private sector and two in the public sphere. As an undergraduate, I attended the University of Kansas, an excellent public institution in America’s heartland. I received my doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later taught there as a visiting faculty member on two occasions. For more than a decade, I served on the faculty of Boston University, like MIT a private university. Since 1991 I have been at the only public institution of higher education in America’s only island state, the University of Hawai‘i, first as a faculty member, then as a dean, then a vice president and since 2004 the chief executive officer.
While each of these universities have a unique mission and special capabilities, all of them, like Doshisha, have a long history of service to the societies and communities they serve. And yet we are all being expected to do more.
Permit me to describe the University of Hawai‘i’s response to this call.
The University of Hawai‘i System comprises a flagship research campus, the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, currently ranked as one of the 25 leading public research universities in the United States; two small comprehensive universities, at Hilo and West O‘ahu; and seven community colleges, four on the island of O‘ahu and one each on the islands of Kaua‘i, Maui and Hawai‘i (the "Big Island").
The University of Hawai‘i System has four goals, all of which serve the public:
- First, we seek to increase opportunities for access to higher education with underrepresented groups (e.g., the Native Hawaiians, our indigenous people who populated our island more than a millennium ago) and underserved regions of the state.
We’ve addressed the former objective by increasing financial aid to Native Hawaiians and by creating curricula focused on Native Hawaiian issues. Our Hilo campus hosts the only doctorate in the world in indigenous language revitalization. Our Manoa campus features a School of Hawaiian Knowledge combining undergraduate and graduate education in the Hawaiian language, culture, history and politics. We addressed the need for new facilities in the rapidly-growing West O‘ahu and West Hawai‘i area by using public private partnerships to plan for the build-out of new campuses (including in West Hawai‘i a partnership with the brokerage industry icon Charles Schwab). - Second, we seek to diversify the economy via the creation of new knowledge and the development of means to transfer new technologies to the marketplace.
Our research enterprise is one of the most prolific of any university our size. Our astronomy program is ranked number two in the world, and our oceanography and vulcanology programs are not far behind in their respective fields. UH’s Department of Second Language Studies is a global leader, and our Asian studies and Pacific studies programs are among the best in the Western world.
Our faculty routinely advise the various departments of State government as well as the non-government ogranization sector on a wide range of topics, from the state of the economy to the best means for keeping our agricultural exports free of disease to the appropriate means for preserving Hawai‘i’s precious environment to such cutting edge issues as bioprospecting. - Third, we seek to develop the state’s workforce, responding to requirements in a variety of expanding industries including healthcare, primary and secondary education, construction and information systems.
Our community colleges have created "academies" within the public high schools to promote student interest in the construction trades (26 high schools), information systems (22 high schools) and the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines (14 high schools). UH systemide working groups in nursing and teaching focus on maximizing our output in these chronic shortage areas given available resources, and in attracting new resources to these areas. - Fourth and most fundamentally, we seek to grow the educational capital of the state by insuring that high school students are well prepared to enter college, by promoting retention of new matriculants, by facilitating the transfer of credit among the 10 campuses of our system and by producing more college graduates.
Our P–20 Initiative, a collaboration of the Good Beginnings Alliance, the state Department of Education and the University of Hawai‘i, aims to insure effective transitions from early childhood into elementary school, from elementary and middle schools into high schools and from high schools into a university or the world of work. "P–20" means "provisions for early learning through grade 20." It is a metaphor for a lifetime of learning.It is imperative that we increase our educational capital, because Hawai‘i is one of the states in the United States in which the 25 year olds have less educational attainment than 40 year olds. (Indeed, the United States as a whole, along with Germany, now have this characteristic.)
This lack of educational progress among the youth of our state bodes ill for Hawai‘i’s competitiveness (and for that of the entire United States and Germany) and for the vibrancy of a democratic society in an ever-more-complex world.
Democracy depends on an educated populace to function effectively, and the national competitiveness which is something of a precondition for a well-functioning democracy also starts with a well educated citizenry.
These four goals of the University of Hawai‘i System have been developed by the university and its board of regents and also reflect informal conversations over the years between the governor’s office and legislative leaders.
Our ability to pursue these goals aggressively has been enhanced by the approval by voters in the year 2000 of a constitutional amendment giving the University of Hawai‘i a measure of autonomy, with increased control over its own assets and finances, as compared with other departments of the state government.
In this, our centennial year, informal conversations with the governor and legislature are focusing anew on performance measures, such as improved enrollment, retention, transfer and graduation rates and the development of a comprehensive, multiyear financial plan designed to provide the resources needed to meet those objectives.
These informal conversations—which in some states have evolved into formal compacts between state governments and their public universities—reflect a nationwide discussion in the United States focused on the role of universities in sustaining and increasing America’s competitiveness. At a conference I attended last summer with the Wellington Group, comprised of higher education officials from England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the topic was much the same.
As a private university, Doshisha must find strange such devices as constitutional autonomy and compacts; the discipline of the educational marketplace already provides a powerful incentive for private institutions to provide a quality education to the students they serve.
Today in the United States, however, even the most elite private institutions are under public scrutiny, asked to address whether their private goals are consistent with national needs and whether their governance processes are above reproach.
In recent days I’ve had the chance to talk with President Hatta about the current aspirations Japan’s national government holds for its private universities. There seems to be some commonality with the recent American experience, focused in particular around the issue of national competitiveness and innovation.
Of course, for all of today’s concerns about competitiveness, neither of us, Doshisha nor the University of Hawai‘i, can know precisely what our students and our nations will expect from us in 2020, or 2050, as our second century unfolds.
At the most basic level, we will need to continue to develop in our students the passion and the capability to be lifelong learners. Decades ago, our Board of Regents put it this way in describing the university’s primary mission:
…to provide environments in which faculty and students can discover, examine critically, preserve and transmit the knowledge, wisdom and values that will help ensure the survival of the present and future generations with improvement in the quality of life.Developing lifelong learners means continuing and amplifying the relationship between our two great universities. Our students need to continue to travel back and forth between Hawai‘i and Japan, as they have done for nearly a century. Our faculty members need to pursue their scholarship collaboratively, as is occurring in today’s symposium. And our universities’ leaders need to exchange perspectives on how our institutions, and indeed our nations, are managing in this new "Island Earth" century, as President Hatta and I have done this week.
Whether public or private, a common element to both our responses to this second century challenge is our reliance on fundamental values to guide our approach.
As I noted in my remarks yesterday, our strategic vision at the University of Hawai‘i for our second century is grounded in the values of island societies generally, of Polynesian island societies particularly and of Native Hawaiians most particularly. These values include a strong sense of community and mutual respect among members of the society and an enhanced sense of the need to conserve and care for limited resources—in Hawaiian "malama ‘aina," which means to care for the land.
In the 21st century, our second century of partnership, these island values of community, respect and malama ‘aina are essential values for the world as a whole, and particularly for continental nations thrown closer together by the forces of globalization. We simply must develop a global ethos that we’re all in this together. And we must do so in the multicultural context that is Island Earth.
In conclusion, then, in this centennial year of the University of Hawai‘i, as we honor our past, celebrate the present and create our future, I can say to this symposium and indeed to the global community that the missions and evolving social roles of our two universities are suggestive of the roles all universities will play in the Island Earth of 21st century society. It’s a complex assignment, with a multiplicity of stakeholders—but it’s ours as university leaders because no other institutions on the planet are more important to our societies.
Thank you for the invitation to address this symposium, and thank you for Doshisha’s support of the University of Hawai‘i over the past century. Working together, we can create a bright future for our students, for the nations of Japan and the United States and indeed for Island Earth. Mahalo and aloha.