INTERVIEWS, FOCUS GROUPS, AND SURVEY RESULTS

I – Introduction and Background

1. Objectives

Annex-C is a report on Phase-III of the study completed under GUILD Consulting’s contract to gather qualitative data and information pertinent to the University of Water Resources Research’s Third Decade Strategy. Included here are the results of 84 individual interviews, 6 focus groups, a crowd-sourced survey with responses from 210 people, and a critique by a Panel of Advisers. A general analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) was derived from the interviews and is included as Attachment-1.

The objective of this phase was to solicit personal observations about the University as a system and to gather insights on how UH can positively impact workforce and economic development across the state over the next ten years. We were also asked to look at how the university fosters Native Hawaiian empowerment, sustainability, and democracy-building.

This document reports what was heard and does not reflect any views or opinions of GUILD Consulting except where indicated. Attachment 2 lists the names of those interviewed. The core questions we asked are at Attachment 3 and were used to start conversations and to gather as much feedback as possible.

2. Interviews

Each interview began with a recap of the project’s goals and phases; assurances of confidentiality and a promise of no personal attribution; and a series of conversations that, in most cases, unfolded as follows:

1. Your background and experience with the University of Hawaiʻi.
2. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the UH system, i.e., “what currently works and what doesn’t.”
3. UH’s town-gown connections in terms of workforce and enterprise development, and other types of connections that tie UH to communities and communities to UH.
4. Specific ideas for strengthening the UH system (“upping the game”) over the next decade that could find a home in UH’s ten-year strategy when it is written.
5. Impediments, barriers, and gaps to long-term success.

Eighty-four interviews were completed. Most were conducted online (via the Zoom platform) and ran 20-40 minutes. Some were longer. Interviewees were sought out from five major sectors:

1. Business
2. Government
3. Civic and Non-Profits
4. UH Educators and Administrators
5. Media

Other interviewees were from the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Hawaiʻi Professional Assembly, and the Department of Defense.

Every request for an interview included detailed background on the project and an introductory letter from President Lassner. Of the more than 125 persons asked to participate, a few people declined based on either having insufficient knowledge of UH or being too busy with COVID impacts. For a few people deemed “critical to interview,” multiple requests were sent. Some did not respond.

3. Focus Groups

With the help of Vice President Donald Straney’s office, five focus groups were identified, organized, and conducted between June and September 2020. Focus groups were held with:

1. All Campus Council of Faculty Senate Chairs (ACCFSC)
2. University of Hawaiʻi Student Caucus (UHSC)
3. Council of Chief Academic Officers (CCAO).
4. Council of Senior Student Affairs Officers (CSSAO)
5. Hawaiʻi Papa O Ke Ao

Each of these focus groups lasted between 60 and 90 minutes with discussions centering on three questions. 1) In the UH system, what currently works well? 2) What does not work well? And, 3) What ideas, moves, or changes could potentially strengthen the system?

A sixth focus group called “Town-Gown Economic Bridge Crossers” was assembled by GUILD. A dozen individuals who had either been interviewed or further identified as project innovators were brought together. This group met electronically for several hours on a Saturday. Discussions centered on incentives, barriers, and possible changes that could strengthen the ability of UH’s more entrepreneurial faculty and administrators to create community ties that produce greater workforce, enterprise, and social impacts.

4. Survey

Each interview/focus group participant was sent a survey before the meeting. The thirteen questions on the survey were:

1. What is your affiliation with UH (check all that apply)?
2. Imagine you are an investor investing your own money. Which sectors of Hawaiʻi’s economy are likely to SHRINK or GROW in the coming decade?
3. Which UH academic programs are best aligned to your growth bets?
4. UH’s Strengths (areas of excellence, competencies - tangible and intangible)
5. UH’s Weaknesses (lacks, disadvantages - tangible and intangible)
6. UH’s Opportunities (trends/events to capitalize on)
7. UH’s Threats (dangerous external trends/events)
8. What should UH prioritize to support State’s economic growth?
9. What should UH’s top consideration be for a mission to serve Hawaiʻi?
10. Any other thoughts you want to share?
11. What is your ZIP code?
12. What is your primary occupation?
13. How many years have you lived in Hawaiʻi?

We also requested interviewees to forward the survey weblink to other colleagues. In all we received 210 completed responses which are summarized in this document.

II - Assumptions

Over the course of eighty-four interviews, six focus groups, meetings with advisers, and with our UH point-of-contact team, we persistently gathered potential assumptions about what may lie ahead over the next ten years. “Assumptions” are a critical foundation for formulating and grounding five-year strategic plans and should be stated at the front of any serious strategy work.

Three reasons drive this. First, economic, technological, political, social, and other assumptions are a potential basis for proposed future actions and additional evidence- based inquiry. In part, they serve as an environmental scan. Second, they are a check point for future updates. If critical assumptions change, plans may need to change. Third, the articulation of assumptions provides transparency and clarity to system stakeholders and rights-holders.

GUILD does not necessarily agree with any or all of the assumptions that follow. We report them. However, when UH prepares and writes its decadal plan, we suggest system planners state what assumptions they believe ground their plan. This list offers some possible suppositions to consider.

1. Demographic Assumptions

1. “Hawaiʻi will experience a net loss of twenty- to thirty-thousand current residents in the next 5 years.”
2. “The state will continue to experience an aging population, a declining birthrate, a reduction in the number of 18-year-olds, and the exodus of many young people.”
3. “Any population growth will likely take place in Maui, Kauaʻi, and Hawaiʻi counties.”
4. “As technology improves, Hawaiʻi will experience an in-migration of virtual workers from other locales absorbing jobs that might have been done here. Similarly, new jobs elsewhere may get filled by skilled workers living here.”

Economic Assumptions

1. “The U.S. economy is in trouble. The U.S. may drop out of the top three financial systems in the world. We will be less able to compete on the world stage.”
2. “Hawaiʻi’s overall economy will remain in freefall from 2020-2021, then slowly recover through 2025 with rising employment and improving tax collections. No “V-shaped” recovery is possible, and Hawaiʻi will recover more slowly than the continent.
3. “The overall cost of living in Hawaiʻi will not decrease.”
4. “Furloughs, reductions-in-force, and horizontal budget cuts are inevitable over the next two years. Some vertical cuts may be implemented if the BOR can withstand the political pressures to keep UH being “everything for everyone.”
5. “Tuition increases will not occur until after 2025 assuming the economy regains stability.”
6. “Hawaiʻi’s total unfunded liability will grow and likely affect bond ratings.”
7. “G-funds will not expand. In fact, they will likely contract, and there is not one program in the system that can get along entirely without some amount of State general funding. That means we have to supplement our own revenues.”
8. “Despite attempts to find diversified replacements, industrial scale tourism will inevitably revitalize but be different from pre-COVID hospitality. It will continue to be a critical piece of Hawaiʻi’s economic future; however, it will continue to be fragile, globally competitive, and largely out of local control.”
9. “Going to college will cost more. The usual cyclical enrollment increases in times of economic decline may be offset by limitations on financial assistance to students.”
10. “Defense spending in Hawaiʻi will increase as a result of the geopolitical shift toward the Indo-Pacific region and rising tensions with China, North Korea, and Russia.”
11. “For cost reasons, Honolulu’s planned rail will not extend to Mānoa. That will inure to the benefit of UHWO and LCC and create possible revenue losses to Mānoa.”
12. “Hawaiʻi’s workforce will undergo major, uneven and permanent transformation in next 10 years and beyond, shaped by advances in AI, big data, biotechnology, 5G, and remote work.”
13. “The state will continue to undertake economic initiatives around sustainability goals – likely based on the Hawaiʻi 2050 Sustainability Plan update underway. This could benefit UH’s programs.”
14. “Federal dollars for research and student support will be reduced through 2025, then slowly increase between 2025 and 2030.”
15. “The Gini Ratio which measures income inequality will rise over the next decade.”

Educational Assumptions

1. “A major shakeout in higher education has started and the core business model for public and private schools is breaking. Twenty- to thirty percent of American colleges may fail completely in the next decade. Most of these will be private schools, though some smaller regional publics or their extensions may also face closure or consolidation.”
2. “The COVID-19 crisis will force UH to cut programs and simultaneously reimagine itself.”
3. “There are too many colleges and universities in the United States. The market is saturated. Competition is increasing, including global competition.”
4. “Students will come to UH at a younger age and we will recruit them. This works for enrollment and finances.”
5. “Enrollment in the UH system will decline, creating more competition with other schools.”
6. “Program reviews across UH will become more rigorous and determinative of staying power.”
7. “Enrollment recovery, especially from Hawaiʻi’s high schools, will take several years.”
8. “We will be under increased pressure to provide mental health services.”
9. “The tenure system, which limits opportunities for down-sizing or eliminating academic programs, will be an increasing financial burden; conversely, recruitment of faculty in growing programs will continue to be constrained by Hawaiʻi’s high cost of living.”
10. “The traditional model for faculty advancement will continue to create silos and fiefdoms, but interdisciplinary projects will be increasingly recognized as new frontiers for ambitious younger faculty.”
11. “At R-1 colleges like Mānoa, faculty will continue to be rewarded more for publication and research than for instruction or community service. Lecturers will become increasingly important at Mānoa as tenured faculty gravitate away from teaching. This same problem will not occur at the other campuses.”
12. “G-funds for UH will decline over the next five years as more of the limited State revenues need to be devoted to other government obligations.”
13. “UH will undergo a major contraction and downsizing. Some programs that are not core to mission and not financially viable will be consolidated with others or eliminated. The trend to ever more specialized curricula will reverse. Programmatic consolidations will occur.”
14. “Competition with other colleges and universities will intensify. Our local students will be cherry picked by other out-of-state institutions seeking to bolster their own enrollment.”
15. “In the face of financial cutbacks, administrative and support positions will be reduced over the next three to five years, then rebuilt as universities shift to new forms of teaching and research.”
16. “Regulatory oversight and compliance, which tend to be invisible to the public, will probably increase, impacting complexity and cost.”
17. “Our international student population will decline, not only because of quotas or reductions, but because universities abroad will improve and they will want to keep their own at home for either financial or prestige reasons.”
18. “Distance learning will blossom but also become highly competitive, with better opportunities for expanded programming in region-distinctive programs targeted to job needs and adult learners, and bring on greater regulation and oversight.”
19. “Online/hybrid education will become the norm in the near future. The new education model will be a sophisticated formula of specialized “high-tech” and “high touch” but will require greater efforts to ensure that online courses deliver quality in learning results.”
20. “Adult learners will go back to college to complete degrees, retrain, or add certificates. Online learning will make it easier for them to do so.”
21. “Expansion of degree completion programs and other initiatives to attract adult students will require flexible scheduling, including more modular courses.”
22. “Student recruitment and retention will be increasingly difficult under the existing model of classroom-based learning and will become powerfully reliant on forms of distance learning.”
23. “In the face of continuing economic and racial disparities, financial aid systems will tilt away from the current overemphasis on “merit” to “need.”
24. “The economic incentives to seek a BA or BS will decline and certificates and micro- credentials will increase in value. AAs, MAs in certain areas, and certificates will increase in value; together with non-credit programs, certificates will become increasingly important for workforce and enterprise development.”
25. “UH will have to prioritize potential program growth areas. The most likely candidates are health, energy, education, engineering, film and media, climate sciences, agriculture (modern), cyber security, culinary, AI and data sciences.”
26. “Restrictive immigration policies and global public health measures will limit reliance on revenue from international students and will lead to restrictions on study abroad, curbs on "non-essential" travel, and greater use of video conferencing for professional gatherings. Unless offset with innovative ways of penetrating the growing Asian market, this will reduce overseas participation in the UH system.”
27. “Accreditation will make it easier for non-regional players, including global players, to operate in markets like Hawaiʻi.”
28. “The federal government is unlikely to step in with financial support for UH but will support programs that are in its interest, e.g. areas like energy, public health, and food security.”
29. “National rankings (such as US News & World Report) will continue to be symbolically important, but smart universities will find their own ways to rank their own programs.”

4. Political Assumptions

1. “The U.S. is likely to continue to experience a hyper-partisan political climate, limiting its ability to undertake major policy initiatives or to advance solutions to unprecedented fiscal challenges.”
2. “New political leadership will move into the Hawaiʻi legislative and executive branches in the next five years. They will be younger but will be just as vulnerable to union pressures to maintain the status the quo for public employees.”
3. “Legislative “meddling” will continue. In 2022 and 2023, the Hawaiʻi legislature will require substantial cuts in State funding for higher education in the range of 20-30% and may insist on vertical cuts. However, there will be fierce fighting to protect special interests across all campuses and programs.”
4. “Higher levels of fiscal and political scrutiny over UH will be put in place driven by a poor economy and by rising demand for State spending in competing sectors such as environment and public health.”
5. “Many special funds will be raided. The legislature will try to scrape money wherever it can.”

5. Social and Cultural Assumptions

1. “Regardless of whether TMT stays or withdraws, Native Hawaiian issues and other populist and anti-growth movements will continue to roil the state and affect how UH implements its stated mission.”
2. “Sustainability, climate change, sea-level rise, and environmental resilience will become increasingly important in Hawaiʻi.”
3. “The current national conflicts concerning race and equity will extend to Hawaiʻi in the next several years and other ethnic and culture groups will press their own cases, including pressures for greater access to higher education.”

6. Technological Assumptions

1. “The military will drive Hawaiʻi’s and UH’s programmatic focus on cybersecurity and super-computing.”
2. “Distance learning technologies will evolve rapidly and accelerate. Artificial Intelligence algorithms and 5G technologies will play an increasingly stronger role in personalizing educational plans for individual learners.”

7. Legal Assumptions

1. “UH will be perceived as a “deep pocket” institution attracting administrative and judicial litigation from students who eschew online education and faculty and staff who grieve when furloughs or RIFs are put in place.”
2. “Regulatory oversight and compliance will continue to be hugely demanding and will grow. It will also cost.”

III - Interview Findings

This section reports on what GUILD heard through the 84 individual interviews conducted by phone, Zoom, or WebEx. It is organized around high-level themes that emerged from interviews as respondents offered their confidential comments, observations, and insights. The views expressed are extremely diverse and differ depending on the affiliation and experience of the interviewee, his or her knowledge of UH, and his or her pessimistic or optimistic outlook about the larger condition of the State.

The fifteen “Interview Take Aways” are GUILD’s summary and conclusions. The “Perspectives” that follow in quotes are actual comments, some of which were similar and have been combined. Virtually all have been paraphrased to ensure anonymity. All perspectives should be viewed as assertions (rather than truths).

1. Perceptions of System Functioning

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

There is no one, overriding, animating, and navigating image of the whole UH System, though many people seem hungry for one. UH is seen differently by individuals in different sectors and even by various actors within each sector.

Generally speaking, educators working in and around UH’s ten campuses tend to focus on complexity, bureaucracy, silos, the high value of their own work, and a lack of systemic coherence.

Business professionals are surprisingly uninformed about the system’s moving parts and, with a few notable exceptions from trade and craft-focused oriented small businesses, center mainly on Mānoa. The Mānoa campus is dominant in people’s minds. Government and media respondents are attuned to politics and political conflicts both legislative and internal.

Civic sector interviewees believe the University is not attentive enough to the needs of communities - both geographic communities and specific communities of interest. The University’s efforts to further Native Hawaiian studies, local and international sustainability, and economic and workforce development appear very well anchored in actual programs. The goal of democracy-building and creating good citizens is not.

There are many criticisms, critiques, hopes, fears, and expectations. There is also considerable fondness, respect, and goodwill for UH.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “We really are a true system with lots of options that provide access and affordability to our citizens. What’s wrong with that?”
2. “‘System’ may not be the best description of us. We are more like a higher education ecosystem, a jungle with different educational habitats and species.”
3. “Our old role as a land grant college that develops and brings knowledge out to the local community has dissolved.”
4. “People in Hawaiʻi really see UH as OUR university.”
5. “Continuous mission creep.”
6. “We are only a system at a very high level of generality. Not at ground level.”
7. “Being a system has a lot of efficiencies in terms of IT, accounting, and facilities but it is also duplicative since each campus does a lot of the same functions.”
8. “Like the whole state, UH seems frozen into inaction. We don’t really build stuff. We don’t do well at partnering with others. We don’t draw enough local and federal funding and we don’t make decisions. We dither.”
9. “Articulation across campuses is required precisely because we are not a system.”
10. “The COVID pandemic is exposing all the state’s shortcomings and fault lines, including UH’s. We are in a major crisis that’s been slow cooking for a long time. Now, it’s visible and we are at an inflection point.”
11. “The UH system faces inward on itself. Lots of navel gazing, constant reorganizing, endless complaining, especially from tenured professors who are extraordinarily privileged.”
12. “We tend to be Oʻahu-centric, and Mānoa-centric in particular.”
13. “American colleges are losing their shine and UH in particular doesn’t have any real identity when you look across the country.”
14. “I can’t get good employees from UH. I look to other schools, some in other countries, for many of the high-tech jobs I want to hire for. ASU is especially strong and high on my list.”
15. “If the system has a financial model, I can’t tell you what it is.”
16. “We are mediocre, largely because we keep trying to be everything to everybody. Locally and on the mainland, UH has a reputation as a party school in a beautiful backwater but for serious students it’s not the place to be unless you are going to one the few programs of excellence.”
17. “One of UH’s biggest strengths is the ability to work with local students. DOE kids often need a little extra help and UH delivers.”
18. “This idea of a ‘system’ just doesn’t work. We need to bust it up.”
19. “The university has been dumbed down to make up for the DOE’s incompetence. I’m not very optimistic it can change. In Hawaiʻi, protectors of the status quo always seem to win over changemakers.”
20. “Mānoa is a repository for retired civil servants, a constant cesspool of intrigue, and racist against community colleges.”
21. “As a community person, I love UH because they bring us sports. Sports rallies the community.”
22. “Fifty years ago, my family was very proud of UH and the whole state. My parents who weren’t connected to UH knew the programs and buildings and always took out of town people to see the Mānoa campus.”
23. “Among the professionals I work with, UH doesn’t really show up as a ‘ripe’ asset or resource.”
24. “People seem to forget that Mānoa is a huge asset to Hawaiʻi because it is a Carnegie R1 institution. That’s a feather in the State’s cap.”
25. “UH tries to do things itself and only turns to collaboration with other colleges and universities out of desperation. That’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. That said, I think the University is on a generally good path.”
26. “The community colleges are our working-class schools. They are connected to their local high schools which are connectors to local communities and districts. Bless them!”
27. “I wish we were ranked higher.”
28. “We are at a financially precarious moment. The last recession resulted in 26% cuts. This one will require us to cut programs and salaries, which means renegotiating our union contracts, which will be tough.”
29. “In some areas, we really punch above our weight. In others, below.”
30. “If you want to see real university creativity in Hawaiʻi, go to West Oʻahu.”
31. “We are pretty thin. Too many PhD programs, too many obscure programmatic study areas, and too many professional schools. As a result, a splintered identity and no identity at all for the system.”
32. “The value of a four-year or even a more advanced degree is now a real question. Marketplace expectations by students are changing pretty fast and we have to be responsive.”
33. “We don’t have enough local kids to absorb all our capacity and we are not importing enough to make up the financial difference.”
34. “The community colleges are far more nimble than Mānoa. They will be pioneering micro-credentials, certificates, certificate stacks and applying those to big areas: health care, education, social work.”
35. “We are conservative, afraid of the unions, the legislature, and accreditation.”
36. “The tie-in between academics and finances is very tenuous. Most departments, schools, colleges, and institutes really don’t see themselves as businesses that need to generate revenues, and not just spend G-Funds. Financially, some programs produce a lot of revenues that others depend on and expect.”
37. “We are in the midst of a colossal thinking error at UH: mistaking small statistical reports on everything for the whole. The whole is always something more than the sum of its part.”
38. “Our leaders, from department heads up to the BOR are conflict-averse. Mostly, they seem to want to keep the lid on things rather than confront them and reach conclusions.”
39. “The State lost a lot of money when they raised foreign student tuition.”
40. “Used to be that academics who did more applied work were looked down on. Now, we are the cool kids!”
41. “In my department, our job doesn’t need to pay attention to access and affordability. We just need to produce PhDs and get research money.”

2. Programs of Excellence

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

When asked about “standout” areas, especially those that may potentially help contribute to the future state economy, certain programmatic areas come up consistently many of which span all ten campuses. They are (in no special order) ocean science; astronomy; economics; culinary; tropical agriculture, aquaculture and food production; graphic arts; travel and hospitality; energy (renewables); cybersecurity; creative media; Native Hawaiian studies; sustainability and environmental management.

To a lesser extent, these others were also mentioned: veterinary; dental hygiene; engineering; Asian and Pacific languages; business; law; geophysics; medicine, nursing, cancer research and allied health areas; public administration; education psychology and administration; aviation (drones).

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “For us, the trades are far more important than degrees. All the brainiacs are at Mānoa but we need trades and crafts people and I still can’t find them in the community colleges or among millennials. I love the idea of certificates of proficiency.”
2. “Engineering and computer science at UH, both critical to the world I work in, are lackluster. It’s a bedraggled crown. I really love the community colleges. Those are the real crown jewels.”
3. “We get bright, shiny younger faculty members but it’s hard to retain them. They get poached off.”
4. “HCC used to have good programs in graphic design but they have slipped.”
5. “While the trend is to look just at feeding ourselves, agriculture must focus on what we can export and make money at.”
6. “The non-credit programs offered on Maui and by Outreach College are stellar programs that deliver a lot of education and pay their own way. On Maui, some of their programs are launch pads into two-year programs.”
7. “Get the DKI policy center in the College of Social Science moving finally. The money seems to be there. It’s interdepartmental cooperation that is missing.”
8. “Other than the fact that (Neil) Abercrombie went there, why do we have an American Studies department? What is learned there that can’t be picked up in American History and American literature?”
9. “Astronomy (despite the TMT stumble), along with oceans and volcanology, are ‘category killers.’ I would invest heavily in those if there is a good business case that can really show return on investment or be tweaked to do so.”
10. “SOEST brings in more money that anyone else. They also have their own navy and air force!”
11. “There is a vast amount of program redundancy across the system.”

3. Impediments and Roadblocks

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

Every university has to manage ambient tensions and persistent tugs and pulls. Those challenges are compounded in a “System.” Specialize or stay general? Centralize or decentralize control? Focus on local demand or recruit from elsewhere? Build new buildings or repurpose old ones? Favor general education or graduates and research?

Because UH has diverse campuses on different islands, the UH system has additional obstacles. Major among them are:

• The system is difficult to explain both internally and externally.
• Considering how intimate a body politic Hawaiʻi has, there are serious disconnects between the University and the business community.
• Hawaiʻi’s unwritten cultural expectation to be inclusive of everyone, avoid conflict, and “go along to get along” makes the system sluggish. Relationships tend to be more important than robust transactions.
• The University has an inferiority complex even though it is superior in many areas.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “There is no sense of urgency in the system. No feeling of hard-wired ‘hustle’ like you would find elsewhere. Competition is just not in our DNA and we are competing with schools that are far more nimble. That’s why I look to Cal Tech, Stanford, ASU, MIT and others. Those folks are palpably hungry. We have a laissez faire attitude that leaves us slow and ponderous.”
2. “It’s just hard for those of us in the business world to connect to UH. No one is there to help navigate to the right people and programs. I would like someone to be a concierge, but there isn’t one.”
3. “Relationships between campuses is an issue. It’s a federalist system but doesn’t really have clarity of expectations between the whole and the parts.”
4. “Our finances just don’t pencil out and our backlog of repairs and maintenance is backlogged by half a billion dollars. We just don’t have a sound business plan.”
5. “The ten campuses compete with each other for students. That is most pronounced at the moment between Mānoa and West Oʻahu. West Oʻahu was a real mistake. It cannibalized Oʻahu enrollment.”
6. “We have way too much administrative and program redundancy. Every campus has its own communication director, finance director, and personnel director. We have multiple culinary programs, Native Hawaiian programs, astronomy programs. Why?”
7. “I’m not quite sure why, but somehow, we lost our mojo in public health and agriculture.”
8. “We have an aging professoriate.”
9. “The word I would like to use for UH is “facile” but it just ain’t!”
10. “I think a lot of mergers have been messed up and haven’t really effectuated savings or compatibilities, i.e. journalism and communication, public health and social work.”
11. “There is constant self-doubt … that ingrained ‘subtle inferiority of spirit’ that Burns spoke of and the nagging fear that ‘we aren’t good enough.’”
12. “Everyone is busy with their own empires. That’s not necessarily bad but there is no sense of the whole. That’s what gets lost.”
13. “Organizationally, we are screwy and inconsistent and have a proliferation of specialized entities. UH has colleges, schools, institutes, labs, programs, centers, and consortia. Shidler alone has two centers, one consortium, one school, and one institute.”
14. “System? We are more like a big, spectacularly dysfunctional family with four different tribes: administrators, faculty, students, and staff. Each tribe has its own allegiances.”
15. “We suck at getting philanthropic dollars.”
16. “Our back-office support procedures seem to be in constant turmoil and insufficient in most colleges and departments.”
17. “UH is currently optimized for enrollment, status-building, and technology transfer but we are not positioned for potentially scalable local enterprise building at the community level.”
18. “Risk is not rewarded. In fact, it often gets punished. This leads to a drift to the status quo.”
19. “Most campuses, especially Mānoa, are not inviting. No one can park.”
20. “There’s a tendency to look for villains and conspiracies but that’s not what is going on. UH suffers from “systems effects,” not individual bad actors.”
21. “Some of the best people in the system get poached off, often because we can’t pay enough or the high cost of living is too much, or an accompanying spouse can’t find good work.”
22. “UH across the system is paperwork heavy.”
23. “The faculty senates really bottle things up and are resistant to change. Faculty are completely misguided in their interpretation of ‘shared’ governance.”
24. “We do not have system-wide and in some cases, single-campus-based, processes in place that tie us to the workforce, the economy, and business.”

4. Economic and Workforce Development

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

Workforce and enterprise development do not appear to have a central, catalytic driver, interdisciplinary or cross-campus coordination, or high-level academic sectoral leadership. Both functions — assisting sector businesses to strengthen and helping grow and adapt workforces — are diffused and spread around the system.

Workforce and enterprise development are most prominent in two places: 1) the community colleges which are responsive to their own local communities and largely train for trades and crafts; and 2) the professional schools which prepare students for specialized careers in law, medicine, engineering, allied health, and other areas.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “If UH really wants a serious interface with business, the Peter Quigley model needs to be extended and expanded.”
2. “We need to really pour resources into this area across all ten campuses if it’s of real
value. The problem is that it competes with other good public missions and goals.”
3. “The community colleges actually do this. Maui and West Oʻahu as well. Mānoa not so much. Being an R-1, Mānoa doesn’t actually understand or perhaps even care that much about this, though the professional schools do.”
4. “UHERO and DBEDT are the only games in town when it comes to usable data and, candidly, DBEDT isn’t that reliable. It is prone to political control. UHERO is far more independent.”
5. “The truth? UH has a statewide monopoly on higher education. It’s an extension of state government and the DOE so it just doesn’t need to be that responsive to marketplaces. Other than HPU and Chaminade, the monopoly doesn’t need to compete. Other schools really watch their markets carefully.”
6. “One key is robust internships in which students actually go perform supervised work and get actual on the job experience. Internships. Externships. Residencies.”
7. “We really undervalue the non-credit portions of UH. That’s where a lot of real workforce development gets done. In fact, a lot of what sits in AA and BA programs would be much better for the student and for UH if they were done through non- credit mechanisms that just lead to certificates of accomplishment or performance.”
8. “Daniel Susskind predicts that 40% of our current jobs will disappear in the next ten years. That means we have to prepare students for transitions and change even as they get ready for something particular.”
9. “As an investor, I love practical partnerships that have a payoff. I might invest in UH if it could produce intellectual property based joint ventures and funded training and some housing subsidies for knowledge workers in software, design, and media.”
10. “The most active UH-economic sector partnerships seem to be taking place in healthcare, engineering, agriculture, education, and areas related to sustainability.”

5. Native Hawaiians

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

UH excels at indigenous studies and languages. It is a dedicated and prominent part of the system’s mission, if not an actual centerpiece, and has a fast-growing suite of innovative programs, projects, and initiatives. This is a point of great pride among Native Hawaiians, a source of complaints and bickering by different Hawaiian groups vying for the spotlight, and a focus of resentment by some non-Hawaiians. The latter includes some non-Hawaiian disciplines within the university system.

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) issue and the long running quest for some form of sovereignty weave into many discussions. Native Hawaiian programs are decentralized, and no individual seems to have leadership or a serious span of influence, if not control, on how these programs should mature in the next decade.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “We absolutely must get Native Hawaiians through the University system with more PhDs. That is the key to preventing future unnecessary standoffs like we are experiencing on Maunakea and getting to a more authentic conversation between Hawaiians and others. Right now, Hawaiians are mostly talking to each other and stuck in their own echo chambers.”
2. “One of the ways we can distinguish ourselves is by blending elements of Hawaiian culture into every other subject,”
3. “Why exactly are we so heavily focused on Native Hawaiians instead of our larger population? It’s good that they learn their language and reestablish their culture, but I don’t see the long-range impacts on workforce and business-building.”
4. “UH needs a real ‘reckoning’ with the Native Hawaiian community. It’s evidenced in the TMT issue most prominently.”
5. “The commitment to Native Hawaiians is very uneven across the system. I think it’s because languages, social sciences, and Hawaiian studies don’t generate a lot of outside money.”
6. “Get TMT resolved, and soon. Its casts a big chill over Native Hawaiian programs specifically, and UH generally.”
7. “We need metrics that get to the connections between Native Hawaiian culture, education, and economic progress.”
8. “It’s time to evolve a new idea of what being a Native Hawaiian is. Blood quantum is a diminishing idea, if for no other reason than we are more and more chop suey. Focusing just on language? What about those who don’t speak it? Can they still be Hawaiian? And just who is Hawaiian and who isn’t? How is UH helping with this?”
9. “Native Hawaiian programs are sacred cows. We can’t actually evaluate them.”
10. “The current West Oʻahu administration really gets it. They understand our historical claims. They also know that 15% of all our students identify themselves as Native Hawaiians.”
11. “This is a central part of the University’s mission, or at least it’s supposed to be. Our programs help everyone connect to ‘place’. Native Hawaiian values can ground and guide everything else. It comes down to how we take care of each other and the environment.”
12. “Native Hawaiian studies are just as fractured and silo-ed as everything else at UH.”
13. “Others who are not Native Hawaiians don’t seem to view us positively. I don’t understand that.”
14. “I would like to see Native Hawaiian programs focus on jobs and business-building. Right now, they are obsessed with the past. That is nice but it won’t fully carry them into the future.”
15. “A lot of money rolls into UH for Native Hawaiian scholarships. What’s the total and where does it come from?”
16. “Is the University willing to invest in people who will stay here? That’s us. Native Hawaiians.”
17. “We really need to have a serious conversation about the travel industry and how it interacts with Hawaiian studies and our programs at UH.”
18. “The redundancy of Native Hawaiian programs is a luxury. I don’t mean to pick on them alone because that’s also true with a dozen other program areas as well.”
19. “We are catering to Native Hawaiians. Actually, we are doing more than that. We are pandering to them because they make a lot of ruckus.”
20. “Native Hawaiian programs in the UH system are quite uneven and divided, mostly out of competition and the quest for individual scholarly supremacy.”

6. Sustainability

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

Similar to the focus on Native Hawaiians and related to it, resilience, adaptation, and long-term environmental, economic, and social sustainability are key pieces of the University’s mission. In some ways, Hawaiian studies and sustainability are yin and yang, yet diverse sustainability efforts also seem caught in dispersed definitional debates. There does not seem to be a common use of the term “sustainability” that would anchor the different efforts underway on all campuses. Some focus globally, others nationally, and some on what the campuses themselves can do to lower their own footprints. The close relationship of Native Hawaiian studies and sustainability appears be grounded in views of pre-contact history. Ancient Hawaiʻi, for many, is the model for the future.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “UH is making a valiant attempt at pushing sustainability but those programs don’t get much support.”
2. “UH leadership doesn’t fully get how important this is and how it needs to crisscross a lot of other programs that aren’t focused on it. We have an environmental challenge of massive proportions in the making. Temperatures will rise and kill a lot of people from hunger, displacement, and civil wars. A refugee crisis is coming and UH will probably be a refuge and “lifeboat” community.”
3. “We need to focus interdisciplinarily on climate change. It’s the paramount problem of our time. It is the big thing we must do in Hawaiʻi and it must pervade every aspect of our cultural, social, economic, and political mix. That’s the same challenge UH faces. How do we make sustainability the big, cross-cutting thing we do?”

7. Democracy Building and Citizenship

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

When brought up, helping UH students become good citizens is, at best, an afterthought or a generalized, implicit aspiration. At worst, it’s irrelevant. It is not a readily visible or important piece of the current UH picture nor is it mentioned much by educators, government officials, business professionals, civic sector actors, or the media. Where Native Hawaiian, sustainability, and economic development issues broadly are woven into the research and teaching in the UH system through courses, projects, and programs, citizenship does not appear to come to ground.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “The way we try to do this is through service learning which gets students out of the classroom and inculcates the idea of volunteerism.”
2. “We don’t really teach it. It sort of sneaks into a few departments or courses or debates.”
3. “We honor good citizenship with the Robert Clopton award for community service.”
4. “One of the goals of UH is to develop good citizens. We have missed opportunities. We should be having good citizen centered deliberations, not inchoate discussions.”
5. “There are seven thousand 501(c) 3 organizations in the state, two thousand of which are real service providers. A lot of those are down in the trenches doing gritty citizenship work. I don’t see a lot of UH professors or students down there.”

8. Bureaucracy

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

Observers outside and inside the UH system almost uniformly view the system of ten campuses as an organizational jumble prone to programmatic proliferation and continuous and exhausting proceduralism. This seems to be attributed to three things: 1) the nature of being a system with mixed types of campuses, many competing moving parts, and the need to manage all of it rationally; 2) larger and smaller fiefdoms over departments, colleges, schools, institutes and centers; and 3) periodic political interference from the legislature which sometimes demands reactive changes that have no larger planning context.

UH as a bureaucracy is slow moving and resistant to change. It is a source of endless complaining.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “The silos just don’t talk to each other. They remain structurally isolated. We are completely stove-piped.”
2. “We tend to strangle our own ability to generate patents, inventions, and other commercial innovations through cumbersome rules and regs. I know people inside UH who take their IP outside because UH is a pain in the ass to work with.”
3. “There is a legacy of classes that never get taught but stay on the books.”
4. “From the outside, my attempts to work with UH come down to individuals. Some are easy to work with, others I’ve had to play rope-a-dope with even when it is clearly within the University’s stated interests and they can win big.”
5. “We have layers upon layers of procedures. UH is process-gone-crazy. It’s just too hard and frustrating to get anything done.”
6. “Both the DOE and UH have pernicious bureaucracies which grind people down and spit out the good ones.”
7. “The campuses have same or similar certificates but different costs which doesn’t make sense for consumers. Why should the same thing cost more on one campus, and less on another?”
8. “The difference between UH and more flexible colleges is profound. It took me 18 months to change one course here. At a university in New York where I spent time, it took 28 months from start to finish to implement an entirely new and across-the- board STEM curriculum.”
9. “When it comes to innovation and doing new things, there always seem to be legal impediments. It’s easier to go around, under, or outside the system for enablement.”
10. “We suffer from new bureaucratic procedures piled on to old ones. Nothing ever goes away. New layers just keep getting added.”

9. Liberal vs. Career Education

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

As at many colleges and universities, there are two conflicting philosophical undercurrents about the purpose of higher education that compete with each other conceptually. One is the focus on specialized areas of study and career training. The other is life-preparation and broad exposure to history, arts, science, and the humanities. The tension between the two notions tends to be discussed in broad, pedagogical terms and far less in the specifics of particular degrees, programs, or departments.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “I really worry that we are losing the traditional essence of education: helping people prepare for life.”
2. “Critical thinking isn’t generic, across-the-board around the whole system. In fact, not everyone gets a dose of it.”
3. “The more you look at UH through an economic lens, which is more and more pervasive, the more liberal arts gets devalued.”
4. “We have to deemphasize ‘education’ and ‘training’ and focus on ‘learning’ which can happen in many ways, including machine learning through AI. AI and Big Data will enable us to become truly learner-centered by letting us understand what students want and what we can then offer them as they make enrollment choices.”
5. “We must figure out the relevance of college to emerging generations. It just isn’t clear anymore.”
6. “The word ‘education’ comes from Latin and means to nourish, to bring up, to lead forth and draw out. We may be good at a lot of specialized things but do we do any of that?”
7. “I think we could do career training and wrap-around education in everything we offer if we put our minds to it. It’s a design problem and a competition for space in curricula.”
8. “St. John’s focuses on the great books. How can we bring that kind of proven learning to students here?”
9. “We need math, reading, and writing but we desperately need to teach kids how to read and write English if they are to succeed in a modern world, especially local kids.”
10. “The UH system is more and more tilted toward careerism which misses some foundational things a university needs to offer.”
11. “You need to ask: what exactly is the purpose of everything we are doing? You can also ask: what makes a university great? Once you do that you can find greater meaning and some better balance between career and basic foundational education.”
12. “We must build more resilient and humanistic people through our curricula, not just walking widgets and gizmos who will leave and then be unprepared to change jobs four or five times in the next decade.”
13. “Every kid coming into the system ought to be required to read a short list of essential books. Doesn’t matter if they come from Kansas or Kalihi. Career-ready, yes, of course, but ready when it comes to critical thinking and enough grounding to read a newspaper or listen to a news broadcast with a critical eye.”
14. “We need to think like a business and help guide our customers, who are students. They don’t always know what they want or need but that’s where we should come in.”
15. “What kind of UH do we need to help our kids stay in Hawaiʻi?”
16. “Liberal arts offers a good foundation but not every student gets a dose of it. I want to put ethics and critical thinking skills into everything UH does.”

10. Entrepreneurial Connectors ¹

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

On every campus certain individuals, some active and some retired, were cited as examples of productive town-gown bridge building. These persons, both academics and administrators, seemed especially deft at working with communities of interest or geographic communities and creating specific areas of communication, collaboration, and impact to the mutual benefit of both, many in areas related to economic and workforce development and some in other socially and politically impactful ways.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “From my point of view, it’s hard to get Mānoa people downtown. A lot of tenured faculty just sit in their offices or around academic conference tables and want everyone else to come to them.”
2. “CTAHR has a long and powerful connection with real farmers, people with their feet in the dirt, through extension services. Agricultural extension goes back to recovery from the American dust bowl. Can we do that in other areas? Health care? Business? Social work? Even in the liberal arts and humanities? Can we design extension services in health, engineering, and education?”
3. “We have expertise but I find it hard to cultivate outsiders to reach into our department.”
4. “The University of Arkansas has a tele- and digital health program that has four hundred hospitals linked. How did they do that and how come we can’t?”
5. “There are some unseen costs to the town-gown connectors you mention. It’s mostly on extra time, so they get fried. Sometimes it leads to divorce and isn’t financially rewarded or valued. People who sometimes get recruited for this also have the ‘trailing spouse’ problem in a state with a very high cost of living.”
6. “Communities don’t actually care about what discipline you come from. They want help with a problem.”
7. “Bridge builders don’t get rewarded.”
8. “To do this kind of work with outside agencies and communities you need to be an emotional super-athlete.”
9. “Town-gown entrepreneurs seem to have a few things in common. Political savvy. Finding work-arounds from the UH bureaucracy. A willingness to step out of their foxhole. Thick skins. Most of all, some kind of driving vision.”

¹ Early during interviews, we began asking for examples of academics who had forged serious town-gown links, especially those that led to workforce or enterprise development, but in other areas as well. UH appears to have had some of its greatest influence through certain individuals, academic pioneers who build or cross bridges to different communities and, in some cases, acquire outsized influence. In most interviews I asked for the names of exemplars, both current and past. A list of names that came up is at Attachment- 5.

11. Vision and Mission¹

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

For many, the written statements of system “mission” and “vision” are remote and often irrelevant. They do not succeed as system ‘unifiers’ that might help connect and integrate UH’s ten campuses and numerous diverse programs. There is a hunger for both a more articulated visionary concept and an envisioning process that can better cohere natural campus and disciplinary divergences.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “We suffer from a failure of imagination and are collectively unable to face the future in a disciplined way. We are not a force to be reckoned with. We are not really vital or indispensable.”
2. “UH is a young institution because we are a young state with more unified dreams set down 50 years ago, some of them in the ‘Hawaiʻi 2000’ project. Since then, it’s gotten stale, disjointed, and fragmented into dozens and dozens of smaller parts.”
3. “Harlan Cleveland’s philosophy was ‘selective excellence.’ What’s wrong with that, especially if we talked about it at each campus rather than ‘We have to be and do everything.’”
4. “Mission statements are meaningless unless they lead to big initiatives.”
5. “Where is the 3-year plan to help move the State ahead?”
6. “We need something inspiring, exciting and amazing, or outside the box from UH. If the University can’t provide its students and faculty with inspiration, we should send our students and faculty to someplace else that can. We have to be far more ambitious if we expect our people to be competitive in the future and face it head on.”
7. “Where does UH visioning take place? Who does it, how is it done, when is it done and who navigates towards it accountably? My impression is: nobody.”
8. “We need to do things here that others can’t or won’t. Why aren’t we focused on robotics, space exploration, building a moon base, or on making hydrogen fuels?”
9. “When it comes to my community college and vision, I think of my island first, the State second, and the University third. I’m focused on my local-region economy and workforce.”
10. “What is missing from the system is a broader vision that will link all ten campuses to each other and to the State, if that is even possible. Right now, we are a Franken- system.”
11. “What are the real values? The articulated mission and goals don’t really seem to capture them, or if they do, they get lost in the hurly-burly of each siloed effort.”
12. “How come no strong joint ventures with ASU, Stanford, MIT, and Harvard? We need a vision that brings in dollars from philanthropists like Omidyar. The starting point isn’t money. It’s all about imagination.”
13. “We have to put some core 21st century skills and attitudes into play: collaboration; teamwork; problem analysis; factfinding. If we don’t do that, we lose the next generation.”
14. “The danger of doing a serious visioning and goal setting process is we will have to step away from some things. We really aren’t good at letting anything go.”
15. “To support Hawaiʻi’s future economy, we must get really good at a few things rather than trying to be everything. We need priorities.”
16. “We have gotten more and more insular over the decades and failed to expand our reach. The internet and distance education can do that if we lean into it. This requires creativity and imagination not to mention an honest appraisal of today’s realities.”
17. “It’s a great time to reduce the number of campuses as we maximize distance education. Zoom will actually affect the willingness of many to pay big money for college.”

12. Leadership

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

UH faces the persistent challenge of leading a complex state system of colleges and universities. Some observers note the cyclical and contextual rotations of presidential appointments in which leaders are brought in as a reaction to challenges arising from previous administrations. Others look at the Board of Regents as the body responsible for leading the system. A few point to the Governor as the ultimate leader who sets direction, vision, and guardrails for the State and the University.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “We need leaders who will not be afraid to shake things up. That has to start at the top of the pyramid, not with words but with bold actions. Then it has to trickle down to all the levels of leadership below.”
2. “A leader’s real job at UH? Manage the mess and deal with tribalism.”
3. “UH is in perpetual suspended animation. We get no direction from the top and there is no focused surge from the bottom. It’s a mirror of the state’s larger political condition.”
4. “I don’t think the BOR is fully socialized into their job. There is lots of committee work but there is no thematic integration. It’s not a healthy governance system.”
5. “Lassner has his hands full but I think he does a pretty good job of managing everything that rises to his level of attention. He’s also a very decent man.”
6. “Our leaders tend to focus on mechanics to the exclusion of the larger picture which is about the system and its relationship to the problems of our time.”
7. “We need a much, much stronger BOR but the selection process for Regents is very weak. It has lost horsepower and our best potential candidates won’t consider being nominated because financial disclosures are required.”
8. “UH has the opportunity to reset itself but I don’t think the leadership is there for it, nor does it have the power to actually make changes. The BOR, President, and senior executives have limited margins of power to plan and implement.”
9. “We have cyclical challenges. Each new leader is reactive to the past and we never quite hit the point of balance. Maybe that’s because different moments present different challenges. Still, seems reactive. McClain came after the Dobell debacle and was a stabilizer, as is Lassner after Greenwood tried to make changes.”
10. “We are victims of our own success which have become sacred cows. A few programs work their way up, then we can’t modify them.”
11. “David Lassner and the BOR need to put together a serious huddle with a kitchen cabinet that redefines UH and looks long and then take it out for full discussion.”
12. “We have a robust faculty governance system.”
13. “UH’s faculty governance function is completely useless.”

13. Politics

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

Institutional politics is expected and inevitable in every college, university, and state system. Like other institutions, politics runs along many lines, internally, externally, structurally, in relationships, in terms of values, and with regard to both big “P” (policy) and small “p” (interpersonal) politics. In Hawaiʻi, a small state with intimate political relationships, connections with the legislature seem perpetually challenging and occasionally fraught. The issue of the University’s autonomy is continuous and ambiguous.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “UH never quite seems to find its voice at the legislature or in the media.”
2. “The legislature gets accused of meddling and micro-management, compared to other state universities, and there may be truth to that. On the other hand, UH sometimes makes stupid decisions and missteps that really require them to get scolded; the “Wonder Blunder” for example.”
3. “I remember McLain once calling the legislature a ‘Noah’s Ark of special interests.’”
4. “UH isn’t very good at political management. Too many mixed messages and crossed signals. That opens the legislative window for a lot of micro-management.”
5. “When they are at their best, UH brings valuable data to the table for us legislators but that always comes down to individual academics.”
6. “We have a lot of federal agencies here but I don’t see much linkage to UH.”
7. “The BOR and President Lassner run the university like a wholesale operation. Some of it needs to be far more retail.”
8. “We won some constitutional autonomy but we have been quite timid in asserting it. If we do, the legislative budget becomes more weaponized.”
9. “The legislature gets pretty toxic. A few lawmakers cross the line and just get mean and shame UH leaders when they don’t need to. When legislators beat up on UH, they actually need to have an end game in mind.”

14. Branding and Messaging

A. GUILD’s INTERVIEW TAKE AWAYS

UH as a system does not fare well in projecting an external identity and building a distinctive brand. Individual campuses do better. UH is largely an internal facing system with an unclear imprint and poor messaging to external audiences. Individual campuses and programs do better than the whole but the system itself does not have a consistent and coherent message to the world that explains why the University of Hawaiʻi is significant, different, and valuable.

If this is an intentional strategy or policy and it is the job of each campus to brand itself, UH needs to state that. If it’s not, action is missing. Right now, it appears confusing.

B. INTERVIEWEE PERSPECTIVES

1. “Our major selling point: we are reasonably priced and very affordable!”
2. “UH has a passive culture when it comes to communicating its value to students. Basically, the message is ‘We’re here for you.’ That’s different than ‘You are better than you know and we will push you to discover it.’ That needs to be a meta- message for everyone, not just a few departments or for the athletes.”
3. “We don’t have much name value like some big-time schools. I’m thinking of MIT or North Carolina Chapel Hill.”
4. “How can we reactivate alumni?”
5. “This kind of outward facing brand requires cooperative thinking. We’ve lost a lot of our ability to do this in the world of increasingly competitive academic program- building and colonizing from other universities. Still, we really need to do this together.”
6. “We tend to hide our light under the proverbial bushel basket. It would be good to have a smart, systematic PR and marketing campaign linked to new opportunities for enrollment.”

15. Ideas for Change

The ending question in most interviews was, “What practical moves do you suggest UH consider for the next decade? How can UH ‘Up It’s Game’? The following are ideas, some larger, some more granular, gathered from the interviews. Here, GUILD reports these but does not take any position. Some of the ideas on this punch list may be worthy of consideration and/or additional research by UH’s strategic planners.

1. “Move swiftly to take full advantage of the COVID crisis and kickstart the new era of distance education. Distance education isn’t right for everything and will go through a transition period. The old dogs who refuse to adapt to it will leave and the right balance of ‘high-tech’ and ‘high-touch’ will be discovered for each program.”
2. “The result of moving to distance education ought to lead us to a right sizing and a diminution of fixed costs. We should plan this so we can actually shrink our physical footprints, take old buildings down, or rent space to outside entities. Target specific increases in UH revenues by finding alternative uses for renting buildings on every campus as distance learning reduces the need for physical instructional space. Many teaching spaces will become obsolete. Rent them to other government agencies or private sector enterprises whose purposes seem compatible with other UH programs.”
3. “Conduct a formal programmatic prioritization and begin the painful culling process. Determine which disciplines and programs we should focus on and which can fall, consolidate, or be identified as second or third tier areas of emphasis.”
4. “Separate UH into two systems, Mānoa, Hilo, Maui, and West Oʻahu being one, and the seven community colleges being the second.”
5. “Have one system level community college entity with seven geographically dispersed education centers.”
6. “Merge LCC and West Oʻahu. Merge UH Hilo and Hawaiʻi CC.”
7. “Make UH one single university. Mānoa becomes the flagship and each island would have only one other campus that is an extension of Mānoa. Close the rest.”
8. “Consolidate and power up data analytics, AI, and 5G services to the whole University system and especially focus on those with promising payoff areas: ocean sciences; conservation sciences; cybersecurity.”
9. “Create signature projects in which the UH system is THE place in the State for data aggregation and data visualization. Establish UH as a ‘demo site’ for the best AI- based learning in the world.”
   -“Signature Project #1. Climate change, sea level rise, and global warming are a “50 Year” problem and directly in UH’s wheelhouse if the University can get organized to hit the problem hard. Organize a three-year signature project built on the right question and the right academic cluster to develop a full list of solutions.”
   -“Signature Project #2. The state does not have a coherent development plan for the future such as was explored in Hawaiʻi 2000. Offer to co-create a State, county, and UH system Signature Project that develops a robust State development plan with agreed upon vision, goals, and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).”
10. “Formulate a new “network governance” protocol that tightens system linkages, reduces redundant campus-level back office supports, and creates new expectations and relationships between and among campuses.”
11. “Create a high-level cross-sector team (UH administration, legislature, unions) to revisit and appraise UH autonomy from the legislature and evolve specific proposed rules, roles, and procedures for better managing interdependence.”
12. “Assemble an inter-campus work group to focus first on UH system’s identity, then on “branding” messages. Then hire outside professionals to execute a marketing and public relations campaign for the system.”
13. “Cross-cutting multi-campus thematic program areas (sustainability, Native Hawaiian language/studies, allied health, engineering, sustainability, and others) are fragmented. More clumping and less splitting is needed. To counter continuing proliferation and splintering, start the process of greater programmatic unification across the campuses by appointing interim senior VP-level executives as programmatic “Tsars” with system authorities. Give them the power to integrate and align related offerings across all campuses in the areas of health (medicine, nursing, pharmacy), justice (law, criminology, paralegal), education, engineering, technology and others that need coherence. Imagine them as “Special Masters” in the court system.”
14. “Create a downtown campus, or buy HPU. Create off campus night schools with classes in malls and community centers. Bifurcate the research and R-1 programs from instruction and separate them completely from teaching functions. Make researchers live on the money they raise for research. In effect, they need to ‘eat what they kill.’”
15. “The BOR and administration must enable, incentivize, and reward cross-disciplinary work, especially between the professional schools where that is most logical: business, engineering, law, medicine, pharmacy, social work, and others.”
16. “Examine and restructure programs that could make a big difference locally and help fuel vital social and economic needs in Hawaiʻi. Agriculture can shift its attention to large scale, high-tech ag and crops that substitute imports or make money. Tourism is ripe for a makeover but UH hasn’t evolved into a powerful influence. It should, since one way or another hospitality and travel will continue to be a mainstay of the economy. Become the “Cornell of the Pacific.”
17. “The College of Education needs to shift from more abstract research to concrete teacher preparation.”
18. “Have a single degree source. Issue all degrees and certificates from the UH system rather than individual campuses. Specific hubs, colleges, and departments can be identified but make the system dominant.
19. “Conduct a top-to-bottom administrative review. There is a widespread perception that UH is “top-heavy.” Similar to the University System of Georgia, conduct a “Comprehensive Administrative Review” focused on improving administration by creating efficiencies, streamlining processes and finding ways to be more effective with UH resources.”
20. “Undertake a very robust cluster mapping study. Identify specific issues or problems and initiate a detailed academic and business cluster “mapping” exercise that will link UH’s academic clusters to the state’s traded and non-traded economic clusters, both current clusters and ones that seem likely to emerge over the decade.”
21. “Create an incentivizing gown-to-town grant program that invites promising proposals by UH faculty who want to develop worthy “town-gown” initiatives that will potentially lead to stronger workforce and enterprise development or other valuable social and cultural impacts.”
22. “Assemble a system level working group to focus first on UH system’s identity, develop a crisp new vision statement, and then design a “branding” campaign. Hire outside professionals to execute a marketing and public relations campaign when the tasks are clear.”
23. “Consolidate all astronomy programs and relocate IFA to Hilo.”

16. Other Comments

While almost everyone who consented to be interviewed was cooperative, thoughtful, and eager to talk, some expressed skepticism about the study, as if to say, “We’ve done all this before…and nothing changes.” Right or wrong, that idea was expressed most directly by a prominent high level former government official who said:

1. “Peter, this isn’t personal but I’m always skeptical of these kinds of consultant studies because they tend to perpetuate the status quo. They may come up with a few tweaks, but I have never seen them transform matters at hand.”

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