IS mediocrity crowding out excellence at the University of Hawaii? Is this even more of a statewide disaster than it may first seem? Does it doom the whole state to a future of mediocrity and diminished challenges, choices and prosperity? Is the UH threatened
by mediocrity?In a state with a single dominant university providing higher education to most of our people, we need the best, most challenging university we can afford. The evidence is we aren't getting it. We still have a good university. It could be far better.
These are sad thoughts for a longtime optimist about Hawaii's future, but they become more compelling all the time.
A recent trigger was a forum by the Hawaii Society of Corporate Planners highlighting the university. Early on the point was made that in today's knowledge societies public universities have the importance to communities that industrial plants had in the industrial age.
They are the community's generators of strength. They are its way to develop the talents of its people to keep pace with the amazingly fast pace of change. They facilitate economic development.
The University of Hawaii was formed 90 years ago by citizen leaders concerned about educating for future leadership our young people who could not afford to go off to mainland colleges.
Beyond education, the university interacted with the community to help it develop economically and socially. It promoted diversified agriculture and brought in new crops like solo papayas. It supplied the public schools with teachers.
It bridged ethnic lines to train our people to administer, to govern, and more recently for medicine and law. It went into research, helped high tech develop, explored the seas and skies. It broadened horizons. It helped create jobs.
Even greater responsibility falls on today's UH. People in every field must be better than in the past just to stay in place. We must mix more knowledge of the Pacific, of Asia and of the world into our everyday lives. The university's doors must be open to all our people.
Would-be leaders must learn to think critically, to integrate knowledge from different fields into patterns for life, to develop values, to realize partnership responsibilities with the community, to communicate well and to keep up with the accelerating expansion of knowledge.
We live near the center of the Asia/Pacific basin, which promises to lead the world in economic development in the decades ahead. The future will bring higher worldwide living standards and a better life for most but not all.
FOR Hawaii to share fully in this we need strong, well-educated, concerned local leaders. Our mixed cultures must be seen as an asset.
But what I heard at the forum on the University of Hawaii is that we are making it hard to attract talent by spreading the impression that things are not going well here.
We are piling more garbage paperwork on the desks of administrators. We aren't giving the university free range to use funds its generates, funds that can create new jobs in the community.
We are making it harder to assure recruits whom we can't pay as much as we'd like that their spouses, too, can get jobs. We are so concerned with political and bureaucratic correctness that mediocrity is crowding out brilliance. We are fouling our own nest and our own future.