Honolulu -- For two years the University of Hawaii has been foundering like a vessel caught in a ferocious tropical storm, with its hull battered and many members of its crew demoralized or abandoning ship. Campus leaders are beginning to tack in a new direction, but the elements still threaten.
Hawaiians have a lot at stake in their 10-campus university system, the only low-cost option for students who cannot afford the tuition, living, and travel expenses of mainland American colleges at least 2,300 miles away. The system’s efforts to be"all things” to its far-flung constituency, however, have changed markedly.
Because of prolonged economic problems, Governor Benjamin J. Cayetano has cut the system’s appropriation by about $40-million, or 15 per cent, since 1995. Tuition rates will have risen about 70 per cent over two years by 1997-98. Enrollment is down sharply. The cost of deferred maintenance stands at $70-million, and 900 teaching and staff positions have been abolished or left vacant.
“I would not kid anyone that we haven’t been seriously damaged,” says Kenneth P. Mortimer, president of the university system of 47,000 students.
The system is playing out a worst-case scenario in today’s world of public-college economics, as many states shift the cost of education to students. The administration has tried to spread the pain evenly.
Budgets at the seven community colleges have fallen 10 per cent, while spending at the flagship university at Manoa has dropped about 15 per cent. But no tenure-track professors have been laid off and no major academic programs eliminated.
People on the campuses here have started looking to the future. The state and the faculty union agreed on a contract last month, averting a strike. And the university’s Board of Regents has approved a long-term plan that is committed to turning the system into the leading center of Asian and Pacific higher learning in the region.
“We see the 21st century as the Asian-Pacific century, and the university as a bridge from East to West,” says Lily K. Yao, chairwoman of the Board of Regents.
Before an academic change is made, administrators say, a financial one must be charted. The university for years thrived on Hawaii’s booming economy, expanding its base of academic programs, professional schools, and teaching positions. Legislators, who set tuition revenue and appropriated state funds for the system, kept tuition nearly free; as recently as last spring, a full-time undergraduate at the four-year campus in Hilo could take a semester of courses for $252.
A state-budget crisis struck in 1995, as the tourist-based economy sagged. In the last two years Governor Cayetano has restricted about $40-million from the university’s appropriation, which has sunk to $271.7-million. To provide more budget flexibility, the Legislature in 1995 granted the university’s wish for greater autonomy and allowed it to set tuition rates and keep the extra revenue.
Tuition has since shot up. Undergraduate rates for in-state students at the flagship campus at Manoa rose from $1,534 in 1995-96 to $2,832 for 1997-98, an 84.6-per-cent increase.
While the colleges were still a good buy compared to many mainland campuses, the sticker shock was of megavolt proportions for Hawaiians unaccustomed to high tuition. The increases helped spur an 8-per-cent decrease in system enrollment this academic year, with the number of freshmen at Manoa dropping about 17 per cent from the fall of 1995.
The statistics are particularly troubling to people at Manoa, who say their mountainside research university of 18,000 has weighty responsibilities here.
“You can’t just go to the university down the street,” says Kathy Ferguson, the chairwoman of the political-science department at Manoa."When we become less accessible to the poorest people in this state, a lot is lost.”
Undergraduate tuition will increase much more modestly in the future, says Dr. Mortimer, who believes that enrollments will rebound once students adjust to the new prices and realize how inexpensive the system is. About 14 per cent of Hawaiian high-school graduates left the state for college in 1994. Many enrolled in private, four-year institutions on the mainland, where average tuition and fees are about $12,000.
Eugene S. Imai, the system’s senior vice-president for administration, says college officials here need to become adept in areas that their peers elsewhere have mastered, such as persuading more of the admitted students to enroll, managing tuition dollars, and raising private funds.
“It’s a new ball game, where we have to become more self-reliant,” Mr. Imai says."We’ve been trying to learn the new rules very quickly.”
Life seems to have changed for almost everyone on the Manoa campus. Entities such as the athletics department and the University of Hawaii Press are becoming self-supporting, as are some professional schools. Last month, despite criticism from students and at least one regent, the Board of Regents approved raising tuition for in-state students at the School of Law from $4,800 this year to about $9,000 in 2000. The tuition in 1995-96 was $2,400.
With all of the increases, financial aid has become a bigger priority than ever for administrators. And the funds are more important than ever to students, even with enrollments down.
The Manoa campus has awarded $24-million in aid so far in 1996-97; $20.6-million was given in all of 1995-96. Aid applications rose to about 15,000, up from 9,000 last year. And federal-loan volume was $15.3-million last month, compared to $11-million in January 1996.
Gail C. Koki, director of financial aid at Manoa, says the tuition increases may force the university to rethink some of its practices -- the politically sensitive issue of tuition waivers, for instance. Waivers go to students who are needy or who fall into a host of other categories; about 13 per cent of undergraduates receive tuition waivers, as do 25 per cent of in-state law students. The tuition increases may force the university to be less generous, Ms. Koki says.
“I don’t think the university sees waivers as a dollar value yet, but to me, that’s a significant amount of money,” she says.
The professional lives of faculty members at Manoa have also been affected by the vacant teaching slots and the 200 courses and sections that have been discontinued on the campus. Because of the unfilled positions and reduced funds for equipment and infrastructure, college officials say, the dollar amount of outside grants won by campus researchers has fallen 5.8 per cent over two years. With little travel money, most professors and administrators who have gone to conferences in North America or Asia have had to pay out of their own pockets for airline tickets.
Edgar F. Kiefer, chairman of the chemistry department, has become an expert at coping with the new environment. Chemistry has lost six of its 20 teaching positions since 1993. A section that enrolled up to 350 students has been canceled, and classes for majors are not offered regularly.
Dr. Kiefer worries especially about lower-division instruction."We’ve had to hire very cheap, temporary people who can’t do the job very well,” he says."This affects the ability of students once they get to the upper division. We can’t go on like this and call ourselves a Carnegie I university.” (Carnegie I includes major research universities in the classification developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.)
Manoa won’t look like one, either, faculty leaders say, if deferred maintenance isn’t dealt with. Governor Cayetano has proposed about $29-million over two years for repairs, but campus officials say $70-million is needed to fix the cracked windows, broken air conditioners, leaky roofs, and deteriorating buildings.
Hamilton Library is a particular concern. With the most holdings of any library in the state, Hamilton has lost about 20 per cent of its budget since 1995, or $4-million, and has not filled 27 of about 160 positions. Library officials have canceled 1,200 journals, and monograph-volume acquisitions decreased to 13,000 in 1995-96 from 35,000 the year before. The situation recently improved with extra $500,000 for new books.
Older holdings are in greater jeopardy. For more than a year, library officials have hired students for a"mold patrol” to inspect and vacuum scholarly, commercial, and rare periodicals, spanning the 19th century through the 1970s, which were moved across the campus to the Sinclair Library for space reasons. The new quarters lack air conditioning.
On a recent afternoon, Byron Fernandez takes a few moments out from his 11 hours a week of patrol duty to explain his work to a reporter. The job is disgusting, he says, describing books speckled with quarter-inch-high clumps of green, fuzzy mold. The sophomore, who earns $6 an hour, is especially frustrated when areas he has cleaned turn bad again. Gloves, and often face masks, are a must.
“If we inhale too much we might get sick, and I’ve had some skin irritations a few times when I’ve touched the stuff,” he says."But someone has to do it.”
Everyone here decries the conditions, especially President Mortimer. He has had to deal with worsening financial problems since he arrived here in 1993 from the presidency of Western Washington University. A professor of higher education who appears more comfortable in a suit than in the colorful short-sleeve shirts that are standard attire here, Dr. Mortimer, who has written extensively about college retrenchment, says the crisis here requires vision much more than administrative expertise.
“The long-term issue for us is developing a new relationship between the state and the university, the issue of the social contract,” he says. For example, he says, the losses in the state appropriations weaken the university’s authority over tuition, since the fee revenues are eaten up by the cutbacks. “We at least need an informal understanding with the government.”
He and the regents are intent on improving the university’s standing with Governor Cayetano, who has been a tough critic since his election in 1994. Mrs. Yao, the board chairwoman, says she believes his attitude changed after she accompanied the Governor on a recent trade mission to China. She says he seemed impressed after she mapped out how the system had helped the state economically and educationally.
While many campus administrators complain that the Governor cut the university’s appropriation disproportionately, compared to other state agencies, the leaders are more conciliatory."I don’t think we can criticize him on the surface,” says Mrs. Yao, who was not appointed by the Governor but is an ally."We can’t just fight for the university and put the state government in jeopardy.”
Governor Cayetano has mixed feelings about the university. For years he viewed its goal of becoming a premier Pacific Rim institution as empty rhetoric. But he is impressed with the new plan’s emphasis on Asia and has told the regents he has appointed to pare academic programs with that goal in mind. He says his support for the university will depend on fast action in that direction.
“It’s tough to change or eliminate programs that have been established for so long,” says Governor Cayetano."You need to have leadership down there that’s going to step back and look and say, this is where we’re going to be going.”
But as academic-program reviews continue at Manoa, professors say regents need to consider several issues.
Roger T. Ames, director of the university’s Center for Chinese Studies and a professor of philosophy, says many undergraduate courses are comparative in design, drawing on both Eastern and Western knowledge. This approach makes sense in a system where over half of the students are of Asian or Pacific ethnicities and only 20 per cent are Caucasian. So, he says, you cannot lop off the sociology department -- often a target of budget cutters elsewhere -- without losing insight into the Chinese.
“Asia is the heart of the institution,” Dr. Ames says."When you have budgetary assaults, it’s the whole education that suffers.”
ALSO SEE:
Hawaiian Lawmakers May Not Provide Aid Pledged to Universities