Bleak building not fit for a queen

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Columnist

You have to wonder if the people who want to name the Social Sciences Building at the University of Hawai'i after Queen Lili'uokalani have ever seen the building. It's one of the darkest, most dismal, uninviting places on the Manoa campus.

Never mind that it was designed by Hawai'i's famed architect Vladimir Ossipoff. Never mind that it's home to the lofty-sounding Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Women's Studies Program. Never mind that some of our brightest students and scholars fill it every day.

Just take one step into its dank courtyard or try to find an office in its confusing maze and you'll know it's not a place worthy of the illustrious Lili'uokalani name. Surely, the queen deserves a building of her own, but this one isn't it.

That's the problem with this name game. You've got to be careful where you step. There's trouble — and troublemakers — lurking around each new moniker.

Through history, names have been misappropriated and misapplied. In old Constantinople, hawkers used to invoke the highest calling to sell their cheapest wares: "In the name of the Prophet — figs!" We do the same thing today, calling our shampoos Divine and our hamburgers Royale. (In fact, we've got hundreds of businesses proclaiming their regal connections in Honolulu — everything from Royal Adventure Travel to the Royal Yakiniku Restaurant, none particularly high-born or majestic.)

UH officials don't take this building-naming thing lightly. They've got rules and regulations, public hearings, ad hoc committees, involvement from the top (President Evan Dobelle), input from the bottom. These are cautions to make sure we don't end up calling one of our places of higher learning after a professor with racist ideas, as we did once with the Social Sciences Building, nee Porteus Hall.

In many other places, buildings get named for one person only — the one who gave the most money. Walk around the University of California-Berkeley and you're never out of sight of a building named for a Hearst family member. In much the same way, you can hardly drive around O'ahu without seeing one place or another named for the late Henry and Jeannette Weinberg, who left a fortune to good causes, none of it anonymously.

Thankfully, at UH, the name of the game isn't money but respect. You rename Rainbow Stadium for Les Murakami because you respect what the man has done for the school for more than three decades. You give the Hawaiian Studies Center the name of Gladys K. Brandt because she has dedicated her life to Hawaiians and education.

And you keep calling the Social Sciences Building just that because attaching anyone's name to a place that ugly would be a mark of disrespect, no matter how well intentioned the idea.

Reach Mike Leidemann at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com