'Homeless' UH campus beats odds

By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

Professors and students can see the promised land.

A sign marks the future site of the University of Hawai'i's West Oahu campus just off H-1 between Waipahu and Kapolei. Gov. Cayetano's plans for the 900-acre site fell through during the state's financial crisis in the mid-1990s. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

It's a campus that has never existed except in the imagination.

A quarter century ago, lawmakers envisioned a liberal arts college that would help citizens in Leeward O'ahu earn a college degree.

But hard economic times and the pressure to maintain existing college campuses has turned that vision into the orphan of the sprawling University of Hawai'i system.

This year, the University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu celebrates its 25th anniversary against all odds. Its home is a collection of brown painted portable buildings lifted calf-high off the earth and planted in a corner of Leeward Community College.

At the University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu, progress comes in excruciatingly small doses. But in the place where it's least expected, hope springs eternal. Its students are happy, parking is ample and tuition is cheap. The small school, which accepts students for only the junior and senior years of college, has established outreach programs on six islands.

"We're just not on the radar screen for a lot of people," said UH-West O'ahu Chancellor William Pearman. "I think it's easy to assume that we'll just wither up and blow away in the wind and quit asking for money. We're survivors."

The college has had a difficult history, exacerbated by the state's economic downturn. As a nearly $170 million backlog in maintenance and repairs mounted in the past decade on campuses throughout the UH system, it became impossible for officials to think of paying upward of $200 million for a new college campus.

"The joke around campus has always been that when they build the permanent campus, it had better be handicapped-accessible, because we will all be in wheelchairs or walking with canes," said Melinda Wood, education specialist at West O'ahu.

Despite the challenges, West O'ahu's 700 students consistently rate themselves as the most satisfied out of all the UH campuses. Ninety-seven percent of UH-West O'ahu graduates report that the quality of academic programs on their campus met or exceeded their expectations.

"There is a lot of personalized attention," Pearman said. "We have faculty that really care about the students. They give them a lot of advising."

C. Denise Lord, a West O'ahu student working toward a psychology degree, transferred from Manoa in search of smaller class sizes. "It's really a blessing being there," Lord said. "The one thing that I love about the campus is the personal atmosphere. That's why I left Manoa. The classes were too large. I like to interact with my instructors. I know all of my instructors. I like being able to walk in a building and talk to a person."

Many satisfied students

At around $1,000 a semester for full-time tuition, it's also the most affordable place in Hawai'i to earn a bachelor's degree.

UH President Kenneth Mortimer said the college is successful because it has sought out students who might not otherwise go to college. In addition to outreach programs, West O'ahu offers online courses.

"They're doing a great job," Mortimer said. "They're serving a clientele that is older, that has already had two years of college education. They have the highest satisfaction rate of any UH school."

The nontraditional student has always been the bread-and-butter of the campus. With a big slate of night and weekend classes, the campus is geared to the working adult. The average age is 33. More than 60 percent are first-generation college students.

West O'ahu also has the highest percentage of Native Hawaiian and Filipino students of all UH campuses.

"Our students have a lot of life experience. They're struggling, they're working," Pearman said. "I think they're really appreciative of the education because they see the value. Many of them say they've never thought college was possible for them."

The idea for the college started in the mid-1960s, when an increasing demand for higher education in Hawai'i led to a crowded Manoa campus. Legislators saw a need for a community college system and another four-year campus, and in 1966, financed a study to assess the possibility of building a liberal arts college in Leeward O'ahu.

Long way from its roots

The most recent addition to the UH system, West O'ahu College opened in 1976 with evening courses at local high schools.

It moved with its 140 students to a leased space in an 'Aiea strip mall later that year.

History Professor Dan Boylan remembers teaching above a restaurant and liquor store, and down the hall from a massage parlor at the 'Aiea location.

"The clients would come walking by the classrooms," said Boylan, who has written about the history of the college in the book "Malamalama: A History of the University of Hawai'i." "It made for an interesting teaching environment."

Enrollment eventually grew to 369 students and the college moved out of the strip mall and into its first set of temporary quarters on the Leeward Community College campus in 1981.

Even as the campus grew and attracted students who were leaving the community colleges, it struggled to find a place in the community. The lack of an independent location meant that even many Leeward residents had never heard of UH-West O'ahu, Pearman said.

The school changed names in 1989, from West O'ahu College to the University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu. In a sign of the school's low profile, many people continued to call it by its original name.

The first real hope for a campus of its own came in March 1994, when then-Gov. John Waihee announced the state would give the University of Hawai'i 500 acres on the makai side of H-1 for a permanent home for UH-West O'ahu. Waihee said the key to the plan was a gift of 200 acres of sugar cane land to the state from Campbell Estate.

But that plan never materialized, and in 1995, Gov. Ben Cayetano negotiated a new deal with Campbell Estate for a 900-acre site on the mauka side of H-1. In exchange, the state swapped its 59-acre Hawaii Raceway Park site for 941 acres of Campbell Estate land above H-1, east of Makakilo.

Planning big push

Cayetano planned to pump $30 million into improvements to the original 500 acres and sell it to a developer for housing. Net proceeds from the sale — expected to be around $130 million — would be earmarked for a special fund for UH-West O'ahu campus construction, the governor said.

Although the plan sounded good to West O'ahu officials, it fell victim to the state's financial crisis.

Still, a white sign on the side of the highway remains, declaring the location as the future site of the campus.

The location is supposed to be the capital of the long-touted "Second City." It would divert traffic away from downtown and have an enrollment goal of as many as 7,600 students.

But some think the campus has never materialized because of a perceived competition with Manoa.

Sen. Cal Kawamoto, (D-19th, Waipahu, Pearl City), has supported the West O'ahu campus since the 1970s. "I call it a Manoa mentality," he said. "It appears that they don't want this campus established. I'm disappointed. They're not going to treat it with any kind of priority."

Next year, Kawamoto plans to gather the Leeward legislators and pull everyone together to push for progress on the permanent campus. "We've been talking about this for over 20 years," he said. "We all talk about it in our campaigns. We don't follow up."

Kawamoto said building a new campus would give the university and state a chance to partner with several Asian countries. If Korea, for example, wanted to send students to Hawai'i for an American education, it could also help pay the price of a dorm, he said.

With a focus on liberal arts and social sciences, officials also suspect the coursework offered at West O'ahu has kept the growth of the campus down.

It doesn't have science labs, computer science programs, nursing classes or education graduates — some of the prime areas the UH system has tried to emphasize in recent years. "Those things have taken off," Pearman said. "I think if we had offered science or nursing or education that we would have taken off as well."

It's now Dobelle's decision

The lack of a campus has threatened the existence of UH-West O'ahu in other ways. In the mid-1990s, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges placed West O'ahu on warning status because it lacked a permanent location and any apparent long-term commitment from the university or state.

Mortimer, who will leave Hawai'i at the end of June, said UH-West O'ahu had to be moved to a new spot on the diamondhead side of the Leeward campus in 1998 to satisfy accreditation requirements. "They have a home now," he said. "We spent some $3 million to locate those portables. That's as permanent as home as they've ever had."

As for the future of the campus, Mortimer said that is the job of incoming UH President Evan Dobelle, who starts in July.

Dobelle has said the school needs its own campus, and quickly.

Hawai'i has a few years left to complete its land-swapping deal. Construction on the Kapolei site is supposed to start by 2006 and be complete by 2011.

If nothing is done with the land by then, ownership of the 900 acres returns to the Campbell Estate. And West O'ahu will again go back to the drawing board.