Recent events may brighten Isles' future
By John Griffin
Former editorial page editor at The Advertiser
Greatness could emerge with the hiring of UH president Evan Dobelle and a growing multiracial local culture.
Two events this month — the naming of the new University of Hawai'i president and release of new U.S. census figures on multi-racial Americans — say much to me about our potential future. Or at least I hope so.
The mood was grim at an early Monday morning meeting of town and university folks I attended on the Manoa campus. One leading faculty figure predicted the looming strike of professors could be "long, ugly and devastating" to the university. "It's a train wreck," said another.
And those were the moderates.
From there most of us went on to watch the regents introduce Evan Dobelle, a rangy academic-politician who seems to have been the clear first choice of everyone in the secretive selection process. One told me Dobelle could be "another Tom Hamilton," a reference to the charismatic president who started UH on the road to excellence in the 1960s.
The atmosphere was heavy at first in crowded Bachman Hall as regents went through the formalities. Quiet (nobody even booed Gov. Ben Cayetano when he arrived) but determined-looking faculty members stood facing the regents holding signs spelling unhappiness.
But as Dobelle gave his first short speech, that mood seemed to shift from tension to hope. Finally, the protesters actually put down their signs to applaud when Dobelle stressed how he wanted the faculty to lead in the selection of a new chancellor for Manoa.
Maybe oceanographer-executive Alex Malahoff, president of the faculty union, caught the spirit best when he looked beyond the possible strike and said of Dobelle's taking office July 1:
"It will be like a kabuki play. Everything is in chaos, and the emperor appears and things suddenly fall into place."
Two thoughts struck me: Maybe they could ask Dobelle to mediate the current contract dispute, except that wouldn't be fair to him. Regardless, under the new autonomy, it may be that the next president and regents should be key figures in negotiating the contract after this one.
Of course, the problem now is to get through the current bargaining battle. Some feel a strike is inevitable, maybe teamed to a public school teachers' walkout. I'm more hopeful for cooler heads and compromise.
But nobody should underestimate the bitterness between the governor and much of the faculty. And right now it's Ben Cayetano, not Evan Dobelle, who's playing the mikado.
On the 2000 Census results, there's bound to be debate over the figures being dribbled out this month from Washington. We'll see the final picture later, but already different categories used for 2000 make comparisons difficult with the last census and various samples taken here in between.
In racial matters, I'm intrigued by how Hawai'i is different from the Mainland, how we have set some patterns in integration others are following, and how we are like other states in some respects.
For example, one in three Americans nationally is now a member of a minority, compared to one in five in 1980. In Hawai'i, everyone is in a minority, a situation soon to be achieved in California in a different way.
Nationally, Hispanics or Latinos, to use the better term for those from south of the U.S. border, now rival blacks as the country's leading minority group. In Hawai'i, the number of Hispanics-Latinos (who can be in any racial group) has quietly grown to more than 87,000, and no doubt that official figure is low. And it doesn't include most Filipinos, who count as Asians, yet come from an old Spanish colonial heritage.
All racial and ethnic groups should take pride in what they are and seek to preserve the best of that heritage. I'm Irish and French. That's the kind of haole ethnic mix not very appreciated in Hawai'i. But I also have part-Asian children and find myself most interested in Hawai'i's growth of our multiracial population, a group just starting to be counted in the national census.
A 1999 state survey indicated that some 232,000 non-Hawaiian people here were of mixed racial stock, mostly haole-Asian, I suppose. And that didn't include another 223,000 who were classed as part-Hawaiian and also mixed.
Again, comparisons from the 2000 census can be debatable. But it does show that Hawai'i is becoming ever more mixed, and, of course, is far beyond the national average.
So, if we aren't the old "melting pot" or Cuisinart-ed Culture that some people denounce, we are still evolving into a group you might call "local," for want of a better term.
I find it exciting that the future Hawai'i will be defined by a mixture of this growing multiracial local culture, older ethnic groups, newcomer immigrants from East and West — plus whatever emerges from the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.
Mix in a more dynamic and unified university and revitalized public education, and, who knows, greatness could emerge from present turmoil.
And it could be ironic if some day we will look back and admit it somehow began to emerge under two guys who struggled with the state's economic downturn in recent years — Cayetano, and the overshadowed outgoing UH president, Ken Mortimer.
