Island Voices
Community colleges on the front burner
By Evan Dobelle
Evan Dobelle is president of the University of Hawai'i.
After nearly two decades, the University of Hawai'i-Manoa has its own chancellor.
Peter Englert's international identity resembles Manoa itself: He is a native of Germany, now a U.S. citizen, with vast experience in the Asia/Pacific region.
Now that Manoa has a permanent advocate of its own, I can focus my efforts on positioning the university as a whole. UH must offer the local and international communities it serves a whole university, one greater than the sum of its parts. Nowhere is Hawai'i's need for a seamless system of higher learning more evident than in our community colleges: distinguished individually, but not yet working together in sync with our baccalaureate institutions as well as I want — or they want.
As the only president of a research-I university system who also formerly was president of a community college, I understand the vital importance of our two-year campuses to our state's social and economic development.
Under the leadership of Chancellor Joyce Tsunoda, UH's community colleges in particular have become great resources for their home communities: Maui Community College is home to one of the most advanced media technology studios in the state.
Windward Community College's cutting-edge Imaginarium is the setting for journeys from the inside of a cell to the far reaches of the universe. Leeward Community College students are pros in front of, and behind, Hawai'i's television cameras, thanks to top-rated programs in the performing arts and TV production.
With seven fully accredited colleges and an employment training center, the UH community colleges deliver a broad range of high-quality and low-cost degree and certificate programs throughout the state. Utilizing an open-door, "access to opportunity" policy, our two-year colleges ensure that any person ready to learn has a place to do so.
The ranks of Hawai'i's two-year college students are as varied as any snapshot of our rainbow society. They may include traditional students beginning a baccalaureate degree, workers looking to upgrade skills or keep up with the latest developments in their fields, even people going from one full-time job (such as motherhood) to another.
Open-access higher education did not exist before the dawn of the last century, and today 75 percent of American high school graduates enroll in some form of higher education within two years of graduation.
No matter what their motivation is, all students at UH community colleges have at least one thing in common: They receive a comprehensive education, not just training in a specific task. This approach, rooted in the liberal arts, holds that higher education should not be transitional — something a student does simply to get a job or better pay. It should be transformational. The heart of the transformational experience is the relationship between students and teachers in a classroom setting. We are not simply teaching tasks or techniques. We are teaching our students to think.
We have reached a critical moment in the development of our own community colleges, which have matured independently — perhaps too independently. We must commit ourselves now to making an exceptional whole out of the sum of excellent parts.
One way we will know we have achieved systemic equality is when we look at our system and see that the full resources of the university are available to every student, wherever they are, whatever their course of study. Each campus should be a unique point of entry into our system: student-focused, faculty-led. As a first step toward this, our open strategic planning process is breaking down the barriers between administration and classroom, between town and gown and between our own campuses.
We will always remain true to the two-part mission of access and affordability that creates a springboard and safety net at our two-year colleges. In the near future, we will look, particularly on the Neighbor Islands, at how to initiate certain four-year programs like nursing, teacher certification, social work and tropical agriculture on community college campuses. Expanding the scope of the community colleges will not detract from our baccalaureate campuses in Hilo or West O'ahu. In fact, just the opposite is true: By offering expanded programming at the community colleges, we will free those campuses to explore new areas of excellence and serve our population in new ways. It also allows Manoa to compete with Berkeley, Chapel Hill and Austin: university towns that drive state and regional economies forward.
It is said that training prepares people to handle tasks that we know how to do, whereas education prepares people for tasks that are yet unknown. Many of the challenges we will face as a state are likewise unknown to us. Yet by putting the pieces of our system together, we will ensure that UH community college students are fully integrated and welcomed into the UH system and that they identify themselves — with pride and without equivocation — as University of Hawai'i students.
In doing so, we will transform UH from a place where specific tasks are accomplished into a place where the unknown can be met with confidence, creativity and a deep sense of social responsibility — just as our community colleges do with Hawai'i's students.
Calvin Klein just attested to this in Los Angeles. He attended a community college, as did Tom Hanks, Jackie Robinson, Sheryl Swoops, Craig Venter, Joan Lunden, Ross Perot, Annette Bening, Ben Cayetano, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jimmy Carter and Walt Disney. So, too, did the author of this article.
