Malamalama: A History of the University of Hawaii

18. THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I AT HILO

243 ntil 1970, the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo (UHH) was a satellite of the Manoa campus that combined a two-year liberal arts curriculum with the offerings of a community college. This curious mixture of programs was the result of an ill-conceived move in 1965 to ensure the survival of a burgeoning and popular college curriculum on the Big Island. Post–high school noncredit courses had been offered in Hilo as early as 1945 under the University’s Adult Education Service, which became the UH Extension Division. Three years later, the Hilo Center was organized at Lyman Hall of the Hilo Boys School utilizing local instructors, who taught fifteen credit courses to fifty students. An attempt in 1951 by Governor Oren E. Long to close the school as an economy measure led to the Big Island’s first concerted effort on behalf of its only “college .” The local community noted that the threatened closure was not opposed by the Manoa campus. This would be remembered. An outpouring of support, spearheaded by influential Republican legislators in Hilo, resulted that same year in establishing the Hilo Branch as an integral (two-year) part of the University, its director reporting directly to Vice-President Paul S. Bachman. Edward T. White of the Manoa faculty was sent to serve as the first director of the school. He initiated the process that led to a full-fledged two-year undergraduate program. Much of the credit for the development of the Hilo Branch, however, goes to the Hilo chapter of the UH Alumni Association, whose active membership included most of the educational establishment on the island. It was through its efforts that the Hilo Branch was able to get funds and land, a thirty-acre parcel that is the present UHH campus. In 1952, Bachman hired Frank T. Inouye, a young history instructor at Ohio State University, to succeed White as director. Inouye had been a graduate assistant under U 18 THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT HILO Frank T. Inouye In 1947 a Hilo Center of the University opened in Lyman Hall of the old Hilo Boarding School. In 1955 six new buildings were opened on 37 acres mauka of Hilo. The photograph (bottom) shows the cafetorium, now the Geology Department, under construction. The University of Hawai‘i at Hilo 245 Allan Saunders, chairman of the Department of Government at Manoa, and was the first nisei to be hired by that department. Within three years, the Hilo Branch had moved to its new campus and enlarged its faculty to serve a growing student body. Working closely with the UH Alumni Association , the island’s legislators, and county officials, Inouye organized tours of all Big Island high schools to acquaint students with the advantages of attending the local branch. By 1957 enrollment approximated two hundred, with a faculty and staff of twenty. That year, Bachman, newly installed as UH president and still supportive of the Hilo Branch, suddenly died. His successor, Laurence Snyder, was an outspoken critic of the school. He said that Hilo was a “fringe operation . . . which should not have been started and should not be kept going. . . .”1 Snyder’s opposition gave the Big Island community a political goal: the school should add a curriculum in agriculture and become a four-year college. The future of the Hilo Branch, according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, in 1960 had become the “hottest issue” on the Big Island. Support was widespread. Governor William Quinn asserted that “The State needs a small, fouryear liberal arts college to round out its program of higher public education.”2 In 1964 President Thomas Hamilton, a strong believer in centralized administration , released a feasibility study on creating a statewide system of community colleges operating as part of the University.3 A key recommendation was to merge the Hilo Branch and the the Hawaii Technical School to create a community college in Hilo. The threat thus posed to the status of the Hilo Branch stimulated Big Island legislators to gain deletion of these recommendations from the 1966 statute creating the community college system. Instead, Hawaii Technical School was converted into Hawai‘i Community College, under the state Department of Education, not the University. For economy , however, the college and the Hilo Branch of UH were to share campus facilities. This awkward arrangement was to plague both schools for two decades. In 1969, as part of a...