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A Price of Paradise panel convened in October 1995 to assess a budget crisis that had, by all accounts, already stripped the University of Hawaii at Manoa of its available slack. Carol Eastman, Vice Chancellor of UH Manoa, described cumulative erosion that left the campus with no option but vertical cuts—eliminating programs entirely—and said the administration was conducting systematic program reviews to identify units that were neither central to the university's mission nor academically strong. Richard Dubanoski, Dean of Social Sciences, argued that the financial crisis, serious as it was, masked a deeper problem: the erosion of shared governance and academic values that had persisted even during prosperous times. He called for a frank institutional conversation about the university's core mission before budget decisions were made on purely financial grounds. George Simson, Professor of English, went further, suggesting that the UH system structure itself should be broken up, with individual campuses becoming self-regulating. The three disagreed on emphasis but shared the view that Manoa faced a moment that required deliberate choices about what kind of institution it intended to be.
Transcript
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Companion newspaper commentaries
Commentaries by the guests, published in The Honolulu Advertiser around the broadcast.
