Hawaii’s World
HAWAII'S only Catholic university -- Chaminade University of Honolulu -- is doing things bright. Chaminade is
making progressMost obvious is the first repainting in over 20 years of the three historic buildings at the core of its Mediterranean-style hillside campus overlooking Diamond Head and Waikiki.
But it extends much farther. Undergraduate enrollment is up from 630 in 1995 to well over 900, with a goal of topping off at 1,500 in a few years despite the highest university tuition in the state -- $11,600.
Most of these students are live-ins, either on campus or in an apartment on Waialae Avenue, just across the street from the campus entrance. They are females predominantly, about half from Hawaii and the rest from over 30 other states plus a strong Pacific Island representation.
Hawaii students get a preferential rate of $3,000 off the regular tuition. Many students get scholarship assistance.
Values education pointed toward community service -- but not rigid Catholic Church education -- is integrated into a diverse curriculum that is expanding significantly thanks to recent special grants.
These include $175,000 from the Clarence T.C. Ching Foundation for a new computer classroom and conference center, $90,000 from Edward and Peggy Eu for a distance learning classroom that reaches out to faraway places through the miracle of TV, continuing grants from the late Maurice Sullivan to upgrade the Chaminade library, and a $147,000 grant from the E.L. Wingard Foundation of Nevada for a physics laboratory that will include a 16-inch telescope.
Presiding over and sparkplugging the brightness is Mary C. Wesselkamper, who prefers to be called Sue and is regularly addressed that way by students, faculty and others.
She is Hawaii's first woman university president, devoid of previous presidential experience but a dean at the College of New Rochelle, N.Y., before a regents' search committee found her in 1995 and persuaded her to take the job in a state she had never seen.
The Marianist Brothers, who operate both Chaminade and St. Louis High School, which shares the campus, helped her by paying off a $4.3 million debt. Ever since, Chaminade's operating budget has been balanced at $17 million and this year produced a $500,000 surplus.
Wesselkamper gives a great deal of the budget credit to the leaders of Chaminade's much larger sister Marianist school, the University of Dayton, for sharing financial know-how.
There also are other cooperative activities. Distance learning has allowed some Dayton professors to come here, meet students, then teach the rest of their course from Dayton.
AS the smallest of Hawaii's four universities, Chaminade has to look for niches it can fill best. Catholic values-based education heads that list.
Its master's degrees suggest these others: criminal justice administration, pastoral leadership, counseling psychology, public administration, business administration, and education including the only Mon-tessori training in the state. There is a strong undergraduate program in interior design.
Chaminade's off-campus instruction at military bases plus graduate instruction, which is mostly in on-campus night classes, swell its total enrollment to around 2,500.
Some years ago I served a brief tenure as a Chaminade regent at a time when Chaminade had something of an identity crisis with its first president who was neither a Brother of Mary nor a Catholic.
Chaminade's first woman leader and first Catholic lay leader has brought a fascinating and heart-warming vibrance to the 54-year-old institution.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.