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UH hopes scholarships
will boost Pacific studies

By Susan Kreifels
Star-Bulletin

The University of Hawaii-Manoa wants its Asian and Pacific studies at the forefront of the field, and a dean believes a recent grant will help it do that.

Last month, the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies received $1 million in federal scholarships for graduate students during the next three years.

That, said Dean Willa Jane Tanabe, will help UH recruit top graduate candidates, "the next generation who will teach about these areas."

The school is using other grant money to develop innovative curricula. In February, faculty members traveled to the Philippines, setting in motion the last step of a project funded by a $500,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to "revitalize and reconfigure area studies."

"Our goal is to be in the forefront of area studies," Tanabe said.

The highly competitive scholarship money came from the U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies. Tanabe said that for the first time, some of the scholarship money, an increase over past years, will go to Pacific Islands Studies.

The grant also reflects UH's "national stature as the premier institution for the study of Southeast Asian studies," the school said.

The money will provide tuition and living stipends for an estimated 20 graduate students a year, and they can be enrolled in any department at UH, as long as their studies have an Asia-Pacific focus, Tanabe said.

Because education has become so expensive, most graduate programs offer such scholarships to top students, often being the decisive factor on where they attend.

"This is the real key to recruiting and keeping top students," Tanabe said.

The Ford Foundation grant is helping the school develop cultural identity courses in partnership with faculty members at universities in Fiji, Palau and Mindanao island in the Philippines. UH faculty members have traveled to those countries.

"When we study other areas, we often do it from our own uniquely American viewpoint," Tanabe said. "We want to be a leader in the field by taking area studies to those areas we study.

"Doing it this way, we're creating a new curriculum for UH, by crossing the ordinary boundaries when we study the rest of the world."

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University of Hawaii