RICHARD WALKER / RWALKER@STARBULLETIN.COM Joshua Cabebe, right, representing minority faculty, stood before a crowd of other students representing Caucasian faculty yesterday during a performance art piece on the steps of the UH-Manoa Campus Center.

UH racial protest
serves as final exam

Caucasian professors are
in the majority, while most
students are non-Caucasian

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By Treena Shapiro
tshapiro@starbulletin.com

With painted faces and colored signs, 21 University of Hawaii-Manoa political science students demonstrated yesterday against the racial disparity between faculty and administration and students.

"Does your color count?" read one sign, while others showed that the Manoa faculty and administrators were 70 percent Caucasian, compared with 70 percent non-Caucasian students.

To student Luukia Archer, one of the organizers, the numbers mean that more than "70 percent of our voices are not being heard or represented."

According to figures given by UH, 23 percent of students at UH-Manoa are Caucasian, compared with 60 percent of faculty and administrators who are Caucasian.

Almost 80 percent of students across the 10-campus system are non-Caucasian, but Caucasians make up 56 percent of faculty and administrators.

During a 10-minute performance, other students passed out surveys for the Listening Project, which is a separate UH initiative gathering community input for UH's strategic planning process.

The demonstration was the final examination for an introductory political science course taught by Hawaiian activist C. Mamo Kim. Students in the class were required to perform some sort of political action but were not required to participate in this one.

Shem Lawlor, 23, said that if the university wants to create an atmosphere that really reflects the community, it needs more diversity among the faculty.

"We want the professors at the University of Hawaii to be the best that Hawaii has to offer," he said.

Instead of recruiting from the mainland, the university should have more Hawaii faculty, Lawlor said.

"We want to have a local perspective," he said.

RICHARD WALKER / RWALKER@STARBULLETIN.COM Adam Luchs, a University of Hawaii junior, left, and UH professor C. Mamo Kim debated the issue of racial disparity yesterday on the UH campus following a performance art piece on the steps of the UH-Manoa Campus Center.

UH President Evan Dobelle was not present for the demonstration, but said he regrets the situation he has inherited and plans to do something about it.

Dobelle suggested that people attend an open-door forum on Feb. 1 to address this and other issues as part of the strategic planning process.

The new strategic plan is expected to be completed at the end of March.

Students passing through the Campus Center courtyard stopped to watch and fill out surveys, but not all were convinced that a more ethnically diverse faculty should be a priority.

Adam Luchs, 20, said that he had not been aware that the racial disparity was an issue.

"I like that they go out and make a demonstration to let people know," he said.

However, Luchs said, passing out the Listening Project survey was misleading because it did not include the racial disparity issue and asked questions about other issues he thought were a bigger priority, such as building a campus community.

Luchs said race should not matter, "as long as they are good teachers and good students."

He suggested that the racial disparity could be remedied by recruiting more Caucasian students.

Brandon Chang agreed that race should not matter.

"This is Hawaii," he said. "There's more aloha."

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University of Hawaii
Ka Leo O Hawaii