Awakening in Hawaii

In the contest for young minds in backward countries, the University of Hawaii's East-West Center should have been an early winner. Billed as a magnet for Asian students, it was first proposed by U.S. Senator Lyndon Johnson in 1959--nearly a year before Nikita Khrushchev hatched Moscow's Friendship University (TIME, Jan. 6). Hawaii had the advantage of the island's proud multiracial harmony; Friendship University is a segregated school for Afro-Asians. Yet somehow the Russians scored all the propaganda coups. Hawaii's East-West Center foundered in big talk and bad planning.

Last week there were sure signs that the center had secured a new lease on life with the appointment of its first chancellor: able Anthropologist Alexander Spoehr, 47, director of Honolulu's Bishop Museum and a scholar armed with a deep knowledge of Asia and a firm plan of action for what he calls a challenge "unique in American history."

Daring or Dead? For flubbing the challenge before, almost everyone shares blame. Handed $10 million by Congress in 1960 to launch the center, the State Department simply turned it over to the University of Hawaii without guidance. Though first-rate in a few fields, such as tropical agriculture and marine biology, the university was best known for a summer hula course, low faculty pay and an uninspired board of regents. Critics charge that President Laurence H. Snyder, who in the words of one faculty member "came out here to enjoy semiretirement and polish kukui nuts," mainly saw a way to polish up his lackluster campus with Government money.

While local orators paid flowery tribute to Hawaii's "daring experiment," the university set up the center as a confusing blend of graduate and undergraduate studies. In fact, it was just another department with an amorphous mission. Alarmed at a possible flop, prominent Hawaiians campaigned for a prestigious director: U.N. Under Secretary Ralph Bunche, who judged that the center had a flaccid future, backed away.

"This Is Not America." State legislators were so vexed at the regents' dawdling that Hawaii's Governor William F. Quinn fired the entire board, appointed a new one headed by Hawaiian Pineapple Co.'s energetic President Herbert C. Cornuelle. Things began to move a bit. Though still without a plant of its own, the center scoured Asia for students, snapped up Fulbright rejects. The bait: two-year scholarships, valued at $9,000, including transportation, books, board and room, $50 a month spending money, and a two-month study tour of the mainland. When ground was broken last spring for the first center building, Lyndon Johnson himself jetted in to announce that "the concept of the East-West Center is as broad as the vast Pacific area it will serve." Less cheerful were the students, many of them Moslems who boiled at the cafeteria menu, expressed themselves as "shocked" at the coeds' shorts. Other beefs: unavailable or inadequate courses and the wistful complaint, "This is not America."

Finally, last winter, the State Department woke up. Into action went Philip H. Coombs, former Ford Foundation economist and the new Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. Coombs started by withdrawing a new $9,600,000 budget request for the center, then got the regents to call in some able pulse takers, including Presidents Clark Kerr of the University of California and John Gardner of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Their advice: make the center semi-autonomous and give it a chancellor ranking with President Snyder; concentrate on technical graduate studies in the university's strong fields; and make sure that one-third of the students (2,000 by 1965) are mature Americans. Said Secretary Coombs, with a dig at Friendship University: "This should not be a ghetto for Asians."

The Stage Is Set. Last week the regents completed the center's reorganization with the appointment of Chancellor Spoehr, whom Carnegie President Gardner calls "the best man for the job in Hawaii." Trained at Stanford and Chicago, Anthropologist Spoehr is famed for having enriched a remarkable center of Polynesian artifacts at the Bishop Museum. (One item: a royal cloak left by Kamehameha I that is made of extinct birds' feathers and is now valued at $1,000,000.) Spoehr is also known as a shrewd administrator: he accepted his new $25,000-a-year job only after insisting that the regents carry out all the Kerr-Gardner recommendations, give him full power to aim the center toward "real eminence and distinction." No sooner had the regents agreed last week than President Snyder resigned his own $24,000-a-year job. Said he a bit sadly: "The stage has now been set for the long pull toward greatness."

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