New Tides in the Pacific

"The world is moving toward a new era--the Pacific era," says Hawaii's Governor John A. Burns, and his state shows a lively new determination to make its mid-Pacific location the center of the region's rising tide of intellectual and scientific achievement.

Atop Hawaii's clear, cloud-free Mauna Kea (13,784 ft.), new telescopes sweep the skies from a site that Astronomer Gerard Kuiper terms "the finest in the world--I repeat, in the world." Five space-tracking stations in the islands now spot missiles and satellites. A hundred miles northeast of the island of Maui, a place where the ocean is three miles deep has been chosen for the $71 million Project Mohole--an attempt to drill three miles through the earth's crust to the underlying mantle. A recent business-sponsored survey projected a possible annual income of $100 million for state firms from oceanic re search.

Revitalized University. The battery powering much of this activity is the revitalized University of Hawaii under its new president, Dr. Thomas Hale Hamilton, 50. A former vice president for academic affairs at Michigan State, Hamilton served for three years in the frustrating presidency of the State University of New York's 58 uncoordinated branches before quitting in 1962 to take the Hawaii post. Now, with a central campus and a clear line of authority, he is carrying out his concept of the great university. "A university is established by a society to ensure that the values to which that social order subscribes are perpetuated," he said in his inaugural address. "And yet, in its rarer moments, society also acknowledges that it is equally important to examine and indeed to modify its orthodoxy. Thus the university is mandated to question the value system which it is also supposed to preserve."

Physically, the school for which Hamilton set this goal is as spectacular as its symbol, the rainbow. Its 268-acre campus abounds in landscaped lawns, red and yellow hibiscus, shower trees and coconut palms. Semicircled by the greenery of Manoa Valley's bordering volcanic mountains, the campus overlooks Honolulu, Waikiki Beach and Mamala Bay. Student dress is almost as colorful as the sunsets. An Indian girl in a scarlet sari strolls with a Chinese girl in sneakers and blue jeans. Caucasian girls in muumuus and poi pounders (an above-knee muumuu with long, tight pants) vie for attention with others in Polynesian prints and Bermuda shorts. The motto on the university gates is fitting: "Above all nations is humanity."

Shake-Up. Until four years ago, the intellectual life was as placid as the setting. Then former Governor William F. Quinn fired the entire board of regents, appointed an energetic new group headed by Dole Corp. President Herbert C. Cornuelle. This board brought in Hamilton, who began a ten-year development program that strives for particular excellence in those fields in which Hawaii enjoys natural advantages. Hamilton sees these as the behavioral sciences related to the area's multicultural citizenry, those cultural disciplines in which "the East-West dialogue is best promoted," and natural sciences tied to Hawaii's geophysical location.

Pursuing this plan, Hamilton launched a new graduate library school, which will include a $2,500,000 research library and will nearly quadruple the university's present 800,000 volumes. Research in Asian and Pacific linguistics, including compilation of dictionaries of little-known Asian languages, is a major goal. Hamilton intends to add eight new doctoral programs, including oceanography, linguistics and Asian and Pacific languages, to the 18 now offered. An effective public salesman, he coaxed $30 million from the legislature for his current budget, compared to $12 million in 1960, and expects to get $41 million for next year.

Much of the money is needed to keep up with the university's rising enrollment: it was 5,000 in 1950, 10,000 in 1960, and is 15,519 now. Buildings are going up so fast that wags call the university "an empire in which the concrete never sets." Yet a significant sum has been used to improve salaries and lure top teachers and researchers to Hawaii.

Hamilton has netted such names as Windsor Cooper Cutting, former dean of the Stanford Medical School, to direct the university's Pacific Biomedical Research Center; Schuyler Hoslett, a Dun & Bradstreet vice president, as dean of the College of Business Administration; and U.C.L.A. Economics Chairman Wytze Gorter as graduate-school dean.

Atomic-Fed Fisheries. The university's main contribution to the state's intellectual thrust has been in the natural sciences. Grants, mainly for scientific research, should reach $15 million this year. Even bigger sums are foreseen by Hawaii's newly imaginative faculty.

Hawaii was selected for the National Science Foundation's huge Mohole project* mainly through the energy of the new director of the university's Hawaii Institute of Geophysics, George P. Woollard. He gambled some $15,000 of university funds in a crash survey of likely sites, came up with the winner. Convinced of the growing interrelationship of meteorology, geology, solid-earth geophysics and oceanography, he has lumped all four studies into an unusual single department of geophysics. His institute is engaged in tidal-wave research at sea, cloud research atop mountains. He envisions the dumping of atomic wastes into the area's underwater volcanic mountains to create thermal currents that would drive nutrients to the surface for new fisheries.

At the Biomedical Research Center, Cutting directs studies of the high rate of stomach cancer among Japanese males, seeks antiviral agents in Pacific herbs and fungi. Other university scientists have developed new techniques for commercialization of macadamia nuts and launched gravitational studies that may prove Tokyo to be some 400 meters closer to San Francisco than map-makers now believe--which would be a matter of considerable interest to the world's missilemen.

One beneficiary of the university's progress is the semi-autonomous East-West Center, which occupies soaring-lined buildings designed by Architect I. M. Pei on the university campus; the center taps the university's resources, but has its own chancellor and is financed by Congress. Founded in 1960 as a vehicle of American-Asian under standing, it floundered at first for lack of direction. But Hamilton has served as acting chancellor for the last year, tightened its organization and eased the strain between Hawaiian and Washington officials. Soon U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Howard P. Jones will become chancellor, and the center finally seems past its growing pains.

* Which was proved feasible in drilling tests off La Jolla, Calif., and Guadalupe Island, Mexico, in 1961 after being stalled by wrangling among scientists, engineers and politicians.

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