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UH-Manoa Economics: A Brief Modern History, 1962-2007
II : A New Doctoral Program and a New Focus on Asia: 1966-1974
The University of Hawaii's commitment to establish a doctoral program in economics was cemented when it hired a highly respected UCLA economics professor, Dr. Wytze Gorter, to become Dean of the Graduate Division in 1964. (Wytze would go on to become the first Chancellor of UH-Manoa in 1972. A fracas with the UH Board of Regents, who bypassed him when they extended the contract of football coach Larry Price--yes, the Larry Price of KSSK's Perry & Price in the Morning--led to his resignation as Chancellor in 1974.) In 1966 the UH-Manoa College of Arts & Sciences would once again turn to the UCLA Economics Department to hire an outside faculty member--Burnie (short for 'Burnham') Campbell--to become Department Chair and to lead the effort to form a nationally recognized economics department.
Burnie served 12 years as Chair (punctuated by several overseas leaves) and would leave his mark on the Department in three big ways: (1) Hiring large numbers of young, talented faculty to staff the fast expanding program; (2) establishing a new research focus on Asia's developing economies; and (3) guiding the development of the State's and the University's first doctoral program in economics. With a faculty that was staffed predominantly by junior members fresh out of graduate school, he acted more as the Head of the Department than the Chair, as his somewhat autocratic yet widely accepted decisions firmly established the direction and the culture of the Department. While he consulted with a handful of senior faculty and close confidants (notably Professors Larry Miller, Harry Oshima, John Power, and Seiji Naya), he rarely held more than one faculty meeting each academic year. All proposals were almost always accepted unanimously, due to his "coffee-cup" diplomacy, whereby he would fashion a departmental consensus before the meeting began. He was widely judged to be fair and easily approachable and worked to incorporate others' ideas in Department policies and decisions. For example, he acceded to Larry Miller's idea of evaluating the research of faculty members by a point system ("Miller points") that assigned higher points to publication in top-rated economics journals, etc. Campbell kept tight reins on how the Department's money was spent and made final decisions on which mainland professors would be invited to visit the Department.
And the department had great visitors in the 1970s, among them, Milton Friedman (U. Chicago), Armen Alchian (UCLA), Dan Suits (Michigan State U.), Akira Takayama (Purdue U.), P.T. Ellsworth (U. of Wisconsin), Frank Hahn (Cambridge U.), Hirofumi Uzawa (U. Tokyo), Miyohei Shinohara (Hitosubashi U.), and the unforgettable Maurice McManus (Manchester U.) who liked Hawaii so much that he stayed on far past his appointment. Maurice finally left Honolulu after the Department gave several farewell parties for him.
During the 1970s, the department picnics and parties were frequent events. During one of those picnics at Kapiolani Park, Professor Walter Miklius broke a rib playing in a soccer match against a team of graduate students. The picnics were far surpassed by the great parties which Burnie and wife Carole hosted each year at their open and beautiful, ocean-view home on lower Waialae Iki.
 A quick look at the 1971 faculty reveals an eclectic group of enthusiastic young faculty with interests and looks more diverse than their economics. Jim Mak had black hair that flowed down to his shoulders. Jack Tawil lived on a boat at the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor, watching sunsets while pondering new methods for reducing taxes paid to the IRS. Rich Burcroft briefly lived in his VW bus parked at various city parks after UH Campus Security warned him that he could not sleep in his office. John Haines regularly played the commodity markets, until he discovered that to hold a position into a contract's final thirty days, one had to come up with a great deal more money than he would ever see. Bob Ebel and his wife, Claire were both drawn to local politics. Claire was the head of the George McGovern Campaign for President in Hawaii, and both were active in the failed attempt to elect Lt. Governor Tom Gill as Governor of Hawaii in 1970. Gill was soundly defeated by Incumbent Governor John Burns in the Democratic Primary. And Gary Walton was ... well, the same unique irrepressible character who became the founding Dean of the Graduate School of Administration at the University of California, Davis, and who today presides over a national foundation that delivers training courses in economics to K-12 economics teachers anywhere they can be found.
The Department's new graduate program added excitement to this young group, for while student numbers were small, the new faculty and the graduate students from Asia were eager to see the new program succeed. The close-knit atmosphere, the attention paid to the development of doctoral dissertations, and the many informal department gatherings allowed many of the graduate students and faculty from this era to become personal friends and professional collaborators. Burnie kept in touch with many of his former students and hired two of them back: Ed Fujii, a UH-Manoa B.A. in economics who received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and Jim Roumasset, a UH-Manoa M.A. in economics who received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.
Burnie hired several faculty for joint appointments with the Economic Research Center (ERC). The ERC's Director in the late 1960s was Professor Walter Miklius (Ph.D., UCLA), a transportation economist, the Department wit and curmudgeon, and, now comfortably in retirement in Prescott, Arizona, a composer of self portraits and piano CDs. Walter was a strong advocate of teaching "useful economics" which he defined as anything but what we were actually teaching. When he later served a brief stint as Chair of the Department, he had a sign on his door which read, "Tell me what you want, and I'll tell you how to get along without it." The ERC was the economic research arm of the Hawaii State Legislature and its primary mission was to produce economic forecasts for Hawaii and to conduct research on burning public policy issues facing the newest state and its booming tourism industry. Among those hired by Burnie for the ERC were Moheb Ghali (Ph.D., U. Washington via Egypt), Dick Pollock (Ph.D., U. Wisconsin), Salvatore "Sal" Comitini (Ph.D., U. Washington), Robert "Bob" Ebel (Ph.D., Purdue U.), and Bertrand Renaud (Ph.D., U. California-Berkeley). When large state fiscal shortfalls forced the ERC to dissolve in 1974, its research staff was dispersed to the Department of Economics, the Social Science and Linguistics Institute (later renamed the Social Science Research Institute - SSRI), and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Despite the ERC's closure, Hawaii-related research and service continued to be important missions of the Department. Several former ERC faculty continued to focus their research on public policy issues in Hawaii, and a new undergraduate course on Hawaii's economy became a regular part of the curriculum in the early 1970s and continues to be a popular course.
Wytze Gorter was instrumental (along with First Hawaiian Bank Chief Economist Tom Hitch) in founding the Hawaii Council on Economic Education, a group of business leaders, economists, union leaders, K-12 teachers, principals, and Hawaii Dept. of Education officials. The Council had the goal of promoting and enhancing economic literacy in Hawaii's public and private K-12 schools and raised money to help UH-Manoa's Center for Economic Education provide in-service courses for Hawaii's K-12 economics teachers. Many of the Department's faculty and graduate students would become heavily involved in Council and Center's programs. Housed on the fifth floor of Saunders Hall, Dr. Steven Jackstadt headed both groups from 1971. An extremely outgoing and personable individual, Steve managed to involve Hawaii's leading business executives, education leaders, and union officials in the Center's programs. During his tenure, economics became an established part of the social studies curriculum in Hawaii's schools. After Steve's departure for the University of Alaska in 1985, faculty affiliated with the Center for Economic Education would continue to educate K-12 economics teachers, but would mourn the end of Steve's lunches with business leaders and faculty at the Outrigger Canoe Club and the Pacific Club.
A head count of the faculty members--who either held full-time or joint appointments--in the Department in the early 1970s tallied some 30 people! (Not all were on the faculty concurrently.) One reason for the high head count is that joint appointments for economics faculty were common in the early and mid-1970s. In addition to the faculty with ERC ties, Rich Coffman (School of Public Health), John Richards and Hans Overbeek (East-West Center), Edwin Fujii (Urban and Regional Planning), and James Moncur (Water Resources Research Center) had joint appointments.
 Rising University enrollments--byproducts of the military draft and the Vietnam War, a growing university-age population, and a booming state economy--and a new doctoral program meant that the Department would try to hire 6-9 new tenure-track faculty annually from 1969 to 1971. In fact, Burnie would personally recruit 21 tenure-track faculty during the 1969-1971 period. Before leaving Hawaii for the recruiting sessions at the late December meetings of the American Economics Association, he would spend several days at the beach acquiring a deep tan, the better to leave potential recruits at the usually very cold annual meetings with first-hand images of the weather and fun times in Hawaii. Of course, first impressions were critical in faculty recruiting during the 1960s and 1970s, as the University of Hawaii did not offer fly-outs to job candidates! Job offers were often timed to coincide with a huge snowstorm on the mainland, and Burnie would typically preface the offer with an off-hand comment that he had just come in from tennis or the beach and that the weather was magnificent.
Until the summer of 1974, most of the Economics Department was housed on the 4th floor of Spalding Hall, although, with expansion, a couple of faculty later shared a partitioned classroom on the 2nd floor. Teaching assistants were housed in World War II temporary "Quonset" huts (with the curved corrugated roofs), located along Maile Way directly mauka of Spalding Hall. Because space was at such a premium, junior faculty members shared hotbox offices, armed only with fans (personally supplied) against the afternoon heat and humidity. Four to six professors shared a single phone number. The secretary answered all incoming calls and used a buzzer system to alert the professor for whom the call was intended.
Recitations from language classes across the hall from faculty offices (doors were always open to let the trade winds blow through) were a daily ritual for the huge cohort of assistant professors. Armies of students from the language departments sat on the floor right outside faculty offices waiting for their classes to begin. Instructors of the language classes regularly complained about the noise of typewriters coming from faculty offices!
Faculty research was clearly focused on Asia. Professor Harry Oshima was at the heart of these efforts. His prolific career would lead him to spend many years at the University of the Philippines and Thammasat University. His books on monsoon agriculture and his work on income distribution in developing economies (the "Kuznets-Oshima Curve") were already established classics. His remarkable career and prolific research output never waned even in "retirement." Just days before his death in Honolulu in the late 1990s, he was in his East-West Center office, putting the finishing touches on his book on income distribution in Asia. He often joked to Sumner La Croix (who had the office next door) that it wasn't even worth a bet to figure out who would go home first!
 One of Harry's biggest contributions to the Department was his leadership in the early 1970s in securing a substantial grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Department. The grant allowed several UH-Manoa economics faculty to make extended visits, usually for two years, at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand. In return, a constant flow of Thai students arrived in Honolulu to earn their graduate credentials. In Bangkok, the UH faculty taught economics courses (in English), conducted research on the new, somewhat fragile Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and provided assistance to Thammasat's economics faculty and administration in establishing Thammasatís own graduate program in economics. Larry Chau (who would leave UH after his Thammasat stint to join the faculty of Hong Kong University), Jim Moncur, Seiji Naya, and Burnie Campbell were delighted to find themselves living in Bangkok, although a military coup provided a few unnecessary thrills and chills. Seiji Naya even learned to speak passable Thai, and all three developed a keen taste for Thai food, which they shared with their colleagues after returning to Manoa. The Thai students at UH earned their graduate degrees and embarked on amazingly successful careers in government and academia. Not surprisingly, the flow of Thai students has continued long after the Rockefeller grant ended. Many students who came to Manoa during the pioneering years of the economics Ph.D. program became faculty members at Thammasat University. In particular, Naris Chaiyasoot (Ph.D., U. Hawaii 1983) rose quickly through Thammasat's hierarchies to become the University's rector (its president) in 1998.
The contacts established with Thammasat University in the 1970s provided the basis for establishing a student exchange program that allows economics major in both universities to spend a semester (or two) at the other university. UH-Manoa economics majors who take advantage of the opportunity typically report back that the experience of studying at Thammasat and living in Bangkok was the highlight of their college years. The Department also has an active student exchange program with Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan, and a faculty exchange program with the Research Institute of Economics and Business at Kobe University, Kobe, Japan. Professors Mak, Bonham, Lee, and Naya have been visitors at Kobe University, while Professors Abe and Igawa have been visitors with the Department.
III : A New Home, New Colleagues, ... and No New Funding: 1975-1984
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