|
UH-Manoa Economics: A Brief Modern History, 1962-2007
In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the University of Hawai
Download this essay (without picture) in PDF format.
The modern history of the UH-Manoa Economics Department is ultimately the story of how faculty, staff, and students have been enriched by participating in a community that creates, values, and disseminates economic knowledge. This history focuses on the people who form the community and on the events and trends that have affected the vitality and quality of the Department's academic and research programs. Hawaii's boom-and-bust economy is one of these forces, as its fluctuations have led to big swings in Department budgets and faculty numbers. By contrast, economic growth and development in Asia has been a stabilizing force for the Department, as it has provided its students and faculty with a rich assortment of policies, institutions, and empirical puzzles that are the necessary ingredients for exciting intellectual exchanges and outcomes.
The economic historian writing this essay has divided the Department's 45-year modern history, 1962 - 2007, into six distinct periods, which have start and end dates suspiciously close to the turning points in Hawaii's business cycle. The six periods are:
- 1962-1965. First Steps
- 1966-1974. A New Doctoral Program, A New Focus on Asia
- 1975-1984. A New Home, A Recognition of Limits
- 1985-1992. Riding Hawaii's Boom Years
- 1993-1998. Will the Last Person Left Please Shut Out the Lights?
- 1999-2007. Fortune, Rejuvenation, and Revival.
A quick note of caution to those who desire to compare the Department's achievements across the six periods: such exercises are not a simple matter once we acknowledge that the measures of our discipline--the breadth and depth of its knowledge and analytical techniques, the standards of education defining the economics major, masters degree, and doctorate, and the use of economic theory by educated economists to delineate, understand and evaluate critical public policies--have changed dramatically over the 45 years of modern Department history.
 Finally, this history essay is terribly unbalanced in its treatment of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate majors and minors. You, the reader, can help us remedy some of these problems. You can enliven this faculty-drenched narrative by contributing your recollections of the best achievements of our former undergraduate majors and minors, by remembering a faculty visitor from years past, by reminding us of the forgotten students tormenting and enriching our classes, by sending us photos from your UH days and today, and, yes, by sending us your personal remembrances of the multiple choice questions with no answers, the macro model with multiple equilibriums that you thought you knew until it appeared on a qualifying exam, or the buckets of lemons that Dr. Hasegawa (a doctoral student during the 1970s and 1980s) often left in front of 5th floor office doors. Please send us an e-mail (econsuccess@hawaii.edu). We'll add your (edited) comments and photos to our centennial blog, which is located on our centennial page: http://www.economics.hawaii.edu/history/centennial.html.
I : First Steps
|
