University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s new School of Communication and Information made its official introduction to the community Friday night with an Open House that included mini academic workshops, an overview lecture about the school and the presentation of the first group of alumni awards, one for each of the school’s five programs.
“We took four different departments from three different schools and brought them together with the idea to merge all of these with the technology side of things,” said UH Mānoa Provost Michael Bruno, “taking these traditional forms and bringing it all into, dare I say, the modern age of communication.”
The new SCI has 24 faculty members, 22 adjunct lecturers, 305 students enrolled undergraduate majors and 75 graduate students, 93 students taking minors and certificates, with, all together, 4,180 students across 223 classes. The school offers five distinctive academic programs: Communication, Communicology, Journalism, Library and Information Science and the Matsunaga Institute for Peace.
“Tonight’s event is especially exciting because we’re linking with the community and our alumni, those who have been successful,” said Denise Konan, dean of the College of Social Sciences. “They have the heritage, the relationships here in the community, they can be our models, they can help us see the way forward and to have that ability for the students to exchange with the community group. To me, it’s terrific.”
As examples of the school’s scholarship, Communicology professor Amy Hubbard presented her new innovative virtual reality (VR) lab that offers a unique opportunity for students to perfect their public speaking skills by presenting to a virtual audience that can range from engaged and attentive to rude and disruptive. The project received a $4 million grant from the National Science Federation in 2021.
Journalism Program Director Brett Oppegaard also presented about his UniDescription project, founded in 2014, and funded by more than $1 million in federal grants, aimed at improving Audio Description for people who are blind or who have low-vision. In addition, Oppegaard showed examples from the journalism program’s capstone class’s award-winning collaborations with Civil Beat, and Associate Professor Patricia Buskirk showed videos demonstrating the media arts classes in Communication.
“All of our classes are very useful,” aid Maya Soetoro, Associate Specialist for PACE. “There’s sort of an algorithm that I use with frequency, which is that in order to be peace builders, we have to build peace within, between, and in service to others. So personal peace, interpersonal peace and peace within our community. … Many of my classes involve exploring those dimensions of peace-building variously.”
The 2024 Distinguished Alumni Awardees were honored during the final segment of the presentation. Those awardees were: Ruth Horie, retired catalog librarian at UH Mānoa, Nyle Kauweloa, director of UH Esports and specialist faculty, Anne Marie Smoke, administrator in the Center for Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Hawaiʻi State Judiciary, Jennifer Sur Matayoshi, lead deputy Title IX coordinator and senior investigator at UH Mānoa, and Suzanne Puanani Vares-Lum, President of the East-West Center at UH Mānoa.
All of the recipients took the stage to accept their awards, with the exception of Kauweloa, who could not attend; he was acknowledged with a warm round of applause and cheers from the audience for his trailblazing efforts as the UH system’s first director of Esports.
Horie, retired catalog librarian at UH Mānoa, was honored for her work in helping pioneer the Hawaiian Electronic Library, an invaluable resource known by many as Ulukau.
Matayoshi, UH Mānoa’s Deputy Title IX Coordinator, was recognized for her continued diligence as a leader and educator as well. As coordinator and senior investigator, she helps students, faculty, and staff navigate gender-based violence and sex discrimination with a balanced and caring demeanor.
The awards celebration rounded out after two more highly respected figures were acknowledged; Suzanne Vares-Lum, President of the East-West Center at UH Mānoa, and Anne Smoke, Administrator of the Appellate Mediation Program and Trainer for the Center for Alternative Dispute Resolution within the Hawaiʻi State Judiciary.
Both hold a degree in Journalism, and offered their words of encouragement to the next generation of journalists who strive to navigate the challenges of AI and social media, among other things.
“Good governance in the world is going to rely on journalism,” Vares-Lum said. “Without a free and open press, we have no democracy.”
The diversity of outstanding alumni represent the richness of scope within the new School, but that variety also represents a distinct strength at UH, said Hubbard, the Communicology program director.
“All the units are like facets of one thing,” she said. “If you think about it like a diamond, or the cuts on a diamond, then it’s like how we fit together, it’s like we show different facets. So even though we reflect different aspects, we all are still connected.”
