 This is ThinkTech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Okay, welcome back. This is ThinkTech. I'm Jay Fidel. Welcome to Making Leadership Work on ThinkTech. Today is called A New Day at Shamanad. We're going to talk about important changes at Shamanad and new delivery models for innovation at Shamanad. If you want to ask a question, participate in discussion, you can tweet us at ThinkTech HI or call us at 808-374-2014. Our guest for the show are Lynn Bavington. She's the President of Shamanad University and Helen Turner. She's the Vice President of Innovation at Shamanad. So we're going to talk about new programs, new delivery models, new innovations, new entrepreneurship, the whole enchilada at Shamanad. Welcome to the show, Lynn and Helen. Thank you so much for having us on the show. Thanks, Jay. So why don't you tell me about yourselves. President, what does it mean? Where do you come from? How can I get your job? I'm not sure how you can get my job yet. I just got here. I arrived on campus on August 1st to be greeted by a wonderful group of staff, faculty, and students in a traditional OLE, which was a gift. And I came to Shamanad because it's a very special place. I came from Fairfield University in right near New York City, which is a Jesuit University, similar in some of its mission to Shamanad. But I was attracted to the university because Shamanad really walks the talk. They have a commitment to educating students to be leaders in the world today, to contribute to their local economy and the world economy in some very special ways. So I feel very privileged to be here in this role right now. And I guess time will tell whether or not you'll be able to take my job. I always ask that. Helen, you used to be the what, the Dean of Natural Sciences at I actually still am. So I came to Shamanad 10 years ago now. And it was really to help them do a big build in the sciences. So Shamanad had, you know, a small but high quality science program at the time. What we were focusing on then was to try and do a build to make it really cutting edge and relevant. So that's what I spent the last 10 years doing as Dean of Natural Sciences. And then Dr. Barrington asked me to add to my job, thinking about innovation at a whole university wide level. And so we've been doing a lot of innovation in STEM at Shamanad, a lot of grant programs, a lot of new delivery methods, a lot of student success that we're seeing. So my challenge now is, okay, how does that vision get articulated across the whole university? What an exciting time. It is exciting. It is a new day. The two of you are engaged in a kind of new step up in your careers and then your daily, your daily quality of life, I guess. Yeah. We certainly are. So tell us about Shamanad, educate us about Shamanad. How big was it cover? You know, what is going on there in general? Okay. Well, Shamanad is a private Catholic, Marianist university here in Honolulu. We educate about 2,500 students. We have a number of undergraduate programs and selected graduate programs. And Shamanad is really based on a strong liberal arts background with professional schools woven in. We have an education school, nursing, business, criminal justice, as some of our professional programs. And we really are in the business of higher education for a higher purpose. We want our students to graduate and be able to be leaders and contribute to their own communities where they live. And we think that by blending both liberal arts and the professional programs that our students have that opportunity. What is the element, what is the religious element, if at all? I mean, I'm not sure I know what it is. I don't think it's a very religious school, but tell me about that. Well, the Marianist tradition focuses on family. It focuses on inclusivity. About 40% of our students are Roman Catholics. But the Marianist tradition celebrates all faith traditions. And the whole idea is that you teach students to look beyond themselves and look to contribute to their community. A strong emphasis on making the world a better place on inclusivity and including the whole family in what we do. It is a Roman Catholic institution. Is it religious? I suppose it depends on your definition. We don't require any of our students to particularly attend prayer services or anything like that. But we do celebrate all different kinds of faith traditions on a regular basis in our community. It's right near St. Louis. Is there a relationship? We arose from St. Louis historically. The founders of St. Louis at some point in history decided that they would build a junior college, which is what Chaminade started out as, and then became a university. And that was in the 1950s. So do you get a lot of students from St. Louis? Actually, not as many as you might expect. But some of that is because the students have been going to school there for a period of time on the same campus. We share the same campus. Their students can take some classes while their senior year towards a college education. And we certainly have a partnership with St. Louis for many of the functionings on campus. What about science at Chaminade? How important is it? What are the depth and breadth of its offerings? It's been an area of great growth in the last 10 years. I think how important it is to Chaminade is that science and technology are one of the sort of fundamental expressions of our Catholic social teachings. So Catholic social teachings tells us to be concerned about the stewardship of the earth. It tells us to be concerned about the dignity of people and their health care. And so those are really the kind of themes that we threaded through the development of the science programs at Chaminade. We have some unique niches, so we offer the only forensic science program in the Pacific region. Very proud of that. That's a really innovative program. We have a really strong presence in pre-med and pre-health careers as well. And then we've also recently started a building environment and sustainability. So really trying to think about what kind of professionals does Hawaii need to work in the conservation agencies to become environmental justice lawyers. I mean everything that we can think about that's not such a hardcore science focused degree. I mean those young people are thinking about policy, they're thinking about advocacy, they're climate warriors, right? So really that's the kind of breadth of the science programs. And then it's sort of there are two, there's some foundations that underlay the way we think about science. We have a lot of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Island students, so the challenge of how you can bring culture and traditional knowledge into the science curriculum and blend that as a way of knowing with the Western way of knowing about science is very important to us. And then also we constantly have an eye on the future and we think that the future lies in students really being able to understand big data and not being limited. Yeah it's a kind of computer science that just is now I think in every aspect of the science endeavor. And we talked just earlier about science communication that's another big piece for us as well. What is that? Tell the people what that is. So it's an evolution like many things at Shaman Islands. So we always had the you know a big focus on science writing, right? So we thought yeah if we make the students able to write about science then they'll be able to talk to other scientists in writing and of course that's the way science works. But I think it's becoming clear to every practicing scientist in the United States today that unless you can communicate with the public, unless you can communicate with politicians then you are not going to be successful as a scientist and also your agenda is not going to get served. And so we've been taking as a guidance from National Science Foundation who have their super communicator program and we've been implementing that in the classroom actually starting this semester. Well it's very interesting because you know take the science fair we cover the science fair coming up in March I guess and go around and these kids I guess they're not college kids they're high school kids. Right. But the biggest and most exciting part about them is their ability to tell you what they're doing. And they're so cute they're so lovable because they they can do that they understand this thing about science communication. And to tell the story of their work in a bigger context you know so when I was being trained in science communication as a grad student the bar was to be able to in you know exhausting detail tell people what I worked on. But that sense of hey in the big sense I'm trying to cure cancer or I'm trying to attack heart disease or I'm trying to mitigate seawater inundation that's the big story that every student has to be prepared to tell and then explain how their work fits into that you know which piece of the pie they're focusing on. And I think that goes back to what makes the shamanide education different because our students it doesn't matter if they're a science major a business major health care history the skills they learn are communication they learn to communicate both verbally as Dr. Turner was talking about but also in writing writing is essential and they work on teams so by the time they're ready for the workplace they're team ready I mean I talk to employers and they say the hardest thing about college graduates is they step into the work world they don't know how to work on a team and our that's that is a shamanide education they our students have had so many experiences working on interdisciplinary teams that they understand and can communicate with you the history major when I'm the science major and Alan might be computer science and we can all work together solving problems and and we think that that's a really important skill for graduates today. I'm what I gather is that you're looking to create a well-rounded individual as your graduate who has the technology as appropriate and has the special skills in the special courses but is also able to deal in this world as a responsible citizen right what what's the blend and how do you do that? Well you know some of it is very deliberate in plan for example if you're an accounting major we all know pretty much what goes through that but I just described to you all of the liberal arts courses that those students take but even within the business curriculum those students have service built into their class service learning it's called throughout the curriculum they go to homeless shelters and help the folks in the homeless shelter fill out a tax return wonderful which which can make the difference between the person being able to actually get enough money to get out of the shelter so by the time these accounting majors graduate they may get a job at the big four firm now but they also understand the importance of their work to their community besides just simply taxes so you can take every discipline and we have deliberately interjected those kinds of experiences so that when our students graduate they see the value of that. And I think it's also about listening to the students and who they want to be so you know you hear a lot said about the millennials generation whatever we're up to now I can't remember the but you know these young people are interested in having social impact as well as successful lives and successful careers and trying to think about there the world that we're preparing them for and what their motivations are you know I think a while ago in Shamuna we really moved away from a very kind of top down here's what you need to know go forth it's much more now thinking about listening to the students listening to the the community and figuring out who should we be preparing and that might change quite often right and academia typically moves at a glacial time pace but but one of the great things about Shamuna as Dr. Bamenton alluded is that because we can move fast and we're not afraid of bringing new programs online bringing new initiatives online for as long as they're needed that I think means that we can continue to serve the students and their vision of who they want to be and what their dreams and their passions are. So you find out what their dreams and their passions are and then you build a real knowledge base and you build confidence and you build confidence yeah I think that's critical plus we are situated here in Hawaii economy and we have to look at what the needs are within our community and we know what those needs are I mean we have a big focus here on innovation and innovation economy and our programs have fit nicely into the focus on health care we have a holds rich deep expertise in that area in the area of data and data science in the area of sustainability and certainly in the area of social justice which is one of those pillars so we think we're very well positioned to to contribute to the education of students here that can make a difference in Hawaii. Well yeah you said magic words in Hawaii because you want to build students who can have a life here and can build the economy for us if they leave we lose them on the other hand there's a certain culture point in Hawaii in all the schools high schools and colleges about heading off to the mainland immediately and finding a life there and staying there and never coming back in fact sometimes their parents follow them and so when we get back from this break Lynn and Helen I'd like to ask you you know what the blend should be ideally and what do you want to communicate to these kids about whether they should stay here participate in the development of the state going forward and and and what they want to think about about going to the mainland okay we'll be right back after this break. Hi I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock I present Think Tech Hawaii's research in Manoa where we bring together researchers from across the campus to describe a whole series of scientifically interesting topics of interest both to Hawaii and around the world so hopefully you can join me one o'clock Monday afternoon for Think Tech Hawaii's research in Manoa. Aloha and Richard Concepcion the host of Hispanic Hawaii you can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. we will bring you entertainment educational and also we tell you what is happening right here within our community Think Tech Hawaii Aloha. Rebecca I told you we come back and we came back some things you know you got to do so Lynn Babington she's the president of Shamanad and Helen Turner she's the vice president of innovation both critical figures obviously in development of the school so where you know where does the school fit are you are you building graduates who will stay or you're building graduates who will go you carefully selected areas of focus which sounds to me like those areas would be relevant to this economy or to the economy we want to have it's aspirational but you know what do you see what do you ideate for these kids well to be quite honest with you we hope that our students graduate with the skills to be successful and contribute here at home but we want them to have the skills to be successful globally we want them to come away from our education as good communicators as I said but to be adaptable which really fits in with the Marianist tradition as well adaptation for change is one of the pillars and values of the Marianist education and we all know today that students will graduate and probably have 10 jobs five different careers we want our students to be lifelong learners we want them to have the skills and knowledge to retool when they need to retool so from that perspective we hope that they will be successful wherever they go um you know on the other hand it is common here that people want to send their children maybe to stateside to um or to the mainland for their undergraduate education and we feel very strongly that while that may be a good opportunity for some for some students they may be better served to stay here for undergrad and link into programs that can help them be successful to maybe go to graduate school for example we have our science students and students in the humanities we have these programs whereby in the summertime we belong to a consortium of 20 different universities and our students go to Stanford and Princeton and they are working to be developing as leaders so I'm at a young lady this is a good story and she grew up in a high school um here and she said she wasn't prepared and she came to Shamanad we sort of had a boot camp for students to help them in the science and math her freshman year between freshman and sophomore year she went to Stanford she worked in a high-profile researchers lab it was a great experience the next year she went to Princeton in the meantime we have these partnership agreements with medical school she decided partway through she went to go to medical school she hasn't even graduated and she will already be in george washington medical school automatic in well because they save spots for us we have these agreements with over 20 different institutions for medicine osteopathic medicine podiatry all the various ptot the various health professions so the family that's thinking about sending their child for an undergraduate education somewhere really if they want to go to a health profession school they would be better off staying at Shamanad and having an absolute entree but the best thing about that story is that young lady said to me she walked didn't to stanford in this lab and she thought to herself oh my gosh i'm just coming from Hawaii you know i'm not gonna be quite up to snuff and she said within two weeks she realized she was as smart as any of these great and that's that's what we want that's what we want yeah and she could be anywhere she could be anywhere she could be our choices are that's right that way yeah what about your graduate programs you have you know what you use the term lifelong learning which resonates with me because i learned that the hard way so what do you do are you are you doing that i mean if i'm a graduate can i come around and take a graduate course well we have graduate programs in education the variety of field special ed early childhood education etc in an MBA program and in the business world and we have graduate programs in forensic science and criminal justice that are very well known we will build graduate programs in nursing but in addition to graduate programs we're also focusing on certificate programs as you indicated you may want to learn a specific area like we're looking at data science data analytics do you need a master's degree maybe but you may already have the skill set that you just need a little bit extra fine-tuning in health care for instance we have a very rich expertise in gerontology we have an aging population here very important yeah so we will be developing and offering a post graduate program contribution in yeah in gerontology and we are trying to leverage where our expertise are and what our community needs yeah so you're responsive to that you're responsive to change yes you got to do that you got to be nimble you got to be nimble today yeah now the hogan program yes we would be remiss would we not if we did not mention them can you talk about the hogan program so the hogan entrepreneur program it lives in our school of business and communication under the dean scotch rotor and it is i think a hidden jewel in Hawaii we regularly have students who place in national business competitions what we perhaps you know what perhaps don't see behind those headlines is this two-year program that focuses as an entire kind of additional curriculum for the students and it's about entrepreneurship it's about innovation and it's also about networking so hogan rejoices in this amazing advisory board which are not just movers and shakers in the hawaii community they're also the people who've been here for a long time and they know how business is done here and actually one of the things that budded from that was one of the new MBA programs that came on at shamanard just a couple years ago which is an island business MBA it is focused on how you do business in this community great preparation but the hogan students go on to great things one of my students devon rostoffer who is a hogan graduate she's now running urban planning for the city of detroit in michigan right so so they are both social entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs i think in the more you know conventional setting we have students who set up companies we have students who've gone off from hogan and then being placed in in large organizations as well where they can kind of be entrepreneurs right so very exciting program yeah so this is not just technology and it's not just innovation it's could be anything anything at all uh as a subject of the entrepreneur i remember i went to one of the your hogan programs and i noticed you had a category for nonprofits yes i thought it was really important because so much of the economy is tied up in nonprofits so much of the work is being done by it like us you know i think one of the the the taglines is helping those who want to do good do better right i think that's that idea that if you can support social innovation and you can support um one of our partnerships with mehmer schools is actually thinking about how you can have incubator spaces that really support both native Hawaiian innovation and then specifically in the social arena so that you know yes there have to be new companies there has to be tech transfer in the sense that maybe an organization like university of Hawaii would do it but there also needs to be that framework for social social justice endeavors that will benefit the community but then nevertheless have to compete for funding have to do a great job of communicating their mission it's an overlapping skill set so that that takes me to one one point i wanted to discuss with you and that is where in your view does shamanad fit you know in the landscape of higher education state of hawaii well hawaii is very fortunate to have some wonderful higher education uh institutions here i think that um we all uh need to work better together and we are beginning to do that we're all slightly different in in our missions and in the students we serve and in the graduates that we graduate and so we need to capitalize on what each of us is good at you know you already discussed we're smaller we're more nimble and we've targeted where our expertise are uh university of hawaii benoa particularly is a research one institution we have many partnerships with them both research partnerships clinical partnerships we have faculty that move back and forth that is very important we now are building some very strong agreements with our community college partners all of whom are part of that system because we understand that it's important for students to have a variety of entrees into a higher education and the community college is certainly certainly one of them um and so students to seamlessly finish their education there and if they can transfer to shamanad to complete their baccalaureate degree we think there's a place for everyone um and it's important that in a community like this there are different kinds of options for students and for businesses to partner with how do you compare with hpu which is all around us downtown here well again hpu has some very good programs we have some of the same we have some programs they don't have um their their focus is um slightly different than ours on the other hand they have very good educational programs and their graduates are very successful and i think like us they emphasize the small class sizes i mean i think where where i see shamanad fitting in you know having you know this is my 10th year now so i've sort of seen this shift a little bit is i i think that it's like the boutique hotel in wikiki right small but perfectly formed high quality um for students for whom a family atmosphere is very important maybe it's their first pass um the first generation students who you know maybe they're going to be ready for going to the mainland but maybe not right now i think there's a lot of of those kind of aspects that we we tailor to and then this this great wonderful openness to being a place where students from community colleges can come and complete that degree and get the four-year that's a great opportunity for them and then there's a lot of other conversations that are happening right now about people who want to learn differently or in a different place or for a different purpose and again i think you know there are a lot of students out there or learners out there who don't they don't want a degree they might even want a certificate but they may need a training experience linked to one of the innovation hubs or something like that and and that openness to to serving all of those different constituencies i think that's where i'm hoping we can fit in more in the next in the next few years we have a few minutes left to talk about the future and i mean i'm going to make a guess and say that we're in a new time shamanada is in a new time new administration new vice president of innovation new new ideas new nimbleness if you will new new perceptions of the relationship of the university in the community new new ideas about the the way the model student graduating but one of the things i noticed i think i noticed is that you're you're into finding more robust partnerships all over the place because you have concluded i guess that these partnerships are of value to you know to going to the next chapter can you talk about that absolutely yes we have a variety of partnerships both with the local business community we have a program with university or the bank of hawaii to educate their current workforce those who haven't completed a bachelor's degree um we also have partners with a number of foundations i'll i'll let dr turner speak to one of the partnerships that's been particularly successful and we are replicating that partnership with others so would you like to talk about that coming on there when i first came to shamanada i remember giving a presentation to the faculty senate and you know that's that's like the shark tank right and and their question was well where's the money going to come from how are we going to do this because we are a small tuition driven university and and now looking back at the decade i think what lets us punch above our weight are the partnerships a lot of those have been federal so we have funding from the department of education department of defense national science foundation nationally institutes of health you know the whole laundry list of people who both hold us to a high standard and then also contribute to our programs more recently though one of the big partnerships that we were able to develop was with kamehameha schools and i think a lot of people in the community have heard about it um full ride stem scholarships for native hawaiian scholars multi-million dollar program really looking at the whole student again how do we support that student not just as a future scientist but as a person of culture a person of hawaii in their family context and so that i think is one of the the real signature programs for for shamanada at the moment of how we fit with community and we would like to develop more and so thinking about how we can network with the innovation community with htdc with you know all of these innovation ideas that are going on finding out where we fit into that and what service we can provide with us particular skillset and i think also that partnership led to us being successful in in achieving a howard hughes the medical foundation grant which was it's huge it's a nationally recognized very prestigious group of people and we were recognized because of these partnerships and being successful at including culture including the the rich diversity of our population here into the education so we only have a minute left but let me let me ask you then how do you see this all unfolding over the next say five years if i if i go down the time trail the timeline here and i and i stopped five years from now what am i going to see how am i going to see the changes at shamanada well i think what you'll see is it will be very clear our areas of excellence and in those areas of excellence we hope to have deep partnerships with our community with our educational partners as we talked about and people will know the areas that we are good at and they will understand the value of a shamanada education we don't expect to grow our undergraduate program to be huge we need a right size what that is we're in the education business and we have the obligation to educate our community in all kinds of ways whether it's graduate programs certificate programs training programs we see a lot more of of that type of education being developed in the areas that we're expert at and in the areas where there's a need within our community so that's what i would expect to see then that's encouraging and that's vital and that's important to the community and i hope when you say that you include that you'll have a nice relationship with fink tech and you'll send your faculty down and we'll talk about all the things they're doing thank you thank you then well thank you for having us on having been president of shamanad thank you jay the vice president of innovation thank you both so much for coming around