Mike Foley

Mike Foley | University Advancement | 12 October 2004 A delegation of 10 faculty and staff from the China Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of World Religions in Beijing spent October 7-8, 2004, at BYU-Hawaii where they toured the campus, experienced the Polynesian Cultural Center, and held a roundtable forum with faculty members.

The group stopped over on their way home from BYU in Provo where they participated in an academic exchange and attended the J. Reuben Clark Law School's 11th annual international symposium on law and religion.

Asian history professor, Dr. Michael Allen, who is also associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, welcomed the group to the roundtable discussion in the BYU-Hawaii student stake center cultural hall, explaining it was "a chance to have a dialog with you to promote mutual understanding, and to help you understand what BYU-Hawaii and all LDS educational institutions are about."

Matthew Kester, who graduated from BYU-Hawaii in 1999 and is a Ph.D. candidate in Pacific history at the University of California-Santa Barbara, recently joined the university staff as the assistant archivist. It is planned that Kester will replace university archivist, Dr. Greg Gubler, when he retires at the end of this school year.

Mike Foley | University Advancement | 27 September 2004 Kim Austin, BYU-Hawaii Director of Career Services, recently told an information systems class, comprised mostly of seniors who will graduate in December, they need to make up for lost time in their career planning process.

"In today's market, the average amount of time you have to put in to find a job is one year," said Austin, pointing out that the fourth quarter is traditionally not a good time to look for a job, and that many technology companies currently have hiring freezes.

Mike Foley | University Advancement | 1 September 2004 His Royal Highness Crown Prince Tupouto'a of the Kingdom of Tonga visited BYU-Hawaii on August 31, at the invitation of President Eric B. Shumway, to inspect the university's computerized distance-learning technology.

President Shumway explained that H.R.H. Tupouto'a, who has been involved with the developing computer and telecommunications industries in Tonga, is especially interested in the potential of high-tech education in the South Pacific nation.

"He is highly literate in the high technology world," said President Shumway, a noted Tongan language scholar who holds a chiefly title. The crown prince earned a degree in international law at Oxford in England and was also educated in Switzerland and New Zealand.

Academic Vice President Keith Roberts, substituting for BYU-Hawaii President Eric B. Shumway who normally delivers the first devotional address each new school year, urged the audience to surmount their diversity through "the unifying culture of the gospel as we experience it here on this campus."

As usual, President Eric B. Shumway started off the "family" meeting at the beginning of the 2004-05 school year that marks the university's golden jubilee with a fishing story. Then, after presenting a series of awards, he recapped highlights from the past school year and encouraged the faculty and staff to be committed to the mission of BYU-Hawaii.

Mike Foley | University Advancement | 16 August 2004 About 100 BYU-Hawaii faculty, staff and administration representatives spent the morning of August 12 in a retreat to focus on building capacities in key areas as the university prepares for the golden jubilee celebration in 2005 and re-accreditation in 2006.

"The re-accreditation process includes what is called capacity review," President Eric B. Shumway explained to the group, who met in the Stake Center cultural hall, "or a formal document that will describe our various capacities at the university to accomplish our stated mission and deliver what we think should be the four themes of our re-accreditation."

Those four themes are 1) an outcome assessment of our major academic programs; 2) an outcome assessment of our general education programs; 3) teaching the English language across campus; and 4) the placement of students after graduation, including graduate school.

Barbara Barrington-Jones, who has been bringing her "New You" program to BYU-Hawaii each summer for over a decade, shared a powerful testimony of the love of living prophets and the Savior on August 5 in the last devotional of the summer term.

Mike Foley | University Advancement | 5 August 2004 When BYU-Hawaii students and others who have been away for the past several months return, they will be pleasantly surprised to see all of the physical changes on campus and in the community. They'll be equally pleased to see the improvements being made in the Joseph F. Smith Library.

Douglas Bates, University Librarian and director of the Joseph F. Smith Library since August 2002, explained that he is "shepherding projects that my predecessors started and envisioned" that will "enhance the usefulness and usability and atmosphere of our building."

"Last year we renovated the front entrance," he said. "We put in new doors, laid new tile, got new security gates and new furniture for the e-mail post office, and we bought a new circulation desk."