University of Hawaii President Wendy Hensel announced more federal funding cuts and took her strongest position yet to defend academic freedom at Monday’s public forum held at the UH Manoa Campus Center Ballroom.
Hensel told the ballroom’s crowd of 100 and around 1,000 attendees on Zoom that the amount of federal funding cuts rapidly increased by $6 million, to $36 million, since Thursday, bringing the total of terminated or paused research programs to 48 from Thursday’s 36. There are now 82 employees affected by the federal cuts, she said.
“In the time it took me to walk over here, I received another email with a major termination for one of our programs,” Hensel said.
She also took a firm stand in support of Harvard University, who she said has faced “extraordinarily egregious” conditions established by the federal government to avoid losing federal funding, including enforcing harsh disciplines for student involvement in protests, limiting student and faculty governance and completely eliminating all diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives.
“These are the type of things that I can say confidently pretty much no university could agree to and remain a university,” Hensel said. “We absolutely stand with Harvard in this, and we absolutely would not submit to these types of conditions. It is fundamental to academic freedom. It is fundamental to our core mission as a university.”
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Monday’s forum marked Hensel’s second town hall-style meeting with the community since March 14. Since then, Hensel said, recent federal policy changes and actions have been “fast and furious.”
That includes President Donald Trump’s sweeping student visa revocations, which have now changed the legal status of some 1,680 international students and recent graduates, according to the publication Inside Higher Ed.
Hensel said the number of revoked student visas has not changed since the Honolulu Star-Advertiser initially reported that fewer than five UH student visas had been revoked.
However, Hensel noted Monday that two students on that list were no longer current students, and said that while there is no clear indication of why their visas were revoked, she does not believe anyone has been targeted for free speech or engagement in protests on campus.
“We do not take folks who have lost their visa off our enrollment agendas or our rosters. That’s not something that we’ve done,” Hensel said. “We’ll work with each of these students to finish out or identify how we can support their academic studies during the legal challenges that occur.”
Looking forward, Hensel said the university is financially stable and has the funds to “meet the challenges of this moment,” including severance pay for laid-off faculty and staff.
However, she predicts that the external impacts of international tariffs and new economic policies will increase UH’s operational costs, especially those that require federal personnel who are now being laid off by the Trump administration.
“It isn’t just us, as we know,” Hensel said. “If there’s no one there to process an award or to administratively grant funding, then there is a significantly longer period of time that we don’t receive funding that’s already been expended.”
Hensel was later joined by a panel of UH leaders to answer attendees’ questions, including Vice President for Research and Innovation Vassilis Syrmos, Vice President for Budget and Finance Kalbert Young, Vice President for Administration Jan Gouveia, Vice President for Legal Affairs Carrie Okinaga and Chief Global Officer Brent White.
U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii, made a surprise appearance and addressed the crowd upon invitation from Moanike‘ala Nabarro, UH spokesperson and moderator of the forum.
Tokuda told the crowd that it has “an ally in Congress fighting for these basic things, fighting for the rights of our students, our faculty, of our community, to be able to gather, to question, to challenge, to think freely — all parts of an open democracy, you would think.”
Most of Hensel’s messaging encouraged the UH community to be steadfast in its trust of the school’s administration, while understanding that things can change in an instant.
“Today I was on a call with 100 presidents from around the country, and the conversation that we had is similar to the one I just articulated: The stakes are changing, the level of attack has escalated. It is in no one’s interest to be by themselves, and frankly, everybody is concerned. There’s a lot of fear out there for everybody at every level,” Hensel said. “Joining together in banded communications in terms of concerted action and litigation means that everybody has to be a little brave but no one has to be the hero.”
