The incoming chancellor for the University of Hawaii-Manoa campus promised he won’t be sitting much in his office during his five-year tenure.
Tom Apple, provost of the University of Delaware, said he intends to walk around and talk to students, faculty and staff to get the pulse of the campus.
"I like to stay active. I intend to be a walking-around chancellor," Apple told reporters Friday in a teleconference from the Delaware campus in Newark. "I really enjoy getting the feedback of students, faculty and staff. I like just walking around campus and talking to people."
Apple, 57, said he also likes forming discussion groups led by "thought leaders" to gain feedback from the campus community on major issues. "I really believe the best results on campus involve having lots of conversations and really involving faculty, administration, students, staff in coming to find common ground.
"But you also really have to lead that. You have to come to closure on various issues. So I really believe in having ‘thought leaders,’ getting them together, thinking about how to move things forward."
Apple, in response to a question from a reporter from Ka Leo o Hawaii, the UH-Manoa newspaper, said he meets "virtually every week" with reporters from Delaware’s student newspaper. "So you and I will become good friends, I’m sure."
Apple starts work here June 18, earning $439,008 annually. He will move to Honolulu with his wife, Anne, a veterinarian.
The two have been frequent visitors to Hawaii over the last 20 years, the new chancellor said. "It’s our favorite place on the planet," he said.
"I always felt the aloha spirit. You really do feel it when you visit," Apple said about what made Hawaii special to him. "I think that is a tremendous community resource — the community spirit, the ohana is something that the host culture teaches us."
Much of Friday’s news conference dealt with increasing the number and value of federal research grants at Manoa and the UH system overall, listed as a top priority for both Apple and UH President M.R.C. "Marcie" Greenwood.
Apple said he wants to see Manoa become a "research university driving the economy of Hawaii."
He pointed out that UH-Manoa geology and geophysics professor Chip Fletcher of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology was cited this week by The for his studies in beach erosion. "This is the kind of work that has impact, that people around the world see," Apple said.
"What’s really important going forward is the ability to earn multi-investigator awards that cover a trans-disciplinary approach, that take a trans-disciplinary approach to the … key problems that we’re trying to solve," he said. "Building research teams, and in some cases co-locating those teams around shared equipment and shared resources and building a more vibrant infrastructure, and in addition translating that research out into the community — this is a pathway that I think is really promising for the future."
Greenwood noted that UH-Manoa is ranked among the top 30 public universities in receiving research grants. "We’re looking forward to advancing that," she said.
"At the main campus we expect the leadership for this new initiative to double the amount of the research industry here in the state of Hawaii, and that’s going to require a lot of leadership, particularly (that of) a scientist and an administrator," Greenwood said. "Tom Apple is all of those things."
Apple said another goal for him is to find ways to help students "find their passion" and prepare them to "be part of the knowledge economy of the future and building the strength of Hawaii."
He also spoke of the need to strengthen the host culture in Hawaii and "learn from the Hawaiian culture on sustainability and to, quite frankly, teach Western society about sustainability from the host culture."
Twice, Greenwood helped deflect questions raised about Apple’s salary and the opinion raised by some about the need for a Manoa chancellor at all.
Greenwood reiterated comments she made Thursday that the salary, about $100,000 more than outgoing Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw’s, allows Apple to make a "lateral" move from Delaware, and said the question of whether a chancellor is necessary was unfair to Apple.
