Ronald D. Gordon
Professor of Communication, UH Hilo

As the longest-standing member of our department, about to begin my 42nd year at UHH, I have many times been asked to record in writing remembrances from earlier days in our UH Hilo Department of Communication. Finally, in summer of 2025, I am getting to this task.

Hopefully these subjective memories and reflections will initiate an ongoing record of departmental developments to which others departmental colleagues will contribute. In this way a mosaic of patterns and perspectives can perhaps construct an overall tapestry that will be of interest to future faculty and students yet to come to this department.

This is a starting point.

I came to UH Hilo in August of 1984. I had, nine months earlier, finished serving in a visiting assistant professor role under Don Klopf at UH Mānoa. Here at UH Hilo we were a Department of Speech at that time (as was Mānoa’s department, in addition to an independent Department of Communication there as well--a most unusual arrangement).

The chair here at UHH was Dr. Leila Kanno (with her Ph.D. from UH Mānoa, as I recall), whose field of specialization was speech pathology and audiology, and who also served as our campus EEO officer. Also on our small faculty was Iva Goldman, who had started at UHH many years earlier in the Department of Speech & Drama, prior to these two programs going their independent ways (in the spirit of a national trend). Iva was an associate professor (out of Northwestern, ABD) and taught General Semantics, Communication in Innovation, Nonverbal Communication, Persuasion, and other standard com courses. The third fulltime faculty member was Dr. Steve Miura (Ph.D., Washington State), who taught Small Group Communication, Com Theory, Interpersonal Communication, Culture and Communication of Asian Americans, Intercultural Communication, Public Speaking, and other courses. I recall no departmental lecturers at that exact time.

I was brought over from Oahu to UHH because the new-hire who was to start his assistant professor of media studies position in August of 1984 had backed-out of the position only three weeks prior to the beginning of the fall ’84 semester. From Oahu I made it known in a phone interview with Leila Kanno that my area of expertise was interpersonal communication, not media studies (I’d had only a single graduate seminar in mass communication). But Dr. Kanno assured me that I could “learn on the job,” and that they really did need someone to fill that position on short notice.

I accepted the UHH position as a temporary hire, and stepped into trying to teach courses in Introduction to Mass Communication, Modern American Cinema, Intro to Broadcast Communication, and other such courses. I then competed nationally for the tenure-track line during that 1984-85 academic year, and secured the position, becoming the fourth fulltime member of the department.

Our UHH Chancellor at the time was Ralph Miwa, our Humanities Division Chair was Gerald Pilecki, and Mike Fullerton was Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.

I might also add that in those days UHH and Hawaiʻi Community College were a single combined institution. A major campus debate for a few years was whether technical separation should occur or not; eventually, UHH did become independent of HCC.

In the town of Hilo itself, Prince Kuhio Plaza was still under construction and not open, nor was there a Walmart, a Target store, a Ross store, no modern courthouse, nor many other developments and outlets that there are today. The only store in town open after 8:00 p.m. was Da’ Store on Kilauea, a tiny old mini-mart a block from the also existing Café 100. In sum, Hilo in the mid-eighties was an even smaller and quainter town than it is today in 2025.

And on-campus we had no UCB, no College of Hawaiian Studies building, no new Natural Science building, no new Student Services facility, no Astronomy center, no modern recreational facilities, etc. But we did have a women’s volleyball team that dominated small college women’s volleyball with seven consecutive national championships (out of 300 schools at their level). Coach Sharon Peterson was National Coach of the Year for an unprecedented four consecutive years, and acquired a dramatic overall win record of 95%.

Within my early years at UHH I proposed to the department that we modify our identifier from “Speech” to “Speech and Communication.” Both Iva and Leila were identified with the term “Speech,” this comfortable and longstanding disciplinary identifier. So, the four of us went for a temporary compromise: the B.A. degree would still be granted in “Speech,” but our departmental title would become “Speech and Communication.” This felt like a significant accomplishment, a move more in keeping with the national trend.

I also secured approval for, and taught, the following additional media studies courses during this early period: Mass Media Analysis, Impact of the Mass Media, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, and Myth in American Film.

Classes in the second half of the 1980s in our program were typically quite small, often in the single digits. The smallest class I personally ever remember teaching was a lower-division course with only four students. The administration did not emphasize class size as a pressing institutional issue at that point in time, at least as I recall.

As for major count, my records from that period show that we averaged 23 Com majors across the second half of the 1980s.

The years passed.

In 1996 I proposed to our department that we finally change our departmental identifier to the “Department of Communication” and the degree being awarded as a B.A. in “Communication.” This proposal was passed, went through all UHH divisional, college, and university levels, and then made it up and through the administrative ladder at UH Mānoa, and eventually up to the UH Board of Regents, where these changes were officially approved in October 1997. We now had both a Department of Communication and offered a B.A. degree in Communication.

This felt like a huge evolutionary leap forward. The Speech Communication Association had made its own shift to becoming The National Communication Association in 1997, and we were in-step with this national move within the larger discipline.

Good for us, we were advancing with the times.

In the 1995-1999 years there was a 257% growth in majors in our program compared to that equivalent span in the 1980s. The rise especially accelerated in 1997, our highest number of majors ever, at 58 students. Then in 1998 we went up to 64 Communication majors.

It was clearly time for an additional fulltime faculty member, since we were now having difficulty meeting student demands for classes. Dr. Catherine Becker was brought in on the tenure track in 1998 to help us handle our influx of new majors and other student enrollees.

Dr. Becker would teach Organizational Communication, Family Communication, Communication and Conflict, and Public Relations, plus additional offerings to which students were definitely drawn. She officially introduced these courses into our curriculum. As the years went on she also developed a course in Sustainability, Communication and Culture, plus a course on Ethnography and Communication. Professor Becker also, in subsequent years, pioneered online course delivery within our department.

By 1999 we had our largest major enrollment jump ever, up to a total of 87 Com majors. This is 378% of our number of majors in the second half of the eighties.

Then in the year 2000 we went to 91 majors, and in 2001 we went over the 100-mark for the first time ever, to 111 Com majors. This is 483% the number that we had averaged in the second half of the eighties.

This growth felt wonderful, as if we had “arrived.” We were by then the largest department in our Division of Humanities, and one of the largest programs in the College of Arts & Sciences.

We had also added a B.A. minor program in the 1990s, which further added to our momentum, plus an increasing number of students who simply wanted to take our courses as electives.

At the major count level within our division, we had more majors than Art, Japanese Studies, Linguistics, and Philosophy combined. We had 3x as many majors as did Nursing, or Astronomy, and 4X as many majors as Mathematics, and 5x as many as Geology or Economics, and 10x as many as Physics, 12x as many as Chemistry, etc.

We were on a roll.

But faculty salaries were not keeping pace with the cost of living.

In early April of 2001, 3,000 UH System faculty went on strike, as did 10,000 public school teachers across all of the Hawaiian Islands. This constituted the nation’s first such shutdown at all educational levels, an historic U.S. event. Within a week, the strike was settled by common agreement.

By around that time we had Nina Bremer as a lecturer, and Rayna Morel as lecturer then instructor. Patsy Iwasaki also lectured part-time for us in a lower division media writing (journalism) course.

Rayna had been one of our own B.A. Com grads in 2000, and then graduated with an M.A. from UH Mānoa in 2003. In those days the Public Speaking course was still a CAS requirement for any and all majors, so our lecturer/instructors were active in covering that college requirement. Rayna also went on to develop the areas of Health Communication, Human Communication in a Diverse Society, Death and Dying, especially once becoming an assistant professor in our program after receiving her Ed.D. from UH Mānoa in 2017.

But all of this was not enough to keep pace with the student demand for our Com courses in the early 2000s.

Dr. Leila Kanno had retired from the program for health reasons, and the following courses were then removed from our departmental offerings & requirements: Morphology and Syntax; Generative Phonology; Descriptive Linguistics; Phonetics; Voice and Diction; Speech Pathology; Audiology; Practicum in Speech Pathology I and II.

We had officially added these courses between 1997 and 2003: Intro to Theories of Communication; Intro to Human Communication Research; Interviewing; Organizational Com; Leadership & Communication; Public Relations; Seminar in Human Dialogue; Seminar in Listening; Family Communication; Communication and Conflict; and Communication and Ethnography.

By the 2002-03 year we were up to 141 majors, a 600% increase across fifteen years. We were straining under the load of our own success. The Administration considered us a formally “impacted” major. We were also then up to 30 Com minors, and were servicing the university’s B.A. general education requirements with six different courses. It should also be noted that more than 20% of those UHH students selected for inclusion in Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges 2002-2003 were Communication majors.

We did all this with only four fulltime tenured faculty members, a number that had not changed in more than twenty years.

Some of our majors were unable to matriculate in a timely fashion. Some majors could not get into a single one of their needed Com courses. We therefore found it necessary to close ALL upper-division Com courses to any students who were not Com majors or minors. We also increased the GPR required for entry into our major, setting it at 2.5 or above for the fall semester of 2003, and the foreseeable future. We were straining to keep pace. (These restrictive measures were lifted a few years later, once we were able to add additional fulltime faculty.)

We were still sorely lacking faculty and coursework in the important areas of intercultural and international communication. Pleas for support for an additional position were made at all university levels. Our external reviewer in 2003, Phil Backlund from Central Washington University, supported us in this line of argument. In addition, our majors were all contacted, and asked to apply whatever pressure they could to the administration, to help us secure additional much-needed additional fulltime faculty positions.

Finally, we were successful in this effort, and in August 2004 Yoshitaka Miike (Ph. D., University of New Mexico) joined us, and then in 2007 Jing Yin (Ph. D., Penn State). Yoshi and Jing energetically worked to develop the areas of intercultural, international, and global communication. At least eight new courses were added to our program, including Communication in the Multicultural Workplace, International Communication, Asian Perspectives on Communication, Japanese Culture and Communication, and Asian Cinema and Television, Communication Ethics, Communication and Social Change, and Race and Gender in Media. Yoshi and Jing also energized and expanded the scholarly dimension of our program.

In 2006 Randy Hirokawa, who had been head of the Com program at the University of Iowa, was hired as Dean of our UH Hilo College of Arts & Sciences (I was pleased to serve on the 5-person search committee). Randy volunteered to teach, for no pay, the large-section Intro to Com Theory course for our department for his entire eleven-year service as Dean. When Randy stepped-down as Dean in 2016, he then became a Professor in our Department of Communication, teaching Intro to Human Communication Theory, Small Group Communication, Professional Com, and other important courses.

By the 2010s, we were servicing more of the campus community than ever before.

Back to the growth of our departmental student enrollment: by 2011 we carried approximately 33% of the Humanities Division’s majors, and were generating approximately 50% more of the student semester hours in the Division (19.8% vs. 32%) than in 2003-04. Our FTE course enrollment had increased by over 80% since 2002-03 (98/174), and our faculty taught approximately 80% more semester hours in 2010-11 than in 2002-03.

Of special interest is the fact that 48% of all of our student semester hours were generated by non-Com majors in 2002-03, while by Fall 2011 a full 66% of our SSH were generated by non-Com majors.

I will leave it to Jing Yin to comment on recent departmental developments and issues, since Dr. Yin has been Department Chair for several years now.

But I will note that Steve Miura retired from his fulltime UHH position in 2014, after 36 years of solid service to his department, yet has continued to serve on a part-time basis to this day.

I will also recognize that in the fall of 2022 we added Colby Miyose to our fulltime faculty as an assistant professor. Colby had lectured and instructed for us prior to finishing his Ph. D. at UMass in 2021. Colby has taught a range of courses, including Intro to Communication and Technology, Gender and Communication, Impact of the Mass Media, Communication and Popular Culture, The Dark Side of Communication, and others, and pursues an active research agenda.

My wish is that Steve, Catherine, Rayna, Yoshi, Jing, Randy, and Colby will all contribute, each in their own way, to developing this historical narrative. That will help further document the unfolding tapestry of our UH Hilo Department of Communication, and from a range of perspectives. Remembrances and reflections from each of our unique vantage-points will combine to provide a fascinating retrospective overview, along with fresh visions for the future. Future faculty and students in our program might find this of interest.

Our teaching to this day remains strong, and our servicing of the campus community continues to be robust.

Faculty research in our Department of Communication in recent years has been substantial and significant, and topic areas have included Asiacentricity as a research paradigm, Asiacentric womanism, autoethnography and memoir as liberation, communication ethics in our global era, gender identity and fluidity, global communication, group decision-making, improving doctor-patient communication, indigenous health, indigenous ways of knowing, intercultural and international communication issues, mindful human dialogue, nature and culture, representations of Hawaiʻi and Hawaiian culture, the role of the humanities in todays’ world, spirituality and communication, team-building, the caring presence of the transformational teacher, communication wisdom, the risks of autonomous superintelligence, and other contemporary and relevant topics.

Going forward, we intend to continue meeting the needs of our UHH students, and solidly representing our Department of Communication here at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.

Respectfully Submitted,
Ron Gordon, Professor of Communication, 06/15/2025