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University of Hawaii President David Lassner believes that if he builds “it” — an as-yet undefined retail/entertainment/residential complex on the 15-acre campus currently shared by Manoa’s College of Education, the University Laboratory School, and the University’s Children’s Center — “they” will come.

In his dreams, Campus Town will transform Manoa into a more vibrant academic community, giving students an alternative to the extracurricular life afforded by the Puck’s Alley area (slated to be even more enticing given Kamehameha Schools’ plans for significant redevelopment), Waialae and Kapahulu Avenue businesses, all of Moiliili, Manoa Marketplace, Market City, and the magnetism of Waikiki.

UH may indeed contract a developer to build “it,” but as someone who has spent much of my life at Manoa, I do not believe “they” will come.

Manoa is historically a commuter campus. Of necessity, many students live at home and balance the demands of school, work, and all else that life holds in store for them. Post-Covid, Manoa has become more of a correspondence school, with many students and faculty opting for online courses and degrees and working from home.

It’s a hassle to drive to campus and search for off-campus parking or pay for on-campus parking. Staying home is easy. Were it not for dorm residents and a handful of majors that require face-to-face study, the Manoa campus would be even more of a ghost town. Classrooms are underutilized and faculty and administrative offices are often closed. “They” are not there.

For me, transformative education is immersive. It is purposefully challenging and multidimensional, engaging the whole person in the learning/growth process. Online education is convenient (especially in its asynchronous mode) and two-dimensional — an audio-visual transmission on a flat screen. Its impact pales in comparison to that of the mega-dimensional face-to-face classroom experience of groups of students in the company of a dedicated teacher actively engaging with one another around a topic of mutual interest in an environment of mutual respect.

Attaining a degree is so much more than the accumulation of course credits. It is not just a head trip. It is an endeavor that at its best engages the mind, body, heart, and soul of students and teachers. Rarely can that be achieved online.

I believe that getting students and faculty back on campus for face-to-face encounters in classrooms will do more to revitalize Manoa than a replication of Puck’s Alley on campus. President Lassner could launch a “Come Back to Campus” campaign rather than turn a successful educational complex of buildings, students, faculty, and staff into an unnecessary shopping mall and entertainment district.

The area to be sacrificed to commercial development includes nine permanent buildings and 14 portables, 10 of which are relatively new and cost millions to install (four in 2019, two in 2016, and four in 2010). All will be repurposed, relocated, or razed. What a waste.

Historic Wist Hall has been the home of teacher education for almost 100 years. It is the sixth-oldest building on the Manoa campus and the only one designed by noted island architect C.W. Dickey. Historic Castle Memorial Hall was constructed as a model laboratory school for early childhood education under the guidance of famed educational philosopher John Dewey. In its heyday, it was second only to Dewey’s own lab school at the University of Chicago. The university’s unique ties to Dickey and Dewey should be treasured, not sold out to a developer.

Currently strung out along University Avenue between Dole Avenue and Metcalf Street, the Children’s Center, the University Laboratory School, and the College of Education provide a rare continuum of educational interconnectedness from preschool through doctoral study. That continuum will be destroyed by Campus Town. Lost too will be the historic significance of Founders Gate, which commemorates the 1931 merger of the Territorial Normal School and the College of Hawaii, creating the boundaries of today’s Manoa campus.

If Campus Town is built, it will link the campus and an entertainment/shopping venue — hardly the monument to education it is intended to be. Also lost will be recently landscaped areas of native plants and the sustainable gardens of Hoola Aina Pilipili.

Both the college and the Children’s Center have accepted the university’s veiled “invitation” to move. The Children’s Center will move to an under-construction retail and graduate student housing complex on Dole Street behind the East-West Center’s Burns Hall.

There could be security and safety issues in such a shared space. The College of Education is to be significantly downsized into a to-be-constructed replacement of Snyder Hall on McCarthy Mall. It will be impossible to collapse all of the resources of the College into a few floors of the new building.

Wist Hall’s Andrew W.S. In College Collaboration Center — another unique space — will be abandoned. The 8,000-plus volumes of the Hawaiian library created by Professor Morris Lai could well be homeless and endangered. So much and so many are to be crammed into so little space.

I am hoping that when they realize they are giving up a unique, multi-level educational complex they will reconsider their coerced decision and just say, “No, we won’t go.” The resulting confrontation would be bad optics for UH.

The fate of the Lab School is unknown. It does not want to move. It has never known another home; but, as a state charter school with an affiliation agreement with the College of Education, the university can evict it whenever it chooses to turn the property over to a developer. The school’s forever home will be forever gone.

How can anyone who is aware of what now occupies those 15 acres think that clearing the property in order to monetize it is a plus for the university? UH Manoa is not a for-profit business. It is the only R1 research university in Hawaii, meaning that it has very high research activity. Its business is higher education. Greed should not trump academics at a university that represents itself as valuing a “sense of place, a sense of (educational) purpose.”

Finally, the decision to cede the land to private enterprise precludes future academic growth. The rapid evolution of nanotechnology, bioengineering, and artificial intelligence demand new fields of study beyond current imagination. (See Yuval Harari’s “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” for a thoughtful glimpse of the unimaginable future.)

The university will have to grow to meet future academic and workforce needs. Rather than reduce Manoa’s footprint, the future calls for expansion. Giving up land is simply short-sighted.

Given today’s chronic shortage of teachers, plans to downsize the College of Education are particularly ill-advised. Teachers touch the future as no others do.

Enhancing the college has been on the university’s agenda more than once. In 1990, ground was ceremoniously broken for a new building. Thousands of design dollars were wasted when construction funds were eliminated in 1994. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted in a masterplan of the entire College/Lab School campus when the project was shelved in 2017.

Instead of growing educational capacity, Campus Town will constrict such growth. UH apparently does not care about the history or mana of the space, the resources to be wasted, or the harm done to successful educational programs to be relocated.

President Lassner’s Field of Dreams is an educator’s nightmare. Hopefully backlash from Manoa’s community of scholars and the community at large will persuade the university to remain true to its educational mission instead of selling out to commercial development. Someone must be a hero and stand up for education before it is too late to stop the bulldozers.