Belated congratulations to former Star-Bulletin writer Burl Burlingame, who packed up his stuff and left the Star-Advertiser newsroom last week for a new job as curator of the Pacific Aviation Museum. Good on you, Burl.
And Ron Mizutani made some interesting comments as he prepares to leave the broadcast news business again,this time for a new job at Communications Pacific. His comments came during an appearance on PBS Hawaii’s Leahey & Leahey Wednesday night (by the way, it’s a local program I highly recommend).
Here’s the show–you can jump forward to Mizutani’s appearance, which begins about 15 minutes into the program.
One last media bit. Hawaii News Now reported yesterday on the critical tone that has slipped into Gov. Abercrombie’s talking points on rail. They referred to it as an “exclusive.”
Governor Abercrombie has been a staunch supporter of rail for four decades and fought for Congressional funding for years, but in an interview on Hawaii News Now Sunrise, he raised questions about the project’s current form.
“The difficulty right now is that the rail that’s proposed right now has nothing to do with what was stated before, going to the university, going into Waikiki, the transit-oriented development,” says Mr. Abercrombie.
The interview might have been exclusive, but the news certainly wasn’t.
Abercrombie’s rail criticism was reported here almost a month ago.
Here’s what I wrote back on April 18:
Then there’s the strange ambivalence of the administration. At the same time that the administration is gung ho for development, Gov. Abercrombie told people in a recent informal conversation that he backs both Ben Cayetano’s mayoral bid and Cayetano’s opposition to rail.
Abercrombie said he had favored the original rail plan for a system that would link Kapolei with Waikiki and the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus, but that isn’t the system that is now being built, according to two people who were present.
Neil has sidestepped the public rail debate, but I think he could make a difference if he privately backs Cayetano.
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Thanks for calling this interview to my attention. I watched the portion with Ron and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I knew Ron slightly at UH when he was covering sports for Ka Leo. the experience forced me to stretch my stereotyped notion of what a sportswriter was like.
But hey, the Leaheys, both père and fils, are also both very thoughtful, multi-dimensional people–also going against type. And then there is Ferd Lewis, another thoughtful guy. OTOH, there is Joe Moore…..
(Or am I wrong there, too?)
But thanks for cluing me into this interview.
Burlingame was a witty, knowledgable writer. The paper probably couldn’t wait to get rid of him.
Once again, we can ask the question(s) whether or not Abercrombie is in touch with the people, and/or whether or not he is in touch with reality.
Abercrombie’s idea of a rail system linking Kapolei with UH Manoa reminded me of a story I read years ago — repeat, YEARS ago — in which a college student was living in the dorms and paying full-time tuition, but it turned out that all the classes she was taking were online. Her mother was furious that the student was shelling out big bucks for the so-called “COLLEGE EXPERIENCE”, but spent the bulk of her time in her dorm room at her laptop.
So one scenario is that billions of dollars will be spent on a rail line so that students can ride from Kapolei to UH Manoa, so that they may then walk to a computer center on campus where they will spend the day taking online courses provided by instructors who are … back at home in Kapolei.
BTW, here’s an article from the NYT on Harvard and MIT’s revolutionary new edX initiative to offer free courses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html
While one society in the middle of nowhere embraces yesterday’s solutions for yesterday’s problems, the rest of the world world evolves at the speed of light, utilizing the latest in technology which even the best and brightest acknowledge will probably be obsolete in a few years. This is a threat to schools like UHM.
Also, so many academic lectures have been online for free for so long it’s surprising our Governor has never heard of this. Here’s my favorite, thanks to Sal Khan.
http://www.khanacademy.org/
Here’s an article from yesterday’s NY Times that might be relevant, “Degrees of debt: Soaring college costs hobble a generation”.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47400500/ns/business-us_business/#.T7As1ehYvIZ
Our governor does not seem to have a plan to make college affordable. Or perhaps he does?
What’s the plan, Neil?
Civil Beat has become the “Chad Blair blog”. He is the only one who does not seem to have bailed out. Ian, do you know what is going on over there at CB? Could you blog about it? As CB disappears, local issues do to, and Hawaii disappears from my own radar.
It is sad that young, educated people go into journalism in order to learn about and write about important local issues, but as they learn more and more about the local society they live in, they seem to be overcome with an intense desire to escape it. At least, this is my intuition of what is going on at CB. At the Star Advertiser, they don’t ask the tough questions, so they don’t get any hard answers, and therefore they feel no discouragement. That attitude is very much in alignment with the complacent attitudes of a typical small town.
Ah, to be young again, and to escape while there was still time and some hope….
Best of luck to them.