40 Fun Facts About University of Hawaii at Manoa

Barack Obama's parents met in 1960 at the University of Hawaii in a basic class in which language?

Russian was the course where Ann Dunham met Barack Obama Sr., who had arrived from Kenya the year before as the university's first African student.

The Kāneʻohe Bay home of UH's marine biology lab appears in the opening of which 1960s sitcom?

Gilligan's Island used Coconut Island, in Kāneʻohe Bay, for its opening sequence. Businessman Edwin Pauley gave part of it to the university in 1948 as a marine laboratory.

ALOHAnet, switched on at the University of Hawaii in 1971, paved the way for what?

Wi-Fi still relies on the trick ALOHAnet pioneered: devices share one channel and simply resend when their signals collide. Ethernet borrowed the same idea.

Soon after Dolly the sheep, a University of Hawaii lab's 'Honolulu technique' cloned which animals?

Mice from Ryuzo Yanagimachi's lab began with Cumulina, named for the cumulus cells she was cloned from. More than fifty followed, across three generations.

Robert Ballard, a University of Hawaii geophysics graduate, located which famous shipwreck in 1985?

Titanic made Ballard a household name, but as a Hawaii graduate student in the 1960s he spent his time training porpoises and whales.

Which Honolulu-born singer and actress majored in drama at UH Mānoa but left after three semesters?

Bette Midler moved to New York in 1965, paying her way with what she earned as an extra, a seasick passenger, in the film Hawaii.

When University of Hawaii classes resumed in February 1942, students had to carry what to class?

Gas masks became part of campus life after the attack on Pearl Harbor shut the university for two months. About half the students and faculty had left for war service.

Before a rainbow over a 1923 upset win renamed them, University of Hawaii teams had which nickname?

Deans gave way to Rainbows after sportswriters seized on the rainbow that appeared as Hawaii upset Oregon State. A belief grew that the team could not lose under one.

UH researchers backed Rainbow, a virus-resistant variety that saved Hawaii's crop of which fruit?

Papaya growers had seen ringspot virus halve their harvest. The genetically engineered Rainbow variety reached farms in 1998 and revived the industry.

UH Mānoa helped launch HI-SEAS, where crews lived in a dome on Mauna Loa to rehearse trips to where?

Mars was the goal: crews lived 8,200 feet up the volcano's barren slopes, and one team of six stayed a full year from August 2015.

Patsy Mink, a UH Mānoa student in the 1940s, co-wrote which 1972 law against sex bias in education?

Title IX was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in 2002. She had been the first woman of color elected to Congress.

Which UH Mānoa graduate lost both legs piloting a Black Hawk in Iraq before winning a Senate seat?

Tammy Duckworth chose helicopters because flying them was one of the few combat jobs open to women. She later became the first senator to give birth while in office.

Which future senator was a University of Hawaii premed student before losing an arm in World War II?

Daniel Inouye had hoped to be a surgeon. He came back to the university to study government and economics instead, and received the Medal of Honor in 2000.

Alice Ball, a 1915 College of Hawaii graduate, made an injectable treatment for which disease?

Leprosy had been treated with chaulmoogra oil too thick for the body to absorb. Ball made it injectable, and by 1920 many patients were leaving lifelong quarantine for home.

Which Hawaiian crooner took a University of Hawaii sociology degree, then flew Air Force transports?

Don Ho bought a keyboard while stationed in California, then came home in 1959 to sing at his mother's club. Tiny Bubbles made him famous seven years later.

UH Mānoa education graduate Angela Perez Baraquio was the first Asian American to win which crown?

Miss America 2001 was crowned in Atlantic City in October 2000. Baraquio was also the first teacher to win, and she made character education her cause.

Which Honolulu attraction, built in 1904 to lure trolley riders down the line, joined UH in 1919?

Waikīkī Aquarium was a streetcar company's idea for tempting passengers out to Kapiʻolani Park. It opened with 35 tanks beside a living reef.

Which 200-acre rainforest garden at the head of Mānoa Valley was given to UH in 1953?

Lyon Arboretum began in 1918 as a planters' test plot for reforestation trees. Botanist Harold Lyon planted nearly 2,000 species there and urged its gift to the university.

UH Mānoa's main campus fills the mouth of a rainy valley above Honolulu on which Hawaiian island?

Oʻahu's Mānoa Valley gets rain almost every day, even in the dry season, which is why rainbows hang over the campus so often.

Which coach took Hawaii football from a winless 1998 season to nine wins and a bowl victory in 1999?

June Jones had been a Hawaii quarterback in the 1970s. His first year in charge was the biggest one-season turnaround in NCAA football until Tulane's in 2022.

After a perfect 12–0 regular season in 2007, Hawaii's football team met Georgia in which BCS game?

Sugar Bowl night ended in a 41–10 defeat, but the 12–0 Warriors had gone to New Orleans as the last unbeaten major-college team in the country.

Which Hawaii quarterback, a 2007 Heisman finalist, threw a then-record 58 touchdown passes in 2006?

Colt Brennan finished third in the 2007 Heisman vote, behind Tim Tebow and Darren McFadden. In 2021 his No. 15 became only the second number Hawaii football had retired.

Hawaii's football team played from 1975 to 2020 at which Hālawa venue, later condemned as unsafe?

Aloha Stadium shut its gates to fans in December 2020, so the team moved home games to an enlarged practice field on campus, the Clarence T. C. Ching Athletics Complex.

Which coach led Hawaii's Rainbow Wahine volleyball team for 42 seasons, from 1975 until 2017?

Dave Shoji became the winningest coach in Division I women's volleyball in 2013 with his 1,107th victory, and a former player, Robyn Ah Mow, succeeded him.

Which Hawaii kicker won two Super Bowls with Denver and tied an NFL record with a 63-yard kick?

Jason Elam scored 397 points in four seasons at Hawaii, then the third-highest total in NCAA history. His 63-yarder in 1998 matched a mark that had stood for 28 years.

Which Hilo-born Hawaii infielder was a first-round pick of the St. Louis Cardinals in 2011?

Kolten Wong had turned down the Minnesota Twins out of high school to play for Hawaii, which retired his number 14 in 2017.

UH Mānoa's 10,300-seat arena honors Stan Sheriff, who lobbied for it while holding which post?

Athletic director Stan Sheriff died in 1993, a year before the arena he had pushed for opened. It carried the plain name Special Events Arena until 1998.

The University of Hawaii's green and white school colors were chosen by which group?

Faculty wives picked the green and white. Black and silver joined them only in 2000, with a new athletics logo that dropped the rainbow.

The College of Hawaii's first football team won its 1909 debut 6–5 against which kind of opponent?

A high school, McKinley of Honolulu, lost by a single point before 2,500 fans. Hawaii did not face another college until 1920, when it lost to Nevada on Christmas Day.

The University of Hawaii began in 1907 as a land-grant college of mechanic arts and which field?

Agriculture and mechanic arts were what the Morrill Act funded. Classes began in 1908 with five freshmen in temporary quarters near Thomas Square in Honolulu.

John Gilmore, UH's first president in 1908, was hired from which Ivy League school?

Cornell also lent its president's backing to the 1907 bill that created the college. The regents' first choice, a Berkeley man, had died before he could leave California.

Which architect designed five East–West Center buildings beside UH Mānoa in the early 1960s?

I. M. Pei drew the East–West Center campus, including the 13-story Hale Mānoa dormitory, decades before his glass pyramid for the Louvre.

A royal pavilion beside UH Mānoa's campus was a 1960s gift from the king of which country?

Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej gave the pavilion to the East–West Center in 1964, then came to Honolulu to dedicate it in person in June 1967.

UH Mānoa's John A. Burns School of Medicine in Kakaʻako is named for a man who held which office?

State governor John A. Burns pushed for the school, which opened in 1965. It moved in 2005 to a $150 million waterfront complex about three miles from the main campus.

A UH telescope on Maui spotted ʻOumuamua in 2017, the first known visitor from where?

Interstellar space had never before sent a confirmed visitor through the Solar System. ʻOumuamua got a Hawaiian name meaning scout, a messenger from the distant past.

The University of Hawaii's 88-inch telescope of 1970 proved the astronomical value of which summit?

Mauna Kea first drew astronomer Gerard Kuiper, but NASA gave the big telescope contract to Hawaii instead. He left, feeling his mountain had been stolen.

Georg von Békésy, a UH professor from 1966, won his Nobel Prize for work on which sense?

Hearing was his life's work: he showed how the cochlea of the inner ear responds to sound. He came to Honolulu after a fire destroyed his laboratory in 1965.

UH psychologist Louis Herman opened a Honolulu lab in 1970 to test which animals' grasp of grammar?

Dolphins at his Kewalo Basin lab carried out sentences they had never met before. One of them, Akeakamai, turned up as a character in the novel Startide Rising.

UH ocean science graduate Nainoa Thompson is famed for navigating which vessel without instruments?

Hōkūleʻa took him from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1980 on his first voyage as sole navigator. No Native Hawaiian had practiced the old wayfinding methods since the 14th century.

Richard Parsons, a UH Mānoa varsity basketball player, later led which media giant as CEO?

Time Warner dropped the AOL from its name on his watch in 2003. Parsons also met his wife, Laura, while he was a student in Honolulu.