Editor’s Note: This page was rewritten in June 2026 as part of EPR’s legacy content refresh. Originally published December 2017 as a repost of a University of Hawaii digital agency RFP. The URL has been rebuilt as a canonical reference on the University of Hawaii System’s communications architecture. Original publish date preserved.
The University of Hawaii is a ten-campus federal land-grant university system spanning six islands. Its communications operation runs across the only public R1 research university west of California and south of the Pacific Northwest, the indigenous Hawaiian cultural questions that no mainland university faces, and the geographic isolation that shapes every operational decision.
The University of Hawaii System operates ten campuses across the Hawaiian Islands: the flagship UH Mānoa in Honolulu, UH Hilo and UH West Oʻahu, and the seven UH Community Colleges (Honolulu Community College, Kapiʻolani CC, Leeward CC, Windward CC, Maui College, Kauaʻi CC, and Hawaiʻi CC). Total system enrollment is approximately 47,000 students. The system serves Hawaii’s population of 1.4 million across all the major populated islands and operates as one of the most geographically distributed public university systems in the United States.
The R1 Research Profile
UH Mānoa is classified by the Carnegie Foundation as an R1 doctoral university with very high research activity — the highest research classification, shared with approximately 150 U.S. universities. Mānoa’s research portfolio is distinctively Pacific-focused: oceanography (the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology is among the world’s leading oceanographic research institutions), tropical agriculture, astronomy (the Institute for Astronomy operates major telescopes including the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope proposal on Mauna Kea), Asian and Pacific area studies, native Hawaiian studies, and tropical medicine.
Mānoa’s research positioning is a federal-funding asset and a communications challenge. The Pacific research focus generates federal grants from NSF, NOAA, NIH, DoD, NASA, and other federal funders at levels disproportionate to the university’s size. The communications operation has to position the university to both the academic-research audience (peer institutions, federal grant-making bodies, national media covering science and higher education) and to the Hawaii state legislature that provides the state appropriation that funds the university’s state-share budget.
The Mauna Kea and Indigenous Hawaiian Communications Architecture
No communications topic in the University of Hawaii’s operating environment is more sensitive than the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) controversy and the broader question of telescope construction on Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea is the highest mountain in Hawaii and one of the most sacred sites in native Hawaiian culture. It is also one of the world’s premier astronomical observation sites because of altitude, atmospheric stability, and minimal light pollution. The University of Hawaii holds the master lease on the Mauna Kea Science Reserve and has historically been the institutional intermediary between the international astronomy community and the state of Hawaii.
The TMT proposal — an internationally-funded $2.6 billion next-generation telescope project — generated sustained native Hawaiian protest from 2014 onward, particularly culminating in the 2019 Kūpuna stand at the Mauna Kea Access Road that drew global attention. The protest movement made TMT’s construction politically and operationally untenable in Hawaii, and the project’s sponsors have continued to evaluate alternative sites (La Palma in the Canary Islands has been the most-discussed alternative).
The University’s communications operation has had to navigate this controversy across multiple constituencies: the international astronomy community that views TMT as a critical scientific instrument, the native Hawaiian community that views Mauna Kea as a sacred site that should not host further industrial construction, the Hawaii state government that has had to manage the political dimensions, and the federal funders whose investments in U.S. astronomy depend on the project’s outcome. The communications discipline required has been extraordinary by any university communications standard.
The Indigenous Hawaiian Curricular Architecture
The University of Hawaii hosts the largest native Hawaiian language and culture program of any university worldwide. The Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language at Mānoa, the Kāpiolani Hawaiian Studies Department, the Hawaiian language immersion programs at multiple campuses, and the broader Hawaiian Studies architecture across the system are central to the university’s positioning as the institutional home of the Hawaiian language and culture in higher education.
The university’s communications operation reflects this positioning. Native Hawaiian language appears on university communications. Hawaiian cultural protocol is integrated into university ceremonies and public events. The communications architecture acknowledges the historical and ongoing relationship between the university and the native Hawaiian community in ways that mainland universities’ engagement with indigenous communities typically does not.
The Geographic Operating Environment
Running a ten-campus system across six islands creates operational constraints that mainland multi-campus systems do not face. Travel between campuses requires inter-island flights. Materials shipped between campuses move through Hawaii’s shipping infrastructure rather than ground freight. Student transfer between campuses involves residential relocation across islands.
The system’s communications operation has to address these constraints continuously. System-wide events typically require travel arrangements that mainland universities do not face. Marketing communications targeting prospective students across all the islands have to navigate distinct island cultures and the historical inter-island relationships that shape how students from different islands view the system’s campuses. The communications architecture is inherently distributed.
The Federal Research Communications Function
UH’s federal research portfolio — oceanography, astronomy, tropical medicine, Pacific studies — generates a continuous communications flow that operates separately from the university’s recruiting and brand communications. Research-result press releases, federal grant announcements, principal investigator visibility, and the broader research-communications operation that all major research universities run are particularly significant at UH because the federal research support is disproportionately large relative to the university’s size.
The communications operation that supports this research portfolio works through the University’s Office of Communications and the relevant academic units’ individual communications staff. The flow of research news from Mānoa specifically is among the higher-volume research communications operations in U.S. public higher education.
The Communications Procurement Pattern
The 2017 RFP that originally anchored this URL was a digital agency procurement for system-wide digital communications work. UH’s communications procurement runs through the State of Hawaii’s procurement system — competitive bidding governed by Hawaii state procurement law. The agencies that compete for UH work typically combine higher education communications experience with either Hawaii-specific cultural and geographic fluency or the willingness to develop it in partnership with the university.
The procurement pattern produces a mix of mainland-based higher education communications specialists (with established higher-ed portfolios but limited Hawaii experience) and Hawaii-based communications agencies (with deep local knowledge but smaller higher-ed portfolios). The choice between these structural alternatives has shaped UH’s communications agency relationships across multiple procurement cycles.
The Operating Environment in 2026
The University of Hawaii in 2026 operates in a higher education environment shaped by demographic decline (the “enrollment cliff” affecting most U.S. universities as the post-Great-Recession birth cohort ages into college), federal research funding uncertainty under the second Trump administration’s policy direction, and the ongoing post-TMT institutional reckoning with how university research operates in cultural contexts where the research infrastructure is contested.
The university’s strategic communications challenges in this environment include positioning the system to Hawaii state appropriators, recruiting students against mainland and international university competition, sustaining research funding flows in a more competitive federal grant environment, and continuing the institutional work of integrating native Hawaiian cultural priorities with the federal research-university mandate. The communications architecture that supports all of this is one of the more distinctive in U.S. public higher education.
Higher Education Communications
Pacific and Indigenous Communications
