University Communications & Marketing

Dr. Thomas Buning Named Chaminade’s Athletic Director

July 13, 2020 by University Communications & Marketing

Following an extensive nationwide search, Chaminade University is proud to introduce Dr. Thomas Buning as its new athletic director.

Buning previously served as senior associate director of athletics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and brings more than two decades of experience in NCAA Division I and Division II athletics.

He also brings a passion for the job—and for the Marianist values Chaminade instills in students.

Buning is excited to hit the ground running—understanding the unique needs of Chaminade’s athletics program, today and into the future. He steps into the role at a pivotal time for Silversword athletics and as the university continues to look for new ways to support our student-athletes.

With his personable leadership style, Buning will head up a program with 10 NCAA men’s and women’s athletic teams and over 140 student-athletes, building new strategic direction in concert with the university’s priorities.

His business acumen and strong managerial background make him uniquely positioned to focus on fundraising and long-term budget planning for the athletics program.

Buning recently completed his Doctor of Education in Leadership of Higher Education at Southern Methodist University, where he also earned a Master of Business Administration.

He also has a Master of Science in Engineering Management from Missouri University of Science and Technology, and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the US Military Academy West Point.

At Southern Methodist University, Buning helped lead an athletic program with 150 staff and coaches and an annual budget for $55 million.

Previously, he served as director of athletics at University of North Dakota.

Before joining Chaminade, Buning was a senior partner and managing director at a privately held mergers and acquisitions business brokerage services advisory firm.

While he excelled at the work, Buning said it made him realize his real passion is in athletics.

Buning is set to start at Chaminade in July. Please join us in welcoming him onboard!

Welcome to the New Normal

July 10, 2020 by University Communications & Marketing

Spanish Mission architecture. Large expanses of green. Blooming bougainvillea.

Classroom set up per COVID-19 guidelines

At first glance, Chaminade doesn’t appear to have changed much in the last several months. But a closer look reveals a myriad of upgrades—all aimed at keeping people safe.

In classrooms and other shared spaces, seating is kept 6 feet apart and markings on the floor offer a guide for how to space out. Signage posted all over campus reminds everyone to wear a mask and practice social distancing. At strategic locations, you’ll find sanitation stations and no-contact thermometers. And Chaminade’s maintenance team is busy throughout the day, keeping high-traffic areas and frequent touchpoints sanitized and well-cleaned.

It’s all part of the university’s commitment to ensuring a safe and healthy environment for everyone—and is thanks to a large team of Chaminade faculty and staff who worked tirelessly to develop and execute a campus reopening plan that put a priority on community wellbeing.

The university has already taken some major steps in that plan.

Like most campuses around the country and in Hawaii, Chaminade went fully to online instruction in March amid “stay-at-home” orders and a push to flatten the coronavirus infection curve. Shortly after closing campus, however, Chaminade got to work to craft a strategy—and a timeline—for safely welcoming people back.

Staff returned first—in June. Then, on July 6, in-person graduate instruction resumed. Undergraduate and Doctor of Clinical Psychology students come back to campus for the fall Aug. 24.

A COVID-19 task force was convened to gather data-informed safety protocols locally and nationally, determine what needed to be done—and then figure out how to do it. They tackled a host of projects in a short period, including a campus-wide effort to reconfigure classrooms, residence halls and common areas to accommodate social distancing requirements.

The university also focused on other areas, including by posting bold signage with health reminders and communicating regularly with members of the Chaminade ‘ohana to keep them up to date with what was going on. The appeal to everyone: when you’re on campus, you’ll need to do your part to keep it safe by wearing a mask and practicing social distancing.

As more people have returned, it’s a message that has resonated across a university community that prides itself on a mission of service to others. Everyone understands they share the responsibility of creating a safe campus and that their actions protect not only themselves but other members of the Silversword ‘ohana—and their family members and friends, too.

Dr. William Rhey Named Dean

July 10, 2020 by University Communications & Marketing

After an extensive search, Chaminade is excited to announce the appointment of Dr. William Rhey as the University’s new Dean of the School of Business and Communication.

Dr. William Rhey, dean of the School of Business and Communication

Rhey comes to Chaminade with years of experience in university leadership roles, including most recently as the Dean of Hawaii Pacific University’s College of Business.

In addition to an impressive resume and a history of fostering development and growth at business schools, Rhey also brings a strong enthusiasm and belief in Chaminade’s strong public service mission.

He is especially passionate about the role of ethics in business development and entrepreneurship.

Rhey takes on this new challenge as the state faces an uncertain economic future. Chaminade looks forward to the School of Business and Communication serving as a hub of expertise and solutions as Hawaii looks to diversify its economy and bolster new and emerging growth areas.

In his new role, Rhey also hopes to explore opportunities for growing the School of Business and Communication in ways that meet community needs, including by offering new graduate programs and tracks, micro-credential and certificate programs, and other continued learning opportunities.

Rhey’s scholarly pursuits include entrepreneurship, business ethics, and international marketing.

He received his doctoral degree in Marketing at the University of Mississippi, and has master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Business Administration from Baylor University and Bucknell University, respectively.

Rhey is also proud to volunteer his time at several organizations that serve the community, including the Hawaiian Council for Economic Education and the Metro Honolulu Rotary Board.

Chaminade looks forward to Rhey’s leadership at the Dean of the School of Business and Communication, and welcomed him to campus on July 1.

Pivoting During a Pandemic

July 8, 2020 by University Communications & Marketing

In early March, Alyssa Nagai was living a good life. The 2014 Chaminade alumna would work her nursing shifts at Maui Memorial Medical Center, and always enjoyed coming home to her little dog who would jump on her as soon as she walked through the door. She loved living on Maui, and it was an easy and short flight to see her family back home in Oahu.

She felt comfortable at her job. Her time at Chaminade had prepared her well, and had given her the skills and knowledge she needed to be successful.

But nothing could have prepared her for what came next.

“The nursing and the schooling part of Chaminade definitely prepared me to be a nurse,” says Nagai. “But I don’t know if anyone was really ready for a pandemic to hit.”

When COVID-19 made its way to the Islands, overnight her days became longer and her job became a lot scarier.

Her hospital floor was quickly turned into a COVID unit, and chaos ensued. Policies and procedures kept changing—no one really knew what to expect or what to do. The disease was still so new and unpredictable.

“It was really scary,” says Nagai. “I think every day, or sometimes every hour, things were changing when it came to PPE, or just everything. Policies kept changing and it was really frustrating.”

Her unit converted into a closed unit, meaning team members weren’t allowed to come and go from the floor. It also meant nurses were doing total care for their patients, without help from nurse aides and patient care specialists.

It made for really long, emotionally draining days.

“You see what people are going through, and it’s scary on their end too,” says Nagai. “It was hard emotionally, for everyone.”

It was particularly hard when she saw her coworkers fall ill. “We all kind of saw this coming, we knew that we had the risk of getting sick,” says Nagai. “But it’s scary because you see these people every day and you can’t really help it.”

It was also lonely. For Nagai, the hardest part was staying away from the people she loved and cared about.

“I’d be afraid to hang out with people, and I knew they were afraid to see me too, because no one knew if they had it.”

When she would return home from her shift, she’d immediately shower off and try to stay away from people as much as possible. “I’d try to shower before my little dog would jump on me,” recalls Nagai. “You just feel dirty coming out of there.”

Nagai felt good about what she was doing. She knew she was helping. But she wasn’t sure other people saw it that way. Fears and anxieties were high all around the Island. It didn’t help hearing stories of how people were treating other healthcare professionals, like the story she heard about a nurse who went to the grocery store and had things thrown at her.

Now that COVID numbers have begun to slow down in Hawaii, Nagai’s unit is mostly back to normal. “There are still some changes in place, like the break rooms are different. We can’t be around a bunch of people anymore.”

Nagai has a positive outlook on what the future brings. She’s hopeful there won’t be too much of a second wave, and she’s enjoying the new teamwork and collaboration that has come out of the hospital. Everyone seems to have a new perspective and appreciation for everyone else now.

“When we were doing total care for our patients, I gained a whole new perspective on what nurse aides do,” admits Nagai. “It feels really good to be back to normal (or the “new normal).”

Gary Cordova Named VP of Advancement

July 6, 2020 by University Communications & Marketing

Gary Cordova, a longtime leader in higher education, has been selected as the Chaminade’s new Vice President of Advancement.

Cordova brings over 20 years of experience in public and private universities and independent private schools, including as the head of Chaminade’s advancement office from 2002 to 2007.

He returns to Chaminade from Mid-Pacific Institute, where as head of advancement he tripled its annual fund and quadrupled its major gifts from 2013 to today, launched major gift and international fundraising programs and oversaw a strategic initiative for long-term financial planning.

Cordova’s resume also features successful work in advancement and strategic development in higher education, including at the University of Oregon, Williamette University and the University of Chicago.

Donor support is critical to Chaminade’s ability to meet its mission, and Cordova steps into the advancement role at a critical time.

He looks forward to collaborating with existing donors and forming partnerships with new ones, all the while underscoring Chaminade’s direct impact on the lives of students.

Cordova, who describes himself as a team player and an out-of-the-box thinker, is also interested in generating new opportunities for philanthropy that tap into donor interests.

A graduate of the University of Northern Colorado, Cordova also received a master’s degree in English from Stanford University.

He began his new role on July 1. Please join us in welcoming him back to Chaminade!

Called Into Darkness

June 29, 2020 by University Communications & Marketing

When the coronavirus pandemic hit the mainland U.S. in March, the hospital in El Paso, Texas where Shannon Wright ‘15 worked as a nurse was already experiencing troubles. But when elective procedures were canceled, the hospital began laying people off.

It was a weird feeling—Wright kept hearing about the nationwide shortage of healthcare professionals elsewhere, but she couldn’t get hours at her hospital.

“At the time, I was working in a facility that just kept calling me off and I wasn’t getting hours,” says Wright. “I kept seeing on the news that everyone needed help, and I kept getting called off. I really wanted to help the people who needed me most.”

So on Saturday, April 4, she hopped on the phone with a FEMA recruiter. They were recruiting healthcare professionals from around the U.S. to help the nation’s hardest-hit city, New York.

“The recruiter said ‘we need you and we need you to get here on Monday if you’re doing it,’” remembers Wright. “It only left me two days to make a decision.”

By April 6, she was on an empty plane to New York City.

Her parents and her boyfriend didn’t want her to go. The disease was so unknown, and stories of medical professionals getting sick and dying were flooding the airwaves.

“Everyone was like, ‘you should just write your will now,’” says Wright. “I was super freaked out signing up, and I cried the whole way to New York. I kept wondering if I was making the wrong decision,” says Wright. She was one of only three people on the flight from Texas to New York. It was an eerie feeling. But she was driven by her desire to serve those who needed her the most.

When she landed at the empty airport, she immediately grabbed a taxi to her hotel in Times Square.

“The cab ride through the city was beautiful—I had never been to New York before,” says the California native. “I started to feel much better. But then we got to Times Square which was completely empty and I got really scared again.”

The hotel was reserved for other FEMA healthcare professionals and there were strict safety restrictions in place. Residents weren’t allowed to socialize or have people in their rooms, and other than a cleaning crew once a week and one person at the front desk, there was no hotel staff. The kitchen was also closed, so Wright used delivery services for most of her meals.

Right away she went to an orientation where she met a few other new arrivals. They formed a text message chain, and throughout their time regularly texted each other to check in on one another.

Wright was assigned to a hospital in the Bronx. Every day, a bus would come to pick up her and the other nurses and drop them off at the hospital.

Her first day was eye-opening, and set the tone for what was to come. She was immediately placed on a team that was tasked with creating a brand new ICU unit.

“They had an overflow unit connected to their emergency room, so my team and I had to create a coronavirus ICU unit,” describes Wright. “We made a whole ICU unit from scratch within a day.”

They worked quickly to get the extra basement space ready and gather all necessary supplies, but they couldn’t work fast enough. Halfway through the day, before the unit was ready, hospital staff started wheeling in patients. They had run out of room in other parts of the hospital and were desperately trying to find places to put people.

“They were wheeling in patients while we were trying to get set up, and we were realizing things that we didn’t have, all at the same time. Patients were coding on us, and we didn’t have the right supplies.” Wright’s voice goes soft as she describes what it was like to have patients who suddenly couldn’t breathe while she and her colleagues frantically tried to find the right equipment to respond.

Supplies were scarce throughout the city—not just at her hospital. One of her friends worked at a hospital that completely ran out of oxygen, which was in high demand. Sometimes they just couldn’t get what they needed and had to figure out how to make do with what they had. In Wright’s unit, they were putting patients on really old ventilators that should have been retired, because the new ones were already being used.

Personal protective equipment (PPE) also quickly became a scarce commodity.

“At the start, we had amazing PPE and they were letting us change out our N95 respirators every day,” says Wright. “But halfway through the contract, things changed and they were making us reuse N95s and weren’t letting us use hair covers. They wanted us to use the same gown for 5 days. They made a full switch, and all of a sudden we didn’t have what we needed any more.”

It was up to each individual to figure out how to make it work.

Wright had signed a contract to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week for 21 days. The long days without a break were exhausting.

“The whole time you can’t really breathe, and you can’t really talk,” says Wright. “You have a surgical mask over your N95, and you’re using tape around the edges to seal it off, and you’re breathing in your own CO2 and getting really really bad headaches for 12-hours straight.”

During the days, adrenaline would kick in and Wright was focused on her patients. But at the end of the day, when she’d go back to her quiet hotel room, the fatigue would come crashing down and the anxiety hit hard.

“When I got home every single night I would scrub my body nonstop,” says Wright. “I felt like I was dying, I thought I was dying. I would call my family all the time. I think I was just exhausted and run down.”

The physical exhaustion was real, but it was the emotional drain that was really taking a toll on Wright’s wellbeing.

In the month of April, the death toll in New York was six times higher than its average for that time of year. Wright’s first week at the hospital was the deadliest week on record. News stories of patients being turned away from hospitals, doctors making unthinkable life and death decisions and refrigerated trucks being called in to store bodies shocked households across the nation.

Wright had worked in a level 1 trauma center before but had never seen anything like what she saw in New York.

“I would go to lunch and leave the hospital, and outside I’d see the refrigerated trucks because the morgues were so overwhelmed,” she recalls.

She did her best to be a calming presence for her patients, all the while feeling anything but calm.

“They would wheel a patient in and sometimes they would be really scared,” said Wright. “You’d be talking to them and they’d be fine, and within that same minute all of a sudden you had to intubate them because they couldn’t breathe. And you’re wondering if you’re going to be the last face they see.”

For Wright, the hardest part was watching patients suffer alone, without having their families by their sides. She would try to set up FaceTime calls for her patients so families could see their loved ones.

“Just sitting there knowing these are people, you feel hopeless,” describes Wright, her voice shaking audibly over the phone. “You’re doing everything you can, but you don’t know enough about this disease yet to know if they’re going to come out of it.”

When asked about her mental health, Wright admits it’s taken a toll.

“Chaminade prepared me to be a nurse, but I don’t think anything could have prepared me for seeing that many people die at once,” she says. “You just see people nonstop who were there one second, and alive, and then gone the next. You’re body-bagging so many people who you were just caring for. It’s definitely traumatic.”

But Wright persisted. And when her 21-day contract was over, she agreed to stay another week. Because in between all the darkness, Wright was able to find moments of beauty.

Like when a patient recovered and had their ventilator removed.

“When we extubated a patient, they’d play a fight song over the hospital PA system so everyone knew there was good news, and we would all start crying.”

Her hospital was also one of the first to participate in antibody plasma trials, where patients who were on ventilators received donated plasma from individuals who had already recovered from COVID-19 and had antibodies. She noticed a drastic improvement in the patients who received the trial treatment.

“There were patients who had been on the ventilators for a month and weren’t showing any signs of improvements,” she says. “But then we gave them the blood and within a week everything started to look like it was improving.”

When her time in New York had come to a close, Wright initially struggled to find a flight home—everything was canceled. But she ultimately found an airline who let her fly for free as a first responder. When she got back to El Paso, she booked a vacation rental to quarantine herself for two weeks and recuperate before returning home and seeing her boyfriend.

She had given up her job at the hospital, so after spending some time at home she ventured out to visit her family in California. At the time of her interview in June, she had been with them for three weeks, relaxing and recovering, and making sure they wore their masks.

“I’m more scared of getting coronavirus in public now because I’ve seen how bad it can get—and it wasn’t just elderly people or immunocompromised people. It was healthy, young people.”

While she is no longer afraid of caring for a coronavirus patient, she is much more cautious about being in public. Wright acknowledges that things have gotten better and healthcare professionals have a better idea of what they’re doing now, but the illness is still very unpredictable.

As for her career, she doesn’t know what will come next. She’s slowly starting the job hunt, but she’s also just trying to take time to process everything she felt and witnessed in New York. Part of her wants a slower-paced job now, but long term she knows that she would miss the thrill of the emergency room.

In the meantime, life definitely feels more precious now and she’s just trying to spend time with her family.

“A lot of it was a blur and I have trouble expressing exactly how it was,” shares Wright. “But I am beyond glad that I went. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had in my life. I met some amazing nurses and people that I will remember for the rest of my life.”