Chaminade University of Honolulu

Campus Event

Preview Day Draws Future Silverswords

Chaminade’s president says the event spotlights what makes the University unique

Scores of future Silverswords converged on campus November 2 for Preview Day.

The open house is designed to introduce prospective students and their families to the University’s programs, campus life, and vibrant community. Attendees experienced firsthand what it might be like to be a Silversword, with a full day of activities, information sessions, and interactive experiences.

“We were thrilled to open our campus to so many enthusiastic future Silverswords and their families,” said Chaminade President Lynn Babington, Ph.D. “Preview Day was a wonderful opportunity to share what makes Chaminade unique—from our supportive community to our innovative academic programs.”

Throughout the day, students and families explored Chaminade’s more than 60 undergraduate majors and minors and 13 graduate programs. Faculty members and support staff were on hand to answer questions while a cadre of student ambassadors conducted tours of campus.

The day also featured interactive activities, such as a mock crime scene investigation and a nursing simulation and skills lab tour. Science enthusiasts enjoyed an open house of Chaminade’s fully-equipped labs, engaging with fields like biology, chemistry, and environmental science.

Among those who came out for Preview Day was Hawai’i high school senior Paolo Vietor, who hopes to attend Chaminade to study nursing. He said the open house helped solidify his choice of universities and also allowed him to learn about Chaminade’s other offerings, including extracurriculars.

“I think this could be the school for me,” he said.

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Kaisah Kaaihili is interested in furthering her career working with young children and was drawn to Chaminade’s education and school counseling programs. “Lots of information, lots of resources, I didn’t know how much scholarships they had,” she said, of the Preview Day event.

“Sword Sessions” offered at Preview Day provided themed presentations, including a financial aid overview that explained the FAFSA process and offered practical advice on financing higher education.

Attendees also learned about Chaminade’s Hawaii Guarantee tuition match, which ensures graduates from Hawai’i high schools entering as freshmen pay the same annual tuition rate as resident undergraduates at UH-Manoa, along with a path to graduate in four years.

Entrepreneurial Program Celebrates 22 Years

The entrepreneurial leadership incubator is unique in the islands

“Doing things that make social sense and doing social things that make business sense.”

That mantra, the foundation of Chaminade’s Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program, was emphasized by Hogan Director Roy Panzarella in his opening remarks to attendees at the 22nd annual Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program Kick-Off Celebration on October 16.

“This annual kick-off allows us to recognize current and former Hogan students,” Panzarella said.

“Our students become leaders and changemakers who care about social justice and who are committed to making a difference. We want them to become better versions of themselves.”

Isabella “Bella” Hughes, co-founder of Shaka Tea and other popular brands, echoed the sentiment in her keynote address at the event. “The world is made up of human connections,” Hughes said at the celebration, which was held on the Sullivan Family Library Lawn.

Isabella Hughes, co-founder of Shaka Tea and other popular brands, spoke at the Hogan event.


“It’s vital to build social capital and to choose kindness, which is fundamentally how I live both my personal and business lives.”

Since its launch in 2002, the Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program has sought to prepare students to become transformational leaders, driving change with empathy and compassion. The program is designed to be an incubator and catalyst for community development and job creation.

In her speech, Hughes said entrepreneurship requires relentless work. She added that her journey has included failed companies and a lot of rejection.

“But I persisted because I told myself that I was going to win,” she said.

Chaminade President Lynn Babington called the Hogan program “wonderful and unique” in Hawai’i.

“We link our students through coursework, internships and connections with business people,” she said. “Our students are from all majors. They learn the skills of being an entrepreneur and have the opportunity to work with some very successful start-ups here in Hawai’i.”

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Babington added that she’s proud to say that two decades of Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program alumni have made significant contributions to their communities.

“They’ve started small businesses and launched larger companies, too,” she said.

In addition to economic benefits, the Hogan program seeks to address pressing social issues, incorporating social entrepreneurship into its curriculum. The program also encourages its students to develop solutions to problems like poverty, healthcare and environmental sustainability.

Gary Hogan, CEO of Hogan Hospitality Group, addressed attendees at the celebration event.
Aliikamanaekahi “Alii” Napoleon, second from right, received a $2,500 scholarship from Alaka‘ina Foundation. The check was presented to Napoleon by former Chaminade Athletics Director and Alaka‘ina Foundation board member, Bill Villa, far left. Bella Hughes, Gary Hogan, Dr. Lynn Babington and Dr. Roy Panzarella joined them on stage.
Aliikamanaekahi “Alii” Napoleon, second from right, received a $2,500 scholarship from Alaka‘ina Foundation.

By integrating entrepreneurial education with service and ethical leadership, students are challenged to leverage their passions and skills to make a meaningful impact.

Supported by the Hogan Family Foundation, Chaminade’s Hogan entrepreneurship program has sought to strengthen its partnerships over the years with Hawai’i businesses.

“Under great leadership comes great success,” said Gary Hogan, CEO of Hogan Hospitality Group. “Lynn and Roy are two great leaders who have a vision to build a resilient community.”

Embedded in the Hogan program is the Suzie Martin & Vaughn Vasconcellos Leadership Institute.

Vaughn Vasconcellos, a former Chaminade Board of Regents chair and current member of the Board of Governors, is also the co-founder of Alaka’ina Foundation, a nonprofit Native Hawaiian organization with a mission to build and promote leadership and educational initiatives for the youth of Hawai‘i.

The goal of the foundation is to develop a new generation of leaders.

Representing Vasconcellos at the Hogan event, former Chaminade Athletics Director and Alaka‘ina Foundation board member Bill Villa presented Aliikamanaekahi “Alii” Napoleon with a $2,500 scholarship, awarded to a Native Hawaiian first-year or transfer student for his or her first year of study at Chaminade.

Scholar: Catholic Bioethics Must Evolve

Dr. Therese Lysaught is an influential voice in Catholic healthcare

Dr. Therese Lysaught, professor at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Care Leadership at Loyola University Chicago, argues Catholic bioethics must embrace the fullness of the Catholic social tradition and pay more attention to ethical dimensions of healing that are relevant to people’s lives.

Addressing attendees at the latest Marianist Lecture, which was held Oct. 13 at the Mystical Rose Oratory, Lysaught also said a broadened Catholic bioethics has the ability to play a critical role in society.

In an introduction before the lecture, Chaminade’s Dr. Dustyn Ragasa applauded Lysaught’s encyclopedic knowledge of Catholic bioethics and the healthcare system while also praising her for a “big heart and unwavering compassion and commitment” to help patients.

Dr. Dustyn Ragasa praised Dr. Therese Lysault for her unwavering commitment to help the poor and ill.
Dr. Dustyn Ragasa praised Dr. Therese Lysault for her unwavering commitment to help the poor and ill.

“In her work, she holds theology, medicine, ethics and bioethics in profound dialogue,” said Ragasa, director of the Pastoral Theology master’s degree program.

“She’s addressed such issues as the anointing of the sick, gene therapy, genetics, human embryonic cell research, end of life, neuroscience, global health, bioethics and social justice.”

In her lecture, titled “Catholic Bioethics: Catholic Social Tradition and Human Flourishing,” Lysaught detailed three different healthcare scenarios: One involved a Guatemalan man with kidney failure, the second was an elderly Black suffering from end-stage congestive heart failure, and the third involved an 8-year-old gunshot victim.

“Open up any textbook or journal on Catholic bioethics and you will find no mention of such scenarios or of a myriad of similar issues,” Lysault said. “They don’t count as topics for Catholic bioethical analysis.”

Yet they need to be, she said.

Lysault added Catholic bioethics must incorporate a broader analysis of poverty, race and ethnicity.

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She also argued that the Catholic social tradition could help expand and re-orient Catholic bioethics around a foundation of caring for the sick and approaching the moral dimensions of health and medicine.

Lysault asserted the COVID pandemic exposed many bioethical questions like: How should few effective treatments, such as ventilators, be allocated to patients? How should scarce protective equipment be allocated among frontline healthcare workers? Could patients’ advance directives be overridden?

Dr. Therese Lysault was presented with a lei after Dr. Dustyn Ragasa introduced her to the audience.
Dr. Therese Lysault was presented with a lei from Emmalee Bugado after Dr. Dustyn Ragasa introduced her to attendees.

According to Lysault, there was nothing in the literature of Catholic bioethics to address these questions.

And four years later, she added, while secular bioethics has begun to attend to these questions, you’ll still find almost nothing in the Catholic bioethics literature about these issues.

Tackling questions such as these “will require the theoretical and practical tools of social analysis in the Catholic social tradition,” she concluded.

In her address, Lysaught also touched on a 2022 study in which researchers interviewed 10 kupuna from rural Hawaii communities about their experiences with healthcare barriers. When asked what advice they had for providers about how to improve healthcare for Native Hawaiians, the elders did not list the standard bioethical principles or any of the principles of Catholic bioethics, Lysault said.

“Rather, they appreciated providers who, to quote, ‘took the time to talk story and to get to know them as people and community members,’” Lysault said.

“They appreciated providers who shared information about themselves.”

At the end of her lecture, Lysault was presented with the Mackey Award for Catholic Thought, which honors scholarly, community and faith leaders whose body of work advances the spirit and educational mission of the Society of Mary and the Marianist Family.

Presenting her with an ‘umeke, Chaminade Student Engagement Coordinator Andrew Ancheta told Lysault the significance of the koa bowl in Hawaiian culture and remarked, “Today, you filled it with spiritual and intellectual food.”

Silverswords Gather for Aloha ‘Āina Event

The day included community service projects, hands-on activities and educational workshops

Chaminade students along with members of the faculty and staff gathered on Indigenous Peoples Day for a special Aloha ‘Āina Kalaepōhaku event to celebrate the Hawaiian value of mālama ʻāina with community service projects, hands-on activities, and educational workshops and lectures.

As part of the daylong event on campus, supported by a grant from Kamehameha Schools Kaiāulu, participants planted native flora and weeded community gardens on Chaminade’s campus. A group of students also ventured to Cromwell’s Beach to conduct invasive limu removal.

“Today is a wonderful day for Chaminade University of Honolulu to celebrate the place, Kalaepōhaku, where we reside and to give back and celebrate our ʻāina,” said University President Lynn Babington. “So we come together as a community of mostly students, but faculty and staff, too, to protect the ʻāina, celebrate it, work in our community garden and also work with our native plants.”

Later in the day, students also got hands-on demonstrations in hula, lei making and more.

“Our Marianist mission and values of the University really focus on community,” said Babington, who assisted in clearing the community garden and putting in native plants. “Anytime we have the opportunity to gather people together to celebrate our place here in Hawai’i, we take advantage of that.”

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Kahoali’i Keahi-Wood, cultural engagement specialist and director of Environmental Studies at Chaminade, said the event was an opportunity to “give back to our ʻāina.” “We all have such busy lives,” he said. “It gives us a free day on our holiday to actually go back out into our communities, to think about people other than just us, extend our reach and give back to our community.”

Other workshops at the event explored Pacific pattern making, traditional fishing techniques and Hawaiian herbal medicinal practices. Indigenous scholar Dr. Manulani Aluli Meyer also spoke at the event about the intersection of indigenous knowledge and sustainability.

‘We Need to Talk’: Scholar on Civil Discourse

Dr. Timothy Shaffer spoke on the importance of civil discourse in today’s polarizing times

As the nation marked the anniversary of 9/11, civil discourse scholar Dr. Timothy Shaffer led an engaging conversation at Chaminade to underscore the importance of disagreeing agreeably in polarizing times.

“We are navigating tensions in the past that are still unrecognizable,” Shaffer told a packed lecture hall of students, faculty and staff members and others. “What happens when rhetoric becomes reality?”

Shaffer, inaugural Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Chair of Civil Discourse and director of the SNF Ithaca Initiative in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware, said institutions of higher education offer spaces for sharing ideas, finding common ground, understanding new perspectives and even passionately disagreeing—with mutual respect.

In his lecture, “We Need to Talk: Civil Discourse in Partisan and Polarizing Times,” he told attendees engaging in differences is critical—even essential in a democracy—and that it is absolutely appropriate to challenge one another, as long as it’s done in a fair way. “We have what I call, weak civility, which provides us a code of polite conduct or mode of behavioral management,” Shaffer said.

WATCH THE FULL TALK HERE:

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Strong civility, he added, is a “robust engagement of differences that includes dialogue and deliberation.”

Shaffer’s message resonated with the audience, especially in this election year.

Biology major Jason Edric Ulep ’27 said not everyone is going to agree, but it’s critical to understand where different people stand. “Civil discourse promotes the use of voice instead of resorting to physical violence and verbal abuse,” said Ulep, after attending the lecture. “We need civil discourse, as it aims to seek a middle ground and hopefully come to a common understanding or a solution to the problem.”

In his civil discourse leadership role, Shaffer works on a number of projects, which include annual convenings of faculty and students across the United States at the SNF Ithaca National Student Dialogue and research about the role of civil discourse within public affairs education.

Victoria Perrira ’27, a Criminology and Criminal Justice major, said she walked away from Shaffer’s lecture with a new appreciation of civil discourse. “I value truthfulness and was particularly interested in learning how to effectively navigate conversations around polarizing topics,” she said.

Dr. Timothy Shaffer discusses the importance of listening in his lecture themed, “We Need to Talk: Civil Discourse in Partisan and Polarizing Times.”

Shaffer said polarization isn’t new, but how we respond to each other can be. “We have a lack of public discourse,” he said, adding, “You need to create a space for democracy where you have agency. You can build a culture grounded in civil discourse even in these partisan and polarizing times.”

University President Lynn Babington, Ph.D., said the talk was particularly timely as the nation gears up for the presidential election.

“I believe the place of a university, an institution of higher learning, is to really provide the format, the environment for discourse to take a place,” she said.

“That’s our role. … We need, and our students need, to know how to have those important conversations. to listen carefully to people’s ideas and be able to respond to them in a very civil way.”

This lecture was sponsored by Chaminade University’s Office of Mission and Rector, the Association of Marianist Universities and the Marianist Leadership Center.

Entrepreneur Kicks Off Speaker Series

The co-founder of Kō Hana Distillers detailed how he overcame ‘roadblocks’ to go to market

Kō Hana Distillers co-founder Robert Dawson kicked off the fall Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program Guest Speaker Series, detailing his journey from a business idea to a successful company.

Speaking to attendees, Dawson said he “didn’t know anything about sugarcane” and “didn’t even like rum” when he moved to Hawaii with his wife and son in 2008. He said his deep appreciation of history led him to Hawaii’s agriculture past and ultimately, “Native Hawaiian sugarcane,” called kō.

He teamed up with a scholar to learn more about Hawaii sugarcane, which was brought by ancient Polynesian seafarers to Hawaii more than 1,000 years ago.

Having spent a time in Brazil, Dawson told attendees at his talk Wednesday he had always been a fan of cachaça, the Brazilian rum made from sugarcane juice. This would be the direction he would take with his new venture, he said, growing and harvesting Hawaiian varietal sugarcane to distill rhum agricole.

Incorporating Kō Hana Hawaiian Agricole Rum in 2011, Dawson and business partner Jason Brand introduced their first agricole-style rum made entirely from Hawaii-grown sugarcane in 2014.

“It took time and getting over a lot of roadblocks,” Dawson said.

“But now we’re expanding to grow sugarcane across 1,600 acres on the North Shore, and our goal is to become an international boutique rum distiller.”

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The Hogan Guest Speaker Series is aimed at enriching the educational experience, connecting entrepreneurial-minded students with successful professionals from various industries and bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application.

Dr. Roy Panzarella, Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program director, said guest speakers are selected based on the program’s objectives for the year. There are seven speakers on the schedule for the fall, including Better Sour and Shaka Tea co-founder Isabella Hughes, set to speak on Oct. 16.

“For many students, these are delightful opportunities to be exposed to and learn the power and value of networking,” Panzarella said, adding that speakers gives students invaluable real-world insights.

“Our wish is that all Hogan students, including those pursuing an MBA, will walk away from each lecture even more inspired to listen actively, read critically and speak effectively,” Panzarella said.

He also hopes the students leave the lectures, as well as the Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program, more confident and excited about using their own talent and skills to start something new.

“Sometimes the Wednesday presentations have a long-lasting impact on our Hogan students, but I have found it is the lecturers themselves that have the most influence on them,” Panzarella said.

“Oftentimes, the personal narratives of the lecturers are so powerful they serve to inspire many students who doubt themselves and their capacity to achieve success.”

COMING UP:

An entrepreneurship teacher at Seabury Hall on Maui, Melissa Crounse Kaufman will be the next Hogan guest speaker on Sept. 18. Kaufman is the founding executive director of the Garage at Northwestern University and co-author of “Founded: The No B.S. Guide for Student Entrepreneurs.”

For the complete fall schedule, click here.