Private Schools: Legacy of a Princess

The view overlooking Honolulu from Diamond Head to Pearl Harbor is splendid. Dotting the 500-acre hillside site are an Olympic-sized swimming pool, tennis courts and other lavish facilities, valued at $25 million. Hawaii’s latest tourist haven? Not at all. The spread belongs to the Kamehameha Schools, sole beneficiary of a philanthropic native princess of the last century, whose legacy in real estate encompasses 9% of the state’s area (including land leased by the Royal Hawaiian and new Kahala Hilton hotels) and is worth at least $250 million. This year the holdings will earn $3,500,000 in leases and grazing fees to finance the education of 2,000 boys and girls from kingergartenthrough high school.

Although the “Kam” School have a bigger endowment than any other private school in the U.S., for most of the last 77 years they have been nothing more than unambitious vocational institutions. Now, under President James W. Bushong, 53, who learned how to spend money on quality education while superintendent of schools in rich Grosse Pointe, Mich., the Kam Schools have pushed up standards fast and turned chiefly to college preparation.

Haole Trustees. The vast estates were royal holdings inherited by Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, last direct descendant of King Kamehameha the Great and wife of a native of Glens Falls, N.Y., who founded Hawaii’s Bishop National Bank. At her death in 1884, the Princess left her property in perpetual trust to establish separate schools for the boys and girls of the islands. The five haole (white) trustees of the Bishop estate, rich and paternalistic descendants of missionaries, construed this phrase to mean children of Hawaiian blood, and thought that the kids should get a “Christian industrial education.” Girls were required to take four years of domestic science, including a course in “cottage living,” where they learned to cook, sew, wash and care for a live infant (which the school always managed to provide). Boys were trained as field workers for sugar plantations or as semiskilled laborers, so that they might enter “happy service in our basic industries.”

Such patronizing benevolence persisted until after World War II, when the trustees (who are appointed for life by the state Supreme Court) came under increasing pressure from politically active Japanese-Americans and part-Hawaiians to let the Kam Schools prepare students for intellectual leadership as well as vocational jobs. In 1960 the trustees hired the management consultant firm of Booz, Allen & Hamilton to survey the schools. The firm recommended a broadened school curriculum that would allow graduates to go either to college or directly to work.

80% to College. In the fall of 1962 Bushong took over as the $40,000-a-year president of the Kam Schools to carry out the switch. He made trade-school courses optional, turned over other vocational subjects to public technical schools, with Kam picking up the tab. He established new academic departments in language, science, math, English and social studies. As a result, this fall 80% of the graduates will go on to college, compared with 7% in 1950, 47% in 1959.

From the faculty of 165, he cut away deadwood, hired bright mainlanders, introduced a merit system of raises that could bring a teacher with a doctorate $11,078 a year. Over a three-year period Bushong insists that teachers spend one summer in a campus workshop and one summer taking college credit courses before getting the third summer off.

Problems of Wealth. The school picks students on the basis of home visits and academic achievement, rejecting about half. The torrent of money that pours into Kam pays all board and room and most teaching costs, although students still must pay up to $137 in tuition. Wealth clearly relieves Bushong of the most serious problem headmasters face, but the terms of his riches make other headaches. The princess’ will, for example, specifies that Kam teachers must be Protestants (although the student body is 30% Roman Catholic, 15% Mormon, and the rest Protestant or unaffiliated), but a new state fair employment practices law bars such restrictions.

Race also creates an issue. Bushong, the trustees and Hawaiians in general are willing to go along with the Hawaiian-blood clause for student admission, partly because such students seem worthy beneficiaries of the princess’ wealth and partly because intermarriage has given a big portion of Hawaiians some native blood (almost four-fifths of last year’s Kam graduates had non-Hawaiian surnames). Yet such discrimination runs against civil rights principles and may have to be changed.

It also forces Bushong to send his two daughters to another school. He is satisfied with the education they are getting—but it is a measure of his confidence in Kam’s fast advance and “virtually unlimited potential” that he says, “I’d rather have them here.”