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Andrew Hashimoto
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CTAHR's dean not new to Hawaii
CTAHR’s dean, Andy Hashimoto, came to Hawaii from Oregon State University and has been on the job since October of 2000. But his heart has been in Hawaii all his life. When Andrew G. Hashimoto decided to take the job as CTAHR dean, he was deciding to come home after a long absence. Although born and raised in Hawaii, he had been away for 38 years.

Part of Andy Hashimoto’s Hawaii story began when his maternal grandfather, a sumotori in a stable from Japan, came to Hawaii for exhibition matches on Big Island sugar plantations in the early 1900s. The young wrestler knew that he probably would never be a star in the sumo business, and he liked what he saw in Hawaii—so he hid when his ship left port. What can a fugitive sumo wrestler do to earn a living in a strange new land? In the case of Hashimoto’s grandfather, he opened a Japanese restaurant in Kahului to put to good use the skills he learned feeding the enormous appetites of his fellow sumotori. He married a local Japanese woman and raised a family, one of whom was Andy Hashimoto’s mother.

Hashimoto was born in Waihee, Maui, where the family farmed wetland taro. He has fond memories of catching tadpoles in taro ponds. The family lived in Waihee and Kihei until Andy was about six years old. His father worked for the airports division of the Hawaii Department of Transportation, meaning the family moved frequently. He lived on all the major islands except Kauai while he was growing up. When he was entering second grade, the Hashimotos moved to Waiakea on the island of Hawaii, and the year he was in sixth grade, they moved to Honolulu.

After attending Kuhio Elementary School and Washington Intermediate, Hashimoto went to the UH Lab School from eighth grade through his sophomore year in high school. He spent his junior and senior years at Punahou School, where he graduated in 1962.

When Andy Hashimoto left home in 1962 to attend Purdue University, little did he dream that he would not live again in Hawaii until 2001! At Purdue, he earned his B.S. in civil engineering in 1966 and his M.S. in environmental engineering in 1967.

While he was at Purdue, Hashimoto met Merle Eguchi, a coed at Indiana University. By coincidence, Merle, too, was from Hawaii—Wahiawa, to be exact--a graduate of St. Andrew’s Priory. They married and today have four children and two grandchildren.

Hashimoto says of himself that he was an indifferent student until he entered graduate school and could finally see how book learning applied to the real world. The world in those days was reeling from the environmental revelations of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. We were entering an era of environmental concern and consciousness. In the vanguard of the movement was a Cornell University professor who was visiting Purdue. He asked Hashimoto to enter a pioneering new agricultural engineering program, one that would focus on such issues as management of agricultural waste. Hashimoto went with the professor to Cornell and was one of the first doctoral graduates of the program in 1972.

While he was working on his Ph.D., USDA’s Agricultural Research Service decided to piggyback on Cornell’s agricultural waste management program to assist egg producers in northern New York state in managing their overwhelming waste problems. Hashimoto was hired while a graduate student to run the ARS program and stayed on until 1976.

ARS moved the Hashimoto family to Hastings, Nebraska, in 1976 so that Andy could start its new agricultural engineering program at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center. In that job his research focused on bioconversion of waste into natural gas. Ten years later, in 1986, Oregon State University approached Hashimoto to be head of its agricultural engineering department, a position he held for nine years. In 1995, he became OSU’s vice provost for academic affairs.

In October 2000, Andy Hashimoto came full circle. After 38 years, he was back in Hawaii as CTAHR dean. He assumed leadership of a college suffering the ill effects of six years of steady, deep budget reductions that had cut programs and staff. He brought with him a deep concern for the environment and a leadership philosophy that emphasizes collaboration and cooperation in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect.

Hashimoto listened carefully to faculty and stakeholders when he interviewed for dean last summer. He heard three recurring themes in those discussions: Hawaii’s economy must be revitalized and its base diversified. Hawaii’s agriculture and its natural resources must be sustainable to protect the environment. Hawaii’s communities, especially its agricultural communities, must be strengthened. He arrived on the campus in October 2000 prepared to tackle all three.

The most pressing need was for more funds to meet these concerns head on. On June 13, he achieved his first major breakthrough. Governor Cayetano signed into a law a bill appropriating $1 million over the next two fiscal years to revive CTAHR programs. Careful stewardship of the bill throughout the legislative process—Hashimoto never missed a hearing on it—paid off.

Hashimoto says that his family has enjoyed life on the Mainland, but he and his wife always hoped to return home. They thought of eventually retiring and dividing their time between Oregon and Hawaii. Then came the opportunity to be dean of CTAHR. “The stars were aligned,” he says, and the time was right. “I saw a chance to come home and make a real difference for the state of Hawaii.”
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Posted October 2001