Education: Awakening in Hawaii

In the contest for young minds in backward countries, the University of Hawaii's East-West Center should have been an early winner. Billed as a magnet for Asian students, it was first proposed by U.S. Senator Lyndon Johnson in 1959—nearly a year before Nikita Khrushchev hatched Moscow's Friendship University (TIME, Jan. 6). Hawaii had the advantage of the island's proud multiracial harmony; Friendship University is a segregated school for Afro-Asians. Yet somehow the Russians scored all the propaganda coups. Hawaii's East-West Center foundered in big talk and bad planning.

Last week there were sure signs that the center had secured a new...

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