The University of Hawaiʻi has kicked off a national search to bring back a standalone chancellor for its Mānoa campus, breaking that job apart from the UH system presidency now held by Wendy Hensel. The move restores a layer of campus leadership that had been folded into the president’s office several years ago and starts a fresh round of finalist visits and public forums. University leaders say they expect the new chancellor to begin in the fall, a relatively quick turnaround for one of Hawaiʻi’s most influential academic roles.
Search committee, timeline, and scope
The system has tapped Jan N. Sullivan and oceanographer David Karl to co-chair the search advisory committee and opened an approximately one-month window for nominations, according to a press release from UH News. The announcement states that the goal is to select a new chancellor by summer 2026, with campus visits by finalists set to wrap up before the end of the spring semester. The Mānoa chancellor will be responsible for a campus budget of more than $800 million and a workforce of over 5,000 employees, which is hardly a small gig by any measure.
Hensel frames the change as system modernization
President Wendy Hensel has told lawmakers that splitting the jobs will allow the system to "create an integrated strategy" and hold campus leaders accountable, a talking point she has emphasized while reshaping UH’s leadership structure. As reported by Hawaiʻi Public Radio, a national study found that Hawaiʻi was the only state in which one person served as both system president and flagship chancellor, an imbalance Hensel says the new setup is meant to fix.
Mānoa’s scale: research, students and reach
Founded in 1907, UH Mānoa is the flagship of the system and a Carnegie R1 research university that enrolls roughly 20,000 students and offers dozens of degree programs, according to UH Mānoa. The campus pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars in external research funding each year, which makes the chancellor’s position central to Hawaiʻi’s research engine and workforce pipeline. Whoever steps into the role will inherit responsibility for academic priorities, campus facilities and major research operations that reach well beyond the islands.
What’s next
The search will be national in scope, with the committee screening nominees and inviting finalists to campus for public meetings and interviews before sending a recommended candidate to the Board of Regents. Community members, faculty and students will be able to weigh in during those finalist visits, and the university says it will accept nominations and applications throughout the open period. UH officials have not gone beyond the details in the original announcement, and the full release and timeline are posted online for anyone who wants to track the process step by step.
