THREE GENERATIONS, WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE

When HPU alumnus Eric Axelbank thinks about his alma mater, he can still picture the Honolulu he knew as a young man. Aloha Tower Marketplace would not open until 1994, and HPU students would not move in until 2015. Looking to Diamond Head, the view ran low and clear across Kakaʻako, past warehouses and machine shops, with almost nothing tall enough to interrupt it.

Eric's parents had bought an apartment at Harbor Square on Ala Moana Boulevard, close enough that he could walk to class. It was convenient. It was also, though he could not have known it then, the middle chapter of a story that would run through three generations of his family at HPU.

Eric started college at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa (UH Manoa) as an electrical engineering and mathematics major. It was not the right fit. He did some research on alternative majors and landed on HPU.

"I was living on campus at UH and, quite frankly, there were a lot of distractions," Eric said. "It was hard to study. I read that HPU had just launched a computer science degree program. Back then, there were not as many options as we have today. The degree focused on computer programming which piqued my interest. I transferred in and loved it. I was able to flourish at HPU mainly due to the environment."

Eric completed his degree in about two and a half years and joined the Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps along the way. He points to his classroom experience as the key to his success and that of his classmates.

"Professors at HPU knew me, they knew my name, and they wanted to know how I was doing," he said. "There is a genuine sense of caring about each student. I was a late bloomer, and I did not flourish in high school until later, when I had teachers who loved what they were doing. When you have a professor who enjoys what they are doing, it motivates you to learn. It changes everything and gives you new perspectives."

Small classes meant Eric could ask a question and get an answer from the professor who had written the syllabus. It also meant he could not disappear into the back of the auditorium.

"You cannot doze off," he said. "You have to be present and engaged in the classroom, and that inspires you to learn."

Eric was commissioned as an Air Force ROTC Distinguished Graduate after graduation and received a bachelor of science in computer science degree from Hawaii Pacific College. Receiving a computer science degree, he anticipated working with computers. The Air Force had other plans.

"I thought I would work on computers in the Air Force," he said with a chuckle. The Air Force said, "No, you are going to be a logistics officer," and Eric asked, "What is that?"

He was eager and learned on the job. He spent more than two decades in the service, moving up through increasingly senior assignments and eventually retired as a colonel. As a young officer, Eric was named one of the United States Junior Chamber's 2004 Ten Outstanding Young Americans. Ten years later, the Chamber invited Eric to judge the Ten Outstanding Young Americans award.

Then, in his final assignment at the Pentagon, Air Force leaders reviewed his personnel file and noticed a degree that was more than 20 years old by then. They named Eric Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Air Force logistics enterprise overseeing 340 IT systems valued at $3.4 billion. He was also responsible for approving which information systems could operate on the Air Force network from a cybersecurity standpoint. The work brought him back to the technical foundation he had built at HPU.

"My degree was the defining factor in my selection for this senior Pentagon position," Eric said. "They knew I had a lot of experience, and it was impressive that they looked at my HPU education and gave me the opportunity to be a CIO."

He does not count that career transformation as luck.

"I unequivocally attribute my successes to the educational foundation that HPU provided me," he said. "HPU gave me a technical degree with a tremendous amount of credibility, starting off my career. It was invaluable. Learning how to program computers, and how IT systems work, especially in the early days of mainframe computers, gave me practical technical skills that I used throughout my career."

HPU's educational experience gave him something less tangible as well. Eric's assignments took him overseas and put him alongside people whose backgrounds looked nothing like his own, and he traces his ease in those rooms to the classrooms he sat in at HPU. "Going to HPU gave me a lot of confidence when I started my career," he said. "Some of my counterparts graduated from Ivy League colleges, and I learned that in most cases, I was just as prepared or better positioned to excel at the work we were doing."

Eric had the opportunity to be stationed in Okinawa, Germany and Portugal, and he visited numerous other countries while serving in the Air Force throughout Europe and Asia.

"One of the things I realized through my travels was that everyone is basically the same," he said. "No matter where you are from, what language you speak or what culture you grew up in, we can all relate to each other and have common values."

Eric's first experiences with international students were at HPU. He shared, "Working closely with students from around the world helped me not only appreciate the value of diverse thinking, but it also enabled me to develop lifelong friendships."

Eric was born in Tokyo, where Japanese was his first language, into an Air Force family that moved when the service said it was time to.

The family arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1977, when Eric's father, Kenneth Pope, was stationed at Hickam Air Force Base. Born in Beech Grove, Indiana, Kenneth had joined the Air Force at 18 and served during the Vietnam War in Thailand before the service assigned him to the islands.

Near the end of a long military career, preparing for retirement and a second act, he needed a college degree. He found one at HPU (then Hawaii Pacific College) while stationed at Hickam Air Force Base. Chartered in 1965, the college had grown through the 1970s by teaching courses on military installations across Oʻahu at a time when few institutions did.

Kenneth took most of his classes on base and used his GI Bill benefits, fitting coursework around a job that did not pause for midterms. He was 44 years old, a nontraditional student decades before the phrase was common.

He graduated in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in business administration. The degree proved to be the bridge he needed. After retiring from the Air Force, Kenneth spent more than 30 years with the U.S. Department of Labor in Hawaiʻi as a federal compliance investigator, working out of the federal building downtown and traveling to businesses around the islands to make sure they were meeting federal labor law. He kept at it well into his 70s.

"He really enjoyed his work, and he just retired about five years ago," Eric said. "He loved what he did, and he enjoyed going to work every day."

By the time the third Axelbank arrived on campus, HPU had realized its masterplan to build a downtown and waterfront university experience. HPU moved into Aloha Tower Marketplace in 2013 and spent the next two years converting it into a mixed-use anchor with student housing, welcome center, learning commons, Esports Arena, classrooms, and meeting rooms alongside the restaurants and shops. Students moved in for the first time in the fall of 2015, a few blocks from the buildings Eric and his father had known.

Eric's son, Anthony, grew up primarily in Virginia, though Hawaiʻi was never entirely outside the family story. He lived in Hawaiʻi when he was two years old, and his younger brother, Kenneth, was born in Hawaiʻi. While in Virginia, tragically, Eric lost his wife of 28 years, and the boy grieved the loss of their mother to ALS.

After their loss, Eric decided to come back home to Hawaiʻi. He told his sons what he was doing and left the decision to them. Without question, both of his sons moved back to Hawaiʻi with their father.

Anthony first enrolled at HPU as a distance learner while still in Virginia, then moved onto campus once he arrived in Honolulu. In 2024, he graduated from the College of Business, 35 years after his grandfather. Anthony is an aspiring pilot, and he was recently accepted into the highly selective Air Force Officer Training School as a pilot candidate. His lifelong goal has always been to serve in the U.S. Air Force or Hawaiʻi Air National Guard as a pilot.

Three generations, three reasons for finding the same university. For Kenneth, it was a way to turn a military career into a federal one. For Eric, it was where a new program and professors who knew his name helped him find his footing. For Anthony, it was part of coming home and continuing the family legacy at HPU.

Eric still talks about the people more than the milestones, and he has a reason. Some of his best opportunities came not necessarily from a resume, but from relationships. After retiring from the Air Force, he found himself working at the Department of Veterans Affairs in the building right next to the White House.

When applying for the Veterans Affairs Budget Officer position, he did not know much about the federal budget process. However, his relationships paid off when he knew someone on the hiring panel who had confidence in Eric's abilities and hired him without hesitation.

Within a year, Eric established himself as the agency's budget expert, and he eventually defended the agency's budget justification before Congress. The jobs that followed arrived the same way.

"I've learned that one of the most important pillars of leadership is relationships," he said. "People are human and treating people with respect and getting to know what's important to them will help build a foundation of trust and possibly lifelong friendships."

He says the HPU family legacy was never planned. It grew one generation at a time, each arriving at a different moment for a different reason. His father found HPU while preparing for one of the biggest transitions of his life. Eric found it while he was still figuring out where he belonged. Anthony found it while his family was starting over.

The common thread is that HPU launched highly successful careers for both Kenneth and Eric and is enabling Anthony to pursue his dreams as an Air Force fighter pilot.

“As a college student, embrace your HPU education and start cultivating relationships now," Eric suggests, "because you never know who the person sitting next to you in class will become as the years go on and you both grow older."