Strong UH Connections Inspire Zoology Bequest

Arnold Lum and June Harrigan-Lum’s connections to UH Mānoa go back more than 50 years, to the place where they fell in love.

“Back when Edmondson Hall was bright and shiny,” Arnold says, “that’s where we met.” They were grad students, June working on her PhD and Arnold on his master’s degree.

Arnold grew up on Bingham Street in Honolulu. June, raised in Boston, came to Hawai‘i after studies in Massachusetts and North Carolina. They both graduated from UH, marrying in 1970.

Careers and further education took them across the country, but they returned home to O’ahu after 15 years, building a house on the site of Arnold’s childhood home.

June joined the state Department of Health’s Environmental Planning Office. Arnold was an attorney for the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, now known as Earthjustice. For several years on the faculty at UH Mānoa’s William S. Richardson School of Law, he taught the school’s first Environmental Litigation Clinic.

The couple retired to Medford, Oregon. Yet their Hawai’i connections are ever strong, and Arnold and June held a special place in their hearts for UH from miles away as they considered plans for their estate.

They made a generous bequest to the zoology program, commemorating the beginning of their life together, so that UH may continue to serve as a “magnet for Pacific Islands culture.”

“It’s an important component of the university’s mission,” Arnold says.

Arnold and June will also donate items from their Hawaiiana collection, including hand-painted shirts from his mother, Ethel Chun Lum, who created some of the first aloha shirts in the 1930s when her brother, Ellery J. Chun, registered the trademark for Aloha shirts.

The Lums exemplify Hawai‘i’s permanent place in the hearts of alumni, no matter how far and wide their life journeys take them, and UH grads making an impact for future generations—because no matter how far you’ve gone, UH is always home.