Before retiring in 2020, Borofsky concentrated on undergraduate education as a Professor of Anthropology at Hawaii Pacific University.

[5] Along with his wife and a daughter, he spent 41 months – from 1977-81 – on the coral atoll of Pukapuka carrying out field research for his doctoral dissertation examining Pukapukan and anthropological conceptions of the past which, in revised form, was published as Making History: Pukapukan and Anthropological Conceptions of Knowledge (1987).

"[12]Natalie Zemon-Davis states the book “is brimming over with new ideas about how history can be found, rethought, understood, and told .

Rob Borofsky’s edited volume is multicentered, dialogic history at its best.”[13] Paul Farmer views Why a Public Anthropology?

He shows close up through case studies how the institutional structures of the academy have controlled and restricted anthropology as an intellectual discipline.

In so doing, he provides a much-needed resource for teaching introductory graduate program seminars, especially in the leading departments of the classic metropole.”[20]Robert Borofsky coined the now widely cited term public anthropology, first for the University of California book series he edited and then for the field itself.

[23]  With Shawn Rodriguez, he produced a set of online introductory anthropology lectures that Vimeo indicates were played more than 30,000 times.

In a rare move for an anthropologist, in 2024 he published his fieldnotes – numbering over 12,000 pages – on the internet for Pukapukans and others to read and comment on.