Next week the top University of Hawaii leaders are scheduled to meet with state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim and members of her investigative committee to explain how UH fumbled away $200,000 for an athletic department fundraising Stevie Wonder concert.

To paraphrase the joke about computers, anyone can make mistakes with university programs, but to completely blow up an athletic department, you need the board of regents.

Today’s concerns are about the fitness of the UH decisions: first to rush off into a fundraising scheme they knew little about, and then to suspend and rehire several of the principals. If it is any comfort, in the past UH could make a much bigger hash of it.

Back in 1974, the goal was not to get money for UH. It was a quest for legitimacy and a chance to finally stand as an equal among the big boys: Hawaii was to field a Division I football team.

In typical Hawaii style, everything started to devolve. Dave Holmes, then football coach with 47-17-1 record, suddenly quit.

Gov. John A. Burns, Hawaii’s first elected Democratic governor and architect of the state’s Democratic Party, along with Wally Fujiyama, chairman of the board of regents, launched a campaign to get Larry Price — yes, the current morning radio personality — to take Hawaii to Division I. Price at the time was defensive coordinator and ran the UH athletic dorm. The account of the recruiting and the UH crisis it created is found in a biography of Fujiyama written by T. Michael Holmes, co-author along with Dan Boylan of a definitive biography on Burns.

Price had already planned in 1974 to leave UH to get a doctorate in public administration at American University of Washington, D.C. He also had lined up an assistant coaching job with George Allen of the Washington Redskins.

Then Burns met with Price, asking if Price thought Hawaii would be competitive in Division I with local players.

"When Price said ‘Yes,’ the governor left him no choice but to accept the job," Holmes wrote.

If today’s UH administrators ever needed help in learning how to ensnarl a simple job recruitment into a regime-changing disaster, the Price hiring is a good example.

After it was announced that Price was the new coach of the shiny new Division I football team, Wytze Gorter, Manoa chancellor, said the hiring was for just two years. That, of course, upset Price, who asked for a five-year contract so he could recruit players who were being asked to make a four-year commitment.

So the regents extended the contract to five years. That caused Gorter to resign in protest, Holmes reported, and three more Manoa campus administrators resigned; eventually there would be six departures.

That caused Harlan Cleveland, UH president, to issue a public statement questioning the regents for reaching "into the university and managing directly."

"Down that road lie big troubles for the University of Hawaii. It’s no way to run even a railroad. It certainly isn’t the way to manage one of the nation’s major state universities," Cleveland said.

This is where you insert the note for 2012 regents to please reread UH regent history. Then as now, UH was an absolute street festival of leaked inside information and the 1974 sports reporters were getting and reporting the entire affair.

The UH faculty union protested, with 700 professors rallying to support Cleveland and demand the resignation of Fujiyama.

And the Legislature then jumped in with regents holding meetings with key House and Senate Democrats.

Then acting Gov. George Ariyoshi and the Attorney General met with David Trask, political heavyweight and head of the Hawaii Government Employees Association, and UH President Cleveland. Later the faculty calmed down; Price got his five-year contract but resigned after three years, complaining that too many promises made to him had been broken. Later Cleveland left and was replaced by Fujio Matsuda.

Meanwhile, Fujiyama and the regents again stumbled badly, this time in trying to lure a big-name mainland athletic director from the University of Wisconsin.

You already know the moral of this story: It could be worse.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.