David Lassner

David Lassner has spent much of his University of Hawaii career in the virtual world: Information technology, his specialty, is like that. He believes IT can continue to expand the reach of the state’s largest educational institution and wants to go back to it, once his temporary position in the top UH office comes to a close.

"I had and have a passion for the job I had and have — vice president of IT and chief information officer," said Lassner, interim president of the UH system. "I never looked at the presidents I worked for and said, ‘Boy, I want their job.’"

And now he is confronting the very real world that he encounters from the president’s Bachman Hall office while the UH Board of Regents conducts a search for a permanent chief executive.

At 59, Lassner has worked almost his entire career at UH, first arriving in 1977 on a one-year, half-time contract.

"This is the place that’s really been my home, professionally," he said. "You don’t walk away from that request, if they wanted me to do this. This is service. It really is."

Most of the issues, such as the systemwide maintenance backlog, have been ongoing for a long time. But the conflicts at the UH Cancer Center between its director, Michele Carbone, and some of its faculty and staff, have escalated since moving day.

In his private life, Lassner enjoys hiking and, although he hasn’t had time in recent years to pursue it, he loved studying hula.

Working to see that UH applies technology to its mission remains his professional passion, but he doesn’t see a problem wearing the president’s hat now, connecting with legislators and others in the town-and-gown network.

"You know, the board asked me about this," he said. "They interviewed a few people and then asked me to take on this role. And I would say, ‘I’m doing this job as if it were my job forever, until it isn’t my job.’"

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QUESTION: Do you have any sense yet how long this interim period will last?

ANSWER: The board said six to 12 months.

Q: Starting from … ?

A: September. It’s likely to be closer to 12 months than six.

Q: Let me get this out of the way up front. Is there anything you can say about the whole Cancer Center issue?

A: I’m totally focused on ensuring the success of the Cancer Center. That’s really what this is about for me. It’s an extremely important institution for UH and for Hawaii, and there’s a lot of work to be done. And that’s what I’m focused on, rather than on the personnel issues.

Q: You don’t see the personnel issue as being an impediment to the success of the center?

A: I’m focused on a plan to ensure the success of the center. So I’ll say it that way.

Q: I keep trying to rope you back into it.

A: (Laughs) Really? Gosh, and I keep trying not to be roped back into that.

Q: On other issues: How do you view the maintenance backlog effort? Do you see it as doable?

A: It’s absolutely doable. I think it’s a shame that collectively we have all let the facilities deteriorate, and I think we just have to commit ourselves to an action plan that will remedy it. It won’t be fast, it won’t be easy, but it’s absolutely possible.

It happens all the time, and we fix things all the time. We just have to put our priorities on bringing our facilities back to the conditions they should be in to support student learning, research, scholarship, and get on with the job. …

The board has adopted the moratorium. Some of the projects that had already been on the books will be proceeding. And of course construction projects are appropriated by the Legislature, so we’ll be talking with them throughout the entire spring about our hopes and dreams. And we’re hoping they’ll support us.

Q: You were in the thick of coming up with the matrix, defining which ones go first?

A: Yes. We’re actually still working on the maintenance plan. And we promise that in January we’ll provide that, … something that talks about the specifics of what we’ll fix when, over a multi-year period, and how much it will cost.

Q: Are you hearing from a lot of faculty about that?

A: I think they’re waiting to see it also. It’s kind of straightforward. …

Q: Do you mean it will be easy to decide?

A: We have to focus first on health and safety, right? So things that impact people’s health and safety. A second issue is academic impact, so if we have spaces where students can’t learn or faculty can’t conduct research, and they become unusable, then that’s something we have to pay attention to.

Then we have maintenance that if we don’t do it, the situation will get worse and will incur even greater costs. A good example is a leaky roof. You let the water come in, and then you start causing damage to the floor underneath. …

Then after that it’s really a matter of staging the work. It’s logistics, right? You don’t want to tear up the same side twice in two years. Sometimes if you put projects together you can save money by doing things at the same time. …

Q: Is there any concern UH-West Oahu will compete with Manoa for funding? Or do you not see it that way?

A: Well, I don’t see it that way, but I know many people do. My job as interim president of the UH system is really to look after the higher education needs of the entire state, not individual campuses.

In fact, when you look at locations like Molokai or Lanai, we don’t have a campus; UH Maui College has education centers there. But lots of our campuses are delivering education to those locations. West Hawaii is another one. …

We did an analysis of the higher education needs of the state on a regional basis. It won’t surprise you that when you look at things like population growth, educational attainment, employment, workforce needs, the area served by West Oahu came out at the top of the list as needing higher education services. … Second-highest priority was actually West Hawaii (on the Big Island).

So it’s not a coincidence that we have completed a West Oahu campus, Phase 1, we’re now delivering education to students at a beautiful new campus. And we now have construction going on for our Palamanui facilities at West Hawaii.

That’s what we’re supposed to do: Look at data, figure out where the need is and make those investments.

For me, of course, my background is in technology, so everything doesn’t have to be done in a classroom with a live teacher. But the facilities really help with creating a grounding for how that gets done.

So if Manoa is delivering courses and degree programs to West Hawaii, we’ll do that through the Palamanui facilities as well.

Q: What about the Athletics Department and its budget problems?

A: Let me just say two things. One is I’m the interim president of the UH system, and you’re asking about the Manoa Athletics Department. And the NCAA regulations make it pretty clear that the Athletics Department reports to the chancellor of the UH-Manoa campus.

That said, I think Chancellor (Tom) Apple and Athletics Director Ben Jay have laid out, working with their private-sector supporters as well, the game plan. And I’m optimistic that that represents the path forward for sustainable funding for UH-Manoa athletics.

Q: So the plan makes sense to you?

A: It’s going to take the community coming together. It can’t just be the taxpayers, it can’t just be tuition from students. We’re going to need help from the community. And I think the community wants to help UH athletics.

Q: On the broader financial issue: What do you think of the Obama administration becoming stricter on awarding Pell grants for student financial aid?

A: The University of Hawaii, actually, we have advocated for performance-based funding with the Legislature; that’s something we’ve proposed. We are very willing to embrace performance-based metrics and consequences. That said, we do have some significant concerns about what those metrics are … It’s very easy to say "percentage of students who graduate." …

Now let’s drill into that a little bit. If you optimize for graduating students, then you have a different view of college admissions than if you think your mission is to serve the entire state. It’s pretty clear that lower-income students tend to graduate less. That’s just a data correlation; it’s not a causality. So you could improve your graduation metrics by being more selective, selecting higher-income students, students who have better grades and test scores.

But that’s not what the University of Hawaii is about. So we don’t want national metrics that penalize the institutions that are most committed to serving the students who need it the most. … We want smart metrics that really recognize what we believe to be success.

Q: Can you give an example of what that might be?

A: There isn’t one number, but it would be a complicated matrix. And absolutely, we’re willing to work on that. … You get more credit for taking in low-income students, or students who are more at risk. Just don’t make it overly simplistic. …

Our higher-education associations are also working on this, especially the higher-education associations that work with the public universities, because our mission’s different than the selective-admission privates. They have a pretty different view of the world than we do. …

Q: Is it your sense that the feds are really gunning more for the "degree mills"?

A: Absolutely. And I think degree mills are a huge concern, and I think most of us in what I’ll call "reputable higher education" share that concern.

It’s also not easy to characterize "degree mills," so they also have to be thoughtful about those metrics as well. There are for-profit institutions that do good work. It’s not as simple as for-profit and nonprofit, or public and private. …

But clearly there are people who have identified opportunities to make money out of the federal government’s rules without a commitment to educating students. And that’s a shame, both because it hurts those students, but it also diverts federal funds from institutions and students who really need them.