John Holzman was first appointed to the University of Hawaii Board of Regents in 2009, so he’s been sitting at that table for all of the most turbulent, headline-grabbing episodes: an athletics fundraiser gone horribly wrong, the comings and goings of a chancellor and president, a crushing maintenance backlog, the addition of a fledgling new West Oahu campus, the opening and problems of the new Cancer Center the whole gamut of events.

Now he’s about to depart the board, and the chairmanship that he’s held only since July. There’s nothing more controversial driving this departure, said the retired veteran of the U.S. foreign service, than a desire to spend more time with his wife, Kim, and their three daughters and three granddaughters.

Holzman, 69, is due to leave June 30, so he’s not expecting the marquee task of the board selection of a new UH president to be done until sometime after that. But he’ll make a start, along with the other regents, of working through the candidates at the end of this month, although applications will still be accepted after that.

And he’s bullish on prospects of finding someone willing and able, despite the high-profile problems of recent years. Coordinating a statewide system of a flagship campus and two baccalaureate universities with a fleet of community colleges, he said, making them mesh well together, "is a full-time job, in and of itself.

"I think a lot of people would welcome that challenge," Holzman said. "They might say, Whoa, I don’t want to go out there look at all the problems,’ too, but I think some people might welcome it."

Holzman said his successor on the board, but especially the new president, will have to work with the state on a new "compact" for how much public money should underwrite the university, as opposed to tuition.

"Whatever that social understanding was that did exist in the past people paid a very low rate to come to UH that has slowly been eroded," he said. "But it’s not clear where we’re going to end up."

QUESTION: Did your professional history in diplomacy and mediation help you on the Board of Regents?

ANSWER: Yeah. It’s good, because if you work at being a diplomat, you try to learn how to listen, which is really important. And you also learn how to summarize, which is good. 

And I guess even more important, more fundamentally, you try to understand where people’s interests are, where do their interests lie, and then work from that point of view.

You know, people are usually pretty reasonable. They’re usually trying to achieve something. And what you need to know is what they’re trying to achieve and why. And I think that sort of orientation you have when you’re a diplomat, that helps …

I worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and as beleaguered and awful as those two countries are, you go there as a diplomat, you have a relationship with them. And you assume that relationship’s going to continue, and you want it to continue, because if it doesn’t continue, you can’t get anything done.

That’s the same thing if you’re in the University of Hawaii. The University of Hawaii has a relationship with the state of Hawaii, and you’ve got to work at that relationship, all the time, to see how do you keep it functioning. … This actually would be more of the president than the board. …

Q: Wouldn’t the chairman of the board have a similar interplay to maintain?

A: Yes, and I can tell you about that, too. That’s been one of the things I’ve tried to work on a lot.

Q: How do you view this challenge, given the semi-autonomous status of UH?

A: I hate that term, “autonomy.” Because if you want to talk about autonomy, it’s not going to take you anywhere you want to go. It’s so abstract, it’s so ill-defined. People can have widely differing ideas of what it means, and we’ll probably end up arguing about it.

But if you look at the practical side of it, the first thing is the state gives us a lot of money, and so they control not all of our purse strings but a lot of our purse strings. And they allow us to control our tuition, pretty much. So, from that point of view, to say that we’re somehow independent, we’re separate from the state would be incorrect.

But because we’re a university, we do things differently than most other organizations in this government, and we need some flexibility to do these things. … This is like the Department of Education, but still, a college is a bit different. It needs more flexibility in how you handle it. …

Sometimes the Legislature gets fed up with us, and they say, ‘Well, do this, that and the other thing.’ And we have to try and go back and reason with them and try to understand where they’re coming from.

Last year, one of their provisos, they were upset about the salaries that we pay not only faculty but our executive managers, because they’re higher than the state salaries. That’s one of the areas where we need some flexibility, because we’re in a market called higher education, and we hire people there, which is different from the state.

So we responded to this proviso, which was to begin voting on every appointment in the executive management level who makes $150,000 or more. …

But the point was, we’re concerned about these salaries, too. Our interests weren’t that different from the Legislature. …

Q: There had been an “autonomy” exemption from state procurement control. How do you assess that?

A: It lasted two years, and then they took it back away from us. It gave us some freedom to do things quicker, faster, with fewer approvals. And I think there was concern that perhaps that the contracts were going to just one or two or three or four companies, that they weren’t being distributed as widely as they were before. …

Q: If there was increased oversight, do you think UH would want that exemption back?

A: Sure. Sure we would. But the most important thing is — and this is a hard thing to tease out — where are the interests on both sides? I think on our side it’s pretty straightforward, what we’re trying to do. On the state side, it’s much more complicated. You have to understand that and work through it very carefully. And we thought we had done that. But apparently it didn’t work.

Q: How do you feel about the prospects for catching up with the construction backlog?

A: Depending on how you count, we have about $485 million of what we call the backlog of deferred maintenance, … and, of that, about $405 million of it is right here in Manoa, our oldest campus. The other $80 million or so is scattered between a couple of the community colleges and a little bit at UH-Hilo. That can be taken care of in a year or so. The $405 million that we have here is probably going to take more like eight or 10 years, … if we get the money to do it. …

We had some money that came out of our core budget over the past several years. We want that money replaced, and if it were put back in our core budget, that means we would have a little more flexibility in going out and getting bonds, which could help us finance at least the first half of the work on Manoa.

Q: The money taken from the core budget, was that due to budget cuts a few years back?

A: There were budget cuts but it was due to the UHPA money (UH Professional Assembly, the faculty union).

Q: The raises?

A: Well, the cuts and then the snap-back, the 3 percent raise. So, there’s a history to all of this, and the folks at the Legislature, they remember that history. From my point of view, there is a history, yes, but there is also a need. And we have to take care of it.

If we get the money, we could take care of it in eight or 10 years, and some of that will be coming out of tuition. If we don’t get the money, it will take longer. But there’s no question in my mind that we’ve got to fix Manoa. We can’t just ignore the issue.

The board has made the most intense and concerted effort it ever has to try to deal with this problem. We have this moratorium on new construction. There are a lot of exceptions, I’ll grant you … but we’re focusing on getting Manoa fixed. And we’re working hard at it.

Q: When you say working hard, do you mean lobbying, approaching the Legislature to persuade them?

A: Yes. Yes. All 15 of us.

Q: Been working the hallways at the Capitol, have you?

A: I have. I just turned in my parking stubs. (Laughs.) But yes, we have. And it’s the first time since I’ve been on the board that we’ve had all our regents working the Legislature to the degree they can. We think it’s very important for us to do.

Q: So how’s it going down there? Do you feel like …

A: I feel like not everyone agrees with us 100 percent, but they recognize that there’s a problem and it has to be fixed. And there’s some other ideas on how to fix it. Obviously, we like ours, but we’re willing to work with people to come up with solutions, and that’s what we want to do.

Q: Do you think the biggest issue is the use of tuition funds?

A: Tuition’s an issue, because you want to have an affordable education. To some degree, there’s a relationship between state support and tuition. … To the degree that we don’t get state support, we either have to reduce costs or we have to raise tuition. And if we have to fix this campus, if the state won’t support it, then yes, we’ll have to use tuition.

Q: But you’re anticipating some kind of mix of the two?

A: Yes, and borrowing money. … We have a big tuition increase coming up, we have a schedule of tuition increases, and the highest tuition raises (7 percent in each of two years) are coming up. That will allow us to service the debt, too.

Q: So, these aren’t tuition increases beyond what was already programmed?

A:. No. So when you look at it, we’re trying to balance state support with tuition. If you go throughout the United States, state support for higher education has been, in general, declining, and it’s a long-term trend. It’s declined less in Hawaii than in most other states, but it has declined here, as well.