UH fiasco trying public’s patience

An important function was performed for the public in Monday’s state Senate hearing: shining a light on a compounding blunder by the University of Hawaii administration that’s been obscured by a protective fog for several weeks.

The infuriating part is that it took the Senate to provide this service. The Senate Special Committee on Accountability, by convening the hearing, stepped up to seek an accounting of the Stevie Wonder concert debacle, which started to unfold in early July. That quest should have been the duty of the UH Board of Regents, which for several weeks seemed to be part of the problem instead of getting to the bottom of it.

The panel lacked subpoena powers, but over the grueling course of the six-hour hearing led by Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, an important conclusion could be drawn nonetheless. For an institution that has placed a high premium on autonomy, the UH administration has stumbled badly here. UH President M.R.C. Greenwood surely can expect increasing oversight from lawmakers who approve the budget for the state’s university system. All it takes to justify that oversight is a glance at the mounting expenses. The scam, perpetrated by a bogus promoter pitching Wonder for a fundraiser to benefit UH athletics, cost the university $200,000 for a "deposit" that employees blindly paid.

The losses could have stopped there, but Greenwood’s mishandling of the situation led to a dubious settlement with Jim Donovan, then the embattled athletic director, being transferred to a just-invented job in the office of Tom Apple, the newly hired Manoa campus chancellor. That added another $200,000-plus annual salary to the tab, times three years. More bills are coming in from two law firms hired as consultants in sorting out the mess. This is money UH can’t afford to fritter away.

Much of the responsibility for that has to fall on Greenwood’s shoulders, and it was obvious from her defensive posture at the hearing that she realized it, even stating at one point that her "job was on the line."

What isn’t clear is who is going to hold the president’s feet to the fire? When the regents retreated into a seven-hour, closed-door meeting soon after the concert fleecing came to light, they emerged with no corrective course, no accountability.

Greenwood faced an admittedly difficult situation, and the decision to put Donovan on leave was defensible during the initial investigation. She said the decision to remove Donovan from his job before his contract ended — a decision apparently backed by the regents — predated the whole Wonder fiasco. It was based, she said, on dissatisfaction with his handling of the football program’s departure from the Western Athletic Conference and unhappiness over former head coach Greg McMackin.

But the administration, for some inexplicable reason, then exacerbated a bad situation. Once Donovan was "cleared" of wrongdoing in the Wonder investigation, he should have been returned to his job to run out the final months of his contract. That would been a clean exit and given time for the new chancellor to get his bearings and be part of the decision-making over a new era of the athletic department; it is, after all, the chancellor’s job to do so. Clear lines in the chain of command is a necessity in any organization, and it’s been severely muddled at UH.

There’s plenty of blame to go around here. Greenwood cited the political interference in the Donovan issue — going all the way up to the governor’s office. In fact, external interference is counterproductive to a well-run university. The conundrum here, though, is that UH has done little to demonstrate it deserves that deference.

Sen. Sam Slom made that point, disputing the notion that the concert scam was sophisticated, insisting that a private business would have asked the hard questions.

"The difference is, it’s their money," he said, "and this is why the people are so concerned in our community."

That is the point that ought to clang like a gong across the Manoa campus. Greenwood bemoans that the scandal has clouded the university’s reputation, but it’s the taxpayers of Hawaii that should be furious. They are underwriting all this foolishness, after all, and they’re running out of patience.

The challenge at the next Senate hearing, now set for Tuesday, will be to glean evidence of a corrective course, far more than has been seen so far.