Dr. Carbone must be removed as director of UH Cancer Center

As current and former faculty members of the University of Hawaii Cancer Center (UHCC), it is our duty to speak out about the egregious conduct of the center director, Dr. Michele Carbone, and the deterioration of our academic environment.

We bring the great majority of the center’s federal research funding and its only training grant. Many of us have been at UH for 20-30 years and played key roles in building the national and international reputation that UHCC has enjoyed for decades.

Under Carbone’s tenure, these and other accomplishments have been seriously endangered. His mismanagement has resulted in a high turnover of administrative and fiscal staff and the departure of several successful faculty members. Ten different faculty members filed 25 grievances through the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly (UHPA). These are not the marks of a successful leader.

Complaints that were resolved against Carbone include inappropriate attempts to remove senior investigators from their own grants by fabricating facts to the federal granting agency; placing derogatory documents in personnel files; confiscation of faculty mail; and five violations of academic freedom. A single such violation would have made an administrator’s future tenuous in other institutions.

Carbone demanded that a faculty member stop all outside work immediately, despite requests to negotiate an orderly transition. Since the work included patient care, an abrupt stop would have endangered the lives of children with cancer by shutting down the state’s only pediatric stem cell transplant program. This was fortunately blocked by the then-vice chancellor for research and subsequent actions of UHPA.

Details of many of these grievances and their resolutions can be found on the UHPA website (http://www.uhpa.org/newsitems/cancer-center-news/).

Carbone, lacking any relevant administrative experience, was named as interim director in October 2008 and selected as director in August 2009 by former Manoa Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw over two very qualified candidates and against the recommendation of 87 percent of the UHCC faculty, who recognized in him an absence of the traits of a good leader.

His main task was to keep harmonious relationships with the politically powerful medical centers while developing clinical research in Hawaii, an area outside Carbone’s research expertise.

To help in this effort, he hired as a consultant, at very high compensation, Dr. Brian Issell, a former center director who was unsuccessful in building a clinical research program during his own tenure as director. After five years and spending large amounts of resources, they have not recruited any senior clinical oncologist to lead this effort.

Carbone is credited by supporters with getting the new Cancer Center building, but it was built with state cigarette tax funds secured by the former director. More important, a research center is defined by the caliber of the faculty and their research, not the building in which they work.

One example of Carbone’s recklessness is his idea, presented to the Legislature, to bring Chinese pharmaceutical companies to UHCC to help with a projected budget deficit, rather than seeking additional sources of research funding that would be the natural remedy for a research institute.

Carbone’s management lacks the transparency essential in managing taxpayer dollars. We urge the UH administration to conduct independent audits of the functioning of the UHCC. We also ask for a release of an anonymous “360 evaluation” of Carbone as director, executed by UH over a year ago.

Carbone is unsuited for the position of a UH research institute director. This was the conclusion of UH Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple, who twice attempted to remove him as director. We thank Apple for his courageous attempt to rectify the toxic environment at UHCC and ask that he not be further blocked by the Board of Regents, legislators and hospital executives in fulfilling his duty. Carbone must be removed immediately to give the faculty time to rebuild a nurturing research environment and prepare for the next peer-review of our Cancer Center designation by the NCI.

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This piece was co-signed by Cheryl Albright, professor at the School of Nursing & Dental Hygiene and Office of Public Health Studies; Robert Cooney, associate professor, Office of Public Health Studies; Adrian Franke, professor, UH Cancer Center; Laurence Kolonel, professor emeritus, Office of Public Health Studies; Loic Le Marchand, professor, UHCC; Unhee Lim, associate professor, UHCC; Gertraud Maskarinec, professor, UHCC; Suzanne Murphy, professor emeritus, UHCC; Randal Wada, associate professor, School of Nursing & Dental Hygiene and John A. Burns School of Medicine; Lynne Wilkens, professor, UHCC.