Students should be UH priority

The unpleasant business of balancing the University of Hawaii-Manoa’s budget cost one chancellor his job and continues to bedevil his successor. UH’s flagship campus, while not bleeding red ink, is drawing down on its financial reserves at an unsustainable rate.

So far, the UH administration’s efforts to restrict hiring and impose tighter spending controls have been met with the cries of protest from faculty and graduate students deeply suspicious of the judgment and motives of UH-Manoa leadership.

It’s not surprising. No one wants to feel the pain of the budget-cutting knife. But it hasn’t helped that the decision-making at UH-Manoa can be maddeningly opaque.

So far, UH administrators have done a poor job explaining how they set priorities and allocate resources for the Manoa campus.

We hope that recent promises to develop a more predictable and transparent budgeting process will engender more confidence in the system and those who run it. It’s a tall challenge; there’s a lot of ill will to dispel.

When Chancellor Tom Apple was fired by newly installed UH President David Lassner in July, critics contended that Apple lost his job because he challenged excessive spending by some sacred cows — the UH Medical School and Cancer Center among them —and tried to fire then-Cancer Center Director Michele Carbone, a controversial figure with powerful friends.

It didn’t help that schools with the most students, primarily the colleges of Arts and Sciences, seem to get only a fraction of the tuition revenue they are bringing in, with the bulk distributed elsewhere. In the absence of a good explanation, this appeared to be patently unfair.

Carbone resigned on Friday, saying he wanted to return to research work. Unfortunately, the suspicions about Manoa’s leadership remain, and must be faced by interim Chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman.

Like Apple, the new chancellor instituted austerity measures that included restrictions on hiring and a warning to department heads to maintain tight spending controls.

This time, graduate students and faculty accused Bley-Vroman’s administration of saving money by targeting the most vulnerable and least influential interest group at UH — the students themselves.

They argued that despite the administration’s claims to the contrary, the austerity measures would inevitably require reducing the number of graduate student teaching assistants, and therefore the number of core/required classes students need to graduate.

To Bley-Vroman’s credit, he quickly issued a statement promising that teaching assistant positions, in which low-paid graduate students teach required courses, would not be cut for the spring 2015 semester. Core and required courses would be maintained, at least for now. Furthermore, Bley-Vroman said, UH-Manoa would adopt a new budget allocation model that should provide greater predictability and transparency. That includes a plan to standardize the amount of tuition revenues a school could keep — somewhere between 25 and 40 percent, according to vice chancellor Reed Dasenbrock.

The new model will be introduced for public review next month.

While UH-Manoa has an accumulated carried deficit of $31 million, Dasenbrock said he expects the campus to be fully in the black for the 2015-16 school year.

It’s a good start, but only a start. As a public university, UH must answer to those who pay the bills, primarily the students and the taxpayers. Those answers should be clear, thorough and without obfuscation.

The budget process should illuminate how UH sets its fiscal priorities. Given Hawaii’s geographic isolation, local students have fewer options to cope with the steeply rising cost of higher education. For many, UH is their best and only option. Their needs should be top of mind for UH administrators, and should be reflected in how tuition dollars are spent.