UH president sheds light on governor’s interference

The big headline from Tannya Joaquin’s fine Hawaii News Now interview with retiring University of Hawaii President M.R.C. Greenwood was about state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim’s inquiry on her son’s UH law school application.

As interesting were revelations about how deeply Gov. Neil Abercrombie was involved in the political pressure on Greenwood to give former athletic director Jim Dono­van his job back after the Stevie Wonder fiasco.

The governor claimed at the time he was little more than an interested observer.

But Greenwood told Joaquin that Abercrombie pressed her in several communications to reinstate Dono­van, despite the loss of $200,000 in the botched concert and other serious problems in the athletic department.

"I told him that was going to be difficult to do because we were beginning to feel we needed to do a far more thorough investigation of the whole athletics department," Greenwood said.

She said Abercrombie made clear that Dono­van had "friends in high places," especially in the Legislature, and that failure to comply would come "at some considerable risks to the university."

Greenwood provided a voice mail in which Abercrombie said, "M.R.C., it’s the governor calling. I realize that the suggestions I made before were not carried through on, and that of course is your business and Tom Apple’s business. I can assure you if this is not resolved on Wednesday, by Thursday, you’re going to be in the thick of a Senate investigation and all that it entails."

A Kim-led Senate investigation did ensue, subjecting Greenwood and UH regents to unusual hostility while Dono­van and arena manager Rich Sheriff — the employees most directly responsible for the concert mess — got kid gloves.

Greenwood said Dono­van’s removal was an internal personnel matter, and she felt obliged to defend the semiautonomous university against political interference.

"I consider this a very serious endangerment to the university," she told Joaquin. "While it was the athletic director today, it could be a dean another day or a course they wanted us to not offer or offer another day. These are the reasons our accrediting agency insists that we have independence from political influence."

Abercrombie’s pressure is especially troubling because he comes out of the university and knows the importance of academic autonomy.

Instead of playing messenger boy for outrageously meddling lawmakers, he should have told them to back off and defended UH against legislative retaliation.

Whatever the problems at UH during Greenwood’s tenure, she deserves credit for having the guts to stand up to political bullying that threatened UH’s integrity.

Her principled stand will likely go for naught; one of the first things regents did in searching for her successor was to meet secretly with Abercrombie, tainting the process with political interference from the start.