A marathon Senate panel meeting Monday on a botched benefit concert revealed a dysfunctional UH leadership team, embarrassed the university and raised serious governance and operational concerns, onlookers said.

One professor called the six hours of testimony by University of Hawaii officials before the special panel Hawaii’s version of the "Watergate hearings."

Others pointed out that many of the issues brought out at the meeting — concerning governance, accountability, and the roles of the UH president, chancellor and Board of Regents — have been raised before, while some worried the public display of mismanagement at UH may not be viewed kindly by the university’s accrediting agency.

"I don’t think there are any easy conclusions here," said Kitty Lagareta, who was vice chairwoman of the Board of Regents when the body initially fired former University of Hawaii President Evan Dobelle in 2004, then rescinded its decision and allowed him to resign with a severance package.

Lagareta, who was later named board chairwoman, said some of the problems raised at the hearing are the same as those the university was attempting to tackle when she was on the board, including "board and legislative micromanaging."

"As board chair, I have received calls from legislators on who to hire; I have had the experience of having to fix problems we didn’t create; and I have had the experience of weighing very carefully when you have a tough problem, what’s right for the university," she said. "I’m just really sad for the university. These are not new issues."

At Monday’s hearing, UH President M.R.C. Greenwood said she felt political pressure to allow then-athletic director Jim Donovan to keep his job in the wake of the failed concert. Instead, the school offered him a newly created position in marketing, with an annual salary of $211,000, for three years.

The Senate panel was convened to address a chorus of calls from the public to hold the university accountable for the botched Stevie Wonder concert, which was to be a benefit for the cash-strapped athletics department but ended up costing the school $200,000 in an alleged scam.

Senators had tough questions for Greenwood, Board of Regents Chairman Eric Martinson, Donovan and others in the first of two planned hearings by the Senate Special Committee on Accountability.

Bob Cooney, former chairman of the UH Faculty Senate, attended the meeting in person "without even taking a bathroom break."

"It was fascinating," he said. "The closest thing I can remember in my life to compare it to is the Watergate hearings."

Cooney said he worries that the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent so far on the concert blunder will hurt UH in the long run because legislators may want to exercise more control over UH affairs after revelations from Monday’s hearing.

"That’s the fear that the faculty have," Cooney said. "As a former researcher, autonomy is very important to be able to order supplies or equipment on grants and get repairs done without a lot of bureaucratic red tape and going through a million hurdles. On the other hand, they (UH administrators) have used autonomy to enrich people at the top and form little kingdoms. They’ve abused their autonomy."

The panelwill convene again Tuesday, and legislators are expected to pick up where they left off, with questions for the Board of Regents about its role in holding the university’s administration accountable and working to improve transparency.

State Sen. Jill Tokuda, vice chairwoman of the special Senate panel, said it’s vital that the university learn from its mistakes.

She said the board’s decision to form a working group to study university operations and the events that led up to the botched concert is a positive step, and necessary to allay concerns about UH’s management practices.

Tokuda said she met with officials from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which accredits UH, during a scheduled review last week, and they said they were pleased overall with the direction at UH-Manoa and the separation between the president’s office and the Manoa chancellor’s office.

But she said the board’s review is important "if we don’t want to end up in a place where we could be in trouble" with UH’s accrediting agency. "We’ve got to do this work now."

Tokuda called Monday’s hearing "difficult and very long." She added, "Definitely, I think we’re looking to see what else comes next in terms of answers, in terms of explanations. I think we’re all looking for more answers."

Ticket sales for the Aug. 18 Stevie Wonder concert were well under way on July 10, when Donovan announced there would be no concert because Wonder and his representatives had not authorized the event.

The following day, UH-Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple announced that Donovan and Stan Sheriff Center Manager Rich Sheriff had been placed on indefinite paid administrative leave while an investigation of the concert deal was conducted. UH officials also
explained they had paid $200,000 to a Florida company that purported to be authorized to book the star. The UH says it appears to have been the victim of fraud.

While Sheriff was reinstated to his position in August, Donovan was reassigned to a new, vaguely defined marketing role in the Manoa chancellor’s office.

Cooney and others said Donovan was the only UH official at Monday’s hearing who came out looking good.

While Greenwood frequently paused to consult with an outside attorney hired for the hearings, Cooney said Donovan "gave a very credible performance with no lawyer standing behind him."

Greenwood, Cooney said, "came across rather petulant. She offered no rational explanation for terminating his (Donovan’s) contract."

Bonnyjean Manini, the current UH-Manoa Faculty Senate chairwoman, declined comment until after Tuesday’s hearing. The Faculty Senate is considering a possible no-confidence vote for Greenwood at its next meeting on Oct. 17.

Political commentator Dan Boylan, who is also a UH-West Oahu history professor emeritus, scored Monday’s hearing heavily in favor of state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, who led the eight-member committee.

"She’s no joke and she bores in on people who come before her," said Boylan, a political columnist for MidWeek. "I don’t envy anybody who faces Donna Kim. And Greenwood admitted right off the bat that she was in a bad position and her job may be on the line — and it may be."

While Boylan is proud of the many accomplishments at UH, he said Monday’s Senate hearing was the result of a small-town, island community obsessed with UH athletics, especially UH football.

"In a town with no professional sports, everybody cares about (UH) sports. The governor cares about sports, the legislators care about sports, the students care about sports, people who have never come within an inch of one of the UH campuses care about sports," Boylan said.

Retired UH political science professor Neal Milner said he suspects that more people watched or read coverage of Monday’s hearing than have paid attention to any single political debate, forum or event this election season.

He worries that Monday’s hearing and the one on Tuesday could begin to unravel years of UH autonomy from the Legislature that was hard-won in a "trench-by-trench struggle."

"Autonomy has never really meant what a lot of people at the university want, which is for the politicians to keep their nose out of our business," Milner said. "The university would be a better place in lots of ways if politicians did in fact keep their noses out of their business, butit’s a public university and the Legislature has something to say about it. The problem comes when UH leaders make very public, very stupid decisions. So the Legislature steps in to say, ‘If you can’t run the place, we’ll go back and supervise it for you.’"

While some people watching Monday’s hearing say Greenwood didn’t come across well and Kim and other senators appeared to have the upper hand, Milner said "there was no winner in this. You’ve got a pile of garbage that you’ve got to talk about. How much of a gloss can you put on that?"

"The university as a whole is the casualty in this," Milner said. "This is one of those really public, concrete screw-ups that really take a crack at the university’s reputation. It’s these kinds of things that make people say, ‘Aha! I told you so.’"