Greenwood has learned to put out fires early

More than 4,500 miles and a world of circumstance away from scandal-tossed State College, Pa., this week, you wonder how much Penn State’s problems have resonated in Manoa athletics.

Specifically how much of the swift, decisive hand that University of Hawaii President M.R.C. Greenwood has exhibited in sports matters these past eight months has been the result of witnessing the drubbing her colleague Graham Spanier set himself up for at Penn State?

Spanier was Penn State’s president for 16 years until Nov. 9, 2011, when he was fired amid the rising revelations about lack of alacrity and duty in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.

He was also someone well known to Greenwood, who served with him on several boards and committees, including the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board and Association of Land-Grant Universities Council of Presidents, and a person for whom she is said to have had high regard.

Two weeks after Spanier was sacked we saw Greenwood leap to action amid football point-shaving allegations at UH. She immediately marched with retinue in tow down to HPD headquarters. While some around the school suggested the task might have been better accomplished less explosively, she was having none of it. "Whether or not we think it is credible, we report it," Greenwood said at the time.

She dismissed suggestions of a Penn State wake-up call saying, "This kind of allegation would have precipitated the same response no matter when this had happened."

Perhaps, but a few months earlier the joke around UH had been that when something went wrong in athletics Greenwood was likely to say, "Well, those are (Virginia Hinshaw’s) teams" and leave Hinshaw, the Manoa chancellor, who ostensibly had oversight of the program, to deal with it.

Greenwood had previously served at UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, schools that didn’t have major college athletic programs or passionate statewide followings. And the lack of experience showed initially.

When the Western Athletic Conference began to unravel and UH’s fate was left hanging, legend around Manoa had it that some power brokers took Greenwood aside and explained the facts of life. That while telescopes on Mauna Kea were certainly a point of pride to the institution, the citizenry, for better or worse, was more likely to storm the ivory towers if the football and Rainbow Wahine volleyball teams were left out in the cold.

That was about the time she began to take something of an interest in athletics and when former All-Pro lineman Rockne Freitas, who had been chancellor at Hawaii Community College, came on board as a vice president and eventually become the athletic adviser.

By July 9, when the Stevie Wonder fiasco landed in her Bachman Hall inbox, Greenwood had come to understand, both from watching what had taken place at Penn State and from a better feel for her own domain, that a wise college president deals with smoke in the athletic department before it becomes a bonfire under the chief executive’s chair.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.