When state Rep. K. Mark Takai dared to summon University of Hawaii officials to appear before members of the Senate and House education committees five years ago, he was initially pilloried for it.

“Grandstander” and “publicity hound” were two of the gentler charges heaved his way.

But the 4-hour, 9-minute grilling of then-athletic director Herman Frazier and chancellor Denise Konan on statewide TV shed a lot of much-needed light on how the sports program was operated at the school.

It helped bring into public view the growing athletic department debt and lack of attention to coaches’ contracts, two of the issues that contributed to the sacking of Frazier less than eight months later.

Monday the Senate Special Committee on Accountability is scheduled to look into the Stevie Wonder concert debacle and has asked several UH officials to appear. Again, charges of “showboating” and such are being tossed around as Sen. Donna Mercado Kim prepares to convene the five-member committee.

But as Takai’s session underlined, when the school authorities leave so many questions unanswered, unasked or just swept under the Bachman Hall rug, the public is going to want somebody to get to the bottom of it.

If the UH administration’s overseers, the appointed Board of Regents, won’t do it, that can inevitably mean a date — or dates — in a Capitol hearing room, where legislators, the people who vote on UH appropriations, can demand answers. And where ‘Olelo’s cameras can provide an airing.

Just as Takai’s hearings began over a question about soap, or lack thereof, in the locker room that was deemed the “tip of the iceberg” and widened from there, Monday’s version started with a failed concert and has moved well past a canceled fundraising event. Kim, too, has invoked a “tip of the iceberg” reference.

Wherever they ultimately lead, the hearings shouldn’t be viewed as a threat to UH’s hard-won autonomy but rather as a reminder that with it comes a responsibility for openness. Arrogance and closed-door obfuscation aren’t part of the deal.

The tax-paying, ticket-buying public has a right to know where the money is going. And, in the case of the $200,000 wired to a Florida bank, who sent it there and who had oversight along the way. Or should have.

Monday will be an opportunity to ask pointed questions about who knew what and when they knew it; about who is running things and why they are doing it in the manner in which they are. These are precisely the kinds of questions that should have been posed and answered in the open more than a month ago.

Instead, they were done behind closed doors and in all-day executive session, transparency — and the public — be damned.

You don’t want the Legislature rolling up its sleeves and getting involved in UH operations very often. But sometimes there is nobody else.

And this is one of those times.

———

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