Even when UH does right thing, it doesn’t quite get it

We don’t yet know who the next men’s basketball coach at the University of Hawaii will be, but we see who is willing to stand up and make some necessary calls for the Manoa campus.

Robert Bley-Vroman, former Dean of the College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, has been the interim Manoa chancellor for less than three months, but, by his decision to terminate both head coach Gib Arnold and assistant Brandyn Akana, he has already gone beyond some of his invertebrate predecessors.

For too long and on too many crucial athletic issues, chancellors have either been content to follow the bread crumbs left by athletic directors, do boosters’ bidding — or stick their heads deep in the lawn surrounding Hawaii Hall.

It is part of why little has been done to tackle the long-running athletic budget crisis and why so many hirings have backfired.

But Bley-Vroman is, so far, apparently both a quick study and willing to tackle sticky issues like they were Romanian verbs. Until he put his foot down last month, UH was one signature away from gifting Arnold with a three-year contract extension — complete with a $21,000 raise that boosters clamored for — and a package worth $365,000 annually.

Which would have meant that if UH decided to remove Arnold under those terms, the school would have owed him $1,324,333 instead of the approximately $229,333 they are currently on the hook for.

Bley-Vroman subsequently followed through on information unearthed in both the NCAA investigation and, you suspect, internal inquires, to make, or at least proceed, with the termination call. 

Unfortunately, even when UH does something right, as it did in this case, it tends to shroud it in the kind of secrecy that can’t help but invite skepticism.

UH has a long-running public credibility problem and whomever was advising the Manoa chancellor has done both he and the tax-paying public a disservice by perpetuating it. 

UH’s penchant for opacity has done the near impossible in this case; it has given Arnold’s curious contention of being the aggrieved party instant plausibility.  By playing things so suffocatingly close to the vest and hiding behind a five paragraph press release, UH encourages the distrust many feel and confirms their wildest suspicions.

UH could — and should — have been more transparent as to the reasons why it dismissed Arnold and Akana instead of waiting for the NCAA to hang out the dirty laundry.

UH bemoans the number of information leaks from its ivory towers while failing to grasp that its short-sighted official silence encourages frustrated employees to try to bring light to the situation.

To be sure, there are limits on personnel information that must be observed, but UH could have shared enough facts behind its reasoning so that the public isn’t left to speculate about back room plots and nefarious machinations.

Not that we should be surprised, of course. 

It took UH more than six weeks after the NCAA inquiry hit the headlines to publicly acknowledge there even was an investigation.

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