What a waste. Not just the day. The whole putrid affair, and what it says about the way things work — or don’t work — in our state and specifically at the University of Hawaii.

At the end there was acknowledgement of mistakes and there were apologies from president M.R.C. Greenwood and in a statement from the Board of Regents. They gave us the 57-page investigation report late in the day, and we’ll be dissecting that as quickly as we can.

Otherwise? Pretty much status quo. Maybe some "training" and "job shuffling" to come, we’re told.

It took them a month and then 71⁄2 hours Wednesday to come up with that? Basically, "My bad, now let’s move on."

UH’s idea of resolution — basically doing nothing but promising better — is completely unsatisfactory. And, sadly, that’s no surprise.

Blanket apologies without specifics are easy. How about some real ones?

Start with your most important customers, your students. Explain how you’re going to make up for losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, then spending even more on the investigation and Wednesday’s expensive waste of a day.

Those are resources that should be dedicated to improving the education for which they pay.

How about the people who had other business Wednesday with the BOR and sat around for hours while the president and the regents spent all day messing around with this mess?

There were just a few other trivial matters on the agenda. Oh, nothing important. Just the two-year budget for the entire University system, a $2,000,000 bond re-purposing and a couple of other bits of meaningless folly.

Now they all have to come back on another yet undetermined day. And the regents, too. This is more than irritating, it’s more time and money; neighbor-island regents have to be flown to Oahu again.

Next, how about a sincere apology to the laid-off $40,000-a-year employees you offended with flippant remarks about how easy it is to turn a $100,000 job into a $200,000 job, seemingly at your whim?

Just so your "fantastic" athletic director whose department was most instrumental in losing $200,000 could be reassigned to another job and maybe not sue you.

If so much salary money is just sitting around being unused, maybe more of it should go toward instructors. It’s a college, right?

Finally, the state taxpayers. Don’t tell us to remember "the university is the victim" of fraud. We already know that. Kiss the misplaced money that started this whole thing goodbye.

Victim of its own incompetence and inappropriate political pressure explains it better. And that makes all of us who are stakeholders in UH victims, too.

It reached the point that this is about a failed concert the same way Watergate was about a burglary.

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Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783.