The University of Hawaii Board of Regents on Thursday defended its presidential search process, saying it still plans to make a selection sometime next month between finalists David Lassner and Frank Wiercinski despite calls to reopen the search.
The nominations have stirred controversy in university circles, with some objecting to Wiercinski as an unconventional candidate because of his exclusively military background, and others opposing Lassner because they speculate the longtime UH executive would maintain the status quo.
A regents selection committee announced the candidates earlier this month following a nearly yearlong search. Lassner, the UH system’s vice president for information technology, has been serving as interim president since September. Wiercinski retired last year at the rank of lieutenant general after 34 years of service in the Army.
On June 2 at 1 p.m., at the UH Information Technology Center on the Manoa campus, the board will meet in an open session to conduct a formal vote on the next UH president.
At the regents’ monthly meeting Thursday, a group of UH-Manoa graduate students complained that the search process was flawed and needed to be redone, while another group of students and faculty asked the board to reject Wiercinski’s nomination, presenting a petition with some 600 signatures opposed to the former military officer.
Oceanography doctoral student Michelle Tigchelaar, incoming president of Manoa’s Graduate Student Organization, said the group this week approved a so-called vote of no confidence in the regents’ presidential selection committee, arguing that neither nominee should be in the running.
Tigchelaar said the organization found it troubling that the search committee named Lassner a finalist when it initially said any interim candidate would not be eligible for the permanent job.
"Regardless of the motivation behind allowing the nomination of Dr. Lassner as a presidential candidate, we feel that his nomination gives the appearance of bending the rules and favoritism," she said.
She said Wiercinski, on the other hand, "does not even meet the minimum requirements that were set out by the committee," citing his lack of a graduate degree and experience in higher education.
"We feel that the search process is flawed, and as a result, we think that the search process did not elicit faith in the resulting candidates regardless of the individual merits or qualifications of these two candidates," Tigchelaar said.
Regent Carl Carlson, who served as chairman of the selection committee, defended the committee’s work.
"I’m disappointed to hear that there is push back to what the committee found. The committee worked really hard," he said after the meeting.
In its final report to the full board, the selection committee said it received 60 applications and 20 nominations and concluded that Lassner and Wiercinski are highly qualified for the job.
The regents did not take any action Thursday to reopen the search.
"There are some who have concerns about our process, but I think we’ve tried to make it as open and as fair as we possibly can," regents Chairman John Holzman said.
Carlson said the search committee has been dissolved. "We’re done. There hasn’t been any talk of reopening the search process. If you think about what the ramifications of that might be, what would that accomplish and how would that work? That’s a question people who are critical of the process need to think about," he said.
"If you reopen the search, what you do is you put the interim president as interim for a much longer period of time," he added. "Meanwhile, the university has a lot of work that needs to be done, and it’s more effective and easier for a president to do the work than an interim one. So I think the university gets damaged."
Tigchelaar said after the meeting that her group will need to discuss its next steps. "I’m not sure how powerful we actually are and what our options are for putting pressure on the board," she said.
Meanwhile, the organizers behind the petition opposed to Wiercinski said they plan to keep the online petition open until the board makes a decision.
"We will keep it up until the decision is announced. Then I think that depending on what decision the board makes, we’ll take it from there," said UH-Manoa English professor Cynthia Franklin, who collaborated on the petition and an accompanying letter to the board with graduate students and faculty across Manoa departments.
The letter lists four objections to Wiercinski: a lack of experience in higher-education leadership; a lack of social, cultural and historical knowledge of doing business in Hawaii; the potential for him to "contribute to the militarization of the university" through classified military research; and his inability to cite specific goals or approaches to support the university’s strategic plan.
