The University of Hawaii Board of Regents has come to the end of its year-long process of searching for the next person to lead the UH system, landing some distance away from where members predicted they’d be.

The regents had announced that the finalists for UH president would comprise a list of five or six candidates. They ended up with only two: the interim president, David Lassner; and the former commander of the U.S. Army Pacific, retired Lt. Gen. Francis Wiercinski, now a strategic business consultant focused on the Asia-Pacific region. Lassner’s permanent position is as the university’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer.

Despite the rocky path, the preferable course still remains: Make the selection as scheduled, rather than restart the search process, as has been proposed by state Senate President Donna Mercado Kim and others.

Regents must focus on making a choice based on what UH needs most urgently at Bachman Hall. And that is, a chief executive with proven leadership capability and the willingness to promote the system’s strengths and take on its weaknesses.

The case for making a timely decision is strong despite the fact that the process has been dogged by criticism — a sadly common occurrence with so many UH initiatives in recent years.

Some complaints are simply unfair, such as the protests by those in the university community who have concluded Wiercinski’s military career somehow disqualifies him from this job. They are wrong. His position managing a complex system of separate operations spanning a wide region employs skills applicable to any top-level administrative office.

As for the critique of the process itself, some of it does have merit. Regents may have been able to better assure the public that the best candidates were approached had the search been conducted through a national committee. Questions that were raised about potential nominees to the post being overlooked may have been avoided if a professional headhunting company experienced with these processes had been running things all along.

The early-June selection deadline the regents set for themselves seems motivated by the desire to allow current board members, including three whose terms will expire June 30, to make the choice.

That’s not persuasive.

However, there is another, more compelling reason: The executive vice president of academic affairs position tops the list of jobs to be filled, but only after the new president is in place to guide that selection.

The Star-Advertiser editorial board has met with both candidates and finds them to be qualified, even if neither has followed a conventional path to a university presidency.

Lassner has a deep knowledge of the university system, having earned his degrees there and spending most of his career on the Manoa campus. He understands the conventions and layers of academia. However, his work has concentrated on the technological aspects of UH instructional services and system operations rather than on research and instruction itself. He’s had less than a year as interim and may have pulled his executive punches, so it’s unclear what he can really deliver.

Wiercinski has executive experience dealing with top-tier leaders across the Pacific basin, including the governor, members of Congress and others with whom a university president also would need to interact. But he is not a product of the academic milieu, completing a bachelor’s degree and postgraduate certificate studies before rising on the military ladder. Degrees aren’t central to the core functions of the job, but it would still be a hurdle to overcome with some in the university circle.

The regents are duty-bound to get beneath the surface and assess these candidates’ managerial styles and histories. Doing their homework should give them the confidence to make a decision based on what the university needs, not on what is expedient.

And what the university needs is a dynamic leader who can forge a stronger community commitment, from political and business leaders, to support the state’s only public university.

The top administrator must pull together a plan for retiring, at long last, the backlog of facilities improvements the system needs. This will serve the existing student body and make UH more marketable as an Asia-Pacific regional center of excellence that could attract international students and researchers.

The president must strengthen the components within the campuses that can prepare more of the state’s students for careers and fuel the research that underlies future economic development.

If that sounds like a tall order, it is. It’s up to the regents to recognize just how high the stakes are, and make a well-informed decision.