As a group of 36 faculty and staff from the University of Hawaii-Manoa campus with, collectively, hundreds of years of experience with UH, we feel that it is our duty to speak up about the recent firing of Chancellor Tom Apple.

We have been responsible for bringing almost $1 billion of externally funded projects to the state — averaging $60 million a year — and have taught thousands of undergraduate, and hundreds of graduate students. We work in many of the UH-Manoa departments, ranging from research units like the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and the Institute for Astronomy, to academic departments as varied as Economics, Art History or Physics. Some of us come from the Cancer Center and the medical school.

We share a common deep concern for the well-being of our university, which now appears to be threatened by an administration whose actions are neither transparent nor inclusive of faculty and student stakeholders. The public events of the last few weeks involving Apple, UH President David Lassner and UH Cancer Center Director Michele Carbone leave us with little confidence in the management of the university.

It is no exaggeration to say that recent administrative revelations have been an embarrassment to all of us. The lack of transparency, the absence of broad input into these decisions, and the apparent disregard for the impact of the Cancer Center’s management blunders on the full UH-Manoa community, are critical UH management failures.

This concerns all of us, because it threatens our long-term ability to build a university with an outstanding commitment to teaching and research. Further, inappropriate interference from outside the university, first publicly exerted in support of the controversial Cancer Center director, appears now to have spread campuswide with the precipitous and poorly justified firing of Apple. Such interference publicly detracts from our long-term mission and contributes to the perception of a university in chaos.

We ask the UH Board of Regents to take exemplary and perhaps extraordinary action:

» To engage a broadly representative faculty body in an investigation of the chancellor’s firing and, unless for verifiably egregious reasons, to reinstate him.

» To engage a representative faculty body in an impartial review of the UH Cancer Center management and, to take whatever actions are required to recover a positive environment for cancer research and education within the center.

Extraordinary action and complete transparency is needed in order to reassure the UH-Manoa community, and our broader state of Hawaii constituency, that the UH-Manoa mission remains intact.

Jeff Kuhn, left, John Learned, center, and Loic Le Marchand submitted this commentary on behalf of themselves and 33 other individuals. Kuhn is a University of Hawaii astronomer; Learned is a UH physics professor; Le Marchand is a physician and professor at the UH Cancer Center and Principal Investigator of the Multiethnic Cohort Study. The full list of signatories: Tom Browder, Catherine Chan-Halbrendt, Linda Chang, Brian Chee, Harry Davis, Phillip von Doetinchem, Harald Ebeling, Sarah Fagents, Adrian Franke, Brian Glazer, Shadia Habbal, Tim Halliday, Robert Joseph, Nick Kaiser, Jeff Kuhn, Pui Lam, Boryann Liaw, Unhee Lim, John Learned, Loic Le Marchand, Jelena Maricic, Gertraud Maskarinec, Andrew Mason, Joseph Mobley, Cynthia Ning, Kirsten Pauka, Dusko Pavlovic, Joe Ritter, John Szostak, Xerxes Tata, Hansong Wang, Les Watling, George Wilkens, Lynne Wilkens, Angel Yanagihara.