Like most University of Hawaii sports fans, I was both happy and relieved when the Rainbow Warriors defeated the University of Northern Iowa Saturday night for its second win in the last 15 games.

But I also was concerned about the victory after reading Star-Advertiser columnist Ferd Lewis’s pre-game story.

Lewis noted that the contest was a "guarantee game" in which a Football Bowl Subdivision team, such as UH, schedules a game against a lower-tier opponent, such as the University of Northern Iowa, in order to fatten up its win-loss record. Since there is no inherent benefit for the almost certain loser to sign up for such a contest, the projected winner in a guarantee game pays the would-be victim handsomely for its services.

Other guarantee-game opponents for UH in recent years have included Lamar, Charleston Southern and Northern Colorado, contests UH paid for and won by an average score of 61-5. Last week, UH handed over $300,000 to UNI — that’s right, $300,000 — and won by a score of 27-24.

In contrast, UH-Manoa’s academic departments recently were told that, because of a financial crisis, an across-the-board hiring freeze was now in place. Certain exceptions have now been made, but the reality is that throughout the UH flagship campus, professors with lifetimes of accomplishment are not being replaced when they retire. And there is almost certain to be a purge of lecturers in spring 2015.

Lecturers are instructors with advanced degrees who are hired in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, business, education, arts and elsewhere on a course-by-course basis. They are paid about $5,000 per course. But for lack of funding, many of those lecturers now are unlikely to be teaching any students at all next semester.

These decisions were made by the same administration that had no problem paying $300,000 to the University of Northern Iowa for its football team to lose to the Rainbow Warriors. It also is the administration that no doubt is planning huge guarantee-game payments for additional such contests in the years ahead.

That $300,000 equals the cost of 60 courses taught by lecturers for a thousand or more tuition-paying students — courses scheduled for next semester but that now may not be taught because UH claims the Manoa campus is broke.

There is a great deal of anger among students and faculty at the UH flagship campus these days. It is anger based on a perception of external campus interference by a few high-ranking individuals associated with the university, business and political communities — interference that is diverting money and resources from undergraduate and graduate education and toward enormously expensive peripheral endeavors that cannot or will not pay their own way.

In the larger scheme of things at UH-Manoa, where many millions of dollars are at stake, $300,000 in misplaced priorities intended to guarantee the football team a single victory might not seem to matter much. But it matters a great deal to students who are deprived of classes they may need to graduate. And it is symptomatic of a larger pattern of outside interference that now infects both the Manoa campus and Hawaii’s entire system of public higher education.

The majority of UH students grew up in local families and attended local high schools. They and their parents are paying doubly — through taxes and with tuition — for a university education that will prepare them for lives and careers extending decades into the future. They deserve much better treatment than this.