Storm clouds threaten progress at UH

We don’t normally expect good news from a University of Hawaii administration that signed a weird contract when they hired Gib Arnold as basketball coach — $1.4 million upon termination! — and spent $1.2 million to fix the $200,000 Stevie Wonder blunder.

However, there were two bright spots recently:

» UH President David Lassner is accepting a relatively modest salary and didn’t demand the sort of golden parachute that cost us millions of dollars when previous presidents Evan Dobelle and M.R.C. Greenwood left.

» The UH Regents stepped in to moderate the latest in a long series of sharp tuition increases.

For years, highly paid UH administrators have repeatedly ignored complaints that what they considered minor increases were difficult for students with low-wage jobs. When higher and higher tuition costs finally caused a drop in UH-Manoa enrollment, the regents made a much-needed intervention to slow things down.

However, despite some good news, there are storm clouds on the horizon. Among them:

» There is a laudable effort to increase two- and four-year graduation rates to 55 percent by 2025. That’s what those mysterious "55 by 25" TVs ads are about. But there is also a dangerous effort to push students with jobs, even those working 30 and 40 hours a week, to take five classes each semester.

This is a recipe for disaster, since they will not have the time to do so much classwork properly. Someone up there doesn’t understand that many of our students work long hours and cannot take a full load of classes. UH should back off and let working students go to school part-time.

» Total community college enrollment has steadily decreased, as low unemployment rates tempt would-be students with lots of available jobs. Nevertheless, UH administrators have decreed that, even without any new recruitment strategy or increased recruitment budgets, in the future enrollment will somehow magically increase.

This would be harmless fantasy baseball except that if the goals are not met, the campuses will face budget cuts, resulting in fewer available classes for students and further damaging enrollment — a Catch-22.

It is legitimate for the campuses to be held responsible for graduation rates and other measures of student success. But budgets should not be tied to enrollment increases.

» New wrongheaded faculty evaluations are being proposed. Students are already given a battery of questions asking whether their English classes have improved their math skills, whether their math classes have improved their ethical understanding, whether their science classes have improved their respect for varied cultural values, and so forth.

One new question would ask whether "faculty within the college worked as a cohesive unit to promote student success."

How on Earth would students know whether faculty are working as a cohesive unit?

Another asks whether "the course challenged me to solve complex problems, explore new areas of knowledge, and/or engage in self-directed research."

Sounds great on the surface. But anyone who actually works with undergrad- uate students knows that in reality they work to acquire existing knowledge while being closely directed by faculty. UH needs to reveal all the new questions and listen to feedback before putting more deadwood in teaching evaluations.

Professors are sometimes accused of being out of touch with reality outside the campus. When we look at these bright ideas, it seems that some UH administrators are out of touch with reality on campus.