UH Regents seeking to find proper balance in oversight

Through an NCAA investigation, a costly series of contract buyouts and escalating debt, the University of Hawaii has increasingly sought to calculate a proper level of Board of Regents oversight of athletics.

At a school where, over the years, some regents have been up to their elbows in athletics and others have been content to collect free tickets and stay far in the background, it is a question that has hung over sports in Manoa practically since the Board of Athletic Control was phased out in the late 1940s.

Now, the current regents take their swing at divining the so-far elusive formula on a couple of fronts at Friday’s monthly meeting.

According to the posted agenda, there is to be a “review and approval of consolidated revised goals” regarding “appropriate oversight over the integrity of the athletics program and its alignment with the academic mission of UH.”

In addition there is to be discussion on a proposal to revise a regents policy that would give the UH president more latitude in approving coaches’ contracts without having to go to the board for approval.

What emerges will hopefully culminate a nearly six-year search to forge a formal statement of intent.

Some might wonder why regents even need to conduct oversight over athletics when they don’t do the same for, say, the Department of East Asian Languages &Literatures.

But — for better or worse — EALL doesn’t draw the public attention or, when something goes wrong, have the same potential for embarrassment that athletics might.

It makes little sense for regents to immerse themselves in the the minutiae of day-to-day athletics operations such as whether somebody gets a one- or two-year extension. The kind of things that are in the province of an athletic director the school spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on.

But it does behoove the regents to have a handle on big-ticket items, not to mention how its millions are being spent, how NCAA rules are adhered to and how the fortunes of its teams are trending.

On one hand it was regents interference that helped get basketball coach Gib Arnold the lucrative contract that UH spent a fortune to extricate itself from. But, on the other, it was 11th-hour regents action that torpedoed a three-year extension, with a $41,000 raise, that was sitting on the Manoa Chancellor’s desk awaiting a signature when NCAA investigators came calling.

In the wake of the so-called “Wonder Blunder” episode and other problems, regents sought to better define their role in supervision of athletics. A task force was convened in 2012 and bylaws were amended to commission a special panel — the Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics — in 2013.

UH Regents, according to the amendment, envisioned a committee that “would allow the Board to exercise greater oversight and to have a clear and defined portal into the BOR for the two intercollegiate athletics programs at UH.”

The thinking was in line with the Association of Governing Boards, which, amid several national scandals, recommended that university governing bodies have a committee “with a defined role of looking at campus athletics.”

Now, perhaps, we find out what that means and how it is to be accomplished.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.