A long time ago, a well-meaning friend gave me some career advice.
“You want a job with authority but without responsibility,” he said. “Not the other way around.”
Sounds great. But does such a thing exist?
The only one I can think of is dictator. But openings are rare, I’m underqualified, and the retirement plan is usually not very attractive.
Authority and responsibility are pretty similar to autonomy and accountability — buzzwords we hear a lot when it comes to our state government, which has its way of spilling over into sports — especially concerning the University of Hawaii and its relationship with the state Legislature.
As this session draws to a close in a couple of weeks, it looks as though UH will be getting a lot of funding (presumably, including that on-again, off-again $4 million for the athletic department). Overall, the university is earmarked to get a lot more than it asked for, according to UH’s vice president of budget and finance, Kalbert Young.
This concerns him, partly because he knows money doesn’t come without strings attached.
“Something doesn’t look right. It lacks for consistency,” he said.
One thing Young sees as strange is that the lawmakers want to add 128 jobs UH didn’t ask for, while cutting 38.5 existing positions. Most of those are unfilled because of the pandemic hiring freeze, but they include three that have employees occupying them. One is Dan Meisenzahl, the university spokesman who has also been the UH system director of communications since May 2012.
You might remember Meisenzahl from that strange press conference in the middle of the hot mess of a football changeover in January. During it, he heaped some praise but a lot more criticism on June Jones.
He also voiced support for athletic director David Matlin. Matlin was getting a lot of heat from many corners (including this one) for hiring Todd Graham, and then for not replacing him with Jones. At the time, a lot of us were wondering why Meisenzahl and not Matlin was holding a press conference.
Very soon thereafter, Matlin resurfaced, introducing Timmy Chang as the new coach.
“I don’t know why Dan’s position would be singled out,” said Young, who described the job cuts as seeming to be “punitive,” considering the Legislature is throwing so much money at UH, in general. “Why would you eliminate the spokesperson? And he supervises an office of personnel. There’s 15 people in that office.”
Maybe this is a coincidence, but last Tuesday, during a confirmation hearing for Board of Regents nominee Gabriel Lee, Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, head of the Higher Education committee, brought up that press conference (which came a couple of weeks after Kim and other state senators called Matlin, Graham and UH president David Lassner to a public flogging disguised as an “information briefing”).
She described it as “character assassination” of Jones, and that there were “very offensive comments.”
“As far as I know he’s still at the university,” she said of Meisenzahl. “This is kind of bad.”
I also wonder if it is a coincidence that UH faculty leaders recently went public, officially, with frustration over what they describe as “inappropriate legislative actions” by Kim.
If you are a fan of autonomy, you might be happy that Senate Bill 3268 died in the House. That’s the one that would have given the Board of Regents authority to terminate UH-Manoa’s athletic director and other personnel for cause, and also give the board responsibility in approving any athletic department hires with annual salaries of $200,000 or more.
When this bill was approved by the Senate’s Ways and Means Committee it was amended to appropriate the $3.6 million from state general funds to the UH-Manoa athletic department and $400,000 to UH Hilo sports that was cut last year. The fact that this bill died doesn’t mean UH sports won’t get that money. Over the next two weeks, the house and senate hash out myriad finance and budget questions.
As for accountability, this is what Senate Ways and Means chair Donovan Dela Cruz told Dan Nakaso of the Star-Advertiser last week: “The main thing is we want accountability, we want transparency, we want the president and the regents to do their jobs. We want to make UH more relevant in what the state’s trying to accomplish.”
Whether UH and it fans like it or not, it seems to apply to the athletic department as much as it does other university endeavors. The autonomy vs. accountability war will never end.
Young said it’s a balancing act.
“When I see quotes from legislators saying they want the Board of Regents or administrators to be more accountable, that is legitimate,” he said. “But you also have to at the same time recognize there is autonomy.”
