It was a full house at Hemmenway Auditorium yesterday as hundreds of students and faculty jammed the hall for a briefing on impending budget cuts, including firing of tenured professors.

Conspicuous by her absence in the midst of the campus turmoil was Manoa Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw, who has been on the mainland for the last two football games and apparently is still gone.

One flyer being distributed asked the pointed question: “Where is the Chancellor?”

For two weeks, while students, faculty, and administrators have struggled over the budget crisis–while UHPA has been handed an outrageously draconian “last, best, and final offer” by the Board of Regents–the Chancellor has been enjoying her travels with the UH Football Team to Seattle and Las Vegas.

What kind of leadership is that?

Although proposed pay cuts would again drop Manoa faculty salaries down near the bottom of the list of peer institutions, the real issue is proposal to eliminate restrictions on and strict procedures for retrenchment. The university’s “final offer” would eliminate the retrenchment clause that has been in the UH contract for nearly three decades.

An open letter to faculty by J. De Ste Croix, a member of UHPA’s board of directors who teaches at Leeward Community College, traces the history of the retrenchment clause.

The Retrenchment clause has been in the UHPA contract for twenty-six years and is its bedrock, its lodestone. It controls who stays, who goes, and when, how, and why. Now, for the first time in more than a quarter of a century, as a part of their fake ultimatum, the UH management wants it back. When the Retrenchment clause goes, if it goes, the right to fairly determine layoffs goes with it—probably forever. The Retrenchment clause was negotiated into the contract in 1983 by Dr. J.N. Musto, when his opposite number was then UH President Fujio “Fudge” Matsuda. Matsuda and Musto were also going through difficult economic times back then, and they both knew the score. They knew that faculty in the public university in Hawaii needed to be protected by solid contract language for retrenchment (layoff) because if it is not solidly in the contract, politics will out. In more general terms, the UHPA contract is a massive bulwark against the vagaries of politics in Hawaii and has been diligently built up over thirty-five years of constant effort and strife. It buttresses and protects all our professional rights and is without doubt the best higher education union contract in America. In exchange for a five per cent pay cut in each of the next two years, the current governor and UH administration want us to hand over the heart of it. The threat is that if we don’t give away our contractual rights they will come back and do something worse to us.

A story today in Ka Leo, the Manoa student newspaper, by editor Mark Brislin quotes David Stannard, chair of American Studies.

Stannard said the “simplest way to get the contract passed … would be to remove retrenchment officially from the contract … As long as that is in the contract I guarantee you the contract will be rejected.”

There’s at least one YouTube video about the UH budget crisis, with more promised, and a Google Group with additional information and resources (Preserving Hawaii’s University).

Finally, there’s an excellent essay making the rounds at Manoa which traces the historical roots of the argument over university education to the days of the “Big Five”, when educational opportunities were deliberately limited to keep children of plantation workers “from aspiring to vocations ‘above their stations.'”

The essay by retired UH Professor Robert Potter originally appeared in Honolulu Weekly a decade ago, during the last round of major budget cuts.