Did you catch the Advertiser story last week on an HPD joke about the UH football program that spread outside the department?
According to the Advertiser, a notice at police headquarters reported on discovery of a mysterious white powder during UH football practice. The FBI reportedly was called to the scene, but the alert was called off after more analysis.
“After a complete field analysis,” the highlight states, “the FBI determined that the white substance unknown to the players was the goal line. Practice was resumed when the FBI decided that the team would not be likely to encounter the substance again.”
That part is funny.
The amazing part follows:
The story aired several times on the Perry and Price radio show yesterday morning as a genuine news story. But the station soon realized it was a hoax, said Chuck Cotton, KSSK general manager.
“As soon as we found that it was bogus, we stopped reading it,” Cotton said.
I wonder how many “several times” really was? And what did it take to determine that it was a hoax?
They’re so used to reading bogus news there on the P&P show that I guess one more phony story just didn’t seem out of line.
Thanks to Dan Nakaso for today’s Honolulu Advertiser story on the UH budget crisis.
I’m struck by the comments of my friend, Rep. Mark Takai, which reflect the view from the State Capitol.
State Rep. Mark Takai, D-34th, (Newtown, Waiau, Pearl City) is a former UH student body president who is now a member of the House Higher Education Committee. He says UH’s money problems have to be solved internally — and not at the Legislature.
Says Takai: “We cannot afford a university system that is everything to everyone. We just can’t … We couldn’t afford it 10 years ago, and we can’t afford it today. And this fiscal situation is by far the most serious that I’ve seen in the past two decades.”
Back in 1995, UH had to absorb a $90 million budget hit, which resulted in the death of the School of Public Health — as well as new powers granted by the Legislature to let UH raise tuition and keep the tuition increases.
‘The university had some serious decisions to make,” Takai said. “This crisis in front of us is a lot worse.”
Takai worries that UH administrators will end up making “across-the-board” budget cuts to every UH department and program.
“It’s a simple solution, but it’s not the correct one,” he said. “They need to downsize and eliminate entire programs.
Sounds reasonable, but it only tells us part of the story.
While chiding UH officials for failing to deal with their own budget situation, legislators have shoved the idea of an entire new West Oahu campus down the throats of the university, along with the costs of the faculty, staff, buildings, maintenance, etc. needed to operate it over the long term.
There was never a clear academic argument in favor of this massive undertaking, and top campus officials candidly said so. But powerful political interests and their legislative backers thought differently, and basically have year after year bullied the UH administration into accepting the inevitability of this huge long-term drain on system resources.
It seems to me that legislative leaders are being hypocritical when, on the one hand, they force major items onto UH, and then, on the other, disclaim responsibility when those imposed programs contribute to a budget crisis.
Then there are other UH programs which, from a strictly university perspective, may not be sustainable. The UH medical school is one of those, an incredibly costly enterprise where the main payoff is to the State of Hawaii and not to the university. Should legislators expect the UH system to shoulder this burden for the entire state, even though it involves a miniscule number of students?
A serious look at priorities would turn up other similar programs where the argument for their retention is not an academic argument but a broader social and political one.
I wonder what proportion of state general funds is devoted to the university system compared to that time after statehood when state officials were committed to a vision of a good university system to serve all the people of the state?
I know it’s a mistake to float a question like this without knowing the answer, but in this case I’ll do it anyway.
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I, too, don’t understand why a new campus is being built on the West side, especially when the Manoa campus is crumbling.
My daughter, who is a UH junior, told me that the European languages are being eliminated, and only Hawaiian and a few Asian languages are being kept. Is this true? If so, auwe!
Re: West Oahu. Totally agree with getting rid of West Oahu. It is beyond wasteful at this time to even think about building a new campus.
Re: Cutting programs at UH. Actually, Rep. Takai is wrong. UH is supposed to be all things to the people of this state because it is a Land Grant University. As this explanation from Washington State University’s website (also a Land Grant) makes clear, such schools are meant to provide access to the full range of academic and vocational fields for the state’s citizens:
“A land-grant college or university is an institution that has been designated by its state
legislature or Congress to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. The original
mission of these institutions, as set forth in the first Morrill Act, was to teach agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts as well as classical studies so that members of the working
classes could obtain a liberal, practical education.”
Thus, this mandate would include maintaining a viable program of European languages and other liberal arts & humanities subjects as well as maintaining programs in the sciences, agriculture & so on.
And Takai’s rhetoric sounds an awful lot like that of UH’s administration–specifically that of Gary Ostrander, Vice Chancellor of Research. Ostrander told me in an interview that this “can’t be all things to all people” idea was something he brought up when interviewing for his job.
UH is a land grant university, and CTAHR receives federal and matching state taxpayer dollars to teach farming practices as well as promoting livestock agriculture.
The aggressive pressure by UH animal agriculture faculty on the Legislature and the state Dept. of Agriculture for more and more cash infusions for a dying industry must end.
Self sufficiency is not a good enough reason to continue to prop up livestock agriculture. Feed must be imported as well, so if the transport is halted by strike or other reasons, Hawai’i consumers will not be protected from shortages.
There is an “experimental farm” on O’ahu’s north shore (Waile’e) that is in advanced dilapidation, and has been, for years. The last time I passed it, there was only a herd of extremely dirty sheep walking around falling down sheds. That should be closed and the money from the oceanfront land used for better purposes for the well being of students and the U in general.
To be fair, “all things to all people” is a pretty broad mandate. I mean, does that require all land grant institutions must offer every conceivable major to its students?
I wonder if a land grant university in, say, Minnesota offers a degree in Hawaiian language.
The challenge is what is good for the university may not be good for the state and vice-versa. More importantly, who decides this?
The goal line joke is an old one but it’s still funny. All KSSK had to do was make a couple of phone calls to verify, rather than rip and read something from an unknown source.
But after the days of Aku, that radio station hasn’t seemed too concerned with news reporting except for traffic reports.
When the “war against terror” started in Iraq, Perry & Price filled a lot of air time with personal opinion. That got old real fast.
I switched over to NPR because I wanted to hear what was going on, rather than hear one person’s opinion about what was going on (and a very conservatively slanted one at that).
Yeah, the KSSK flub was quite a hoot. But Advertiser Editor Mark Platte’s unintentional self-skewering was even funnier, in a way. Here’s what he had to say via Twitter:
“Best story of the day in today’s Tiser: HPD posted a joke report about the UH football team on its media highlights and KSSK fell for it.”
http://twitter.com/markplatte
Pretty funny when a newspaper boss thinks his “best story” is one that reveals a stupid mistake by a competitor.
Or maybe it’s really just sad and revealing evidence of a deep and widely-noticed personality flaw.
Ian: I can understand your concerns regarding UH-West Oahu. For many years, I, too, have shared your concern. However, I don’t think that UH-West Oahu was a legislative initiative. In fact, if you review the latest strategic plan for the campus in 2002, you’ll see that construction of a larger campus was supported by the UH BOR.
I have requested research from our research agency to see what the actual timeline was for UH-West Oahu. I should have this information within a week.
In the meantime, I would encourage your readers to check out the UH Government Relations’ website at http://www.hawaii.edu/offices/eaur/govrel/index.html.
In addition, here is an excerpt from the 2002 UH-West Oahu Strategic Plan:
“While planning for necessary expansion at the current site, UHWO will move forward
with plans for a full four-year campus. Resource needs will be based on growth stages starting
with approximately 1,200 students in the first year at the new location and culminating in a
campus with as many as 7,500 students.” (http://www.uhwo.hawaii.edu/pdfs/strategicplan.pdf (NOV. 2002)).
We’re in a pretty difficult situation right now. However, I believe that getting the Legislature involved to determine where to cut the UH budget is not in the best interest of the University.
Ian:
Your readers may be interested in a set of papers that UHERO undertook on the ‘financing of the UH-Manoa’. These articles are dated, but they show that Manoa has been underfunded with state appropriations relative to similar Carnegie classified research universities. The study includes indicators like student numbers, academic programs, med school, athletics, etc to determine our comparison group.
There is also a study that analyzes UHM staffing, which finds that the shortfall in funding is most pronounced in staffing levels for non-faculty.
It would be interesting to see an updated analysis conducted, perhaps extended to the entire UH-System. How do we compare to our peers? It looks like we are doing MORE with LESS, quite literally.
Cheers
The white powder on the football field joke is as old as rocks. I can’t believe it got press. I recall it being told in denigrating fashion about certain professional football teams as early as 1973.