Just a couple of items from the University of Hawaii’s flagship Manoa campus.
A six-year old recycling program in a major classroom building on the Manoa Campus has apparently collapsed under its own weight, according to a story in Ka Leo, the campus newspaper.
The recycling program was part of the “Sustainable Saunders Initiative—a collaborative effort among faculty and students to pursue workplace sustainability,” and involved students and faculty in Saunders Hall. Bins to collect cans and bottles were installed on each floor of the seven story building, which houses several departments in the College of Social Sciences. In addition, white paper, colored paper, and cardboard were collected in department offices and placed in larger bins on the ground floor for recycling.
The recycling bins have now been removed from Saunders, and any recycled materials will have to be taken to bins located at the nearby student services center.
Apparently there was no move to institutionalize the project back several years ago when interest, participation, and visibility were high, so Sustainable Saunders wasn’t prepared for the turnover as students graduated or moved on.
Ka Leo reported:
According to Shanah Trevenna, a board member of Sustainable UH, who was heavily involved with Sustainable Saunders when it first started, the recycling bins were put in place six years ago and were managed by student interns for the Sustainable Saunders group. She said she is not sure who has been managing the bins since she moved to Sustainable UH in 2008 and the Saunders program came under the direction of David Nixon, an associate professor of public policy and administration, who could not be reached for comment.
Director of Buildings and Grounds Management Roxanne Adams said that the custodial staff has been taking care of the recycling bins since around 2008. “It was a student group that adopted that area … they just abandoned it … and that was Sustainable Saunders,” she said in a phone interview.
There are obviously lots of reasons for the project’s demise, but the bottom line is that it’s an unfortunate step back both for recycling and the university.
I also imagine that there’s a bit of unhappiness over the news that outgoing Manoa Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw will take a leave for most of the next year at full pay, as reported by Hawaii News Now. It’s officially called a “professional improvement leave,” according to the request submitted to the Board of Regents. Over the 10 months that she is on leave, Hinshaw will be paid $287,400, or $28,740 per month.
Hawaii News Now also reported:
Sources told Hawaii News Now Hinshaw’s sabbatical proposal generated a lot of debate behind closed doors during the executive session of a UH Board of Regents meeting Jan. 19.
The Regents who opposed the move either left the meeting before the vote or voted “yes” so they would not embarrass Hinshaw, sources said.
According to the minutes of the January 19, 2012 meeting, BOR members Dennis Hirota and Coralie Matayoshi “were absent for the vote.”
Faculty can also apply for professional improvement leaves. But, in the case of faculty, these fall in the category of “leave without pay.”
According to the current faculty contract:
Leaves of absence without pay for professional improvement may be granted where such leave is determined to be to the advantage of the University, provided a satisfactory temporary replacement can be secured.
Faculty also qualify for sabbatical leave after six years of full time work at the university. But sabbatical leaves are limited to six-months (one semester) at full pay, or 12-months at half pay, according to the contract.
Watching top university executives playing by a different rulebook is bound to be an irritant.
A reader emailed me to vent:
The campus is physically a disgrace, students can’t get the classes that they need to graduate but Bachman and Hawaii Hall (both housing administrative offices) seem to be doing fine. If my memory serves me in 2001 the addition of the chancellor’s office was not suppose to cost any thing additional to the system. What did the legislature say, $14 million plus now?
There was also some creative math used in justifying the cost of Hinshaw’s leave to the BOR. The confidential memo submitted to the Regents asserted that there would be no additional cost for the 10-month leave.
No additional cost, as salary is covered by current budgeted funds. Additional cost will be incurred for the new Chancellor.
Creative bookkeeping, indeed, since the “new chancellor” will be paid $100,000 more per year, and the during the period of overlap with Hinshaw’s leave those costs will be “additional.”
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Maybe UH should spend some of our money on better PR so that we would better understand why the rest of our money is being blown on bloated salaries at a dump of a campus.
Many of the new administrative hires in the Chancellor’s office, around 7 of them, have in fact been PR people.
Yes, yes, indeed, including the likes of Lynne Waters, who put out some erroneous info on tuition increases in, like, her first week there. Guess I should have made more clear the facetious nature of my remark!
“. . . or voted “yes” so they would not embarrass Hinshaw, . . .” What’s up with this? Have these people NO integrity? Apparently it’s better to help someone “save face” than do the right thing.
The problem with Hawaii is every one is trying to act nice. Doing the right thing is not important.
Hinshsw should not be paid $$28,740 per month while she’s on leave. I hope some one steps up to challenge this.
Business as usual for the administrators at UH. This is the problem when you hire “tourists” for the top jobs .
They are just passing through to pick up a check. None ever stay; and they have no commitment to the University.
Recruiting nationally makes sense for faculty. They tend to stay. However, there should be some preference for candidates who are familiar with UH.
I noticed that there was no mention of the fact that the rank and file civil service employees have been working with a 5% pay cut, with no new step movements, along with a major hike in medical. Oh, yes, the pay cut continues for a third year.
Are there truly no qualified locals for these jobs, paying $250,000 – $450,000 per year? That’s geniunely difficult to accept. Why do our Regents – who are largely longstanding residents – allow this? I’m sorry but leaving the room instead of taking a stand and voting NO is not fulfilling your obligations as a Regent.
I actually think the general idea of a paid personal improvement assignment (not leave) is a great idea with a lot of potential. We don’t want to always have to import people from the mainland for top positions. It’s risky and expensive. But it definitely also is a problem if you only promote from within; UH lacks for fresh ideas as it is. A good solution would be to let selected, highly regarded personnel take a year of paid, structured “leave” where they can visit other universities around the world with the purpose of bringing back the best ideas. Maybe 2 months per institution, visit 4-6 universities.
Of course, that is not what is going on with Hinshaw now. And I love the state bureaucrat view that things don’t really cost money if they’re ready budgeted. What a country!
“It was a student group that adopted that area … they just abandoned it…and that was Sustainable Saunders.”
Hey lady…they graduated.
Greenwood loves to spend our money, on herself and her cronies. Oh or was that Dobelle?
Saunders Hall was to be a model of sustainability for UHM, and UHM was to be a model for Hawaii, and Hawaii was to be a model for the world.
But how realistic is that series of proposals?
The trick to developing alternative energy is supposedly to dedicate public policy to moderate, incremental and long-term goals.
This seems to go against human nature.
The corollary to this might be found in finance. The financier Warren Buffet likes to joke that the best way to make money is to figure out what everyone is doing and then do the opposite. The overwhelming majority of people are not interested in long-term value investing. So there are speculative bubbles and all sorts of “innovation” in the financial markets that make no sense at all.
It does not help that issues in sustainability are magnets for teenagers and politicians. Teenagers lose interest. Politicians love grandiose schemes, so they can get up on a stage and sing about how “We are going to have solar-powered trains!….”
Ultimately, people simply need to use fewer resources. What’s encouraging is that the younger generation are traumatized by their experience with big-ticket items, and are downsizing, and are shifting their interests toward mobile technology (which is still consumerism, but not gross consumerism).
(I just read an article about how “there is all this pent up demand for cars and houses”. Wrongo. Especially not among younger adults.)
This brings us to the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. Is it moderate, incremental and long-term in nature? Or is it really more of a typical, grandiose short-term “crash program”? Or is it somewhere in between?
Hinshaw’s paid sabbatical is not just about money, it might also be a way of chastising the system President and the Regents who control the system head. Hence, the sheepish reaction by the BOR, with some Regents leaving before the vote.
This is because Hinshaw was rumored to have resigned in protest because the UH Manoa athletic program is supposed to be under the control of the campus Chancellor, but in reality it was under the control of the system President. If this was the case, then Hinshaw probably had a lot of leverage against the UH and in particular against the UH Board of Regents, because if the system President is directing the athletics department, it is either by command of the BOR or with their permission. A lawsuit by Hinshaw would be embarrassing politically and costly financially, but it would also force the system head to put control of athletics back under the control of the campus. The BOR does not want that, apparently.
But why not?
Because more people are going to college.
In the 1970s, 10 percent of Americans had college degrees; in the 1990s, it was 20 percent; today it is 30 percent.
This is a double edged sword.
As more people go to college, the society as a whole becomes a bit more educated, albeit with diminishing returns.
For the university, it’s a bit like when golf was opened up with the appearance of Tiger Woods. Greater inclusiveness means stunning new talent, but also a tidal wave of mediocrity.
So the bad news is that as more people go to college, the attrition rate increases, and the cost of remediation skyrockets. Professors claim that every year the students seem to get worse and worse — because they are getting worse (it’s not an illusion). The college degree also begins to mean less on the job market, so the better students are compelled to avoid ol’ state university, and rather attend an elite college (and grad school). To deal with a flood of new students who are under new pressures but who lack the preparation that older generations of students had, universities must continue to expand their “Student Services Empire”. To attract students who are puzzled by this proliferation of choices in this expanding market, universities engage in an arms race to improve their rankings in publications like US News and World Reports (the ranking criteria are slanted toward the desires of wealthy students, who are concerned with luxury). Simultaneously, looking at their rising expenses, public university administrators (themselves typically educated at elite universities) look longingly to private elite schools like Harvard as a model of how a university can “pay for itself” if only it upgrades and rises up through the college ranking system (which is patently impossible, because public universities have non-selective student admissions as part of their mission).
To make things worse, the character of college becomes more and more like high school. Dormitories can get out of control. Spring break becomes an industry. Notably, there is an unprecedented emphasis on sports. The same fantasy that administrators have about how their university can “pay for itself” if it rises through the ranks is entertained by politicians who imagine that football in particular is a cash cow that will lead the way to greatness “if only a little bit more money is invested in it”. (Unfortunately, every other university is doing the same.) Meanwhile, as society’s belief system — religion, nationalism, ideology — continue to crumble, the masses turn toward sports with a new zeal.
The response by professors to this new environment is to retreat into their graduate programs. Graduate programs are what college was once was. Also, graduate students make up a disproportionate number of the instructors of lower division classes, so the grad students provide not just cheap labor, but a “Great Wall of China” between the unwashed hordes and the professors.
But as graduate programs — along with everything else — proliferate, along with costs, so do administrative salaries. Universities are like pyramids: as they expand laterally, with more and more services and programs, they also expand vertically, with new layers of bureaucracy and managers (and managers to manage managers).
So professors complain about administrative salaries. But the only alternative to highly paid administrators is seriously downsizing the university. Raise admission standards. Eliminate graduate (or even undergraduate) programs in lower ranking departments. In fact, merge lower ranking departments.
It’s that “simple”.
That ain’t gonna happen.
And so the cost of college rises at double the rate of inflation — because politicians, professors and administrators can never be realistic.
(One of the very first Civil Beat articles was by former UHM political science professor and former Manoa Chancellor Deane Neubauer, who argued that college costs were rising because of the rising costs of technology. But the whole point of technology is that after the initial investments, technology leads to a radical decline in costs in the long run. Of course, technology is going to costs more if the number of programs that incidentally use technology are proliferating — along with administrators and their ever-rising salaries, of whom Neubauer was one.)
I would take such rumors with a hefty grain of salt, at least in the absence of some substantive evidence.
What would be the basis for a lawsuit? I believe that the requirement that athletics governance be under the campus rather than the system is an NCAA regulation, not a matter of law.
This Hawaii News Now video interview with UH Chancellor Hinshaw Hawaii epitomizes the need for better reporting in Hawaii. No wonder our money keeps getting wasted. Our local news completely misses the real story!
http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/category/6743/video?clipId=7412507&topVideoCatNo=91610&autoStart=true