In my final Civil Beat column for 2013, I took a look at the messy situation that has been reported at the University of Hawaii Cancer Center (“Hawaii Monitor: Who is the University of Hawaii?“). If you aren’t able to leap the CB paywall, use this alternate link.
What got my attention was a report by Hawaii News Now’s Keoki Kerr that the chancellor of the UH Manoa Campus had determined it was time to remove Carbone from his post, but two attempts to oust the center director failed. Kerr later reported the university had decided to leave Carbone in his position despite unusual faculty calls for his firing and evidence of administrative issues.
Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple is the CEO of the Manoa Campus, according to the UH website and organizational charts. So that led me to the somewhat obvious question–what does it mean when the well-paid academic CEO is blocked from carrying through on his policy decisions? In my view, it’s a larger issue than the immediate cancer center problems.
In any case, if you haven’t read the column, you might want to check it out.
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Without expressing an opinion about this particular case, I would say that ultimate authority rests with the Board of Regents who have and can at any time delegate particular authority to the President, Chancellors, Deans, etc.
I am not sure how one can go about ascertaining what has been delegated by whom and to whom. If not found in written policy, it would take an investigative reporter to disentangle any particular knot!
Question is: who picks the regents?
Worth rereading: Who Runs the University?: The Politics of Higher Education in Hawaii, 1985-1992 by David Yount (Jan 1996)
Nice essay, Ian. This line in particular resonated with me because I’ve been thinking about the unsigned editorials that run in the local daily newspapers: “But just who is “the university”? We don’t know, because the statements were published without
attribution.”
Editorials in the Star-Advertiser, the Maui News, and other papers are written by staff but the articles aren’t attributed to a writer. I guess it’s because the essays are supposed to represent the opinion of the newspaper. That’s silly. Does anyone actually believe the Star-Advertiser has a unified opinion when the editorial team writes about the UH-Aloha Stadium relationship? I certainly don’t.
Transparency is another issue. Knowing who authored what and when the order of the day in social media. Yet these editorials are as anonymous as the comments that appear under news articles in the Star-Advertiser.
“Why in the world are we paying Apple a salary of $439,000 only to have his authority undermined by others within and outside the university?”
You hit the nail on the head, Ian.
For all the poking around and prodding that Keoki Kerr is doing, what I want to know is: Exactly what/who is preventing Chancellor Apple from removing Carbone from his director position? The fact that Tom Apple and the university has been vague on this makes me very suspicious of Apple. Remember, this was the man who thought the public would buy into the Jim Donovan re-assignment charade.
Apple may be one of those bureaucrats who’s using his UH gig as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. You know that type. Eager to take credit for any/all advancements and improvements at the institution. But just as eager to avoid controversies, so as not to step on anyone’s toes. A perfect mindset for an administrator trying to pad his resume. Not so great for a university in sore need of strong and decisive leadership.
A focus on institutional structures might be one of the flaws in thinking about education and educational reform.
In Hawaii, one of the preoccupations of the Lingle administration was bringing ‘accountability’ to public schools. This meant for her the need for the decentralization of the schools. But the public school systems in countries like Japan and France are vastly more centralized, and in those societies centralization is seen as insuring accountability (at the top). In fact, it could be that if the public school systems of France and Japan seem functional and even admirable, it is really a product of the identity and values of (east) Asians and (north) Europeans, cultures which have long prized education (or at least the credentials). So any school system in those countries might have the same basic outcomes. And any school system in Hawaii might produce roughly the same results as the current one.
At the university level, it’s not just the just the (degenerate) nature of the dominant social values (football) of the politicians, public and students that make a lot of American universities dysfunctional, but the mission of the university. In one of his last days on the job in 2000, former Kenneth Mortimer met with state legislatures. Mortimer lean forward toward them and pointed at them and said “You people need to make up your minds what it is you want.” (The politicians just squirmed in their chairs.) Since the 1960s one of the ideals of the UHM was to have basically open admissions and very low tuition, and until the economic crises of the 1990s, this policy prevailed. But that just turns the university into a public high school. It’s ridiculous. The other – and contrary – goal was for UHM to become of the great public research universities in the world, and until the economic crises of the 1970s, it was, ranking higher than even UC Berkeley in some respects. But that had no real benefit for Hawaii (aside from transmuting taxpayer money into professors’ salaries and then again into Punahou tuition). It’s was a preposterous objective. But that had Governor John Burns’ fingerprints all over it. Hawaii was going to become the center of global finance in the Pacific, and UH would be the Harvard of the Pacific, and the UH would have the best sports teams in the US, etc., etc. (And all these grandiose visions were sprung from the mind of an alcoholic Irish Catholic police officer who had himself dropped out of UHM.) So what has prevailed at UHM in the institutions intellectual and emotional underpinning is the most ridiculous forms of egalitarianism and elitism.
Now what would a more realistic university mission look like?
The third site I found when I googled ‘university mission statement’ was Yale’s four-page mission statement.
http://www.yale.edu/about/yale-school-mission-statements.pdf
But this is really a business plan in disguise. This is how Yale makes its money. Yale University is a corporation in disguise.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/25/news/companies/yale-harvard-mit-endowment/
There is nothing that elite universities do that is not calculated for their power, wealth and glory. Elite universities are clear-eyed and hard-headed and ruthless. Everything that seems otherwise is window dressing. But wannabe institutions at the state level buy into the misty idealistic rhetoric.
Meanwhile, Hawaii’s politicians still have not made up their minds. This might be because, more than perhaps any other state, Hawaii’s politicians are graduates of the state university system. They were never taught to think critically.