Hawaii News Now posted several documents last night that shed additional light on the Mess in Manoa, including UH President David Lassner’s evaluation of Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple that rated his performance “unsatisfactory,” as well as two letters from Apple to Lassner, one billed as a direct rebuttal to the evaluation.
There’s a lot of information to be mined from these documents.
A brief excerpt from Apple’s rebuttal letter raises a big question for gubernatorial candidate David Ige, who has chaired the Senate Ways & Means Committee for the past several years.
Apple put the challenge he faced in balancing the UH Manoa budget into a larger context by describing the decline in legislative funding. He wrote:
As you know, since 2009, the Legislature has cut about $75M in General funds from Manoa’s budget. Tuition funds have been used to replace a great deal of the lost funds so a very large part of our faculty and staff salaries are now derived from tuition funds, as opposed to General funds.
And the Board of Regents apparent willingness to suspend tuition increases that had been scheduled to kick in over the next two years just increases budget pressures.
Much of the overall legislative cut came while Ige was the chair of WAM.
And those cuts, in part, triggered Apple’s efforts to scale back the funding going to the cancer center and medical school, as part of broader campus belt-tightening.
Apple’s letters make clear that he believes it was the behind-the-scenes battles over funding of those two units that led to his dismissal.
To what extent did the legislature’s cuts to the Manoa budget contribute to the current mess? And what was the role of the WAM chairman in approving those cuts?
It’s late in the current campaign to be asking these questions, but it would be most interesting to see them debated in the days ahead.
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One also needs to ask what the Governor’s budget going to the legislature has been over this period of time. Since Abercrombie has recently frozen 14% of all state agency budgets (an interesting way of producing the budget “surplus” he claims in his campaign for reelection) and I know that DOE was included in the freeze, I’ve wondered whether the UH was also included.
Tom Apple inherited a mess and made the best of it. He polled the students about what changes they’d like to see on campus and then enacted them. He raised GA stipends to a living wage. Personally, I went from making $12K a year to teach college students how to write to making closer to $18K after he cut the lowest pay brackets.
Most of the complaints I’m hearing now are that 1) He’s from the mainland and 2) he wouldn’t play nice with the big wigs in the cancer center, so the new president is getting rid of him. Rash, very rash.
UHM feels like a sinking ship.
Blame it all on Ige, eh?
Never mind that MRC Greenwood was MIA for nearly the entire ’13 legislative session after being humiliated and exposed for her incompetence after the Wonder Blunder scandal. Hard to effectively lobby for unviersity funding when you’ve gone into hiding.
And who’s bright idea was it to readily forgive $13 million in debt to the athletic dept. if finances were so tight on campus? Why,… it was Tom Apple!
The truth is that the current bind that UH now finds itself in was largely self-inflicted. Trying to make David Ige the scapegoat isn’t going to get much traction, I reckon.
Of course, MRC was at the system level, distinct from the Manoa budget.
Not to mention that UH has given the legislature as a whole, not just David Ige, plenty of reason to question their appropriation requests, given as they have been to ridiculous spending on, just as one example, ridiculously inflated PR position salaries.
You need to ask yourself, Ian, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Greenwood being in charge of the statewide system did not mean that her work (or lack thereof) did not have an effect on Manoa. It was during the aforementioned 2013 session that state lawmakers did not fund $22 million that was needed to pay for faculty raises, which necessitated the use of tuition revenue to cover the cost. Isn’t that exactly what Tom Apple is complaining about in his rebuttal to David Lassner?
Greenwood (damaged credibility and all) may or may not have been able to avert this cut in funding. But we’ll never know since she barely tried. Instead of earning her $4000,000+ salary and spending her time at the Capitol with Donna & Neil, she was doing goodness knows what. (Licking her wounds at home and being comforted by Ben & Jerry?)
Opps, I meant $400,000+ salary
Ige’s role in this and the failed hospitals’ budget seems fair fodder for discussion.
Ian, are you saying that ONLY Manoa’s budget was cut? If there were system-wide cuts, not just at Manoa, why isn’t MRC’s Mon/performance part of the equation?