Here’s an excerpt from an announcement issued on Tuesday by the office of UH Manoa Chancellor (and UH President) David Lassner. It provides some additional background on the hissy fit thrown by Sen. Donna Kim.
Some of you have asked how this happened. Manoa has been deluged
with requests for information about our faculty for more than a
month now. We have provided all of the requested information, which
is public, in the format requested in a timely fashion out of
respect for the legislature and its fiduciary responsibility. That
information included over 1000 faculty positions with a listing of
the value of grants awarded in 2017 and 2018 and total course
credits from Banner for each year for which the position was shown
as the instructor of record. Unfortunately, the requested data was
hastily utilized in a simplistic and misguided attempt to identify
121 faculty who were apparently deemed to be not fully performing.
Throughout this period, there was never an opportunity provided for
us to educate legislators about factors such as faculty who had
multi-year grants awarded other than in that two year period,
faculty serving as department chairs, how clinical supervision is
conducted and documented, and other complexities associated with the
daily lives of our faculty. Even more disappointingly, there was no
effort to understand the dedicated and impactful work of our faculty
and staff in the areas of teaching, scholarship, service, and
economic development and the very real benefits of your work each
and every day to Hawaii and beyond.***
We recognize that the approach taken in the Senate budget appears
contrary to the authority of the UH Board of Regents as provided for
in the Hawaii constitution. We are also mindful of the protections
afforded under Collective Bargaining Agreements. That said, we and
the entire UH Leadership team are continuing to work tirelessly to
reverse the cuts in the Senate’s proposed budget. We have been
bolstered by the outpouring of concern expressed to legislators and
we believe we will succeed.Nevertheless, the fact that an entire chamber of the Hawaii
legislature would pass such a budget, without a careful assessment
of the impact not only on you but also to our students, to the
university and to our State, is deeply troubling.
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Donna basically takes everything personally and makes everything personal. She doesn’t know any other life. It’s like she’s living in a city with a population of a large high school and she never graduated.
The sad thing is that too many frustrated low-information voters allow themselves to be impressed by these kinds of self-serving antics, hissy-fits, and nonproductive or even damaging obstructionist theatrics at the Legislature and City Council because they are construed as standing up against the big bad government.
By the way, is it still socially acceptable to describe a ridiculous hissy-fit engaged in by a female as such? Or is it now counter-PC to acknowledge gender in making that assessment?
She snuck this in as an amendment with no public discussion, testimony, nor even any follow up questions. Which is how this got through a Senate vote. I don’t buy that UH was at all responsible in the way it was presented. She is the chair of a committee and should at least know to ask. One of those targeted was Carl Bonham of UHERO, which isn’t funded by grants. Others were well known faculty in their fields , which means that grant wise they are on auto pilot, they get large multiyear grants. While this “only” 129 people a lot of them are fundamental to the architecture if UH research and that is where the real damage would be done.
Also pieces of the puzzle that faculty, legislatures, and staff/faculty don’t realize… There are many grants and contracts that a Dean / or system-level PI may receive, yet parts of the duties can be assigned to faculty in the form of a mutually-agreed upon ‘course release’ or additional service. Same with internal funds/contracts for research or teaching services… There are many faculty conducting research contract work internally for the system for things that UH needs done, and it’s more efficient to allow faculty to conduct the work within their expertise, yet that does not free up ‘extra’ time to conduct externally funded research, especially for teaching faculty that have ~25% of their time to put toward research/service. It’s hard to draw the line about what is service or research for items assigned by Dean / or V. Chancellor, or things that UH would ‘like’ faculty to do in service of UH needs. Often times these are projects to hire a student assistant or part-time employee for something that is not large enough for admin to conduct themselves, or is too specialized, yet it takes faculty time to run these projects. These items are never treated fairly within the system, and are often foisted upon very senior faculty that can run many projects at once, junior faculty or ‘soft-funded’ non-tenure track faculty that can’t really say ‘no’.