Category Archives: Legislature

Manoa administration provides more background

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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.

More thoughts on Sen. Kim’s proposed UH budget cut

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Senator Donna Kim has proposed cuts of 121 positions and supporting general funds from the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s budget. These cuts are included in the Senate version of the state budget, which was approved by the full Senate and returned to the House this past week.

I understand that the proposed budget and position cuts would impact important research units, including the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), the UH Cancer Center, and the Department of Astronomy. These are, of course, key drivers of the university’s success at obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in outside research funding.

The cuts would likely spill over to impact the federal grants being worked on by any of those terminated as a result of Kim’s cuts.

It’s unclear when the faculty layoffs Kim proposes would go into effect. What is clear is that with the loss of the positions, these faculty could not be replaced or rehired.

In the event the Legislature were to approve Kim’s proposed cuts, it would certainly start a long and bitter legal battle in which the rest of the university faculty and administration would end up as collateral damage.

Continued accreditation of the university and its programs would quickly be called into question. Questions of academic freedom, or the lack of academic freedom, would create a large red flag that would potentially threaten outside funding to the university and its programs, and make it difficult to recruit new faculty. The implications are quite staggering.

So, first question: Is it legal?

The Hawaii State Constitution now provides that the university is a semi-autonomous organization managed by the Board of Regents.

The constitution provides, in part:

The board shall also have exclusive jurisdiction over the internal structure, management, and operation of the university. This section shall not limit the power of the legislature to enact laws of statewide concern.

Kim’s proposed micromanaging appears to go far beyond the bounds of constitutionality.

And then there’s the question of the labor contract between the University and UHPA, which represents the university faculty.

The contract has a section dealing with “retrenchment.”

Retrenchment refers to the termination of the employment of any Faculty Member during any appointment as a result of lack of work or other legitimate reason in accordance with §89-9(d), H.R.S., such as fiscal exigency; reallocation of resources; reorganization of degree or curriculum requirements; reorganization of academic or administrative structures or programs; curtailment of one (1) or more programs.

My understanding of “fiscal exigency” refers to a situation in which the state is just plumb out of money and, as a result of its financial crisis, is unable to meet its obligations under the UHPA contract.

And, if that were to occur, the contract spells out the required “order of retrenchment” as follows:

1. Part-time Faculty, including Lecturers

2. Non-tenured Faculty

3. Tenured Faculty

Kim’s targeted cuts of 121 specific faculty department seems to completely ignore these legal obligations and would leave the university’s administration in an untenable legal situation.

A legislatively-imposed set of budget and position cuts that bypass the Board of Regents in order to target specific faculty members protected by the UHPA contract would seem to be ripe for legal challenge. And what happens to the university during the years that such a challenge is working its way through the labor board and the courts?

And how is it that we’ve gotten to this point without the benefit of public debate and open scrutiny? Senator Kim should be held accountable, it appears.

After posting yesterday concerning Senator Kim’s budget cut, I edited my original version to remove this caricature of Kim drawn by John Pritchett back in 1992.

On reflection, I was worried that its inclusion would detract from the reporting about Kim’s move. So I cut it from the original post.

Now, however, I think it appropriate to share it more generally, as it shows that the image she had built a quarter-century ago pretty much sums up the way she continues to act today.

The drawing appeared in a slim volume Pritchet and I published in the months before the 1992 election. “Drawn & Quartered” featured Pritchett’s drawings of local political figures accompanied by my brief political essays. At that time, Kim was a member of the Honolulu City Council.

I wrote at that time:

“Kim has a combative, aggressive, and sometimes sarcastic style as well as a sharp tongue, often attacking those presenting public testimony or tangling with her fellow Council members.”

Not much seems to have changed.

Senator Donna Kim pushes to slash UH Manoa faculty jobs

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Senator Donna Kim, chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee, attacked the University of Hawaii at Manoa and its faculty this week by unilaterally proposing to cut 121 positions from the Manoa budget.

And Kim made it personal. Apparently the senator, using her own highly questionable methodology, identified 121 specific people who she apparently thinks don’t produce enough to continue as UH faculty members.

Kim’s proposal would cut their jobs and the $13 million currently used to fund them.

The Kim proposal is buried on page 842 of the current budget worksheets. It is not mentioned in the committee report that accompanied the HB2 SD1, the Senate version of the budget bill. The measure was passed by the full Senate on Friday, March 15. It now will head to a budget conference committee, where just about anything can happen.

A memo sent out to UH Manoa deans and directors on Thursday from the office of Michael Bruno, interim vice-chancellor for academic affairs and vice-chancellor for research, expressed alarm at Kim’s attempt to evaluate the performance of individual faculty members.

“Most of this evaluation was incorrect,” the memo said.

Individuals who have retired were included, as were individuals who have been terminated. Likewise individuals who are funded by extramural grants were included. Nevertheless, G funds in the exact amount of each of these individuals’ salaries was removed from Manoa’s budget.

Kim’s proposed cuts are far from trivial.

“Even if we could absorb the budget cut (we cannot), we do not have enough free position counts to make up for the eliminated counts,” Bruno’s memo concluded.

The University of Hawaii Professional Assembly, the faculty union, called Kim’s proposal “an attempt to address her animosity towards the University of Hawaii.”

Kim’s proposals to target specific faculty positions “have been made without understanding the full context of a faculty member’s job duties and responsibilities,” the UHPA email said.

As all faculty know, the number of credit hours is not limited to classroom teaching nor are all faculty members employed to teach. Sen. Mercado Kim has established artificial factors and applied them as a measure of faculty work performance.

Sen. Mercado Kim does not show any appreciation of the research work now underway. UH faculty researchers annually bring in a total of $400 million in grant funds. Many of the faculty members, including principal investigators and their faculty teams are targeted for elimination.

No more free parking for all legislators on UH Manoa campus

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The University of Hawaii’s chief financial officer notified legislators earlier this month that they will no longer be automatically receiving free annual parking passes for the Manoa campus.

In a February 11, 2019 letter addressed to House Speaker Scott Saiki, Senate President Ron Kiuchi, and all legislators, Kalbert Young said the State Ethics Commission had advised that the practice of providing free parking to all legislators would appear to violate the state ethics code.

Instead, the university will provide day passes to legislators or staff with official business on the campus and, after further review, consider annual passes for those whose jobs require very frequent visits to the campus.

Ethics Commission director Daniel Gluck had earlier advised the university that “a significant number” of the passes were being used for personal purposes rather than official business.

In a letter to UH General Counsel Carrie Okinawa, Gluck wrote:

While these passes are clearly marked as being non-transferable and for business purposes only, our further understanding is that a significant number of pass-holders use these passes to receive free parking at sporting events; to allow family members to park for free while attending classes; or otherwise to avoid paying parking fees for non-business purposes. We believe that current state employees, legislators, and board/commission members who use these passes for personal use – that is, to attend sporting events or to allow family members to use the passes to avoid paying parking fees- may be running afoul ofthe Ethics Code, Hawai’i Revised Statutes (“HRS”) chapter 84.

The matter came to the attention of the commission during hearings last year when the Board of Regents approved a plan to increase parking rates.

Written public testimony was submitted challenging the issuance of free passes to regents, former regents, and legislators, among others, and during this process, a complaint was made with the Hawai’i State Ethics Commission regarding the University’s practice of providing free annual parking passes. The State Ethics Commission subsequently informed UH in writing that it should cease issuing annual parking passes as a matter of course to entire categories of State officials.

But the practice of giving legislators free parking or other benefits without regard of whether they were needed and used only for official business has come up publicly repeatedly over the years, and the ethics commission has consistently cautioned lawmakers against accepting such benefits, and advised agencies to cease such practices.

The correspondence did not identify how long UH has provided parking passes to all legislators before receiving this latest ethics commission warning.