Category Archives: education

by | 2 February 2006 · 12:07 pm

A Wreath of Herring Tails and Potatoes

The Prussian government appointed [Julius Maximilian] Schottky as a professor of German language and literature at the gymnasium [in Poznan], believing that he would be able to kindle the interest of the restive student body. But his curriculum fell flat in an institution dominated by Polish sympathies, and his lack of pedagogical skill led to chaos in the classroom. [Marceli] Motty was enrolled at the gymnasium at the time and recalls in his memoirs how his fellow students would chatter among themselves, run from bench to bench, and hide behind the furnace while Schottky tried to teach. On one occasion the professor entered a classroom full of uncharacteristically silent students, only to discover that they had placed upon his lectern a herring ringed with potatoes, along with a note that read: “Out of herring tails and potatoes is Schottky’s laurel wreath composed.” Schottky lasted there just two years….

More typical of Poznan’s German intelligentsia in the early nineteenth century was another professor at the local gymnasium, Michael Stotz. Stotz was first hired in 1814 to teach history, geography, and Latin. He served as director of the institution from the 1820s to 1842. Stotz never earned a reputation as a serious scholar or pedagogue. He published little, and, according to Marceli Motty’s memoir, when he taught, “the greater part of the hour normally would pass in light banter about the news, recent events inside and outside of school, and historical anecdotes.” Despite his shortcomings, Stotz was beloved by his students, Germans and Poles alike. His popularity rested in large part on his appreciation of the region’s cultural diversity and his ability to navigate with ease between the German and Polish spheres. In marked contrast to the nationalist focus of Schottky’s scholarship, Stotz was, in Motty’s words, “utterly indifferent to matters concerning nationality and politics.” Although he spoke German at home and socialized mainly with Germans, Stotz was equally at home among the city’s Polish majority, leading Motty to conclude that Stotz was “a Pole in spirit and instinct.” Like many long-term German residents of the Poznan area, Stotz was a product of the region’s cultural blending. In fact, his students used to joke that he would begin every lecture with the phrase: “We Poles, we Germans….”

SOURCE: Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City, by Robert E. Alvis (Syracuse U. Press, 2005), pp. 73, 74

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by | 20 November 2005 · 12:10 pm

Smithsonian Scholars at Work, 1918

I can remember sitting in Harrington‘s office typing, but I cannot remember what I typed. Surely we must have made a pretense of at least putting the Chumash material in order, since most of his vouchers had been made out for paying Chumash informants. At home we worked exclusively and almost frantically on the Tanoan material. Harrington bought a roll of butcher’s paper, which he meticulously divided into sheets that would lie nicely on our combination kitchen and dining table. On the sheets he diagrammed all the ramifications of the Taos pronoun: the various pronominal postfixes in combination with free standing forms, also with verbs and nouns. I never quite saw the sense of these oversized diagrams, for they contained nothing that could not be shown on sheets of ordinary writing paper. But Harrington enjoyed making them–it was about the nearest he ever came to having fun. Ultimately, he had a stack approximately six inches high. Before I left Washington I pulled the stuff together and wrote a paper on “The Taos Pronoun.” With amazing generosity, Harrington presented it for publication under my own name, and Dr. J. Walter Fewkes, Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, accepted it. I believe I was even paid something. The number “twenty-five” comes to mind, but whether I received twenty-five dollars or produced twenty-five pages of stilted and incomparable dullness, I couldn’t say. There must still be copies filed away in musty archives….

Harrington had another Indian colleague in the Bureau, a Huron (if I remember correctly), a sluggish type who had not gone into the field for years and had no desire to do so. He published, however. I seem to remember the texts of myths with dull translations which shifted into Latin whenever they promised to become interesting. His name is a blank to me.

Still another colleague whose name I do not recall was a short, red-faced, balding man who held the theory that life in America tended over the course of several generations to make the descendants of all immigrants dolicocephalic, no matter how round-headed their ancestors had been. As I was learning, this man and many others who devoted themselves to the pursuit of science tended to evolve fantasies into theories and then to find or twist facts to support them. The first question put to me by this anthropologist was how long had my people been in America? When I replied, “Five generations,” nothing would do but that he must get his calipers and measure my head immediately. To his disappointment, I was brachycephalic. In fact, he found me excessively, inordinately brachycephalic, more round-headed than any one of my ancestry had any right to be. I remembered that my father’s head looked rather long, my mother’s decidedly round, and I refrained from telling him that I had been a stubborn baby who refused to sleep in any position except on my back….

On a bitterly cold night we went to visit a group of Kiowas who were in Washington on official business for their tribe. Harrington said it was our opportunity to contact authentic Plains Indians. He was so enthusiastic that I shared his excitement. The Kiowas were housed in a hotel that had seen better days. It was now a combination of fleabag and firetrap, catering to Indians with little money to spend. We walked along the narrow, smelly, dimly lit hallway with its threadbare red carpeting, and knocked upon a certain door. Although our visit had been prearranged, the response was so slow in coming that it seemed as though we were not to be admitted. At last the door was opened. We entered a hot, musty room where three or four Indians sat draped in blankets. Harrington took out his basic questionnaire and proceeded to ask for certain words in the Kiowa language. Responses to these questions and to all attempts at conversation were so deliberate as to make it appear that the speakers lived in another time-world where a day was as a thousand years, or at the very least two seconds were as five minutes. Even the words were spaced out, with gaps between words and also between syllables. The answers, if one had the patience to listen for them, were coherent and intelligent, but always interminably drawn out. An hour of interviewing produced almost nothing. After we left, Harrington said the Indians had been under the influence of some drug, probably, he thought, peyote.

SOURCE: Encounter with an Angry God, by Carobeth Laird (U. New Mexico Press, 1993), pp. 80-86

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by | 3 October 2005 · 9:57 am

Ethnic Museums: Educating Others or Preserving Selves?

I used my ten days on Hokkaido to examine my idea that Ainu museums present Ainu ethnicity to a larger public, and are run with the goal of asserting Ainu ethnic identity in a way that challenges the majority Japanese conception of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation. This is when the emphasis of the Ainu on preserving their culture and participating in Japanese life as Ainu became clear to me. Ainu-run museums did in fact try to combat popular ideas about the Ainu (such as that there are no Ainu left, that the Ainu language is dead, that the Ainu are particularly hairy, etc.) through signs and information in brochures. At the Shiraoi Poroto Kotan (Ainu Village), guides also tried to make visitors aware that the Ainu are both Ainu and Japanese. For instance, a younger guide (dressed in Ainu clothing) tried to explain that the Ainu aren’t entirely different from the Japanese today, but that they still have a special culture, by saying “I’m the same as everyone else. I only wear these clothes from 8 to 5. Do you know any Ainu? These foods came from the Ainu…these place names are Ainu names….”

However, a researcher at the Shiraoi Poroto Kotan museum explained to me that of necessity, Ainu museums can only go so far in trying to explain Ainu ethnicity as well as traditional (and no longer existing) Ainu culture. She agreed with my feeling that it’s impossible to attempt to show Ainu culture and history in the same way that Japanese history is portrayed, because there are no records of Ainu history from the Ainu point of view. She also pointed out the impossibility of exhibiting a culture or identity that is currently in the process of being re-defined, and explained that “Ainu culture today is changing. People have a Japanese lifestyle, and they can no longer do things like take bears from the mountains, and it is unclear to them how to include their own feelings and lives in the ceremonies.” As a result, she informed me, the main goal of the museum was not to teach others about Ainu culture; instead, it was to focus on cultural preservation for the Ainu themselves.

The emphasis on cultural growth was the most common theme I encountered in Ainu-run museums. I had not realized the extent to which Ainu and Okinawans are currently engaged in re-defining their cultural identities for themselves, or that this concern would dominate other concerns about fitting into a larger Japanese society. Museums did not present this concern to tourists in displays; rather, it was only obvious when I looked at the way space was allocated in museums and talked to people working there. At the Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Memorial Museum, for instance, I was lucky enough to see the most famous contemporary Ainu musician (Oki) practicing for a music competition in the museum’s rehearsal hall, and the success of his rehearsal was the main concern of the museum staff. Ms. Fujita explained that she worked at a tourist village (the Gyokusendo Kingdom Village) in Okinawa because she wanted to learn about making Okinawan pottery: it was an apprenticeship, a place where crafts could be taught not only to casual visitors but to those interested in making the practice of those crafts a part of their life. There was also space at the Kingdom Village, as at the Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Memorial Museum, for local dance or music groups to rehearse.

SOURCE: The Myth of Japanese Ethnic Homogeneity, by Catherine Williams, September 1999

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by | 16 May 2005 · 9:12 pm

Gaddis on Why Grand Strategy Is Tough for Academics

Yale history professor John Lewis Gaddis recently spoke at Middlebury College in Vermont. He had a lot to say, but one thing that struck me was his analysis of why grand strategy is difficult for academics.

First, that grand strategy is, by its nature, an ecological enterprise. It requires taking information from a lot of different fields, evaluating it intuitively rather than systematically, and then acting. It is, in this sense, different from most academic training, which as it advances pushes students toward specialization, and then toward professionalization, by which I mean the ever deeper mastery of a diminishing number of things. To remain broad you’ve got to retain a certain shallowness – but beyond the level of undergraduate education and sometimes not even there, the academy is not particularly comfortable with that idea.

Second, grand strategy requires setting an objective and sticking to it. The academy does not take easily to that idea either. It asks us constantly to question our assumptions and reformulate our objectives. That’s fine to the extent that that sharpens our intellectual skills, and therefore prepares us for leadership. But it’s not the same thing as leadership: for that, you’ve got to say “here’s where we ought to be by such and such a time, and here’s how we’re going to get there.” Taking the position that, “on the one hand this, and on the other hand that,” as you might around a seminar table, won’t get you there. Nor will saying that you voted for the $87 billion appropriation before you voted against it.

Third, grand strategy requires the ability to respond rapidly to the unexpected. It acknowledges that trends can reverse themselves suddenly, that “tipping points” can occur, and that leaders must know how to exploit them. The academy loves this sort of thing when it happens on the basketball court or the hockey rink. In the classroom, though, it resists the idea: instead the emphasis is too often on theory, which promises predictability, and therefore no surprises. That’s why the academy tends to be so surprised when events like the end of the Cold War and 9/11 take place. Leaders, like athletes, have to be more agile.

Fourth, grand strategy requires the making of moral judgments, because that’s how leadership takes place: in that sense, it’s a faith-based initiative. You have to convince people that your aspirations correspond with their own, and that you’re serious about advancing them. You don’t lead by trying to persuade people that distinctions between good and evil are social constructions, that there are no universal standards for making them, that we should always try to understand the viewpoint of others, even when they are trying to kill us.

Finally, grand strategy requires great language. As the best leaders from Pericles through Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan have always known, words are themselves instruments of power. Their careful choice and courageous use can shake the stability of states, as when Reagan said, before anybody else, that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” headed for the “ash-heap of history.” They can also undermine walls, as when Reagan famously demanded, against the advice of his own speech-writers, that Gorbachev tear one down.

But where, within the academy is the use of great language taught? Where would you go to learn how to make a great speech? Certainly not to political science, language, and literature departments at Yale, where as students advance they are spurred on toward ever higher levels of jargon-laden incomprehensibility. I think not even to my beloved History Department, where my colleagues seem more interested in the ways words reflect structures of power than in ways words challenge or even overthrow structures of power.

The art of rhetoric, within the academy, is largely a lost art – which probably helps to explain why the academy is as often as surprised as it is to discover that words really do still have meanings – and that consequences come from using them.

via Roger L. Simon

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by | 15 March 2005 · 8:36 pm

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Princeton emeritus professor of philosophy Harry G. Frankfurt has published a book On Bullshit (Princeton U. Press, 2005).

With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

The Press’s website also includes video clips of an interview with the straight-talking bullshitologist. Here’s my transcription of clip 7.

Q: You mentioned democratization as a function of bullshit. What about education? Are more highly educated people more likely to engage in bullshit just because they have the faculties to do so? I mean, are we more likely to be twits here at Princeton University than in some other part of the country?

A: I think it’s not only that highly educated people have the linguistic and intellectual gifts that enable them to create bullshit. But also I think that a lot of people who are highly educated acquire a kind of arrogance that leads them to be negligent about truth and falsity. They have a lot of confidence in their own opinions, and this may also encourage them to produce bullshit.

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by | 23 February 2005 · 8:30 pm

Ideological Prejudice Test

Why are there so few women in the academic hard sciences? Why are there so few conservatives in the academic humanities and soft sciences? Here are some frequently offered answers to each question. Are your answers the same to both questions?

1. They lack the required the mental capacity for such specialized intellectual endeavors.

2. They lack the necessary intellectual stamina.

3. They don’t find such careers sufficiently rewarding, either personally or financially.

4. They are subtly–or not so subtly–discouraged by their potential mentors already established in the field.

5. They are not sufficiently willing to sacrifice their families or family values to pursue such demanding career goals.

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by | 11 February 2005 · 9:12 am

Studying in the Soviet Union in the 1960s

David McDuff‘s retrospective on studying in the Soviet Union in the 1960s continues. The following are only short excerpts from each post.

Going Back V

It’s hard now, in retrospect, to recreate or even re-invoke the atmosphere of those years. At home, in Britain, there was a sense of social change, the dropping of old certainties and taboos and also a degree of willingness to experiment with new lifestyles and patterns of living. This was accompanied by the burgeoning pop culture, the new cults of fashion, drugs and sex, the advent of rock music, the Beatles and the Stones, and the Wilson government with its slightly tongue-in-cheek, but none the less real commitment to the “white-hot technological revolution”. It all had an air of adventure, but at the same an innocence whose essence is hard to recapture or understand nowadays. In some ways, as students (our official designation was that of “scholars”) travelling on British Council stipends and the recipients of a Foreign Office briefing, we were, I guess, meant to be representatives of the New Britain, carrying the Western way of life into the heart of the Soviet monolith, in the hope – entertained by some – that some of it would rub off and act as diplomatic grease for the rather rusty state of British-Soviet relations at the time (strangely, perhaps, the installation of a Labour government at Westminster and Whitehall had led to more, not less tension between London and Moscow).

Going Back VI

In the morning, we all left the train with our luggage and were herded into another bus. Our mood was generally cheerful, though also somewhat apprehensive. To begin with, the group was housed at a university hostel (studencheskoye obshchezhitie) on Lomonosovsky Prospekt, with the promise that in a couple of weeks’ time we would be transferred to the main university building. The university district, in Moscow’s south-western suburbs, is a rather characterless and sprawling area of geometrically planned avenues, which also takes in Lenin Hills (Lenskie Gory, now Sparrow Hills, Vorobyevye Gory), and the university skyscraper. Our hostel was a five-storey building, indistinguishable from the other five-storey apartment blocks that stretched for kilometre after kilometre on either side. We were fortunate enough to each receive a room to ourselves, though we soon realized what a luxury this was – most of the Soviet students in the building had to share two, three or even four to a room. For the first day or two we restricted our outside forays to such activities as finding the nearest foodstore – something of a necessity, as the university stolovayas (dining-rooms) were situated some distance away. We got used to queuing for such items as bread, kolbasa (sausage), cheese, and so on, and then joining the second queue at the cashier’s desk, in order to pay. The whole process could take as long as an hour. Back at the hostel, we experimented with cans of pork and salted fish, which we prised open and devoured in the floor’s communal kitchen.

Going Back VII

In the basement of Zones B and V were the stolovayas (dining rooms) and shops and stores. Here we could spend our money. We were fortunate by comparison with our Soviet colleagues, receiving a monthly stipend of 250 rubles, supplemented with a monthly British Council grant of £25 in hard currency traveller’s cheques. Most Soviet students had to subsist on a maximum monthly stipend of 150 rubles, many receiving less than this. At this time, one ruble was supposed to be equivalent to one US dollar. The main stolovaya was a self-service canteen which, for very little money, provided a basic diet of shchi (cabbage soup) or borshch (borsch), kotlety (meatballs, usually served with rice), cabbage and/or carrot salad, sour cream, kumys (fermented mare’s milk), kompot (stewed dried fruit in a tumbler, really a kind of fruit juice), black bread and/or white bread, and tea. This was served for all meals, including breakfast. It could be eaten for two or three days before becoming intolerably repetitive. There was also a coffee bar, which was supposed to serve coffee, though I never saw any during all the time I spent in MGU. There was also a store selling such delicacies as Soviet champagne, wine, cigarettes, Cuban cigars and candy. Outside the main building, on Prospekt Vernadskogo and Kutuzovsky Prospekt there were foodstores (gastronom) which sold staple groceries, and it was even possible to buy fresh meat if one was prepared to queue for a long time. If one was feeling especially extravagant, in certain areas of town there were also the so-called beryozka hard currency stores, earmarked for the use of Communist Party officials and high-ranking bureaucrats, but also open to foreign diplomats and their families. Some of these stores sold fresh fruit (often virtually unobtainable with rubles) and superior quality cuts of meat, and after a little argument one could usually be served by presenting one’s traveller’s cheques to the kassirsha behind the often brutally overcrowded sales counter, though this often involved prolonged arguments about whether one’s signature was genuine or not.

Going Back VIII

Lidiya Prokofyevna, or “L.P.” as we soon began to call her, was in charge of all the foreign “philology” (arts and humanities) students in the building and its environs. Her office was therefore often very busy, and the time spent waiting outside it for one’s appointment, which was sometimes delayed by up to two hours or more, could be considerable. When one did gain access to the inner sanctum, one began to realize why these delays occurred. To begin with, L.P. would fix you with her somewhat steely, but none the less friendly gaze, through thick glasses, and ask you questions about your zayavlenie, or application for research and archive facilities. When she had learned what she wanted to know, she would pick up the telephone and call the relevant authorities – however, the people at the other end of the line usually seemed to be busy or absent: the phone would go and ringing and ringing, and L.P. would sit there looking at you through her glasses. She might then briefly change the subject to the questions of how you were faring in Zone V, or who your group leader was, or some such topic, but would then revert to silent waiting, as the phone at the other end of the line continued to ring and ring. Sometimes this process of waiting went on for ten minutes or more – then she would call another number, with the same result, and so on. Eventually the required information would come through, and L.P. would issue instructions about the appointment with the archive director, librarian or other official. I think most of us found these sessions in L.P.’s office something of a Kafkaesque joke – and what made the joke even funnier was that L.P. seemed to share an awareness of the absurdity of the situation. Eventually one day, the leader (or starosta) of our group and his deputy brought her flowers and chocolates, which finally seemed to break the ice.

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by | 4 December 2004 · 7:19 am

Tim Burke on Academic Groupthink

Tim Burke, a history professor at Swarthmore, weighs in on the groupthink controversy in what I regard as a judiciously balanced manner.

Academics are not motivated to groupthink out of a loyalty to liberal causes, left-wing politics or registration in the Democratic Party, though in many disciplines at the moment, they may end up predominantly having those affiliations in a smug, uninterrogated manner. They’re motivated to groupthink by the institutional organization of academic life. The same forces that help academics to produce knowledge and scholarship are the forces which produce unwholesome close-mindedness and inbred self-satisfied attitudes. These forces would act on conservatives as well were we to magically remove the current professoriate and replace them with registered Republicans. They do act already on academics who operate in disciplines where certain kinds of political conservatism are more orthodox, or in institutional contexts, like religious universities, where conservative values are expressly connected to institutional missions.

When I was briefly at Emory many years ago, I helped organize a one-day event about “interdisciplinarity”. After about six or seven helpings of young snot-nosed punks like myself rattle on about how cool and interdisciplinary we all were, a wise senior scholar named David Hesla finally intervened. “Virtually everybody’s interdisciplinary in some way”, he said. “You guys are unhappy with departments, not disciplines.”

What Hesla was pointing was that most of the constraints, both hidden and obvious, that produce forms of “groupthink” or suppression of innovation and debate within academia are the consequence of the administrative organization of academic institutions. Groupthink isn’t enforced by partisan plotters: it happens invisibly, cumulatively, pervasively, in the space in between scholars. It happens in department or faculty meetings, in peer reviews. It lives in what has been called “the invisible college”, the pattern of normative judgements that all academics make (including yours truly) about what is cogent, what is original, what is canonical, what is important. Those judgement are formed out all the things you know already, including those you scarcely consciously know that you know, and the heuristics you use to guide yourself to further knowledge.

That is the heart of the problem. It is one thing to talk about breaking down groupthink, to attack the insularity of academic life, and another thing to figure out how to do that without destroying the productivity and usefulness of scholarship and research altogether. The administrative constraints on my life as a scholar are not just noxious restrictions on what I can and cannot do, should or should not say. They’re also necessary in both practical and philosophical ways.

via Cliopatria

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by | 11 November 2004 · 10:40 am

Why All Reasonable People Agree

Mark Bauerlein explains in The Chronicle:

The first protocol of academic society might be called the Common Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities meetings serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct often enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial events. A fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions….

After Nixon crushed McGovern in the 1972 election, the film critic Pauline Kael made a remark that has become a touchstone among conservatives. “I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won,” she marveled. “I don’t know anybody who voted for him.” While the second sentence indicates the sheltered habitat of the Manhattan intellectual, the first signifies what social scientists call the False Consensus Effect. That effect occurs when people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. If the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way….

The final social pattern is the Law of Group Polarization. That law–as Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of political science and of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, has described–predicts that when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 13 August 2004 · 4:42 pm

UH Regents Discuss Evan S. Dobelle

Both major Honolulu dailies, the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser, published their reports from what the latter describes as “hundreds of pages of documents released yesterday by the University of Hawai’i, including personal e-mails, UH Foundation documents, travel itineraries and draft minutes from two key meetings of the UH Board of Regents.”

The Star-Bulletin focuses on the Regents’ loss of trust and ends with a list of key issues.

Minutes of meetings and documents that led to the firing of University of Hawaii President Evan Dobelle show regents believed Dobelle misused a UH Foundation fund and lost the trust of the board because of his “lies.”

In a discussion in executive session before the vote to fire Dobelle on June 15, regents expressed their reasons why the then-president should be terminated, including allegedly using UH Foundation money for personal benefit, and a lack of leadership, follow-up and credibility.

Regent Walter Nunokawa said the board should have taken action last year, but “the Lingle appointees wanted to have a chance to work with the president and see if they could do better than we did with him.”

Board Vice Chairwoman Kitty Lagareta, who was appointed to the board last year by Gov. Linda Lingle, said she wanted to give Dobelle a chance. But, according to the minutes’ summary of her comments, “the bottom line for her is that the president is a liar — a habitual liar, and unfortunately a very credible liar.” …

According to the minutes, Deloitte & Touche auditor Gary Nishikawa told the regents that there was a “reimbursement frenzy” when the fund was audited. But he said it was not within the auditor’s scope of services to render an opinion or determine whether there was an intent to defraud the university.

Dobelle has said there was sloppy bookkeeping with the fund but no intent to take money….

KEY ISSUES IN THE FIRING OF UH PRESIDENT EVAN DOBELLE

Problem areas related to the Board of Regents’ June 15 firing of University of Hawaii President Evan Dobelle, according to documents released yesterday and cited by UH sources:

>> An audit report that shows $72,000 in undocumented expenses from Dobelle’s protocol fund managed by the UH Foundation.

>> Use of about $7,000 from a restricted donation for a video showing Dobelle receiving a Salesman of the Year award from Sales and Marketing Executives of Hawaii.

>> Use of university funds for flights to the mainland to interview for positions at other institutions.

>> Dobelle, a former mayor of Pittsfield, Mass., flew the sheriff of Pittsfield to Hawaii and put him up in a Waikiki hotel [not just any old Waikiki hotel, but the Halekulani, “the premier luxury hotel”!] at university expense. Dobelle told the regents he was recruiting the sheriff to work on an educational program, but administrators of the program said they never heard of him.

>> Dobelle also used university funds for air fare and hotel expenses for the men’s squash coach at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., where Dobelle formerly was president, saying he was recruiting the coach, even though UH does not have a squash program.

>> Cost overruns for renovation of College Hill, the university president’s residence.

>> A $4,000 trip taken by Dobelle’s wife, Kit, to a conference in Massachusetts at her college alma mater.

Source: Associated Press [probably AP reporter Bruce Dunford; see this blog’s initial post on Dobelle].

The Advertiser leads off with alleged misuse of funds and ends with assessments from each member of the Board of Regents.

During some fund-raising trips on behalf of the University of Hawai’i in the past nine months, Evan Dobelle was job-hunting and undergoing personal job interviews, according to documents released by the university yesterday….

BOARD OF REGENTS ASSESSES DOBELLE

Highlights from the minutes of June 15, when regents fired Dobelle “for cause.” They later rescinded that decision:

Regent Myron A. Yamasato • “Regent Yamasato stated that since Dobelle has no solid support from any stakeholder group … his appointment should be terminated.”

Regent Walter Nunokawa • “Regent Nunokawa noted that after three years there is still no operational plan for the university, just a bunch of big ideas without priority or commitment attached to them. He noted it is particularly troubling, since he is one of the few regents who were on board when Dobelle was hired, to find that many side contracts were negotiated without the knowledge or oversight of the Board. Regent Nunokawa concluded that since there is no trust, and the feeling is unanimous that he has no integrity, there is no reason to continue his appointment.”

Chairwoman Patricia Lee • “In the areas of scholarship and academics, it is questionable whether he is fit to lead a Research 1 (One) University and whether he would have earned tenure on his own given his academic credentials. If the public knew what the board knows and if these things could be brought (to) light, the public would be outraged.”

Regent Charles Kawakami • “He stated that the president simply has no integrity and you cannot trust him so it is really impossible to work with him.”

Regent Kitty Lagareta • “Regent Lagareta also noted that she had been deeply troubled by President Dobelle’s inability to work effectively with women. She said that it was unbelievable when he told some male regents that things would be easier if he didn’t have to work with two women as chair and vice chair.”

Regent James J.C. Haynes II • “He said it is time to move on past Evan Dobelle because he is simply not good for the university.”

Regent Alvin A. Tanaka • “Given all the lies, threats, and problems with money, Regent Tanaka said that personally he would not stay on the board if President Dobelle continued.”

Regent Trent K. Kakuda • “Regent Kakuda said that he simply could not take another year of the president’s lies and deceptions to the board and to the public.”

Regent Byron W. Bender • “President Dobelle has demonstrated no leadership in dealing with problems, choosing rather to allow them to ‘fester’ and eventually land at the board’s doorstep. He has a problem with money and the board cannot allow it to continue.”

Regent Jane B. Tatibouet • “There is too much money being mismanaged and misused for his personal benefit rather than for the entire university.”

A related story is headlined How regents reached decision.

The meeting at which University of Hawai’i regents decided to fire President Evan Dobelle — a decision they later rescinded in a settlement agreement — began with advice from the board’s attorney and discussion of an audit of Dobelle’s spending, draft minutes of the session released yesterday show….

According to the draft minutes, “Lee said that she favors a graceful termination or resignation, but President Dobelle already stated publicly that we ‘can’t fire him’ and that the board will have to ‘buy him out.’

“She added that this may be the president’s final position, but that she has done some analysis and … the university could save about $1,386,000 even if the board did buy him out of his main contract and probably much more once the board does an assessment of all of his side agreements.”

She also said the university could save money with the departures of “his high-priced people, some of whom have already left,” the minutes show.

Finally, the Star-Bulletin includes a sad sidebar story by investigative reporter Rick Daysog headlined, Dobelle siphoned off donation for Jewish studies at UH: The donor asks that the money be restored to its original purpose.

Well, I guess I’ve finally figured out what Evan S. Dobelle’s middle initial stands for.

UPDATE: In the 18 August edition of Honolulu MidWeek, columnist Bob Jones reports on “What the Dobelle Report Left Out.” His sources say that after the Regents decided to fire Dobelle for cause on the advice of their special-hire attorney, Barry Marr, UH attorney [and the Democratic Party’s in-house watchdog] Walter Kirimitsu suggested that [long-time Democratic Party insider] Dobelle might sue the Regents individually, in which case it would be better to try mediation first.

The public also deserves some answers from former regent, chairwoman Lily Yao. The others gave her authority to work out and sign the Dobelle contract.

Why did she give Dobelle everything he wanted, including expedited (immediate) tenure? That’s not uncommon if a university is trying to hire someone who’s a world-class scholar, professor or researcher. Dobelle was a politician with no professorial background and a record of administration only at three very small colleges–never at a Carnegie I research institution such as the UH. Why did Yao toss in a private letter giving Dobelle extra insurance and a year’s paid sabbatical without telling all the other regents?

When the regents went into session on June 15, Evan Dobelle was going to be fired. There was no question of talking to him and trying to work things out. Too many were infuriated by a previous session in which they tell me he leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and I gave them his you-can’t-fire-me smile as they went on about what they saw as misuse of money, bad evaluations, bad management and missed meetings.

And he almost couldn’t be fired. Not one word in the contract allowed him to be fired for insubordination, failure to carry out the regents’ mandates or poor evaluations. He had been made virtually fire-proof by Lily Yao’s solo signature. The only question on June 15 as the regents talked with Marr over several hours was if they could stretch to a for-cause firing. Just plain firing, they agreed, didn’t cut it–mainly because of that tenure business. Marr said yes.

Good riddance. Dobelle was the last straw. I’ve lost whatever residual faith I once had in Hawai‘i’s Democratic Party.

UPDATE: In the 20 August 2004 edition of Pacific Business News, Howard Dicus explains “How Hawaii Works”:

To a journalist, Dobelle’s failure to deliver was the story. Something that isn’t surprising, isn’t news. “Family of Six Survives as Boiler Fails to Explode!” But the gap between Dobelle’s crackerjack billing and slacker performance? That was surprising. [Well, he did work for the State after all.] How could a former White House protocol officer be so bad at politics? [Well, it was the Carter White House.] How could a veteran of New England winters not learn to love slippas? [Well, he apparently didn’t spend all that much time in the Islands.]

By contrast, if the regents mishandled his firing, where’s the news in that? The regents are a committee. We all know how committees are.

Lewis Thomas once described the collective intellect of ants by saying that one ant is an idiot, two ants are the glimmering of an idea, but an entire anthill is a marvelous brain, “with little bits for its wits.”

Humans work the opposite way. One human can be an Einstein. Two humans thinking together are a compromise. Put five or six perfectly intelligent humans around a table and a camel begins to appear in the paddock. And so on, all the way up to the Board of Regents.

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