Category Archives: Hawai’i

by | 10 November 2004 · 2:28 pm

Collaboration Potential in Hawai‘i: Universal

Collaboration is a pejorative word. Often misused, it is inappropriate for those Japanese-Americans whose circumstances and inclinations led them to serve Japan during World War II. On the other hand in Hawaii, potential collaboration was by no means confined to Japanese-Americans. Any resident of the Islands in 1942, regardless of ethnicity, probably speculated on what life would be like in the event of a successful Japanese invasion. Any rational mind considering that contingency would most likely conclude that a degree of collaboration would be hard to avoid. Unlike the Philippines, Hawaii was physically too small for anyone to avoid contact with occupation authorities. A guerrilla movement would have been virtually suicidal. There is little evidence that either the military or civilians were prepared to fight to the last man should Hawaii have been assaulted. On the contrary, many probably shared the views of a State Department special agent who in a report written several weeks before 7 December 1941 acknowledged: “If the Japanese fleet arrived, doubtless great numbers of them [Hawaii Japanese] would then forget their American loyalties and shout a ‘Banzai’ from the shore. Under those circumstances, if this reporter were there he is not sure that he might not do it also to save his own skin, if not his face.”

These words were not written by a coward. Dying to the last man, woman, and child (gyokusai as the Japanese called it in those desperate defenses of Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa) was neither a tenet of American military doctrine nor consonant with American historical experience, the Alamo notwithstanding….

Consequently, if the choice were to collaborate or face suicidal odds, there is little doubt but that Hawaii’s residents would have opted, in the British phrase, to “carry on” with as much dignity as possible. The scale and degree of collaboration would probably have depended upon many obvious and subtle factors, among them individual character, the content and style of occupation policies, the conduct of occupation authorities and garrison troops, and the local assessment of Japan’s prospects for winning the war or at least for repelling an American counterattack.

SOURCE: Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan’s Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor, by John J. Stephan (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1984), pp. 8-9

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by | 6 November 2004 · 9:06 am

Rising Sun in the NBA

Among the new foreign-born players on the NBA rosters as the season opened this week was 5-foot, 9-inch Yuta Tabuse of the Phoenix Suns, the first Japan-born player in NBA history. However:

The first NBA player of Japanese descent was Wataru Misaka. A 5-7 Japanese-American guard [who] was born in Ogden, Utah, Misaka attended Weber Junior College (now Weber State University), and was drafted by the New York Knicks in 1947. He played in three games in the 1947-48 season before being cut.

Tabuse also has a Utah connection of sorts. He played two seasons for Brigham Young University–Hawai‘i in 2001-2002.

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by | 6 November 2004 · 7:10 am

Raging Waters Flood Hawai‘i’s Largest Library

A torrential downpour over the Halloween weekend caused normally placid Manoa Stream to overflow its banks, overturn cars, and fill nearby buildings with layers of mud. Among the worst-hit was the University of Hawai‘i’s main graduate research library. The whole Manoa campus was shut down for several days.

According to a widely circulated email from Southeast Asia librarian Yati Bernard, “the basement of Hamilton Library, which housed the Government Documents, Map Collection, Cataloging Dept., Acqusition Dept., Serials Dept., Gifts and Exchange is gone.”

“We were informed that approximately 80% of the government documents were completely destroyed, 70% of the maps are gone, all newly arrived materials were destroyed,” she added. About 3,000 books on Asia that were waiting to be shelved “are gone forever.”

“Hamilton library is closed indefinitely, because there is no electricity, and the air is not healthy.”

According to a KITV report on 5 November, the University “has hired one of the largest cleanup companies in the world” (BMS Catastrophe, not Halliburton) to help the campus recover. Cleanup costs could exceed $5 million.

A 10-minute slideshow of the library damage and cleanup efforts was online but was inaccessible when this report was posted.

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by | 20 September 2004 · 10:52 pm

Good Soldier Outlier: Gays in the Draft-era Military

The only long-term friend I made during my Army days was gay. And he wasn’t even in the Army; he was a sailor, one of my roommates at the Defense Language Institute. It didn’t strike me until many years later that a fair number of my fellow students at DLI must have been gay. What a shame it would have been if all their language skills had been rejected.

Gary was an ardent film buff from Tulsa, OK. He and I went to many movies in Monterey, Carmel, and elsewhere on the Peninsula, from Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic “War and Peace” to Russ Meyer’s graphic “Vixen.” We also spent a lot of time exploring local history, from Steinbeck to Robert Louis Stevenson.

One weekend when we had planned to hike over the top of the Presidio along a section of 17-mile Drive and down toward Carmel, he failed to return to our room on Friday night. When he finally got back Saturday, he gingerly confessed to me that he had spent the night with a gay acquaintance in town. I was the first straight person he had revealed himself to, and he seemed to think it would be the end of our friendship. But it wasn’t. The next day we took a long hike together, either all the way to Carmel or to a Carmel Valley movie theatre. I can’t really remember.

After he finished his Spanish course at DLI, he was assigned to Puerto Rico, with some time in Guantanamo. He would write long letters about the local scene there, but nothing quite so explicit as what he later wrote once he got out of the Navy and settled in Westwood Village, Los Angeles, where he found work in a factory that employed a lot of Spanish-speaking employees. Once there, his letters began to reveal much more about his active sexlife, including his bathhouse adventures.

By then, I was in graduate school in Hawai‘i, and my life seemed hopelessly boring by comparison, except when I did a spell of fieldwork. However, it was during graduate school that a lesbian friend recruited me to participate in a new gay rights parade right down the length of Waikiki. I only did it for Gary’s sake. There were hardly more than a dozen of us, and I got filmed passing right in front of a TV camera on the local news. When we got to the end, near the Honolulu Zoo, I spent a long time looking at the monkeys–with considerable empathy.

Later in the 1970s, I visited Gary in LA and we made a nostalgic trip back to the Monterey Peninsula, stopping at Hearst Castle en route. When we stopped at a public rest room after a hike around Point Lobos, Gary confessed he was pee-shy. He couldn’t use a public urinal if other men were around. I don’t know how the hell he survived 4 years in the Navy.

I finally lost touch with him in the late 1970s, after I began writing my dissertation and he began writing about his prior incarnations as Amenhotep. La-La-Land must have begun to take a toll on his sensitive mind. I hope his dangerously promiscuous lifestyle didn’t make him a victim of the early stages of the AIDS pandemic.

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by | 11 September 2004 · 8:27 pm

From Watergate to Rathergate: 1972 vs. 2004

I’ve been asking myself lately how a widely reviled incumbent like Richard Nixon could have won in a landslide of such monumental proportions over a well-known U.S. senator–and a courageous war veteran–like George McGovern in the 1972 U.S. presidential election.

Full disclosure: I reviled Nixon, and I voted for McGovern in 1972. In fact, I’ve never voted for a Republican presidential candidate unless you count John Anderson’s third-party bid in 1980, when I helped collect signatures to put him on the ballot. In 1968, I was too young to vote, but did campaign a bit for Hubert Humphrey. In 1972, I was fresh out of the Army, old enough to vote, and newly arrived in Hawai‘i to finish college. But even staunchly Democratic Hawai‘i went for Nixon that year, as did McGovern’s home state of South Dakota.

So, what happened? When I did a web search on “1972 Nixon McGovern” Google’s top-ranked page was a synopsis for a political science course at Kennesaw State College, GA, which provides decent fodder for a compare-and-contrast essay. (I’ve corrected a few minor errors therein.)

1972’s election outcome was decided early on in the Democratic primary. The Democrats were trying to oust a sitting president who, although not very popular, was an effective president. What made their task even harder was that the Democrats lost their front runner candidate, Edmund Muskie, early because the media portrayed him as an emotionally unstable person because he appeared to be “crying” while he was denouncing a news paper editorial that attacked his wife. The incident left the Democratic party without a candidate capable of unsetting the President.Since the outcome of the election was not in doubt, the only thing that was memorable about the 1972 election was the Watergate scandal that started out small and eventually forced the President to resign for the first time in the history of the U.S.A. The Democratic Party was in disarray as they were in the 1968 election. They nominated McGovern who was known as a very left wing liberal and an ineffective campaigner. In addition, the candidate’s first choice for a running mate was forced to resign because the media found out that he had received shock therapy. The candidate was forced to look for another Vice President nominee at the time he should have been focusing on getting his message across to the voters. The person he picked for the Vice President was President Kennedy’s brother in law, Sergeant Shriver, who had never run for elected office and his only experience in the government was being the first Peace Corps director under the Kennedy administration.

This sounds familiar. The Democratic Party is once again now in disarray, with weak leadership unable to decide whether it’s a war party, a peace party, or a party of irrelevant anachronism.

The role of the major media in the 2004 election, however, seems almost exactly the opposite of what it was back in 1972.

The press constantly criticized the Democratic candidate for everything from his stand on the issues to his strategy. President Nixon’s campaign was portrayed as an efficient and superior model of how to run a successful campaign. The press took the Nixon campaign portrayal of the McGovern policies as out of the main stream and ran with it without investigating it and finding out for themselves. The McGovern campaign was no match for the Nixon campaign organization and their constant distortion of his ideas to the media. The media took as a fact most of the distortion without trying to ascertain the fact….The media hated Nixon until he became President…. Once he became President, he mostly eliminated the reporters he did not like by not granting privileges to the White House and by not granting access to the administration officials. The action forced the media to be exceedingly fair to the Nixon administration until the Watergate scandal erupted. Many reporters did not want to report negative stories about the administration because they feared losing sources and access to the White House. The media also did not like the Democratic candidate and many newspapers endorsed President Nixon. That is one reason why many newspapers, except the Washington Post, did not bother to dig deep when the Watergate scandal broke out….

With the help of the media, Nixon won a second term in one of the biggest landslide elections in the U.S. history.

Despite the various scandals their respective enemies attempted to uncover or create, however, Nixon was re-elected, Clinton was re-elected, and G.W. Bush is likely to be re-elected. A party that relies on scandal to win elections is intellectually bankrupt, especially when it has to dig down 30 years to find them. I heartily agree with the following conclusion of the synopsis cited above.

The lasting legacy of the Watergate scandal is that the media now thinks every mistake a President makes is another Watergate that needs to be investigated and reported as a scandal without any evidence. Not only do reporters portray small mistakes as a scandal, they also go out of their way to investigate and dig for “dirt” to see if the person is clean and worthy of being a President. The unintended cost of the media’s obsession with scandal and investigation is that it turns people off from seeking elected office because they do not want their privacy to be violated. It also makes it harder for the candidates to convey their messages to the voters because what the media reports give priority to the scandal, not for the candidate’s ideas.

The saddest omission from this political science synopsis of the 1972 presidential race is the failure to mention any of the real issues of the day. The sole focus is on who controls the discourse, as if the voters are mere “sheeple” who would be lost without the press to let them know what they should think. Well, those days are long over, if they ever existed. And ever since this very date three years ago, the major parties and the major media have both been rapidly losing what control they once had over public discourse.

Speaking for myself, I’ve been subjecting my whole epistemology to a deliberate but thorough reassessment over the past three years, and have severely downgraded the reliability of most of my traditional sources. Fortunately there is a greater variety of sources available now than ever before.

As far as I’m concerned, the partisan hacks of both major parties have now thoroughly disgraced themselves. Throughout the Clinton presidency, the Republicans discredited themselves by focusing too much of their energy on obstructionism and scandal-mongering. During the current Bush presidency, the Democrats have discredited themselves by doing precisely the same.

All the while, for the duration of both administrations, the major media have disgraced themselves twice over, by devoting far, far more coverage to anti-incumbent scandal-mongering than to constructive analysis of issues. And now, as Dan Rather just demonstrated on 60 Minutes II, they’ve gone beyond looking for and vetting incriminating evidence. Now they’re accepting whatever meets their agenda, regardless of its merits; and dismissing whatever doesn’t, again regardless of its merits.

I served as a company clerk in the Army in 1970-71, producing official documents on a sturdy old manual typewriter with a Courier typeface. Every document I produced had to conform to a uniform template. Never did I see any officer type his own document. In fact, one of my company commanders was taking extension classes at a local college and he had me type his papers for him. In graduate school during the mid 1970s, I did most of my work on an IBM Selectric, using mostly the Prestige Elite and Letter Gothic type balls, which were standard in many military and civilian offices in those days. In 1979, I used the clunky IBM Composer in a publications office to produce justified text in a proportional typeface that was a relatively crude (and unkerned) version of Times.

I have enough experience in typefaces to be able to distinguish easily among a manual typewriter’s Courier, an IBM Selectric’s Prestige Elite, an IBM Composer’s crude Times, and MS Word’s Times New Roman typefaces. The last was used in the CBS forgeries, which don’t even pass the laugh test to anyone who knows much at all about both military documents from the Vietnam era and the evolution of typefaces on standard office equipment over the past three decades. 60 Minutes apparently doesn’t even have that level of talent in their research department.

Fortunately, a huge army of bloggers of all ages has reported for duty over the past three years, while the smug patricians in the media have either slacked off or gone AWOL. The bloggers are much more evenly divided along partisan lines than the major media, and there seems to be more indirect cross-dialog in the blogosphere, thanks to a small cadre of fair-minded partisans and a few resolute centrists.

Blogger networks provide a level of distributed intelligence that no newsroom can match. Perhaps the most comprehensive round-up of the many blogger contributions to Rathergate can be found at Hugh Hewitt and Powerline. The latter has also added a dismal (and somewhat over the top) postmortem on the willingness of mainstream “news” organizations to trade their most valuable asset, credibility, for political goals.

Although the major media continue to be far more influential than bloggers, parts of the blogosphere are gaining credibility while some major news media are throwing theirs away. Moreover, many bloggers on the right feel that Rathergate is the 2004 equivalent of the old media’s Watergate in 1972, even though the former are in this case defending the White House, rather than attacking it. And their enemy of the moment, Dan Rather, is responding much the way the Richard Nixon did. Third-rate forgeries, compounded by stonewalling and cover-up, are destroying his pretense of professional detachment. Other media bigwigs, like the Boston Globe, are responding similarly. Watergate may have marked the zenith of the press as honest broker. Rathergate marks the nadir of a long decline.

This has of course led to a certain degree of overwrought blogger triumphalism on the right. Some bloggers had already begun to compare blogging to the Protestant Reformation, during which the printing press helped a broader audience bypass the religious monopoly of a corrupt priestly class. Belmont Club, who reads the media the way Kremlinologists used to read the Soviet press, calls Rathergate the Shot Heard Round the World, and quotes a bit of King Henry V’s rousing St. Crispin’s Day speech at the battle of Agincourt, where his scruffy band of brothers defeated the flower of French chivalry.

The world has changed much over the past three years. For September 11th people, many pillars of conventional wisdom began falling with the twin towers–and they’re still falling. For September 10th people, who appear to predominate in the media, every development since that day has just confirmed their earlier conventional views of the world. The saddest people of all are those who now, in 2004, are still refighting the election of 1972.

UPDATE: Jay Rosen’s PressThink has further analysis of the implications for Big Media, including the following Big Picture quote from Belmont Club.

The traditional news model is collapsing. It suffers from two defects. The “news object” can no longer be given sealed attributes in newspaper backrooms. The days when the press was the news object foundry are dying. Second, the news industry is suffering from its lack of analytic cells, which are standard equipment in intellgence shops. Editors do some analysis but their focus is diluted by their attention to style and the craft of writing. The blogosphere and other actors, now connected over the Internet, are filling in for the missing analytic function. And although the news networks still generate, via their reporters, the bulk of primary news, they generate a pitiful amount of competent analysis.

QandO offers a compendium of the typographical, stylistic, and personal evidence. A Carnegie-Mellon computer scientist who was a pioneer in electronic typesetting presents a detailed technical analysis of the typography. His verdict:

The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.

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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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by | 21 July 2004 · 7:01 pm

The Chronicle of Evan S. Dobelle

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a comprehensive and fairly balanced report by Julianne Basinger on the firing of University of Hawai‘i President Evan S. Dobelle entitled Wipeout in Hawaii: A president is toppled amid claims of arrogance, cronyism, and misspending. If the link should become unavailable, the compilation at The Firing of Evan Dobelle covers much of the story. The following are a few tidbits from the Chronicle story that weren’t covered earlier.

“While it looks like it’s just been a one-year situation of difficulty, it’s been a three-year situation,” says Patricia Y. Lee, a regent who has been on the board for three years and chairwoman for the past year. “At his [Dobelle’s] first-year review, he stalked out of the room and said, ‘You can’t fire me.’ So you can see it’s not a comfortable relationship.” …

Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa, a professor of Hawaiian studies on the Manoa campus, believes Mr. Dobelle’s endorsement of Ms. Hirono [the Democratic Party’s candidate for state governor in 2002] led regents appointed by [Republican] Governor Lingle to seek his ouster. Mr. Dobelle won the professor’s support after he gave $1.5-million from a discretionary fund for a new Hawaiian-studies center. “Evan Dobelle to me represented our champion,” she says. “I was extremely saddened that he should be fired.” But other faculty members, regents, lawmakers, and even Mr. Dobelle himself say that tensions with the board and questions about his spending existed before his endorsement.

The Chronicle also includes the following timeline entitled Steps Toward an Exit

  • JULY 2001 – Evan S. Dobelle becomes president of the University of Hawaii System.

  • FEBRUARY 2002 – Mr. Dobelle takes 25 donors and staff members to a Janet Jackson concert, paying for the tickets through a presidential discretionary fund of the University of Hawaii Foundation, the system’s private fund-raising arm. His action prompts public outcry, and by April a state legislator calls for a state audit of whether foundation money is being used appropriately.

  • SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 2002 – The president judges the Miss America pageant in September, despite criticism from some faculty members who say doing so is sexist and inappropriate for a college leader. In November Mr. Dobelle endorses the Democratic candidate for governor in a television commercial, and a member of the university’s Board of Regents resigns in protest.

  • MARCH 2003 – A state audit of the university’s foundation finds “a number of questionable foundation expenditures made under the guise of fund raising.”

  • OCTOBER 2003 – Amid increasing criticism from lawmakers and some faculty and staff members over his spending, particularly on travel, Mr. Dobelle receives a negative performance review from the regents, which he hotly disputes, both for its content and for the board’s procedure in evaluating him. The review accuses him of a lack of accountability to the board, including murky reporting on finances.

  • APRIL-MAY 2004 – A second state audit of the foundation again finds “questionable, even abusive, expenditures from donated funds.” The state legislature passes a bill requiring the foundation to disclose more financial records to lawmakers.

  • JUNE 2004 – After an evaluation that includes an outside consultant and a financial review of the president’s spending of foundation money, the regents unanimously vote to fire Mr. Dobelle “for cause,” but they decline to disclose what the “cause” is. He threatens to sue, and the two sides and their lawyers begin mediation. The university’s accreditors criticize the board and the university for their poor relationship.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported on 15 July 2004 that Dobelle allocated $90,000 out of his annual protocol fund of $200,000 on a political poll.

Documents in the draft audit of the protocol fund also show that even though the poll was commissioned in November 2002, Opinion Dynamics was not paid its $45,000 fee for the January poll until last October. The protocol fund began to run out of money toward the end of its fiscal year in June 2003, according to the draft audit. However, it was not clear if that was a factor in the late payment.

The contract with Opinion Dynamics was for $90,000 plus expenses for two polls — with a second poll to be conducted in June 2003. In a handwritten note on the contract, Dobelle wrote, “no more than $99,999 for both surveys.”

Under university procurement policies, all consultant contracts in excess of $100,000 require prior Board of Regents approval.

The June 2003 survey was never conducted, Dobelle said.

A special to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on 25 July 2004 by University of Hawai‘i journalism professor Beverly Ann Deepe Keever headlined The Dobelle Debacle notes “The secrecy surrounding Evan Dobelle’s interrupted tenure as UH president has done great harm to Hawaii’s public university.”

The spiral of secrecy that augured the Dobelle debacle began in early 2001 [before the current Republican governor was elected] when the UH Board of Regents met in a series of unannounced, closed-door meetings and agreed to a lucrative contract with Dobelle.

On March 9, 2001, Lily Yao, then-chairwoman of the Board of Regents, signed Dobelle to a contract paying him at least $3 million over seven years and giving him residency in the state-owned mansion near the Manoa campus, use of a state car and a number of other perks.

His first-year salary of $442,000 was more than double that of outgoing President Kenneth Mortimer and four times that of the governor. This multimillion-dollar commitment was agreed to just as the board was raising student tuition and Gov. Ben Cayetano was arguing that the state was too impoverished to increase faculty pay enough to forestall a strike that eventually did occur.

Contesting the secret negotiations that led to such an expenditure of taxpayer monies were graduate student Mamo Kim and the Hawaii chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), who filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s First Circuit Court. They argued that this secrecy violated Hawaii’s “Sunshine Law” requiring open meetings of public agencies, except in specific cases permitting closure. This “Sunshine Law” was passed by the Legislature in 1975 in the wake of the Watergate scandal so that opening up closed doors of government would allow in sunshine that acts as a disinfectant to reduce mismanagement and even illegal or unethical decisions.

Unfortunately, graduate student Kim and SPJ lost the case. Circuit Court Judge Virginia Crandall OK’d the board’s practice of recessing one closed-door meeting in order to hold another unannounced closed-door meeting without the public and the news media even being aware that the board was meeting or what it was meeting about.

Also unfortunate, the board’s secret decision-making on Dobelle’s high-priced and lengthy contract sent the wrong signal to the incoming president that money was no object at UH. Dobelle assumed the presidency on July 1, 2001, just 72 days before the spectacular attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon sent Hawaii’s struggling tourist-based economy into an even steeper nose dive.

The rest is history — and a lot of news stories. Dobelle brought in his own management team from the East Coast, paying members up to twice the salaries of the veterans they replaced. He recommended — and the board agreed — to pay double his own salary to UH’s head football coach June Jones. And Dobelle racked up a tremendous cost overrun in refurbishing his state-owned residence.

Dobelle’s public aura of extravagance was magnified by his driving around campus in his pricey Porsche, rather than the state car, and buying a million-dollar-plus home while he was living rent-free in the president’s mansion, College Hill. The governor is the only other state official granted the privilege of a state residence — and hers is now considerably less impressive than the university president’s.

UPDATE, 30 July: Dobelle and the Regents reached a settlement while Dobelle was away (yet again) at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

In the settlement announced yesterday, the regents will pay ousted UH President Evan Dobelle and his attorneys $1.6 million, plus payments to an insurance policy. He agreed to give up about $496,000 from a UH Foundation incentive fund. Dobelle’s deal includes:

  • $1.05 million payment.

  • A nontenured researcher position at UH-Manoa for two years at $125,000 a year plus collective bargaining raises.

  • $290,000 for his attorneys.

  • $40,000-a-year payments on a $2 million whole life insurance policy for the next six years. UH will be reimbursed for its payments to the insurance company when Dobelle’s heirs cash in the policy.

Nonmonetary highlights of the UH-Evan Dobelle settlement include:

  • Regents rescind firing for cause.

  • Dobelle resigns on Aug. 14.

  • Both sides resolve the dispute without finding wrongdoing by Dobelle or the board and agree not to pursue further legal claims.

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by | 13 July 2004 · 7:48 am

Da Hawaii Pidgin Bible

Who Make Da Pidgin Bible?

From 1987, get 26 local peopo dat help fo make da Pidgin Bible. Dey da Pidgin Bible Translation Group. Dey all volunteer peopo dat stay talk Pidgin from small kid time. Dey give couple hour every week fo translate. Dey Christian peopo dat go diffren churches, but dey all working togedda…. An dey awready write 40% a Da Befo Jesus Book, but gotta check um plenny so gotta wait.

Some a dem live odda place now, some a dem get job dat no let um get time fo translate, an Auntie Rachel Silva, she wen mahke awready 1994. March 2000, dey pau make Da Jesus Book. June 2001, get um back from da printa guys. Five translata guys stay working awready fo make Da Befo Jesus Book.

Wat Da Bible Say Bout Important Stuffs?

Jesus say, “God wen get so plenny love an aloha fo da peopo inside da world, dat he wen send me, his one an ony Boy, so dat everybody dat trus me no get cut off from God, but get da kine life dat stay to da max foeva.” (John 3:16)

Tink hard bout wat I telling you. Cuz da Boss, he goin make shua you undastan everyting I say. So tink plenny bout Jesus, da Spesho Guy God Wen Send. He da One dat wen come from King David ohana. God wen make him come back alive, afta he wen mahke. An dass da Good Kine Stuff From God dat I stay telling everybody. (Letta Numba 2 Fo Timoty 2:7-8)

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by | 4 July 2004 · 6:22 pm

A Foxhole View of the Korean War

In June 1950, Pfc. Susumu Shinagawa of Able Company, 34th Infantry, found himself heading north from Pusan, at the southern end of Korea, to stop the North Korean troops advancing south.

The train chugged to a stop just before daylight at Pyongtaek. There was a light, steady drizzle as we got off the train and waited in the muddy streets for our orders. Without a poncho, I was soaked to the skin. When the orders came, Able and Baker Companies were to set up blocking positions on two hills about 2 miles north of the town. Charlie Company was designated the reserve company somewhere behind us.

The rain stopped when we started the 2-mile hike to our objective. When we got to the hills Able Company veered left and occupied the hill to the left of the road and Baker Company peeled off to the right of the road. Separating us were rice paddies, a rail line, and the road. I could see a small bridge several hundred yards farther north. Five hundred yards separated our company from Baker Company.

We paired off and dug our foxholes. I can’t remember who my foxhole buddy was at the time. About this time we were sloshing around on the hillside, slipping and falling, which made it difficult to dig our holes.

The 3d Platoon was on our left and the 1st Platoon was in the rice paddies to our right. My platoon, the 2d, was in the middle. There were no friendly units to the left of the 3d Platoon.

From my position I could see refugees moving south on a road to the left of the 3d Platoon. My squad leader came by and told my buddy and me to camouflage our position with some branches and leaves. Then it began to rain. It rained for about an hour. I was already soaking wet from the earlier rainfall when we first arrived at Pyongtaek.

Nothing happened that night except that it rained all night. My steel helmet kept my head dry—the only part of my body that wasn’t wet. Within a couple of hours there was more than a foot of water in our foxhole. My feet were sloshing in my oversize boots. In July the weather was very, very warm and, despite being soaking wet, I wasn’t cold. I got out of the foxhole and sat on the edge of the foxhole. My buddy was asleep, curled up in over a foot of water. When I gazed north into the darkness I asked myself, What am I doing here? How can events turn so drastically in such a short time from one of ease and comfort to this miserable situation that I am now in?

Sometime after midnight I was startled by several explosions coming from the north. I didn’t know what caused them but later someone explained that a patrol from one of the other companies had gone to destroy the small bridge just north of our positions.

Just before daylight, a light morning fog settled on the hill but did not affect our visibility. Then I heard a loud bang. I peered through the fog and saw three tanks making their way toward us on the road near the blown-up bridge. We knew that Task Force Smith, which was north of us, didn’t have tanks so we knew the tanks were North Korean. Then puffs of smoke appeared from the enemy tanks and a split second later we could hear the sharp blast of their guns.

To the back and left of the tanks I could see more tanks, followed by North Korean infantry. Then another line of tanks and more infantry came into view on the right side of the road. Our mortars located in the rear started firing and I could see the rounds exploding among the North Korean tanks and infantry. Our mortars had no effect on the tanks. When the line of tanks was about 300 yards away, a few of the men opened fire. I fired my M-1 rifle for the first time in more than a year. My right shoulder got sore after emptying a few clips at the North Koreans.

Then enemy tanks turned their big guns on our hill, the bursting shells showering the area with shrapnel, dirt, and rocks. The fog had now dissipated and I could clearly see the North Korean infantrymen as they ran past the blown-up bridge and fanned out on both flanks. We were in danger of being surrounded.

“Pull out! Pull out!” came frantic shouts from the top of the hill. I was only too damn happy to obey the order. I grabbed my gear and hauled ass with several other men to the top of the hill and down the reverse slope. We headed for the village behind the hill. There were no officers around to give us any instructions.

While we were retreating, several shots rang out. No one knew where the shots came from but this meant the North Koreans were probably very close. Before we got to the village, we were fired on by North Koreans who somehow got abreast of us on our left about 200 yards away. Not only were they behind us, but they were in a position to surround us. We dove to the ground and fired back. I emptied a clip, firing blindly, when my rifle jammed. I tried kicking the bolt free but it wouldn’t budge. The North Koreans stopped firing, so we decided to move again.

We came to a granary that was just outside the village and stopped to rest. While we were deciding what to do, a Korean civilian ran toward us and told us the North Korean soldiers were coming. We hurried inside the granary and hid behind some bundled rice straws.

The North Koreans knew where we were and threw hand grenades into the granary. They also just shot it full of holes with their burp guns. Wood splinters and rice straws filled the air above us. My rifle was still jammed so I couldn’t return fire. All of a sudden, I felt my right arm being thrown back. I tried to move it but could not feel a thing. I thought, Good God, my right arm is blown off! I turned my head and reached out with my left arm to find out what was wrong and saw my right arm bent back in an awkward position. Instinctively, I pulled my right arm back in place. Through all of this I don’t remember feeling any pain. I was relieved to know that I had not lost my arm and stuck it in my shirt like a sling. We didn’t have a chance to fire back. Someone yelled, “We may as well surrender or we’ll all be killed. Okay?”

For a brief moment no one said anything. Finally, during a lull in the firing, one of the guys yelled, “We surrender! We surrender!” The firing from the outside stopped, and he got up and walked to the door. We all followed him out of the granary.

For the first time I came face to face with North Korean soldiers. Man, they looked mean. One had a uniform different from the others and I guessed he must have been an officer because he had red epaulets on his uniform. Gesturing with their weapons and blabbering in Korean, which none of us understood, they herded us in a single file on the road and pointed north.

I really felt terrible having to surrender and I thought this day would be the last day of my life.

As we were walking out, I realized that I was also shot in the thigh just above the right knee. It was a clean wound where the bullet passed through and I felt little pain. With wounds on my right arm and right leg, I wondered what was going to happen to me. But both wounds bled very little so I was lucky in a way. While our captors were deciding what to do with us, one of our guys opened up my first aid kit and helped me apply sulfur and bandages to my wounds. For the next five or six days, that was all the treatment I had.

We were taken to a village, where we joined about a dozen captured Americans, including a couple of ROK soldiers and a lieutenant from our company. There were now a couple dozen of us and about a dozen North Korean soldiers.

They questioned us and wanted to know why we had come to Korea and all that bull. After they were done, we were marched to the rail line, where we thought we were going to be shot. At this point I really didn’t care much and accepted whatever they were going to do with us. No one cried or complained. I guess we were too numb to realize the seriousness of the situation. Instead, they lined us up by the color of our hair. Those with red, blond, and brown hair were put in one column and those with black hair in another column. “You are all Japanese,” a North Korean said, pointing to us with black hair, “and you are all Americans,” he said, pointing to the light-color-haired men. No one tried to explain we were all Americans. It wasn’t funny then, but recalling that incident later in the prison camps made me laugh.

Except for me, because of my injured right arm, all the prisoners’ hands were tied behind their backs with commo wire. I was allowed to keep my hands under my shirt to support my injured arm. We were then marched north along the rail line. It was dark when we arrived at a small village after about four hours of walking. We were all crowded into a jail house that had wooden bars, just like the ones I saw in Japanese movies back home. My arm and leg didn’t hurt too much that night and I was grateful for that.

SOURCE: A Foxhole View: Personal Accounts of Hawai‘i’s Korean War Veterans, edited by Louis Baldovi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002).

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by | 21 June 2004 · 5:53 pm

The Firing of Evan Dobelle

The summary dismissal for cause last week of University of Hawai‘i President Evan Dobelle made the news on CNN, MSNBC, and even the Guardian. The best coverage seems to be that of AP correspondent Bruce Dunford, whose 20 June 2004 report in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin seems to me the most comprehensive and fairest summation to date.

From day one, his $442,000 salary and perks have been an issue, including spending $1 million on renovations to his residence, the UH’s College Hill mansion and guest house. It was three times the amount that had been planned.

Dobelle hadn’t been on the job for a year when his spending habits caught the eye of Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Brian Taniguchi (D, Moiliili-Manoa). He called for an audit of University of Hawaii Foundation money being used by Dobelle to take two dozen donors and staff members to a Janet Jackson concert at Aloha Stadium [a concert free of any “wardrobe malfunction”].

Despite such questions, the regents in their first year evaluation of Dobelle praised him for initiating progress and changing attitudes in the university system.

Things ran smoothly until November 2002, when in the closing days of the heated campaign for governor, Dobelle appeared in a television ad to endorse Democrat Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono over Republican Linda Lingle, who ended up winning….

Some see that as the root of the move to get Dobelle fired as Lingle began making appointments to the Board of Regents.

However, it was Democratic lawmakers who began pressing the point on Dobelle’s spending, including personal use of University of Hawaii Foundation funds and his hiring of highly paid assistants [including his old buddy “Wick” Sloane as the university’s CFO and Sloane’s wife as head of the UH Foundation].

On July 6, 2003, House Higher Education Committee Chairman K. Mark Takai (D, Newtown-Pearl City), Sen. Donna Mercado Kim (D, Kalihi Valley-Halawa), retired professor Ralph Moberly and UH official Amy Agbayani, a veteran Democratic Party insider, co-authored an article highly critical of the UH president.

“In Dobelle’s two years, we see an institution where student tuition is being raised while administrative salaries are boosted by more than $4 million, where substance and services take a back seat to marketing and public relations, and where a globe-trotting president fails to bring home the money he promised,” the article said.

Takai said he initiated a search for Dobelle’s spending and travel records after the president and his top aides didn’t show up at a House Higher Education Committee meeting on April 16, 2003, to answer questions about the $200,000 President’s Protocol and Support Fund at the University of Hawaii Foundation, the legally separate nonprofit organization that raises funds for the school. It’s to be spent on things that the president feels will advance the university.

Dobelle had notified the committee he would be at a mainland conference that day, but Takai said his staff checked with conference officials and determined Dobelle did not attend.

The lawmaker, who once headed the UH student body government and Manoa campus student newspaper, said a check of travel documents showed Dobelle was on Oahu that day.

“So in effect, he lied to us,” said Takai, who added that the Dobelle spending and travel records obtained by the committee were turned over to the Board of Regents and likely prompted a private audit ordered by the regents. The report on that audit has yet to be made public….

In February, the board began a new evaluation of Dobelle, headed up by [Kitty] Lagareta, a Lingle confidante and key Lingle campaign official in the 2002 governor’s race.

The tone for the new evaluation no doubt was set in April, when the previously confidential and highly critical report on Dobelle’s 2003 evaluation was made public at the direction of the state Office of Information Practices.

The UH Board of Regents are in a tough spot. When they gave Dobelle a negative evaluation earlier in the year, he threatened to sue if they made it public. Now they’re taking a lot of flack for not spelling out the grounds for Dobelle’s dismissal, even though they risk lawsuits if they breach confidentiality in personnel matters. Both Dobelle and the Regents have hired lawyers.

Here are a few more background items from various sources.

Pacific Business News reported that Dobelle apparently knew something was up, suggesting he perhaps deliberately made himself hard to reach.

Two members of the University of Hawaii Board of Regents say the regents warned Evan Dobelle he should attend their meeting this week, and when he didn’t they tried repeatedly to reach him by phone to tell him what happened….

Board of Regents Chairwoman Patricia Lee replies that the meeting was not kept secret from Dobelle, who asked if he should be there for it and was told he should. She also says the regents made several attempts to reach Dobelle by phone, but never got a callback, and still haven’t.

“Evidently the president chooses not to communicate with the board,” Lee said Friday. “He has communicated with counsel.”

Dobelle was rumored to have been job-hunting ever since he ran afoul of the legislature last year. Perhaps his prominent placement (cover and lead article) in the Winter 2004 issue of The Presidency was part of that effort.

“The American Council on Education’s flagship magazine, The Presidency focuses on college and university presidents and chancellors.”

Dobelle appears to be a master of PC PR, managing in 2002 to wangle a position judging the decidedly un-PC Miss America pageant and helping give it a PC spin (as reported by Jake Tapper of Salon).

“This selection validates an opportunity for young women who never would have considered entering this competition,” says judge Evan S. Dobelle — the president of the University of Hawaii and the White House chief of protocol during the Carter administration — when it’s all done. “By picking a multiracial, Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard Law School woman who’s articulate and personable and was selected, in my opinion, because she was the smartest — that is antithetical to the perception historically of the pageant.”

Early in his tenure, Dobelle managed to “tread on dangerous ground politically when he handed out more than 200 termination notices to deans, directors and top managers” around Christmas 2002. “Even though most of the notices weren’t acted upon, they left bad feelings, sentiment that reverberated all the way to the Legislature.” The recipients never received follow-up letters whether each would be rehired or let go at the end of the year. Instead, clarifications were issued through press releases. UH administrators often had to read the local papers to find out what was happening at the university. In that respect, the manner in which Dobelle was fired gives him a taste of his own medicine.

I don’t know. Dobelle seems to be someone a Texan might describe as “all hat, and somebody else’s cattle” (rather than “all hat, no cattle”). The Regents who appointed him and gave him such a rich, long-term, iron-clad contract have as much to answer for as the ones who fired him.

UPDATE: More background information is coming out about Dobelle’s dismissal. First, concerns about accreditation seem to have been a factor.

The dysfunctional relationship between University of Hawaii President Evan Dobelle and the Board of Regents threatened the accreditation of three UH campuses, according to a strongly worded report that appears to have been a factor in Dobelle’s firing.

A team from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges — the accrediting body for UH-Manoa, UH-Hilo and UH-West Oahu — told the university last month that the “severe difficulties” between the regents and the president do not meet standards of accreditation for leadership of a university.

Dobelle’s response was to send the regents for training. It was all their fault.

He described the board as “inexperienced” and said he set aside $50,000 for regents to get training from the Association of Governing Boards — another recommendation in the report.

“It’s a learning curve that they chose not to take,” Dobelle said. “I wish we could work it out. They chose not to.”

Next, a legislative fiscal hawk expresses concern about Dobelle’s inability to deliver on his fund-raising promises.

Donna Mercado Kim, state Senate vice president, a longtime critic of Dobelle, said she doubts that Dobelle was fired because of his political support for Gov. Linda Lingle’s opponent, former Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono.

“As a Democrat, I’d like nothing better than to point the finger to Lingle and say it was all politics and that she orchestrated it,” Kim (D, Kalihi Valley-Halawa) said in an interview. “I know she is denying her involvement and I tend to believe it. I was talking to one of the regents. They said they wouldn’t fire him unless the evidence was clear.” …

“I spoke to regents who left the board prematurely, and they said they did so because of Evan Dobelle and (they) were ones appointed by Cayetano [the previous governor, a Democrat].

“They said they couldn’t stomach it any longer, so it was only a matter of time.”

Kim recalled that she was impressed with Dobelle when he came to Hawaii in 2001, but after failing to get him to explain what he would do if he were unable to raise the $150 million for the medical school, she became frustrated.

“Time went by and he was making these promises, but he didn’t have anything to show for it,” Kim said.

Long-time UH faculty member Meda Chesney-Lind adds her perspective.

By way of introduction, I’ve been in the UH system since 1969, and in my time I’ve known and worked with five presidents [Harlan Cleveland, Fujio Matsuda, Al Simone, Ken Mortimer, and Dobelle]. Obviously, I worked with some more closely than others, but I was on the Senate Executive Committee of the UHM Faculty Senate when President Dobelle was first on the campus. I recall the excitement and all the hope that we had about his presidency.

I also recall the deep disappointment that began, for me, some months into his tenure. I’ll spare you the details, except to say that after saying he was a “bottom up,” “faculty driven” administrator, we hardly ever saw him again; his talks announcing major new University initiatives were all off campus. Ultimately, he barely avoided being censured by our senate (and that was avoided only because he threatened to make Deane Neubauer resign if we went through with it). After the first year, filled with cronyistic hiring, excessive and expensive foreign and domestic travel, and grand schemes, he sort of disappeared. Candidly, most of us felt that he was phoning in his performance for much of the last year.

Finally, Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter Cynthia Oi editorializes under the headline Dobelle’s team of outsiders acted as their own insiders:

No one has dared to say outright that he was seen as an uppity mainland haole [Caucasian] who snubbed local sensitivities, but undertones of the viewpoint were audible beneath careful remarks of politicians, faculty, community leaders and others.

There have been many times, private and public, when localism seeped into conflict and life in these islands. Slippery to define, the characteristic fuses values and attitude, social and economic standing, birthplace and ethnicity. It can be precious asset or parochial contaminant.

But in Dobelle’s case, I don’t think it can be marked as the overpowering toxin that produced this unseemly mess. It isn’t an “only in Hawaii” situation. Disrespect knows no boundaries of ocean or land. It is not one-sided or singular….

Dobelle and his crew were their own dazzling insiders. As intelligent and experienced, as sophisticated and charming, as motivated and passionate about doing good, they seemed deaf and blind to the importance of engaging the community. Not just perfunctorily, not through “howzits” and other words, but through deeds, through showing up.

Dobelle may be unaware that he was cut a lot of slack. He made big shoulders about raising money, but the flash didn’t match the cash. Give him time, was the initial reaction. But extravagances overshadowed fund raising, talk subbed for progress, and evasion and snubs became the norm….

Disrespect yields the same.

25-28 June 2004 UPDATE: Former regents appointed by Democratic Governor Ben Cayetano have begun to speak out.

University of Hawaii regents began having concerns about ousted UH President Evan Dobelle’s leadership style on his first day in office, a former regent said.

Regents also began questioning Dobelle’s travel spending and fund raising months before board members appointed by Gov. Linda Lingle took office last July, documents and interviews show.

When regent Michael Hartley resigned on Nov. 5, 2002, he cited Dobelle’s public endorsement of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mazie Hirono as one of several incidents that led to his decision….

Hartley also criticized what he saw as Dobelle’s “lack of respect” for the board by not consulting with regents before sending a fax announcing his endorsement of Hirono….

In a May 8, 2003, memo to Dobelle, former Maui regent C. Everett Dowling asked the president to provide the board a summary of his expenses charged to the UH Foundation and of his travel, including costs for other people traveling with him. As part of last year’s annual evaluation of the president, Dowling also asked for a summary of Dobelle’s fund-raising efforts….

Former board Chairman Bert Kobayashi followed up with another memo on June 17, 2003, repeating Dowling’s request. [Former regent Bert Kobayashi is to former governor Ben Cayetano as current regent Kitty Lagareta is to current governor Linda Lingle–strong political allies in both cases.] …

At a press conference announcing his hiring, Dobelle, with the regents standing behind him, announced several high-level personnel appointments.

Board members were stunned because personnel appointments have to be approved by the board, and no one had been given advance notice.

The business community seems far more stunned at Dobelle’s firing than the university community does. The former have probably been drooling over all the promises of new campus construction projects. In October 2002, Hawaii Business magazine named Dobelle one of “The 10 most influential people in Hawaii” (in #3 position after First Hawaiian Bank CEO Walter Dods and U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, both of whom were said to be among Dobelle’s strongest backers; Dods was on the selection committee). In January 2003, Pacific Business News reported, “Evan Dobelle, president of the University of Hawaii, has been named as the 2002 Sales Person of the Year by the Sales and Marketing Executives of Honolulu.”

Two MidWeek magazine columnists weigh in on opposite sides. Dan Boylan, a Democratic Party insider who served on the committee that selected Dobelle and writes a column called “Mostly Politics,” manages in the 23 June 2004 issue to blame the whole affair on partisan politics, while explicitly acknowledging that Dobelle was a compulsively partisan political hack [which was very likely a feature, not a bug, for the selection committee].

Dobelle let his partisanship blind him to his responsibility to the university he led. [One could say the same for the selection committee!] Dobelle, the former treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and protocol officer for Democratic President Jimmy Carter, couldn’t rise above his party loyalty.

The other columnist, veteran newsman Bob Jones, is much harsher in the 30 June 2004 issue.

Three observations from one of the regents: 1) Six of the ten regents who voted for the firing are card-carrying democrats. 2) If the public knew the mountain of data we have they’d be asking why we didn’t fire him earlier. 3) The BOR attorney said he felt they had a strong case for showing moral turpitude.

Jones’s column on 23 June 2004 ends off on an equally harsh note.

We may find that the vice president who’s now acting president and who previously ran the UH Business School, David McClain, is the right man at the right time.

I sure wouldn’t want to go back to the same old search committee that brought us Trinity College’s leftover [and his hapless predecessor].

A year ago, on 4 July 2003, long-time Hawai‘i muckraking reporter Ian Lind blogged a harbinger of Dobelle’s problems:

Both Honolulu papers this morning report on the resignation of Maui developer Everett Dowling from the University of Hawaii’s Board of Regents. Both focus on the flap over Dowling’s potential conflict of interest in a proposed land deal. But Dowling also been one of President Evan Dobelle’s key backers on the board, and his departure could signal rockier relations between the president and the board.

For decades, Hawai‘i’s dominant Democrats have seen the University as primarily a construction site, not an instruction site. Dobelle certainly fit the bill in that regard.

Perhaps Dobelle thought Hawai‘i operated the way Connecticut operated under now disgraced Republican Gov. John G. Rowland (due to resign on 1 July), with whom he cooperated on urban renewal projects.

UPDATE (13 July 2004): KITV investigative reporter Keoki Kerr adds several new details about ongoing investigation of Dobelle’s finances:

UH regents are investigating whether Dobelle’s wife attended a college reunion instead of going to an official conference on a trip paid for by the UH Foundation, sources told KITV 4 News. An audit revealed the foundation spent $4,100 to send his wife, Kit, to a conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, representing her husband. However, investigators want to know how she attended a UM Amherst class reunion at the same time.

Another issue under investigation is why a UH fiscal officer who raised questions about pricey renovations to the president’s College Hill mansion was forced out on administrative leave. In 2001, renovations there soared from an initial $170,000 to $1.2 million, including $500 for a birdcage….

[T]he regents are also looking into about $70,000 in renovations to Dobelle’s office at Bachman Hall on the UH Manoa campus.

The Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii lent the president’s office [$70,000] for the work in 2001 and Dobelle’s office didn’t pay the money back for nearly three years, until May of this year, sources said.

That raised eyebrows because RCUH’s mission is research and training, not office renovations for the president….

Dobelle knew his job was in jeopardy months before he was fired. Sources said at least one regent told Dobelle to start looking for another job as far back as January of this year, six months before he was fired.

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