T HERE are at least two ways to improve the national stature of your university. The University of Hawaii's president, Kenneth Mortimer, has tried both. Mortimer's efforts to improve UH
The first is to give fuller, better answers to questionnaires sent out to rate you. UH moved from Tier Four to Tier Two in U.S. News and World Report's top college rankings by doing just that.
The near-bottom old ranking resulted from a sloppily answered questionnaire, Mortimer found. Now he sends all questionnaires to his vice president for planning and policy. Besides jumping UH two tiers in its overall rankings in the past two years, U.S. News also nudged UH into its "Top 25 Public National Universities."
The second is to improve the old-fashioned way by foot-slogging your way to real upgrades. Mortimer has a couple of successes here, too. UH last year supplemented its reduced state appropriation of $250 million by more than 60 percent by winning outside grants of $161 million, a UH record.
UH also is making significant improvements in alumni support. Only 5 percent of its 150,000 or so alumni contributed to UH a few years ago. Now, because of phone calls from friendly students who offer to tell an alum about current developments in his or her old school or college, contributors are up to 13 percent.
Mortimer came to the UH presidency four years ago, about as different as night from day from his predecessor. Albert Simone was a cheerleader type, anxious to move on all fronts to improve UH, willing to jump into almost any fray, and seemingly everywhere at once.
I loved him. He enjoyed a time of state prosperity. On a return visit this year he was able to admire five new buildings, just about the best ones on the campus, started under his regime but completed later.
Mortimer was chosen by the regents to tidy up the university structure even before statewide budget-chopping starting in 1995 made that an urgent necessity and fine new buildings a fantasy.
Unlike Simone, Mortimer seldom sought the public eye. This characteristic was so pronounced at his previous presidency at Western Washington University that a community newspaper started a spoof column on "Mortimer Sightings."
The products of Mortimer's efforts now are becoming clearer. A thinned-down UH structure is getting along with much less from the state and raising more on its own. It has permission to at last keep and control its tuition income -and is boosting it. It is seeking more autonomy over its lands and finances with the right to sell or mortgage lands without referral to the state. It wants to cut red tape that has required as many as 45 sign-offs on a single check.
A Mortimer-inspired 1996 revision of its strategic plan retains a focus on international excellence. It keeps Manoa as the core graduate study and research campus with increasingly demanding admission standards. However, it tilts budget emphasis somewhat more toward the nine other campuses, strongly including those on the neighbor islands.
Mortimer persuaded the Governor's Economic Revitalization Task Force, on which he served, that a more autonomous university can be an engine of economic growth for the state.
MORTIMER has helped build up the UH endowment from $35.6 million six years ago to over $50 million now. That, unfortunately, still is no great shakes. Hawaii Pacific University, much newer than UH and less than one-fifth its enrollment, has a $40 million endowment.
Mortimer has set a five-year fund-raising campaign with a goal of $125 million to start next year. Ninety percent of it will go to boost the endowment, with significant amounts earmarked to support new faculty stipends for excellence.
Mortimer's rolling contract with UH has been extended only to early 2000 but he has told the regents he will stay to see the fund drive to completion in 2003 if they want him. If he succeeds in the fund drive and winning more autonomy he will leave behind a university far more politically independent and self-reliant than the one he took over in 1993.