Mortimer confident About 70 people came to bid farewell yesterday to University of Hawaii President Mortimer.
he achieved desired
goal at UH
The former president says
he is leaving the job a better
one than it was beforeBy Treena Shapiro
tshapiro@starbulletin.comOn Mortimer's last day in office at Bachman Hall, Moshin Morita, president of the University of the Ryukyus on Okinawa, traveled to Hawaii to confer an honorary degree to Mortimer, only the second honorary degree the university has granted and the first to an official not in Japan.
Since 1988 the two universities have had a formal exchange agreement that allows students from both institutions to study overseas on a tuition-free basis.
When he became UH president in 1993, Mortimer began developing UH's relationship with Ryukyus, visiting the university in 1994 to confirm policies and exchange opinions about the program between the two universities.
Absent from the ceremony was Mortimer's wife, Lorraine, who was busy preparing for the couple's move to Bellingham, Wash., today.
"My house is a mess and the movers are there, and my wife must stay to make sure they get everything precisely correct," Mortimer said.
Part of the reason for the move is to remain out of the picture while incoming President Evan Dobelle finds his way through the university system. "We believe it is smart of us to be away from Hawaii for at least a year so that President Dobelle has a free reign and we're not called consistently," he said in a recent interview.
Mortimer will be on sabbatical for one year and will spend part of his time as a senior scholar for the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems in Boulder, Colo. Over the course of the year, he said, he will also be looking into opportunities for consulting and writing, while holding the option of returning to UH, where he is a tenured faculty member in the College of Education.
Whether he takes a position at UH or not, Mortimer said he and his wife will continue to have a presence in Hawaii, either on a part- or full-time basis. "We still have scads of family here," he said, pointing out that his wife of 42 years is a Roosevelt High School graduate. "I've had a presence in Hawaii for 40 years."
Mortimer has primarily kept to wishing Dobelle the luck that he himself was not granted. Publicly, his presidency was dominated by crippling budget cuts in the 1990s, but he said that is not the way he would have had it. "That did dominate people's views on how well I did and how I didn't do."
However, he added, "That's not my internal bar."
While often overshadowed in the media by a disgruntled faculty who periodically called for his resignation and students who protested loudly at every perceived slight, Mortimer worked to move the university into a new relationship with state government, winning constitutional autonomy for UH during the 2000 election by a 78 percent vote.
Although the university has already made gains under its new autonomy -- winning a legal battle with the governor over faculty benefits during the 13-day strike in April, for example -- Mortimer said there is still a great deal of work left to gain true autonomy.
Part of it goes back to the strike, in which four parties -- the faculty union, the governor, the university administration and the UH Board of Regents -- represented different interests. "Bargaining can't occur with four parties," he said. Mortimer's vision is for the university to have a fixed percentage of the state budget so that the university can calculate its budget more accurately, and so administration and faculty can bargain among themselves.
Gov. Ben Cayetano, however, has opposed taking the state out of the collective-bargaining process. Given Hawaii's highly centralized state government, he said it is important to have a negotiator who looks at the bigger picture and can determine how it will affect the state as a whole.
"If you bargain in isolation in a little box, oblivious to what the state needs, you're getting yourself into trouble," Cayetano said.
Cayetano also pointed out that the university, unlike other state agencies, has the power to raise its own money, through tuition, grants and public endowments.
In fact, Cayetano named a substantial increase in public fund raising as one of Mortimer's greatest achievements. A four-year campaign finished last month at $116 million.
"It was immediately obvious to me that we were not carrying our weight in public fund raising when I was president-elect," Mortimer said. By the end of his term, however, the university had tripled the annual giving efforts. "In the next decade they will probably triple again," he said.
Part of his success, no doubt, can be attributed to his ability to win friendship and respect from many of the players in Hawaii business.
Mortimer's decisions to funnel money into programs where the university functions exceptionally well -- and away from those with declining enrollment, particularly among the arts -- have raised the ire of many faculty members. But by selectively investing in certain programs, the university's achievements have been numerous. Most recently, UH won the contract to manage the Maui Supercomputing Center, a contract that they had lost eight years ago when Mortimer was president-elect.
Mortimer was loudly criticized for closing the School of Public Health, but stealing Edwin Cadman away from Yale to lead the John A. Burns School of Medicine is considered one of his biggest coups.
Reflecting back on his years at UH, Mortimer said: "I don't have too many regrets. It's easy to use hindsight."
Instead, he will leave the university optimistic about his future and confident that he has achieved the goal he set for himself when he started: to leave the president's job a better one than he had coming in.
"I'm very confident in what I've done, and we've taken the university as far as I can do it, and it's time for somebody else to step up to the challenge."