Talk Story
UH’s Dobelle gives
himself passing gradesSIX months into the job, University of Hawaii president Evan S. Dobelle says he's ahead of schedule and on the move across the board, tackling every item on his 23-item "Things to Accomplish" list.
These range from the cosmic ("Create a true university system with individual campuses, each with a distinct mission") to the humdrum ("Seek a straightforward audit ... of UH's accounts").
Reviewing the list with Star-Bulletin editors this week, Dobelle made his impatience with the status quo transparent. He's hell-bent to engage and challenge as much of the institution and the community as he can. If UH has become static, Dobelle is determined to make it fluid, to "fundamentally change the institution."
Last month, he put 205 senior administrators on notice that they have a year to justify their positions or the jobs would be eliminated. That shook things up.
"It's not a pleasant thing to do," he said, "but I need flexibility and the policy is you have to give a year's notice. So, if I decided five months down the line that this is a position you don't need, I'd have to give that person another year."
The surviving administrators will reorganize around a new academic program now being developed by the faculty.
"This is a total 180 degrees from where universities generally are," Dobelle says, "to have an academic plan directed by the faculty and when it's completed to have an administration built around it.
"I don't want to be a smart-ass, but given the resources, you could end up with 200 administrators and 500 fund-raisers." He grins. "Obviously that's a hyperbole, but the reality is I don't know what it's going to look like, but it's going to be different. It's pretty unique in American higher education."
He's unhappy with alumni fund raising. "The potential is there," he says, but out of 190,000 alumni "we have 50,000 alums we can't find. We have a 9 percent contribution rate, which is just unacceptable."
The annual alumni contribution rate at private schools is above 50 percent, he says, and "most major public universities are happy with 30 to 35 percent because people presume that taxpayers are subsidizing it and they don't need to give."
However, "58 percent of the people who identify themselves as University of Hawaii alums say they have never been solicited for funds and 50 percent of those say they would give if asked. So we just haven't done the job."
Dobelle says his pledge at the UH-BYU game to create an 11th- hour bowl game for the football team this year didn't bear fruit, but was worthwhile anyway.
"It was good for me to find out who would step up and play. I needed to test my athletic administration to see what they could do in a crisis.
"It's also an attitude: Can we do things or not do things? I thought we could do it. The reality is they (the NCAA) just didn't want to set a precedent," he said.
Moreover, he did find some financial backing and UH will be submitting an application for a non-BCS, non-Christmas Day bowl game in Hawaii next year. First Hawaiian Bank's "Walter Dodds stood up with $500,000 on the first phone call," Dobelle said.
"People are excited about the university who haven't been excited about it in a long time. They want to believe and I have to raise expectations -- and meet them."
Dobelle believes Manoa is out of sync with typical top-ranked schools such as those in Berkeley, Ann Arbor or Austin. While it has top-drawer graduate research credentials, it is miss- ing the undergraduate programs, the live-in student body, the sense of place.
His vision is to transform Manoa into a residential campus. "Dormitories are the key," he says.
He laments UH-Manoa's 45 percent student attrition rate, attributing it to the large numbers of students who commute to school in H-1 traffic and fight for parking spaces every day. Before they graduate, they just give up. "Put the people on the campus," he says.
"We just have to step it up here," Dobelle says. "This is a culture that you can either get seduced by -- because there's no punishment for failure -- or it's one where, if you're not looking real carefully and cross the street, they'll run you over.
"This is a political world here," says Dobelle, former mayor of Pittsfield, Mass.
It's a world in which he, for one, appears to be very comfortable.
John Flanagan is the Star-Bulletin's contributing editor.
He can be reached at: jflanagan@starbulletin.com.