|
On Politics Richard Borreca |
What’s
Dobelle to do?This Friday on Maui, the University of Hawaii Board of Regents is expected to give Evan Dobelle, the UH president, the details on what he needs to do to earn the $1,210.95-a-day salary he is paid.
Although Dobelle has been at work since July 2001, the regents have yet to connect the dots on his to-do list.
The job description in his contract says that besides administering the university, Dobelle has only to implement "the policies, rules and directives adopted by the board."
According to several UH sources, the regents will be giving Dobelle more than just guidelines and directives this week. He is expected to get a timeline and then specific checkpoints that he has to hit. The concern, according to the sources, is that Dobelle has widely promised to perform but has not delivered.
There are probably other jobs where you can wear out a welcome faster than being a university president, but Dobelle caught the public's attention with his superstar salary and the promises to match. But then he sputtered on a series of seemingly dumb mistakes.
Running up more than a million dollars in state money to fix up his university-supplied house was a key error, compounded by first promising to raise the money for the house, then failing to do so and then attempting to brush it off as a minor incident.
In a stinging rebuke, two key legislators joined with university veterans to publish a serious attack on Dobelle last month in this newspaper.
"Substance and services take a backseat to marketing and public relations, and ... a globe-trotting president fails to bring home the money he promised," the Dobelle critics charged. Their concern is the pledge to raise hundreds of millions for the university, which so far have failed to materialize.
Dobelle responded with his own defense, but the missing key was that the former Carter White House and national Democratic Party veteran had almost no one to cover his back.
August has been a tough month on major state university presidents. First, William M. Bulger, University of Massachusetts president, resigned over his role in the federal investigation of his fugitive mobster brother, and then John Shumaker of the University of Tennessee quit.
Bulger left with a million-dollar severance package. Shumaker left without a parachute, but he was paid between $733,000 to $800,000 a year in direct and deferred salary and bonuses, plus housing, an automobile and a plane.
Dobelle's contract has a glorious parachute that -- except for a felony conviction, moral turpitude or an incapacitating medical condition -- pays his monthly salary ($36,833) for the remaining months of his contract, plus a $150,000-a-year bonus.
All that money aside, the real road map for Dobelle's career path, however, will be written in Friday's executive session on Maui.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Richard Borreca writes on politics every Sunday in the Star-Bulletin. He can be reached at 525-8630 or by e-mail at rborreca@starbulletin.com.
