i L i n d . n e t

Please count me among those who think that the Senate made a mistake when it turned down the reappointment of Kitty Lagareta to the UH Board of Regents.

Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to tell exactly why Lagareta got the boot from reporting on the issue. Here are two excerpts from stories in the Honolulu dailies following the Senate vote.
Derrick DePledge in the Advertiser:

Senators also cited the selection process of new president David McClain, management shortcomings identified by the state auditor, and the deteriorating conditions at many of the university’s campuses.

Craig Gima in the Star-Bulletin:

Sakamoto (D, Moanalua) said the regents were ultimately responsible for those problems, including the handling of the dismissal of former UH President Evan Dobelle and the hiring of current President David McClain; lack of openess at meetings; Lagareta’s crticisms of the Legislature during board meetings; the loss of football coach June Jones; the salary paid to new football coach Greg McMackin; and the state of UH athletic facilities and classrooms.

Counting down these issues doesn’t really identify what Lagareta did in relation to these issues that Senators took issue with. Perhaps she didn’t really do anything except be the person on the spot to take the generalized blame.

In my view, the vote does appear to result from more of that impulse to micromanage that the legislature has rather consistently exhibited.

I spoke to Lagareta after the vote. She said during her tenure, the Board of Regents generally stayed out of micromanaging administrative affairs or imposing specific decisions on the administration.

She called it “a noses in, fingers out approach”. She explained: “We don’t tell the chancellor or the president to hire or fire specific people. We ask questions, express concerns, but I’m not going to order a personnel change, for example.”

Lagareta said Senators cited several situations in which regents followed a process and legislators didn’t like the outcome.

“I’m all for process,” Lagareta told me. “I was trying to keep the regents out of micromanaging the university.”

She described several incidents of legislators or other elected officials trying to intervene on behalf of candidates for UH positions, including the recent appointment of Donovan as athletic director.

“We had a search committee that made a strong recommendation,” Lagareta said. “The search committee did their thing. We don’t normally get involved in a search committee.”

Lagareta said the search committee identified three top candidates and recommended Donovan for the job, but regents “were beseiged by people backing Rockne (Hawaii Community College Chancellor Rockne Freitas).”

Freitas, of course, has deep political roots and past associations with key figures in and out of government. I’ll try to find some of those clips later this a.m.

“Five of us took the search committee recommendation and said, fine. But four came out of nowhere and said, ‘We’ve been talking to some people.’ That usually means they’ve been talking to legislators,” Lagareta said. “One of them pulled out this article about Jim Donovan spending $50,000 on something, but I looked at the article and it doesn’t find anything illegal or any ethics violation.”

The article in question was apparently part of my 1997 series on UH athletics, “The Money Game”. This particular story examined financial records of expenditures for gifts and entertainment from a fund controlled by Donovan.

Lagareta was correct in her interpretation of the story, which was critical of the way big time collegiate athletics is played rather than of Donovan personally.

Lagareta said eventually all but two regents voted to approve Donovan.

“I thought if we did otherwise, given the search committee’s recommendation, it would be micromanaging of the worst kind,” Lagareta said.

I can’t say that I agree with all the decisions Lagareta made as a regent. Heck, I don’t even agree with all of my own decisions. But in my personal dealings with her, I’ve found Lagareta to be professional and straight forward, and acting in the best interests of the university as she saw them. And her account of warding off outside political pressures certainly ring true.

Had I been asked, I would have recommended a vote in her favor. I’m sorry no one asked.