Monday, January 07, 2008
Looking behind the June Jones headlines at a deteriorating UH
The headlines the past couple of days have been around whether UH can keep coach June Jones or whether he will fly the coop.
Ignored, except by Ian Lind, is the perhaps more important story that the coop is crumbling while we focus only on June Jones. Today he asks if we can (should?) afford a top tier football program. A snippet:
Take the beautiful renovation job that was done on Hawaii Hall, one of the original buildings on the Manoa campus. Now that the building’s like new, the academic programs were moved out and replaced by administrative offices, while across Varney Circle one building has been emptied after being allowed to totally deteriorate and the library seems to be in chronic crisis. Hawaii Hall now stands in the center of campus much like Baghdad’s Green Zone, a comfortable administrative enclave in the midst of widespread campus problems.
Ian mentions that the library is always in crisis. A university can be measured by the quality of its research libraries. UH is sliding academically and physically, even as we ignore everything but its football team.
And the truly sad part, is that UH is pretty much ignoring the football team as well. :o(
: January 7, 2008 at 12:39:00 PM HST To quote somebody or other, Hawaii needs a university our football team can be proud of.
: January 7, 2008 at 1:08:00 PM HST What is truly disturbing, is how corporate interests can co-opt the mission of higher education in this state by meddling with the University of Hawaii. The current call to fire Herman Frazier is an example of a system run amok due to external involvement of corporate interests in the internal affairs of a state agency. Something really stinks when a state university is beholden to outside interests.
: January 7, 2008 at 9:06:00 PM HST I missed the Frazier thing. Probably everyone knew about this but me.
Well, he turned back those tickets, so he's doomed, right? Seems they will decide his fate tomorrow.
The first Google hit explains:
http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/stories/2008/01/07/daily10.html
Ian Lind makes some great points. At the heart of the issue is resource allocation, fiscal accountability, and management issues including strategic planning. Its my sincere hope that the issues coming to the forefront with the June Jones situation will bring all these problems into the light of public discussion. If the press were doing a better job then some reporter or media outlet would mention these are some of the themes from Marion Higa's recent phase two audit of the UH system. Please read Marion's report and keep this one alive until it shows up in the Honolulu papers, etc.
: January 7, 2008 at 10:38:00 PM HST http://picasaweb.google.com/UH.ugly
if you have other photos documenting the shameful state email them to uh.ugly@gmail.com
: January 8, 2008 at 1:55:00 AM HST That's an interesting way to bring about change. Document the problems photographically.
Good citizen journalism!
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