Mortimer gives last speech as UH president
By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer
Saying he changed the way the University of Hawai'i thinks about money, Kenneth Mortimer yesterday made his final speaking appearance as the president of the state's only public system of higher education.
In the last decade, as the 10-campus system sustained deep budget cuts of about $35 million, UH has turned increasingly to federal grants and private fund-raising as it has gained more control over its own budget, he said.
"When you're going down a chute and losing five to 10 percent of your budget every year, you've got to find a way to make lemonade out of it," Mortimer said.
The appearance was his last in what had been a long aloha to the community. Mortimer announced his resignation last spring after a tenure marked by Hawai'i's economic woes, declining state spending for higher education and a dip in the university's national reputation.
"Our economic growth in this state was last in the country in the decade of the 1990s," Mortimer said. "People ask me what I can say to my successor. I just hope to hell he's lucky."
Evan Dobelle, president of Trinity University in Hartford, Conn., will replace Mortimer in July.
Mortimer said his priorities during his eight-year tenure were to focus spending on areas such as astronomy and ocean sciences that UH excels at, start UH's first $100 million capital campaign and to create a more entrepreneurial model at the university. He also said he did not follow the traditional money-saving strategy of capping student enrollment to get through hard financial times.
"As we look toward the university's centennial in 2007, it will also be important to work toward a fixed proportion of the state budget, to vigorously continue private fund-raising, and as the recent strikes have taught us, to assume a more pro-active role in collective bargaining," he said. Members of the University of Hawai'i Professional Assembly went on strike for 13 days in April after negotiations between the union and the governor's office failed. Although the university administration and Board of Regents were at the bargaining table, they did not have the power to set faculty salaries.
Mortimer spoke at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel to the Rotary Club of Honolulu, the largest in the state and his home Rotary Club. It is the same venue where last year he announced his plans for a campaign for constitutional autonomy for UH. The successful campaign helped define a new relationship between UH and the state, with UH gaining more control over its budget and resources.
Mortimer will leave UH at the end of June to return to Bellingham, Wash., where he had been the president of Western Washington University before coming to Hawai'i. He and his wife, Lorraine, bought a home there two years ago.
He will become a senior scholar at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a policy-making and analysis think-tank based in Boulder, Colo. Mortimer will spend much of his time consulting and publishing.
He took over as the 11th president of the University of Hawai'i in March 1993.
