Consultant tells Dobelle UH mired in mediocrity
By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer
A hand-picked consultant to University of Hawai'i President Evan Dobelle yesterday gave the Board of Regents a far-reaching road-map to take the UH system from what she called a "can't do" culture of mediocrity to a world-class "model" for the nation, able to attract the best and brightest faculty and students, and raise the money to keep them.
Dobelle said that even though he was well aware of the university's problems, he was taken aback by the report, which portrayed a university that was "broken down" and where mediocrity was the accepted norm. Dobelle hinted at a housecleaning of UH administrative bureaucracy.
"We're going to have to get hold of this bureaucracy," said Dobelle.
Systems management consultant Linda Campanella's report to the regents, delivered in private session on Kaua'i, essentially gives Dobelle his first sweeping outside analysis of a highly troubled system. But it also provides a blueprint to create a hopeful, though difficult and expensive future — the fresh start he wants for the university and is already pushing to produce.
Campanella's report condemns many practices at UH, including a "top-down" bureaucracy that has shut out of the decision-making process those affected by it and created an "inferiority complex" across the 10-campus system.
Dobelle seemed stunned by her findings.
"I knew it was a troubled system. I didn't know it was broken down," he said from Kaua'i. "There is nothing that doesn't have to be looked at over the next six months. The biggest surprise is the total institutional acceptance of mediocrity.
"What exists today is very unfortunate, but my life is not about pointing fingers or stepping on people's toes. I'm always a 'tomorrow' guy. We need to get to work here and turn this institution around. My interest is how do we make a plan that works, so the university can attain its aspirations. I still look at the possibilities, not the problems."
Dobelle said that in the next week or two he may begin issuing "notices" to some administrators and managers to warn them he'll be looking closely at their jobs over the next year.
"That's one of the options I have. I can give a year's notice, with the understanding that I don't have to exercise it." (University policy requires that managers and administrators not covered by bargaining units receive a year's notice of a job change, or termination, he said.)
Dobelle also said he will be bringing together community groups to create strategic plans for the future of the university's academic program and physical plant, with the hope of completing them as early as spring.
In her 30-page document that also praised strengths within the UH system, including its faculty and outstanding areas such as astronomy, marine science, biomedical research and languages, Campanella made many recommendations for fixes. But it will take dedication, money, leadership, and a need for the whole system to "buy into" the process, she said.
During her interviews she said she felt an outpouring of excitement to move the institution forward.
"After years of cuts, people just seem to want a reason to feel hopeful," she said.
Campanella was hired by Dobelle in June — even before he took office — to provide an immediate heads-up analysis of the system's strengths, weaknesses and major problems. They worked together at Trinity College but she recently left to form her own consulting firm. She has a $30,000 contract to look at both the system as a whole, as well as the UH foundations and fund-raising practices. "I bring no agenda except to help the university reach full potential," she said.
"This is a university system that already is world-class in some areas and has the potential to be world-class in many more," she said, "yet it . . . acts like a second-class, second-rate institution. People have felt neither empowered to make change nor responsible for initiating it."
Campanella said that sprinkled throughout the system are managerial "gatekeepers" who are there not to facilitate action but to stop it. A fear of "making mistakes" runs throughout the system, she said.
Resonating throughout the report is a need for a new world order on the Manoa campus and throughout the system that includes the shareholders in decision-making, encourages a "we're all in this together" attitude, breaks down jealousies and financial disparities between campuses, and rids the university of its many "fiefdoms."
"As hokey as that may sound," said Campanella, "for a system to act and thrive as a system, there must be a sense of being vested in each other's successes, not only in one's own."
None of that has been lost on Dobelle, and he welcomes the challenges. In fact, he says he came here because of them.
"It's a marathon," he said, "and bureaucratic dysfunctionality has a 5-mile head start. But I'm going to run them down."
Dobelle has already seen much of what Campanella documented.
"I guess the worst thing is the extraordinarily low morale," he said. "And in many ways that's unwarranted. People are so separate from each other and so untrusting of each other. They don't know each other. They don't work together."
The Board of Regents released a statement last night that said Dobelle's leadership "has given us the momentum needed to go forward in making the university . . . a pre-eminent system of higher education. What's past is past."
The statement called Dobelle was "the right man" to lay out a strategic plan to improve UH.
Campanella said there are some areas in need of urgent attention, including:
• Aggressive strategies to build enrollment, including marketing campaigns to enhance its image and attract Mainland students and top Hawai'i students now being lost to more prestigious schools. (UH tuition money makes up about one-quarter to one-fifth of its budget.)
• Using autonomy provided by the Legislature to act more quickly on big purchases.
• An aggressive fund-raising drive, with Dobelle playing a major role, which has already begun.
Campanella said there is "untapped potential" for significant private fund-raising; called present operations "embryonic"; and noted that "the key challenge is to create a 'culture of giving' where none has existed."
Her bottom-line goal for next year: $30 million. Dobelle said he wants to see that rise to $50 million fairly quickly.
• The need for an integrated computer-based management system. For example, student records now are on four different systems and fiscal staff cannot effectively access their account balances. The cost to complete the technology system is $20 million a year; Campanella suggests looking at lease financing.
• A close and immediate look at course availability in the upper divisions; juniors and seniors are being lost because courses they need for graduation aren't available.
