Neubauer played key role in reshaping UH
By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer
Deane Neubauer gets on a plane this morning and will disappear from prominence as part of the University of Hawai'i administrative team as suddenly as he rose in it two years ago.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser
The longtime political science professor and former dean of the College of Social Sciences was plucked from faculty ranks by the new president two years ago to be his second in command at Manoa. As such, Neubauer played a key transitional role between the administrations of Kenneth Mortimer and Evan Dobelle.
Outgoing UH Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs Deane Neubauer has won praise from the university's faculty.
"In May of 2001 I was a picket captain for the faculty strike," Neubauer said. "In July I was interim chancellor."
Today Neubauer, 65, begins a year-long sabbatical and next fall will retire after 33 years at Manoa to finish the book on global health-care issues he dropped two years ago. He also plans to rejoin the research group he helped form.
He leaves behind a new contract that the faculty union lauds as having "significant gains" because of his leadership; a student information system he helped tie all campuses together; a significant change of direction and momentum on the Manoa campus that was praised by its accrediting agency; and a more collegial relationship with the faculty union he once led.
"He was an extraordinarily significant factor in the substance of this last contract settlement," said J.N. Musto, executive director of the University of Hawai'i Professional Assembly, the faculty union. Musto cited agreements help community college teachers part-time faculty, plus new agreements on intellectual property rights and family leave.
In his years at Manoa, Neubauer has gone from a bicycle-riding intellectual brought in by former president Thomas Hamilton amid a wave of new blood 35 years ago, to the urbane sophisticate who has tried to smooth the way for a new administrative style under Dobelle.
"What I'm trying to do at UH is find the other Deane Neubauers who should have been identified when they were 45, so there are people like him to succeed me," Dobelle said. "I chose him for his integrity, and we worked well together as a team."
Neubauer's departure is "an enormous loss to the university and to me personally," Dobelle said. "But he's always going to be part of the 'kitchen cabinet.' My job is to be imaginative, and their job is to feel if it has reality."
As interim chancellor for the Manoa campus, as well as interim vice president for the 10-campus system, and most recently outgoing vice president for academic affairs, Neubauer shouldered some of the heavy lifting needed to create a new strategic plan, reorganize the system to boost the community colleges, and he also took some of the flak that comes with change.
When Dobelle was threatened with censure by the Faculty Senate for not being as forthcoming as they felt was necessary, Neubauer took the blame — undeservedly, say some. Neubauer maintains it was his "glitch." Taking the heat, he said, is part of the job.
But even Neubauer hasn't been able to insulate the university and the president from a raft of criticism about everything from the higher administrative salary levels to not raising faculty pay fast enough.
Instead, Neubauer tries to give perspective to such controversy.
Some of the community reaction comes, he believes, because of a decade of flat-lined UH salaries that paced the state's recession through the 1990s, and the propensity to hire and promote from within.
"The real breakthrough in salaries doesn't come with Evan," he said. "It comes with Ed Cadman in 2000. (Cadman, the medical school dean, receives $430,000 a year, which is more than twice former UH President Mortimer's salary.) The decision made with respect to Ed and taken by the Mortimer administration was certainly provocative in setting a course for the Manoa campus in this decade. It was an admission that in certain areas, in order to be competitive, you have to pay salaries that those people can command on the outside."
Now, Neubauer is able to turn full attention to the book he was writing and return to heading the Globalization Research Network he helped found with UH, UCLA, George Washington University and the University of South Florida. The hope is to study the effects of globalization.
Neubauer leaves UH with much contentment.
"One of the things we've tried to do here in the last two years is to address things that have been on the table for a long time," he said.
By all accounts, he did that.
Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.
