EDITORIAL
Latest Dobelle records show complete breach

While the debate continues over whether the firing of former UH President Evan Dobelle was handled properly or not, one thing is beyond debate:

The relationship between Dobelle and the Board of Regents was impossibly and irreversibly soured and had to be ended, one way or another.

That's the only conclusion one can draw from the latest batch of documents released by the university in the Dobelle case. These documents include background materials, UH Foundation records, travel records and draft minutes of two meetings of the regents in which Dobelle was discussed.

In sum, the documents offer two vivid pictures:

• That the regents felt Dobelle had misled or even outright lied to them on many occasions and they had completely lost trust in him.

• That Dobelle knew his days at UH were numbered. He was already conducting preliminary, fallback job interviews months before he was fired.

The records also support, with more detail, what was already known about Dobelle and his presidency:

That there was sloppy record keeping; that he spent generously to bring friends and former colleagues into the UH orbit; and that there was a confusing and sometimes disturbing mix of personal and professional business on the books.

Does all this add up to the serious offenses that, under Dobelle's contract, would be reason to fire him for cause?

Apparently the regents felt it did at first, but after mediation and explanation, concluded it did not.

And that, says Dobelle, should be the bottom line. At the end of the day, he was not fired for cause but was let go with a substantial financial settlement.

The debate over who was at "fault" for the ugly end to this episode will go on for a long, long time.

Our only hope is that UH and those who now run it can get past these unhappy days and return to the task at hand: making the University of Hawai'i a premier institute of learning, teaching and research known throughout Asia-Pacific and, indeed, the world.