Posted on: Monday, July 5, 2004

EDITORIAL
Mediation useful, but secrecy doesn't cut it

It's impressive that the parties in the firing of UH President Evan Dobelle have chosen to go to mediation of their dispute.

If successful, it would avoid the extravagant costs and public ugliness of a trial over whether the firing was fair.

The mediation process itself is private, which is reasonable. This allows the two sides to talk directly, without posturing or legal positioning.

But the public should demand that the results of mediation, if it works out, be made public.

This is not simply a matter between two private parties. This is a dispute that involves public money, a public institution and the reputations of thousands of students (current, former and future) and faculty.

At the end of the day, the public should be given a full accounting of what happened, why the regents acted as they did and what their concerns were about Dobelle.

A secondary issue is that many of the elements in the Dobelle case involve what are arguably public documents. One cannot lock up public documents simply by pushing them through mediation.

Our hope is that mediation will be successful, the two parties will give the public the full story of what happened and then we can all proceed with the task of building a great state university.