Perhaps a course on Surviving Local Politics 101.

First lesson: Keep your mouth shut.

Yes, a backward message for a supposedly progressive state, but sadly realistic considering what happened.

Despite veiled aspersions cast by the Board of Regents in announcing his termination "for cause," it was Dobelle's mouth that caused him trouble.

When he came on the scene three years ago, Dobelle was all big talk and big promises with nary a drop of self-deprecating humor. He came off as arrogant and at times had trouble connecting with local people, spending more effort telling folks what he had done or could do for them than listening to what they had to say.

But his talk was more than just talk. There was action — the creative media (film) department, the new medical school, support for Hawaiian studies, for example — and concrete actions made the big promises more believable, at least more palatable.

Then he made the commercial for Mazie. And Mazie lost.

Once Gov. Linda Lingle got into office and put her peeps on the Board of Regents, things got very quiet on College Hill.

Lingle flatly denies that Dobelle's firing had anything to do with his endorsement of her political opponent, though she has in the past admonished Dobelle for "politicizing" the university.

But before Dobelle, before she won the election for governor, as head of the Hawai'i Republican Party she wrote an essay critical of former Gov. Ben Cayetano's noninvolvement in the university headlined "UH President, regents must go" which ran in The Advertiser in July 1999. In it, she drew a clear line of fire from the governor's office to the Board of Regents to the UH president:

"It's easier to get rid of a football coach than it is to replace a university president, because in athletics there is one clear performance measure, your win/loss record. ... Things are a lot murkier when you try to replace a university president. First of all, how exactly do you measure performance? And, instead of one person being able to fire the president, the unpleasant task falls to the Board of Regents. And what if the Board of Regents isn't performing responsibly? The governor appoints the regents, and presumably would have to replace them if they weren't performing," Lingle wrote.

We don't know why the regents felt there was cause for firing Dobelle. We don't know why the announcement was made when he had his back turned. What we can see, like the flight path of a doomed airplane plotted on a graph, is the precise moment when Dobelle lost power and started falling from the sky.

Did Lingle shoot him down? Did she order her squad to fire? We'll be poring over this case study of local politics for years.