EDITORIAL
UH needs to focus regents back on task

As the dust settles in Manoa over the firing of Evan Dobelle, one of the key jobs will be to reconstitute the relationship between the Board of Regents and the president's office.

It is heartening to hear that the regents are preparing to cede back to the president's office some of the authority and decision-making powers they had taken away in their struggle with Dobelle.

This aggressive intrusion into the operational authority of the top university administrator was one of the key shortcomings cited by the accrediting authority, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

Clearly, that is not the proper role for the regents. Members of the board obviously felt they had to step in because they had lost confidence in Dobelle and his management style. On a human level, that's understandable.

But in so doing, they set a policy standard that inevitably led to charges of micromanaging and interference with internal university affairs.

In general terms, everyone agrees what the role of the regents should be. They hire, or approve the hiring of, top managers, they set broad educational and fiscal policy, and then they let the campus manage its own affairs.

Because of the almost toxic level of distrust developed between Dobelle and the board, those general standards were abandoned.

Surely, that's not the way a university should be run.