Dobelle charting new course for UH, state

PUHI – Evan Dobelle is convinced the way to break the cycle of

teenage pregnancies is to attack the problem before the offspring of

teen parents become teen parents themselves.

Now, “we’re dealing with the symptom, not the problem,” said Dobelle,

the 12th president of the University of Hawai’i.

Fixing that problem is just one reason he is advocating a seamless

public and private education system in Hawai’i for grades

pre-kindergarten through “20” (graduate school). That would also help

the state cope with federal court mandates to provide educational

opportunities for physically and mentally challenged students, he

said.

The Felix students “are coming” to the university system, said

Dobelle. “Are we going to mainstream them? Somehow, we’ve got to fix

the problem.”

Special-needs children in Hawai’i are referred to collectively as

Felix students because that’s the name of a Hawai’i family that sued

the state, claiming their special-needs children weren’t getting

proper educational opportunities in public schools.

The courts agreed, and have ordered changes costing the state

millions of dollars to implement.

Dobelle, on Kaua’i earlier this week for a Koke’e retreat with senior

UH administrators, including Kaua’i Community College provost Peggy

Cha, talked about various issues and some of his plans for the UH

system before sitting down for a dinner in his honor at KCC Tuesday

evening.

He surprised the provosts by giving their schools $50,000 apiece to

do essentially whatever they want with the money, and he pledged to

change their titles to chancellors. Provosts are commonly heads of

faculties, while chancellors are heads of universities.

He said he’ll also work toward longer contracts for provosts than

their current one-year deals. “You have to have some degree of

validation,” he said of longer contracts and job titles that better

describe the duties of the community college provosts.

The money to the provosts is to allow them to initiate or continue

programs they couldn’t before because of money shortages. KCC, for

example, didn’t have the financial wherewithall to establish a

relationship, if the parties desired, with the National Tropical

Botanical Garden at Lawa’i Kai, he said.

He said he’ll issue a memo stating the provosts at UH’s two-year

community colleges are overworked, underfunded and underpaid, and

that he wants them to list priorities he will seriously consider.

Dobelle said it is not appropriate for provosts to work 12 and

13-hour days and still attend night and weekend protocol events.

At the Koke’e retreat, he heard his top administrators’ goals,

desires and problems. Regarding the problems, he said some are

systemic, some historic and some bureaucratic.

Dobelle said the UH system is being held back from becoming a

preeminent university just by its way of thinking. For example, the

quality of undergraduate education is not celebrated as much as its

research advances, he said.

He said he sees the university’s potential to be a clean growth

industry for the state by offering more student housing and turning

all the community colleges into branches of the university to attract

up to 10,000 new students from the U.S. mainland’s west coast and

Pacific Rim nations over the next few years.

Mainland students can be lured in part because of the ethnic

diversity of the state, he said, characterizing college life in

Hawai’i as studying abroad “without leaving the country.”

While in California recently, he met with UH alumni. There was a

near-universal desire to return to Hawai’i to live and work, and a

desire for their children to also attend UH if there were jobs and

places for them to stay, he said.

UH-Manoa has only 3,000 student beds, with most of those reserved for

Hawai’i students from islands other than O’ahu.

Dobelle said he envisioned one UH system with 10 or 11 campuses not

limited by the “community college” label. Community colleges were

founded due to inadequacies in the public school system and because

of the arrogance of four-year institutions, he claimed.

In the expansion process, the UH system will add jobs and help the

economy by its growth, Dobelle asserted.

“Lots of jobs can be created by an expanded academic institution,”

Dobelle said. “It’s clean business.”

Also, since no great city is without a college or university, the

expansion will help create better communities, he said.

By no coincidence, Dobelle is a tenured full professor in the

UH-Manoa Department of Urban and Regional Planning. He lectures

throughout the world.

Within weeks, KCC could become the University of Hawai’i at Kaua’i,

“and a lot of it’s marketing. I think it’s a real opportunity for a

permanent tourist (students from other states or countries),” Dobelle

said.

While it’s his idea for the name change at KCC, the vision for

UH-Kaua’i must come from the island, he added. But it would make

sense to form relationships with the various centers for

international studies at UH-Manoa, and to recruit students from those

centers’ countries to attend UH-Kaua’i, he offered.

He said he expected to take active part in future negotiations for

faculty contracts, employing what he calls “interest-based

bargaining.” That is, asking the faculty where they want to go, and

outlining his plans for how they’ll all get there together.

Dobelle previously served as president of Trinity College in

Hartford, Conn., for six years, and was president of the City College

of San Francisco and Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Mass.

He was also was elected twice as mayor of Pittsfield, Mass., served

as that state’s commissioner of environmental management and natural

resources. He also served as the U.S. chief of protocol for the White

House, and was an assistant secretary of state with the rank of

ambassador under former president Jimmy Carter.

Dobelle holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in education

and public policy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,

and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard

University.

Staff Writer Paul C. Curtis can be reached at

mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).