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The University of Hawaii is going to have a terrible time finding its next president because so few good candidates want to work there. The problem is not lack of transparency or where the candidates are from. No matter how open the selection process is, you can’t get a good president unless you have a decent pool to draw from.

Time and again past choices have been bad because the candidate pool was so bad. The Dobelle and Greenwood presidential searches were crippled by these limits. (David McClain’s presidency was essentially an extended interim appointment.) Evan Dobelle was hired in secret. Many blame that secrecy for his disastrous few years. But according to our sources on that search committee, Dobelle was the best of the bunch.

The search that led to the hiring of M.R.C. Greenwood was more transparent, but the pool problem was the same. Put aside whether you think that Greenwood did a good or bad job. The fact is that the short list for that position at the time included two nondescript, inexperienced candidates, an anonymous candidate with strong Hawaii connections who withdrew, and Greenwood herself. In effect Greenwood was the last person standing. In both cases good candidates for the position, whether they were from here or somewhere else, did not want the job.

There are two reasons why the UH presidency is so undesirable that good candidates look somewhere. The first is that the way the University of Hawaii is organized makes it impossible for a president to succeed. The so-called University of Hawaii System has been a disaster from the get-go because the way the system is organized is fundamentally flawed. In fact the system is not really a system at all. It’s a mishmash based on wishful thinking and a refusal to confront the bad consequences of this magical thinking. The UH system is very different from successful university systems in California or Ohio. Unlike the president in those two places, the UH President oversees three totally diverse elements with differing missions, ranging from competitive national and global research (Manoa) to work force development (Community Colleges). All are competing for attention and diminishing State support. The campuses have regional (island) constituencies and internecine rivalries abound.

The Board of Regents (BOR) does not help. It is standard usage to refer to the Regent from Hilo or the Regent from Maui, not simply to the Regent. Regent selection is based upon geography not qualifications.

Both BOR and the UH system are challenged by the boundaries on their authority. A case in point is athletics. The UH system is not an NCAA member nor does it field any sporting teams. Nevertheless the President intervened in governance of Manoa athletics, purportedly at the urging of the BOR. That’s not just contrary to NCAA policy. It’s bad management because someone else — the Manoa chancellor — is supposed to do that job. Ambiguous responsibility ends up being no responsibility. As a result of this organizational mess, running UH is filled with administrative gray areas and booby traps. The UH president is all too often doing either too little or too much. In short, any candidate worth her salt can see that the job is an organizational minefield that cannot be defused simply by being a good leader

The second reason why the job is so discouraging is that the University of Hawaii is losing the power to run itself rather than gaining it. Autonomy has been the UH’s goal for a long time. Without more autonomy UH will never reach its potential. It has been a long, hard fight. Thanks to the Legislature’s reaction to the university’s handling of the Wonder Blunder and to accusations of procurement violations, UH autonomy has taken a step backward. That’s a very big deal because it indicates lack of confidence in the university, and the delicate balance that autonomy needs requires this confidence. Any UH presidential candidate worth her salt will see this move backwards as a bright red flag.

This threat to autonomy is more than just a short-term problem driven by current events. The threat is historical and ongoing. There is in fact an Iron Triangle of Incompetence that consistently keeps UH from getting the autonomy it needs. One side of this triangle is highly visible management incompetence on the part of University officials. Yes, the Wonder Blunder is in a class by itself, but as goofy and bizarre as it was, the awful way UH handled this was not so out of the ordinary. You can’t blame the Legislature for wanting to step in. Yet legislators themselves form the second side of this dysfunctional triangle by stepping in too often and micro-managing the university. How do you think it looks to a potential UH presidential candidate to see that legislators (and the governor for that matter) tell M.R.C. Greenwood who should be athletic director? This is nothing new. Legislators regularly behave that way. The third side of the triangle involves individual faculty who bypass the university administration and go directly to the Legislature to get funding for their pet projects, “going to the Legislature.”

You can’t blame the faculty for doing so because relations between university officials and the Legislature are typically so dysfunctional and because the university does such an ineffective job lobbying for its needs. But the overall results of this are harmful because it encourages legislators to be more involved. How can you expect an arms length relationship if you spend a lot of your time putting the arm on the legislator? Individually, then, no one is a villain in the sense that everyone is acting rationally, but collectively all three groups contributing to this triangle have to change.

Keep in mind how stable triangles are, and you see the challenge. That is what makes this picture so dismal. The problem is not lack of leadership skills or unfamiliarity with Hawaii. The problem is with the well-established norms and organizational structures that make it impossible to be a good leader no matter how good the candidate is. Astute candidates for the presidency will certainly recognize and be discouraged by this. Candidates who do not see these problems or underestimate their gravity are not astute enough to be given the job.

So in the long run the UH system needs to be totally reorganized and the norms and behaviors that encourage the Iron Triangle need to disappear. But what about the short run? Is there anything that can make the situation here palatable to encourage halfway decent candidates? There are two essential beginning steps. One is for all those involved in the search to make a commitment to work toward the changes necessary in the long run. That of course includes the politicians, but it also includes everyone else who contributes to the Iron Triangle. Go beyond the usual clichés and arguments about leadership skills and convince the candidate that you have a sophisticated grasp of the overall organizational problems that need to be overcome. The second important baby step requires that those who do the hiring make sure that the candidate is committed to making such changes.

Moving forward has to be a joint effort among people who have too often winked at the real sources of UH’s problems and the ways they make these problems worse. As Stevie Wonder sings in “Ebony Ivory”: “There is good and bad in everyone. We learn to live we learn to give each other what we need to survive.”

About the author: Neal Milner is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii.

Tom Schroeder is Associate Professor Emeritus of Meteorology and former Director of the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research at the University of Hawaii.

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