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Does the University of Hawaii even need a new president?

That’s the argument being raised by the university’s faculty union — the . UHPA has for years UH to overhaul its governance structure, including eliminating the president’s post, so it can better manage its finances and establish clearer, more efficient lines of authority.

UHPA leaders and other critics say the current structure, which includes one university-wide president and a chancellor for each of the 10 campuses, is a recipe for dysfunction. They cite vague relationships among the president, chancellors and Board of Regents and “administrative redundancy,” among other systemic flaws.

J.N. Musto, UHPA’s executive director, says the delegation of tasks, such as oversight and control of the athletics program, is muddled, often making it confusing as to which administrator is accountable for specific duties.

“The paradigm in management is you can delegate authority but you can’t delegate responsibility,” he said. “That’s worked the other way around here.”

Musto suggests that each chancellor become a de facto president for his or her campus, with greater discretion over campus budgets and operations. The university-wide president would instead be the Board of Regents’ CEO and multi-campus chancellor with oversight of the campus presidents.

Musto told Civil Beat the current fragmented organization, especially the community college system, means that administrators serving the same purpose are duplicated at each campus, increasing costs and creating unnecessary workloads.

University spokeswoman Lynne Waters said a Board of Regents task group has been investigating concerns raised by Musto and others over the UH structure. The group over the past few months has conducted interviews with major stakeholders, including Gov. Neil Abercrombie, state lawmakers and university administrators across the country to learn of best practices.

The group will soon present to the board a report with recommendations for improved operational efficiency, Waters said.

She wouldn’t comment on whether those recommendations would significantly change the current governance structure of the university, including whether changes to the current president-chancellor framework are at all being considered.

Current UH President M.R.C. Greenwood in May that she’s stepping down, two years before her contract expires. The Board of Regents is currently searching for a candidate to replace her.

Current UH System Modeled After Mainland Universities

The current structure was developed about a decade ago and was in large part modeled after other successful state university systems such as those in California and Ohio.

Dobelle turned the seven community colleges, which were originally grouped into a separate system, into independent campuses with individual chancellors. He created additional executive positions, including one in charge of research. He ordered that each campus have two coordinating offices: one for academic affairs, and one for non-instructional areas.

“This reorganization establishes a senior administrative structure of the university dedicated to facilitation and coordination efforts across the system,” Dobelle wrote in a Honolulu Star-Bulletin editorial in 2003.

Dobelle also consolidated the campuses under a university-wide administration in an effort to “promote open communication and coordinated planning with all the campuses.”

The UH structure, according to Chronicle of Higher Education spokesman Andrew Mytelka, is typical of multi-campus public university systems in that it has one president and individual chancellors.

But Mytelka said it’s difficult to compare Hawaii to similar mainland university systems because of how varied its campuses are, which range from two-year community colleges to a four-year research institution.

“I’m not aware of any other system with that characteristic, which must make for some management complications,” he said.

Musto and others say Dobelle’s effort was flawed and relied on a mainland model that doesn’t make sense in Hawaii.

Other than the obvious differences in size between UH and successful systems such as the University of California, Musto said that the systems are also more neatly broken into smaller administrative units that have more direct control over individual campus operations.

“They compare to that which is not comparable,” Musto said.

Who’s in Charge?

In testimony to the Board of Regents in 2007, Musto wrote that the current structure promotes “dual reporting.” Community college chancellors, for example, report to both the vice president for community colleges and the president.

The dual reporting is just one symptom of what Neal Milner, professor emeritus of political science at UH, described as an “insidiously counterproductive” system.

“You get a great deal of confusion,” Milner said. “That translates into a constant level of tension between the president’s office and the chancellor’s office.”

Milner argued in an op-ed for Civil Beat that the university’s current organization cripples its efforts to find good presidential candidates because it “makes it impossible for a president to succeed.”

The UH president’s role, he said, includes oversight of a hodgepodge of distinct initiatives, including efforts to bolster UH Manoa as a globally competitive research institution and through the university’s community college network.

According to Milner, all these efforts compete for attention and state funding, putting the president in an ill-defined, if not awkward, position.

Milner and others point to management of the UH Manoa’s as proof that the lines of authority are blurred. The Manoa department, not the entire university system, is a of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

Still, Greenwood, and not Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple, took charge in the aftermath of the so-called Stevie Wonder Blunder, a benefit concert for the athletics program that turned out to be a scam perpetrated by the promoters.

According to Milner, the university’s handling of that fiasco and, later, alleged procurement violations has helped erode its autonomy from the state — a problem that he says prevents the university from reaching its potential and attracting decent presidential candidates.

One example of its diminishing autonomy is passed this year that shifted oversight of university-related procurement from the UH president to the state procurement office.