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The recent search for a new University of Hawaii president had some glitches, but overall, it was acceptable. Good searches don’t guarantee good results, though.

Before we look at why, consider this. Top leaders in public positions don’t last long. The average tenure for presidents of large universities is about the same as the tenure for big city police chiefs — five to six years. (The president of Harvard held the job for six months.) School superintendents last three years on average.

Enough time to unpack but still best to keep your satchel handy in the front closet.

Over the years, UH presidential searches have improved, but there is always the shadow of Evan Dobelle looming over the process.

Evan Dobelle turned out to be the worst president in UH history.

You could have fooled the regents who made that selection. And fooled they were.

According to Lily Yao, Board of Regents chair when the board chose Dobelle, he had “an outstanding record of accomplishments at the three institutions of higher learning where he has served … The time spent with him in the interview process made it very clear that he is eminently qualified.”

The time they spent with Dobelle could and should have shown that he was enormously unqualified.

Dobelle was fired after four years, then later fired from the next college that had the wool pulled over its eyes.

In this case, the moral is easy: awful searches lead to awful outcomes. 

The search committee and the firm hired to vet candidates missed crucial and totally available information critical of his past work.

Instead of transparency, the search was conducted by a secret squad in isolation.

The squad was duped. As it did not take long to discover once he began the job, Dobelle was a master slickster, a silver-tongued devil with confidence man skills that wowed, cajoled and flattered the committee members to dream big and trust that he could make dreams come true.

Assessing this mess is an easy call: garbage in, garbage out. The search was so awful, so bad that the ghost of the Dobelle search lingers like those scary stories your mom told you to keep you from doing something awful again.

The recent presidential search was different. It was an OK search that both implicitly and explicitly exorcised the Dobelle ghost.

But there is only so much an exorcism can accomplish.  Exorcism may rid you of the devil, but it can’t keep Satan from coming back and sticking his fork in you another time.

Executive search firms, whose websites by the way are quite full of themselves, skirt over this fact.

“Unlike traditional recruitment methods,” , “where personal biases or preferences may influence hiring managers, executive search firms are objective and impartial in their selection process.”

Let’s all put our hands together for those social scientists. The trouble is these headhunters don’t furnish any data showing the link between this process and the chosen leader’s ultimate success.

Is this link hard to predict? You bet. It’s easy to see why the Dobelle process failed to do this. The search was awful. Garbage in, garbage out.

But the recent presidential search was far from garbagy and yet success, even for a really good on paper candidate — excellent credentials, big-time experience — is far from a guarantee.

That’s because running a public university is so devilishly complex, much harder to run than a private corporation or a public bureaucracy. It’s also because of outside events over which a president has no control, from UH losing its stadium to elite university presidents losing their jobs because of the way they responded to Gaza.

I don’t want to talk about the usual things like management skills, cultural awareness or fiscal accountably. Those are all important, but instead I want to discuss subtle, basic macro-forces that are at the root of presidential success.

A university cannot be run like a private business or a government. A good university is more fluid, decentralized and chaotic.

And that’s a good thing. A university is more like a police department. On paper the Honolulu Police Department is hierarchical, but in reality the lower ranks, the officers on the ground, have enormous discretion minute by minute, day by day. 

That’s what university faculty members are and do. Faculty members are like independent contractors working individually writing, researching and teaching on their own.

What drives this work is individual initiative and a conscientiousness that comes from liking their job and a combination of loving what you do and having the autonomy and resources to do it.

That’s a pretty bold statement, but it’s accurate. The challenge for any college executive is to get the right balance — to be able to get people to do what you want them to do when it is easy for them not to as well as to convince others, particularly the Legislature but also the public, that it is an essential working model.

It’s about as different from Mister Dithers calling Dagwood Bumstead into his office and chewing him out as it gets.

This basic difference looms any time UH officials come to the Legislature with their budget requests.

Legally, an existing state constitutional provision that gives UH more autonomy is a step in that direction.  The Legislature, however, has never been all that interested in making that legal enabler work. State money, in their thinking means state control.

The cruder manifestations of this shows up all the time with the same small group of state senators coming down publicly hard — some call it bullying — against one thing or another UH is doing.

The real significance, though, is not these few legislators. It’s that how little other legislators get involved with defending the university.

For you UH football fans, think of it this way: running a 4.4 40-yard dash in the Combine is no guarantee that you will catch a lot of passes or that your team will make the playoffs.

Final lessons. There are good reasons to be optimistic about Wendy Hensel, the new UH president. There are also worrisome reasons why she might not succeed. 

One is that unanticipated stuff happens. Just ask those elite university presidents who got dumped because of Gaza.

Another is that the way a candidate is selected, is far from a guarantee of a good outcome. In crunch time, process and outcome are two different things.

Looking back at Evan Dobelle’s case, failure was a no-brainer because the search was so bad.

This time it was different: A pretty good search, a candidate with good credentials, but a job full of exciting opportunities and crippling pitfalls that have been around for a long, long time.