Under the leadership of free spending Evan Dobelle, Westfield State University has taken on the feel of a horror film. Every day brings new financial and legal disaster. Most recently, the state of Massachusetts, displeased with Dobelle’s apparent misuse of public money, has frozen much of the school’s funding.
All of this because – with full knowledge of his scandalous behavior at his previous employer, the University of Hawaii – Westfield went ahead and hired this man.
… you get a wonderful shot of the University of Hawaii athletic director leaning comfortably back in his office chair and wearing one of those relaxed Hawaiian shirts and drawling about how firing someone you’re paying more than your state’s governor… firing that person after only a few months… and giving that person a huge buyout to go away… and giving no reason why you’re doing all of that is utterly routine, no biggie, a real yawn. Happens every day in the business world~!
Well, number one, no, it doesn’t happen every day in the business world.
Number two, the University of Hawaii is a public, taxpayer funded, institution.
And while we’re at it, number three: The AD casually mentions that there’s no scandal here because after all the position was budgeted anyway, so why be upset that UH is paying the budgeted money for no one to do anything in the position?
I mean, let me be understood here about exactly what the AD is saying. He is saying that we quickly fired the highest-paid public employee in the state of Hawaii for reasons we’re not sharing (UD‘s been at this game long enough to know that quick secretive firings like this one almost always involve the discovery of an alcohol problem, or criminal misbehavior of some sort), and we’re going to keep paying this person as if he still worked here (I mean, he will physically be here until the end of the year; he just won’t do anything), and that’s your tax money, but nothing in this picture is amiss.
When UD saw that name in the news this morning, it stirred a memory… She’d written about Evan Dobelle years ago on this blog…
So she checked her archives, and there it was – Dobelle was busy being fired, back in ’04, from the presidency of the University of Hawaii. He was accused of excessive personal spending.
The University of Hawaii is among this country’s very worst university systems, so Dobelle was moving into a laughable mess when he took that job. On the other hand, he does seem to have spent lavishly, with little in the way of results.
Dobelle, who jumps from job to job with suspicious rapidity, is, à ce moment-là, president of one Westfield State University, where damned if he isn’t facing exactly the same charges.
The University of Hawaii has it all; and its last president just gave up – years before her contract’s end – in the face of it. Now UH’s clueless trustees will spend months and lots of money trying to come up with an interim president and then a (cough) non-interim one…
A common theme at Thursday’s meeting was that the university needs to return its attention to students.
Now there’s an idea!
One trustee pointed to “abysmal graduation rates.” Enrollment’s declining on virtually all campuses. Over the last eleven years, tuition has gone up 141%. Much of the money seems to have gone to administrators.
Regent Jeffrey Acido, the board’s sole student member, also stressed that the university lacks a culture in which students feel committed to the school and its mission.
Now a Ph.D. student in his 10th year at UH, Acido said that he’s regularly had professors tell him to leave the university because of Hawaii’s dismal job prospects or because he has greater academic opportunities elsewhere.
“It kind of hurts because I believe in this institution, but (the university needs) to cultivate a culture in which you breed amazing students with faculty that encourage you to stay and not leave,” he said.
He recalled visiting campuses such as the University of California at Berkeley or Harvard, campuses at which he felt that “culture of commitment.”
“But I don’t stand toe to toe with them,” he said. “That culture has to expand. That culture has to multiply.”
It’s odd that Acido has been hanging around UH for ten years; but put that aside. He has detected the problem, the fundamental cause of all the UH embarrassments UD has chronicled on this blog. (Put Hawaii in my search engine for details.) But what he’s calling for – a setting of intellectual seriousness – is unlikely to emerge at UH. Hawaii’s one of those states – like Nevada, Montana, and South Carolina – with a toxic mix of anti-intellectualism and corruption. To make matters worse for Hawaii, it is, like Alaska (another state with terrible universities), much too far from the mainland for any of us to pay attention or care. Hawaii is doomed – university-wise – and would therefore do best to appoint a total insider its next president. Someone who will leave it alone to continue stewing in its own juices.
…you’ll need to keep tuition very high too.
Thus, at the University of Hawaii, a perennial source of embarrassing stories on this blog (type hawaii in my search engine), tuition has had to double in the last five years in order to keep administration palms greased. In the last eleven years, tuition has increased by 141 percent. Without these increases, the campus cronyism that doles out huge sums to inept friends with construction companies – in the expectation, I guess, that some of that money will come right back to the dolers – would not be able to operate.
… features horrendous University of Hawaii.
The University of Hawaii and South Carolina State University give UD an empty feeling. She doesn’t like this feeling any more than you do when you have it — as if existence is suddenly stripped of meaning and value and you’re inside a howling panorama of futility and anarchy.
Corrupt outposts of corrupt states, these two are always on UD‘s radar, not only for the commonplace (theft of funds, exploded athletics budgets), but for the baroque (Stevie Wonder concerts about which Stevie Wonder doesn’t know; just-completed federally funded research buildings turning into instant ruins).
These schools are the public non-profit twin of America’s private for-profit schools: Both surreal ruinations are fueled by the trapped, hapless, American taxpayer.
The benighted University of Hawaii – a bad school with a bad football team that’s always getting arrested (background here) – rigged up a Stevie Wonder concert to benefit athletics…
No one told Stevie Wonder, however.
The university spent $200,000 to organize the concert, however.
The university isn’t sure who it gave the money to, however.
It’s trying to get the money back. But it doesn’t remember who it gave it to.
The University of Hawaii. Isn’t she lovely?
Haven’t written about it in awhile, but longtime readers know that this blog has a tea category (click on TEA to read previous posts on the subject) … And that I drink mainly Marco Polo, from Mariage Frères… And that I like to plan visits to tea plantations, etc.
Cam Muir is a biology professor at the University of Hawaii who, in his spare time, has been growing and processing tea on a tiny plantation located on volcanic slopes. His wife seems to be the genius behind the project, but Muir’s scientific background has also contributed.
[Eliah Halpenny] said few if any insects or predators exist, and the Big Island of Hawaii provided just the right amount of rain, and fertile volcanic soil. Which is why, she added, that “I jumped at the possibility.”
That’s how Big Island Tea was born on the Northeast slope of Mauna Loa Volcano, one of the most active volcanoes on the planet. Halpenny said, “With my husband’s ecological and scientific background and my horticultural interest, we have grown and learned how to process tea over the past 10 years — with a passion.”
Harrod’s has just bought up all of their crop. It paid $90,000 for 22 pounds of tea — a staggeringly high price.
Which is impressive, of course. But more impressive to UD is the whole feel of these lives lived amid smoke plumes. Like W.S. Merwin, these people found their Hawaiian plot of land and set about doing what they loved on it. This photo from the plantation says it all.
