The two finalists to become the next president of the 10-campus University of Hawaii system are scheduled to meet with community members across the state later this month and early October, when public input will play a role in determining who the UH Board of Regents selects.
The board has narrowed the search to succeed current President David Lassner to:
• Wendy F. Hensel, executive vice chancellor and university provost for The City University of New York.
• Julian Vasquez Heilig, provost and vice president of academic affairs for Western Michigan University.
UH said Hensel “oversees every aspect of the student and faculty experience across the 25 campus system.”
Previously, Hensel was the dean of the College of Law and provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Georgia State University and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School. She earned a bachelor’s degree “with highest honors” from Michigan State University, where she was a Harry S. Truman Scholar and an intern at the U.S. Supreme Court, UH said.
Vasquez Heilig previously was the dean of the college of education at the University of Kentucky. Vasquez Heilig has doctorate and master’s degrees from Stanford University and degrees from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
They were picked from 93 applicants and are scheduled to appear at community forums and before groups of campus leaders, faculty, staff and student leaders, including the Puko’a Council, a group of UH Native Hawaiian leaders, according to UH.
“There was a tremendous amount of interest shown in the president’s position, and now we have two excellent candidates,” Board of Regents Chair Gabe Lee said in a statement. “We are asking all members of the UH ohana and other stakeholders, along with the general public, to participate in the public events and provide feedback on our finalists. That input will be critical as the regents deliberate and select the next UH President.”
Neal Milner — former chair of the political science department at UH Manoa and UH’s ombudsman, who also ran a program on conflict resolution, said the candidates will have to walk a line between listening and talking about their experience, particularly to often-skeptical faculty who will want to hear about their teaching backgrounds.
They also will face the challenge of coming from out of state and not from Hawaii or from within the UH system.
“The first trap is, are you snotty?” Milner said. “Are you holding up your nose and telling people how it was done someplace else?”
He called Lassner a good and generally successful leader during Lassner’s 14 years as UH president. Lassner is scheduled to retire at the end of the year.
But UH has had some clunkers among its 14 presidents before Lassner, especially Evan Dobelle, Milner said.
Milner called Dobelle, in particular, “a con man … who suckered the board of regents.”
The regents conducted “a secret search” before picking Dobelle and didn’t conduct basic research into Dobelle’s troubled background of controversy.
In 2004, UH regents voted unanimously to fire him following accusations of lavish spending, dishonesty and wasting university resources.
He infamously drove around the Manoa campus in his Porsche rather than a state car and bought a home for more than a $1 million while living rent-free in the president’s mansion, College Hill.
The regents’ decision to fire Dobelle “for cause” while he was on the mainland enabled UH to avoid paying around $2 million for the last four years of his contract, plus benefits.
Dobelle went on to become president at Westfield State University where he also was fired after criticism that he charged personal expenses on school credit cards and went on lavish foreign trips.
Milner said it’s good that the two finalists to become UH’s next president come from public university systems and not private, elite schools.
“They didn’t just get off the turnip truck, so they get it,” he said.
Milner called UH’s flagship Manoa campus, in particular, “an urban commuter school with an international flair that doesn’t get celebrated enough” that “does good research and has raised a tremendous amount of money.”
The candidates will have to “learn how to learn and thrive and accept what this place is like but there is a culture of resistance that exists at the university,” Milner said. “The university is resistant to change.”
At the same time, he said, “all presidents have to be strong advocates both for the university and the importance of knowledge.”
Simultaneously, Milner said, the next president has to be responsible for fundraising and “understand when you have to be tough with faculty” while also earning “the respect of faculty members.”
