Bachman Hall legend has it that when the Western Athletic Conference began to crumble around the University of Hawaii in 2010, an influential insider took president M.R.C. Greenwood aside for a facts-of-life speech.
Succinctly, she was said to have been told: It doesn’t matter how many telescopes you have; if the school’s sports teams don’t have a viable conference to play in, people won’t be happy.
That, the story goes, led to the president taking an immediate interest in UH athletics.
We bring this up because the last time UH went searching for a president, an "appreciation for the role intercollegiate athletics play in building public support for the university" was dead last on the regents’ announced list of "key selection criteria."
And we all know how that turned out.
As UH goes about framing the search for Greenwood’s successor — and the regents have another meeting dedicated to that pursuit Tuesday — you hope that somewhere along the way they will give some thought to the athletic realm.
Make no mistake, nobody is saying it needs to be atop the list or that academic priorities should be ignored. They shouldn’t. But athletics deserves a place somewhere in the conversation. Somewhere before they hand over the keys to the office and say, "Oh, by the way, you know we have sports teams around here somewhere, right?"
You get the feeling that Greenwood was never fully apprised about athletics or the state’s interest in it until things got out of hand. Which is why she is said to have termed the athletic department as "Virginia’s teams" in reference to then-Manoa Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw, and told people she would have been fine if there were no sports at all.
It isn’t necessary to have a president who wants to take batting practice with the baseball team the way Albert J. Simone (1984-92) liked to, one time vowing to remain in the batter’s box until he reached the Murakami Stadium warning track while game time approached. But some grasp of the workings of intercollegiate sports would be nice.
The next UH president need not come from a Bowl Championship Series powerhouse, but an appreciation for what athletics can bring to a school and a critical sense for when things are getting off track would sure be handy.
In the announced new order, where the Manoa Chancellor is the administrator held responsible for athletics and a Board of Regents committee is to be created for oversight, the president need not be immersed in athletics up to the elbows. A feel for how much this state follows its sports is desirable, however.
David McClain (2004-09), a season-ticket holder as a faculty member, often referred to athletics as the "university’s front porch" for the way it could introduce the school to the wider community.
The hope is the new president will know there is life below Dole Street and have an early sense of what it is all about.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
