Randy Moore, former chair of the University of Hawaii Board of Regents, put his finger on the reason for the poisonous dynamic between UH and our state Legislature.

Most committee chairs, he wrote in a recent Honolulu Civil Beat essay, “are supportive of the agencies for which their committees have oversight. A chair’s ‘how can we help?’ puts the Legislature and the executive branch in a partnership to accomplish shared goals.”

Moore’s implication was that such a healthy partnership doesn’t exist between UH and Senate Higher Education Chair Donna Mercado Kim, whose latest rant against the university he was answering.

Moore didn’t explicitly say what’s replaced the “how can we help?” question, but when it comes to Kim and other senators who have targeted UH, like Donovan Dela Cruz and Michelle Kidani, I’d say it’s something like: “How can we flaunt our power over you? How can we grandstand at your expense? How can we use you for our personal and political needs?”

In her earlier essay, Kim groused about criticism of legislators for cutting the budgets of both UH and the Department of Education despite a large surplus.

She accused UH of poor policy judgment on matters from capital improvement priorities to scholarship choices to the balance between four-year campuses and the community colleges.

She directed special ire at UH for spending $40 million to convert Ching Field into a football stadium that meets minimum NCAA Division I standards after the state unexpectedly closed Aloha Stadium.

These are differences of opinion, not malfeasance, and Hawaii’s Constitution gives the UH regents and president broad independence and “exclusive jurisdiction over the internal structure, management, and operation of the university.”

The Legislature’s role is “laws of statewide concern,” but Kim and the others use their power of the purse to flagrantly micromanage in violation of constitutional intent.

Most troubling is that it often comes from malice. The latest UH budget cuts, from which students suffer most, came after Kim, Dela Cruz and Kidani demanded the ouster of UH President David Lassner and the regents didn’t oblige. Kim has now sought the heads of three of the last four presidents, often over personal pique.

Her complaints about Ching Field are especially annoying, given that the problem was entirely of the Legislature’s making.

Aloha Stadium closed because lawmakers year after year failed to provide funding for basic maintenance. Their promise of a new stadium has slipped from 2023 to 2028 at the earliest because of their constant plan changes.

UH deserves kudos instead of blame for making lemonade out of the lemons handed it by the Legislature to try saving a football program highly popular with much of the public.

Gov. Josh Green recently appointed new faces to the UH regents, including former Gov. Neil Abercrombie, in what he described as an attempt to change the unhealthy dynamic with the Legislature.

Let’s hope that the play is to better defend the university that’s so important to our community’s well-being, and not give in to Kim and the others who seek to sidestep the Constitution and run UH from the second floor of the Capitol instead of Bachman Hall.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.