The trust deficit between the University of Hawaii and the Legislature, already an enormous chasm between them, just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

More to the point, the general public that is underwriting this critical institution is surely losing faith, and is sorely in need of reassurance from top UH officials.

The cause of the latest erosion is the allegation of mismanagement of construction contracts by the UH overseers. In particular, the charge is that Brian Minaai, associate vice president for capital improvements, was steering subcontracts to firms operated by friends.

At the moment these are just allegations, and the accuser — Dennis Mitsunaga, owner of an engineering firm and a major Democratic Party donor — is not exactly an objective observer himself.

But this has further destabilized an already rocky relationship between elected leaders at the Capitol and those hired to run the state university, sitting at Bachman Hall.

To underscore that point, the House Finance Committee last week revived a proposal to strip UH of its oversight of procurement of construction contracts. The prompt for that action came on Wednesday, when Mitsunaga wrote letters to the UH Board of Regents and the UH-Hilo chancellor, Donald Straney, in which the allegations broadened with greater detail.

For example, in the letter and in testimony before the state Senate, Mitsunaga alleged that Minaai allowed contractor AC Kobayashi to change a project so the firm could realize greater profits.

Meanwhile the state’s attorney general will be investigating the case, as univer- sity officials have requested. The lawmakers decided to keep their options open on tightening the reins on UH as that investigation progresses — a wise decision — by reviving the bill.

Considering how long various university administrations worked and waited for autonomy in administering its own construction projects, this is a momentous development that surely worries the current president, M.R.C. Greenwood.

So it’s puzzling that Greenwood has not taken a more public stance in the effort to allay public concerns about the continuing controversies.

"Until the investigation is complete, we anticipate having no further comments," read the written statement that was released.

While it’s prudent to withhold comment on the case, Greenwood needs to be more front and center as the face of UH, instead of leaving that to impersonal dispatches issued through a communications team. She has a leadership role to play in telling the public how the university intends to reform its operations.

Greenwood would say that the decision by the UH Regents to spend $260,000 on an accountability study, broadly reviewing UH administrative processes, conveys those intentions.

However, the regents themselves were called on the carpet by lawmakers last summer over Exhibit A in the case against UH managerial competence: the swindle involving a bogus fundraiser concert purportedly featuring Stevie Wonder. So it’s logical to ask how the regents hope to overcome their own inherent conflict of interest in ordering up and supervising the study.

Larry Rodriguez, the chairman of the regents’ task force overseeing the study, asserts that universities commonly perform such self examinations and that even with the hiring of an outside consultant to do the fact-finding, the costs will be kept in check, with committee members taking on some of the work of compiling the report. The interim and final reports will be public documents, he said.

But everyone remembers the heavily redacted Phase 1 report on the "Wonder Blunder" and questions whether this effort will go any better. In the current atmosphere of distrust, the investment of more UH dollars — a quarter of a million — seems patently unwise. Indeed, some lawmakers are already dismissing the effort as a fox-guarding-the-henhouse operation, and a waste of money.

Still the regents have the prerogative to order the study and it’s a fait-accompli. The work had better proceed with the knowledge that it will have to satisfy lawmakers and the taxpayers, now with multiple reasons for anxiety. They are ready, if not eager, to take over the reins of the university.