There will be no dire warnings about closing down the football program in Ben Jay’s new athletic director position.

Nor will he wade into controversies about winnowing down nicknames.

Of course, the Academy of Art University doesn’t have a football team and it has just one nickname, the “Urban Knights.”

Still, Jay says lessons learned at the University of Hawaii, where he served as athletic director for three years, make him much better prepared to embark upon another unique experience, leading the self-described “only higher arts education institution in the U.S. to have an NCAA athletics program.”

The private, for-profit college spread across downtown San Francisco announced Jay as the director of its 16-team, Division II program Friday, a position he assumes June 22.

The hiring comes almost a year to the day after he left UH, where he was forced out of a job he had held since 2013.

Jay said he spent the year between UH and his AAU appointment in consulting, working with the homeless and at-risk youth — and reflecting.

“You always think back to what you did — and what you didn’t do,” Jay said.

“Certainly I learned about myself and about leading people,” Jay said. “You make mistakes and you learn from them. But you also make great progress and build upon that.”

From his time at UH, Jay said, “You learn that communication is very important and that you are going to have to make some judgment on coaches.”

At UH he came under criticism for retaining Norm Chow as the football coach and planning to extend Gib Arnold as the men’s basketball coach.

“It is all about how much time you are going to give somebody (as a coach) to progress with their program,” Jay said.

In two previous stays in Northern California, as a minor league baseball executive and then an administrator with the Pac-12 Conference, Jay said he was familiar with the school’s ubiquitous double “A” logo. But it wasn’t until he was in Hawaii, and noticed the school playing Hawaii Pacific University, Chaminade and UH-Hilo as a Pac West Conference member, that he knew it even had an athletic program.

Jay said, “I’ve had to change my (vocabulary) a little to ‘artist-athletes.’ The kids are remarkable and the uniqueness of the program is amazing.”

And, so, too, are the challenges. The school has no athletic facilities of its own apart from a conditioning center and training room. It rents practice and competition venues around the Bay area and its “campus” is arrayed among 30 or so buildings.

But the school also doesn’t have to pay burdensome travel subsidies and there is no double figure million dollar deficit to be inherited or surmounted. “President (Elisa) Stephens is committed to the program and we’re fully funded to the Division II level on scholarships,” Jay said.

Mostly, Jay maintains, “What I take away from my time in Hawaii is all the great people there. They love the program and a lot of them are still good friends of mine across social media.”