Dear Board of Regents and Hawaii leaders,

We, the undersigned, represent a broad cross-section of faculty and staff from the UH Manoa campus. We collectively have hundreds of years of experience with UH, have been responsible for attracting almost $1B of externally funded projects to Hawaii, and have taught hundreds of graduate, and thousands of undergraduate students.

We work in many of the UH-Manoa departments, ranging from research-oriented units like SOEST and the IfA, to academic departments as varied as Economics or Physics. Some of us come from the UHCC and JABSOM.

We share a common deep concern for the well-being of our University which now appears to be threatened by an administration whose actions are neither transparent nor inclusive of faculty and student stakeholders. The public events of the last two weeks involving Chancellor Apple, President Lassner, and the UH Cancer Center Director Carbone leave us with little confidence in the management of the University.

PF Bentley/Civil Beat

It is no exaggeration to say that recent administrative revelations have been an embarrassment to all of us. The lack of transparency, the absence of broad input into these decisions, and the apparent disregard for the impact of UHCC management blunders on the full UH-Manoa community, are critical failures. This concerns all of us, because it threatens our long-term ability to build a University with an outstanding commitment to teaching and research.

Further, inappropriate interference from outside the university, first publicly exerted in support of the controversial UHCC Director, appears now to have spread campus-wide with the precipitous and poorly justified firing of Chancellor Apple. Such interference publicly detracts from our long-term mission and contributes to the perception of a University in chaos.

We ask you, the Board of Regents, to take exemplary and perhaps extraordinary action: 1) to engage a broadly representative faculty body in an investigation of the Chancellor’s firing and, unless for verifiably egregious reasons, to reinstate him; 2) to engage a representative faculty body in an impartial review of the UHCC management and, to take whatever actions are required to recover a positive environment for research and education within the UHCC (and UH).

We hope you agree that we require extraordinary action and complete transparency in order to restore confidence to the UH Manoa community and our broader State of Hawaii constituency, that the UH-Manoa mission remains intact.

Sincerely,

Tom Browder, Marguerite Butler, Catherine Chan-Halbrendt, Linda Chang, Brian Chee, Harry Davis, Phillip von Doetinchem, Harald Ebeling, Sarah Fagents, Adrian Franke, Brian Glazer, Shadia Habbal, Tim Halliday, Robert Joseph, Nick Kaiser, Jeff Kuhn, Pui Lam, Boryann Liaw, Unhee Lim, John Learned, Margaret Maaka, Loic Le Marchand, Jelena Maricic, Gertraud Maskarinec, Andrew Mason, Cynthia Ning, Kirsten Pauka, Dusko Pavlovic, Joe Ritter, John Szostak, Xerxes Tata, Hongsong Wang, Les Watling, George Wilkens, Lynne Wilkens, K. Laiaina Wong, Angel Yanagihara