HONOLULU -- A state agency ruled that a job evaluation critical of University of Hawaii president Evan Dobelle must be made public in response to requests from KITV and the Star Bulletin.
It's still not clear if Dobelle and the UH Board of Regents will release Dobelle's job "report card."
Dobelle fought the release of his first written job performance evaluation since becoming UH president, claiming it should remain private because it's a "personnel matter."
However, the State Office of Information Practices disagreed.
"We felt that the public's interest was greater than the privacy interest of the president," said Les Kondo of the OIP.
Kondo said the public has a right to know how the regents feel about Dobelle's job performance, because he's one of the state's highest-paid employees who's in charge of the state's only higher education system.
Dobelle said he hasn't read the opinion yet and would not say whether he would fight the release of his job evaluation. He did call it "flawed" because the regents broke sunshine laws by holding evaluation meetings in secret.
"A lot of these opinions were given, willfully, I gather, and with some malice, in secret meetings. But they don't square with the facts. The facts are, applications are up, admissions are up, foundation support is up, grants from the federal government are up, the medical school's in the ground, the film school is up," Dobelle said.
The OIP suggested waiting five days to give Dobelle time to decide if he'd go to court to stop the release. So will he sue?
"I'm not a suer, I lead. I don't have interest in those kinds of things," Dobelle said.
"Even though OIP says we can release it, I think we want to look at the various liabilities there might be in doing that, we want to get the president's opinion on that, and so I think it's something we want to discuss as soon as possible," UH Regent Kitty Lagaretta said.
Sources told KITV 4 News the regents' evaluation praises Dobelle for coming up with a vision for the university, but criticizes him for having no plan to put that vision into place going into his third year as UH president.
Sources said it also questions Dobelle's trustworthiness, citing examples where he's said one thing and done another.
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