Letters to the Editor

Go ‘Bows

Regarding Ron Mizutani’s column about the Mililani school counselor leading the rebellion to maintain “Rainbows” for UH men’s athletic teams:

I have a couple of questions for new athletic director Ben Jay: When are you going to rebrand the Rainbowtique stores? You know, where they sell Warrior gear?

Sorry, but this whole “uni-form marketing” concept, as stated, is stupid. If we have Rainbow Wahine, why not Rainbow Warriors? That would be the logical thing, right? You could even market an “RW” logo. What am I missing here?

What I am getting is that for the second time – June Jones being the first – an outsider with no sense of the meaning of the rainbow in Hawaii and its frequency in Manoa comes in and arrogantly trashes a beloved tradition.

I wonder what would happen if, while at Ohio State, Mr. Jay had tried changing Buckeyes to, say, Fighting Chestnuts?

Meanwhile, here at home, just one more painful example of poor leadership at UH. Go ‘Bows!

Steven Lee
Honolulu

UH mediocrity

The answer to the question at the end of the Bob Jones’ column – “Should UH have less autonomy and more and better oversight?” – is no. The real answer is to hire a good chancellor/manager and let him/her do their job. Unfortunately, whoever does the hiring has been unable to do this since I have been here, so the answer may be to get a search firm that does major company CEO hiring.

Again, unfortunately, this also probably will not work because: 1) If he or she (chancellor) is not from within the system, then they do not understand how we work here (which is not very well); 2) The faculty union does not want to work with anybody. Pardon my rudeness, but I think that this is total rubbish – no merit to it whatsoever. I came to these realizations very quickly after arriving in Hawaii and remember suggesting that the whole structure of UH should be scrapped, and that the state should contract with California to run a remote campus of UC in Hawaii. Obviously not going to happen.

So I do not see salvation here. As with the public school system, UH is totally mediocre by national standards, and yet locals are so proud because they do not seem to understand the perpetuated mediocrity and do not understand the concept of excellence. Besides which, who is competent and strong enough to do the oversight? Which is a whole other problem. The Legislature in Hawaii mostly has no backbone. So who can rate the chancellor’s performance?

Paul Tyksinski
Kailua