The University of Hawaiʻi violated the Sunshine Law when it hired new president Wendy Hensel in 2024 and her special adviser a few months later and shut the public out of Board of Regents meetings where the job applicants were interviewed and decisions made to hire them, according to a lawsuit filed this week in state court.

The suit by the Public First law Center also alleges that the regents’ evaluation of Hensel’s first-year performance was illegally conducted in secret this past October.

The public interest law firm is not asking the court to invalidate Hensel’s hiring or that of her special adviser, Kim Siegenthaler. But it does want the court to order UH to release minutes and recordings of executive sessions where the discussions and decisions took place as well as other open meetings improvements.

“The goal is two-fold,” law center attorney Ben Creps told Civil Beat. “One is to get compliance with the law but also to better understand the decisions that did happen behind closed doors.”

For instance, Creps said, minutes and recordings could show the role played by the executive search firm that recruited and recommended Hensel and to what extent the regents relied on the company’s recommendations when it came to choosing Hensel and the hefty compensation package she was ultimately offered.

UH “used open meeting exemptions excessively and improperly to secretly hire the UH President and her Special Adviser, award them a combined one-million-dollars in annual compensation, and evaluate the UH president’s first year of performance, entirely behind closed doors,” according to the complaint, which was filed Wednesday in First Circuit Court.

UH spokesman Dan Meisenzahl declined to comment on the case on Thursday, saying in an email the university hadn’t yet seen the lawsuit.

He included a letter UH had sent in December to Creps in response to his request for executive session minutes. The letter detailed UH’s reasons for declining to release the minutes and other material including that the president search offered public forums for people to attend and that the regents openly discussed their reasons for hiring Hensel, provost of City University of New York, instead of the other candidate, Julian Heilig, provost of Western Michigan University. Matters discussed in executive session were considered private, the letter said.

Hensel was chosen over Heilig in October 2024 to replace retiring president David Lassner. Civil Beat reported extensively on Hensel, including that she had been accused of discrimination twice in previous jobs — once when she was dean of the Georgia State University law school and once when she was the CUNY provost.

Civil Beat’s reporting raised questions about the work of the executive search firm, WittKiefer, that UH regents had hired and whether the company had known and told regents of the accusations raised about Hensel before they moved forward with her hiring. WittKiefer and UH have declined to disclose information collected during the search, saying that is the property of the consultant.

In 2025, lawmakers introduced a bill that would have forced consultants such as WittKiefer to make public material collected during a search process under the public records law. That bill, as well as a similar measure introduced this year, failed to pass over concerns about how records needed to be kept and retained for all state contractors.

Ultimately, the board decided to give the job to Hensel, paying her $675,000 a year, plus a $7,000 monthly housing allowance. That salary and allowance was significantly more than Lassner’s compensation.

In January 2025, Hensel wanted to bring on Siegenthaler, whom she had worked with at CUNY, and the Board of Regents created a new special adviser position for her with a salary of $250,000. All those discussions were held in executive session although the board took a vote approving the hire and salary in open session.

The Public First Law Center complaint argues that the Sunshine Law requires the hiring, firing, evaluation and discipline of a high-level state official to be done openly and that only “highly personal and intimate” matters can be construed as affecting privacy.

In 2019, in a case involving the Honolulu Police Commission’s decision to pay $250,000 to then-Chief Louis Kealoha even though he was under federal investigation on public corruption charges, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruled that public boards and commissions must conduct discussions and decision-making related to top state officials in public, not in executive session.

Last year, as part of a lawsuit involving the Agribusiness Development Corp. and the Defender Council, both of which had hired top staff in secret, the state Office of Information Practices updated its guidance to align with the 2019 high court ruling, further solidifying that the intent of the Sunshine Law is to make sure important public decisions are conducted openly.

The Sunshine Law also requires public boards to summarize any executive session discussions and maintain written or recorded minutes of all meetings, open or closed, that accurately reflect what went on at the meeting.

The Public First lawsuit filed this week challenges UH and the regents on those points as well, alleging that numerous meetings in 2025 and 2026 lack proper minutes.

The lawsuit also says UH violated the Sunshine Law by allowing regents to attend remotely but not the public because there was no link for the public to use, as well as by requiring people to register before they were allowed to testify.

In addition to disclosure of the executive session minutes and recordings pertaining to Hensel’s hiring and subsequent evaluation and Siegenthaler’s hiring, the lawsuit asks the court to order UH to do better when it comes to conducting the public’s business and follow the law regarding how testimony is conducted and how records of the meetings are kept.

The Public First Law Center, formerly the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest, is an independent organization created with funding from Pierre Omidyar, who is also a co-founder of Civil Beat. Civil Beat Ideas Editor Patti Epler is a member of its advisory board.