In The Life of Reason, George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The folks responsible for major appointments at the University of Hawaii appear to have selective memories at best.

The recent dust-up at the Manoa campus over the firing of Chancellor Tom Apple and the possible chaos about to engulf the fall semester as a result of the “freeze” do indeed have the air of “déjà vu all over again.”

The latest UH budget crisis — an annual event, but this one’s a doozy — appears to be the fallout from a series of poor financial decisions that are said to have originated with demands made by the Cancer Center that diverted student tuition funds that should be spent on core student educational priorities.

The crisis at the University of Hawaii is just the latest in a long line of them.

PF Bentley/Civil Beat

Financial mismanagement and the inability to enforce rational priorities — or just plain bad priorities — are nothing new at the UH, where athletics take precedence over anthropology or astronomy, junkets trump Japanese literature, and the UH Foundation’s ratio of employees to actual accomplishments makes the Byzantine Court look like a paragon of efficiency. When it comes to managing money wisely, the Vatican Bank may have a better track record.

Another factor in the latest uproar is the specter of “outside interference,” meaning influential politicians and wealthy donors, “the ladies who lunch” and various VIPs from downtown have a greater influence on decisions than the administrators who are hired at huge salaries to make those decisions in an honest and intelligent manner actually do. The process appears to lack integrity, to put it mildly.

But we’ve been here before.

When it comes to managing money wisely, the Vatican Bank may have a better track record.

Never above making his wishes known — and getting them carried out — our late senior senator, Daniel K. Inouye, and other powerbrokers in the state Democratic apparatus allied themselves with several ranking faculty members and administrators from Manoa to foist Evan Dobelle upon an unsuspecting institution.

Already grossly overcompensated, Dobelle, the former chief of protocol under President Jimmy Carter, succeeded in allegedly engaging in a systematic ripping off of the university for personal enjoyment to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars, and then scaring the feckless Board of Regents into giving him $1.6 million to leave town.

Was this a fluke? Apparently not, as should be clear to anyone familiar with Dobelle’s recent dismissal from Westfield State University and the Massachusetts Inspector General’s report on his spending habits.

But the real question — after Hawaii has endured a series of top UH administrators who would make for a frightening exhibit at Madame Tussauds — is whether the next ones will be any better?

The folks who make the final selections at UH have so far never learned from the past. So don’t hold your breath.