Unlike you John I know exactly what I'm talking about. Lassner grew up in NYC, Boston and Chicago. His Bachelors and Masters are from second-rate state schools. His PhD is in Communication and Information Sciences, an interdisciplinary program that is essentially a tutorial in giving Power Point presentations. When he got his degree at UH the program was provisional, as a result his PhD was guaranteed, the program needed to show results to survive. 
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 As for the UH IT infrastructure it's a network, straight out of the last century, servers, virtualization, co-lo and hosting.  No cloud, private, public or hybrid. It's the LAN that time forgot.  
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Nobody comes to Hawaii to get a PhD unless they plan to stay in Hawaii. UH isn't a highly selective university, it's credentials are unimpressive.  You're right about falling in love with the place. When I got here I did too, mainly because the local competition is laughable. If you can't make it here you can't make it anywhere. Love it.