by having a medical school. I also thought that the medical school would help
us attract research grants. I saw the growth in research grants as a very important
aspect of building a university.
Those are good reasons to have a medical school, but they’re not THE reason
to have a medical school. You ought to have a medical school that’s dedicated
to training physicians who will actually serve people. And in this process in the
story I’m going to tell you, I changed my mind. I got educated about what medical
education really should be….
FSU presidents had [talked about a medical school] for years and years;
Bernie Sliger, when he was president of Florida State University, suggested that
we have a medical school but could get no movement at all. Incredibly, one day
in 1998, I think – late 1997? – see, it’s good to have Myra here to correct me
and give me directions as she did throughout this whole process – I ran into Rep.
Durell Peaden…. He’s a physician. He’s also a lawyer. And, important for our
story, he’s a legislator, and he’s a legislator from West Florida. I ran into Durell
at the Governors Club in downtown Tallahassee. Durell had just driven across
North Florida, and he said that as he drove … he was beginning to think about
how few physicians there were in these small towns he was going through. And
he said to me, “I think we need to think about a medical school for Florida State
University.” Now if the university president has been thinking about a medical
school for a while, and a legislator walks up and says something like that to you,
it’s hard to hold back from grabbing them and hugging them.
As huggable as Durell is, I didn’t do it. Instead, I said, “What you need to do
is you need to get to know more about the Program in Medical Sciences that’s
already in place at Florida State University,” and I suggested that he go by and
visit with Myra Hurt and see this incredible program that was operating first of
all to recruit medical students who cared about serving people – which I thought
was one of the great aspects of it – but also really good about recruiting minority
students, good about placing its students -- they went on to the University of
Florida, but despite that they managed to keep the acculturation they got with
Myra, and many of them became primary care physicians. So we were educating
already the very people Rep. Peaden was talking about, and we were doing a good
job of it in cooperation with the University of Florida. The University of Florida
had them for three of the four years; it didn’t undo the good work that Myra
did only having them for just one year. So I was very proud of that program. I
wanted Durell to see it.
So he came out and visited in … January of 1998. It’s incredible to me that,
two years later, we had a medical school authorized by the Legislature. Now
here’s the process we went through: first of all, to establish a medical school; and
then to get the medical school accredited.
The establishment of the medical school, looking back on it now, seems to
have been the least painful [part of the] process. Durell Peaden was a member of
the House of Representatives. He introduced a bill … which had a majority of
48 | Breaking the Mold