the members of the House as co-sponsors. So we had a pretty good start at getting
legislation passed with Durell’s bill.
But we didn’t get it passed. The first year, the Board of Regents indicated
that they would not support a medical school at Florida State University. That
was unfortunate for us because it delayed us a great deal. It was unfortunate for
the Board of Regents because they ultimately got abolished – over this medical
school.
The conflict that came between legislative leadership and the Board of
Regents really came to a head over the medical school. The first year, the bill was
introduced, had this great sponsorship, then did not get passed. We then had a
session with the legislative leadership. Very important in that leadership was the
person for whom this building was named: John Thrasher, a graduate of Florida
State University, a lawyer, but a lawyer who had worked for the Florida Medical
Society, general counsel for the Florida Medical Association, and a lawyer who,
before he went to law school, had been in Vietnam, and he had headed a medical
evacuation team. These are the people who flew in the helicopters and rescued
soldiers who were wounded out on the front lines. John saw an enormous
amount of combat and saw a lot of emergency medicine practiced in the most
trying of conditions. He knew something about medicine, and he cared about
medicine. He cared about FSU. And he very much supported Durell Peaden’s
idea that we would have a medical school.
So we didn’t get the medical school, but we got funding for a study. Now
if you think about the process of building a medical school, if we had received
authorization on Day One, what would we have done? We would’ve conducted
a study! We’d try to figure out how we were going to put this medical school
together. So, in a sense, we really were not delayed by the Board of Regents a
bit. We began to do a very comprehensive study, a properly funded study. My
memory is that we got about a million dollars to fund these studies. We divided
up into task forces. The task forces went about their business and created these
reports that led to a plan to build a medical school.
Over a period of time after doing our study, we selected a model for a medical
school, and it was a model of distributed clinical work, which now has been
so successful for us and it worked earlier at some other medical schools. Because
I had known the president of Michigan State, I had known that Michigan State
had the kind of program where medical students came to the main campus for the
first two years and then the clinical years were spent in other places – in the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan and other places around Michigan. And I had known that to
be a successful model. I had not known of other places that ran a similar program,
but Provost Larry Abele and Myra and [Durell Peaden and the MGT team] went to
these other campuses. They told me that I could go with them to North Dakota in
February, and I declined. I said, “I’ll stay in Tallahassee.”
But they were diligent in going to places that had these incredibly successful distributed
programs. As we looked at that model more and more, we began to realize
that it was not just Northwest Florida, the Panhandle, that had this great short[fall]
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