in terms of physicians but around the state of Florida, a county as prosperous as
Palm Beach – you look at where the physicians are in Palm Beach, if you look in
Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, you’ll see one of the greatest concentrations of
physicians anywhere in the United States. But if you go a little bit to the west in that
county and get close to Lake Okeechobee, you’re going to find that there are not
many physicians. You find that people who really need to have medical care were
simply not getting it.
So we began to think about the various spots in Florida that really were
underserved. A lot of them were rural, some of them were urban, some of them
were inner-city sites, but our idea was that we would try to recruit students and
orient students toward the idea that they would actually go out and provide
medical services where they were really needed. That idea, I believe, still motivates
this medical school. I’m running into a number of its graduates, and I’m
confident that it does. Not that everybody has to follow this cookie-cutter ideal,
but the medical school itself really ought to have an orientation to be sure that its
graduates care about serving people who are not able to get service.
So we developed a model, we developed a plan, we decided that we would go
back to the Legislature and get the funding for the plan.
I want you to think about building a medical school now. What was here
where we’re now located? When you look around you now and see this magnificent
building, I hope you’ll pause at some point and say, “How the hell did it get
here?” It got here through a really fairly complicated process.
That process included closing down a longstanding institution we called
Florida High, but it actually had other grades than just high school. It was located
here because it was directly across the street from the College of Education. If
you’re at a university and you’re university president, you may think that what
you do is just order that something is done, and all of a sudden it gets done.
That’s not the way universities work. It’s not the way universities ought to work.
They really ought to work on a process of consultation and communication on
all major decisions. So if you’re having a decision now to move a facility which
is under the jurisdiction of the College of Education, you’ve got to talk to the
College of Education. And you have to have the kind of exchange with the
College of Education that says, “We’d like to move your demonstration school
away from the present location to a location we’ve found for you that’s only 12
miles away.”
So what’s the reaction of the education school? The reaction is: “You can’t
possibly do that! You can’t do that because we use that school for research, and
an awful lot of what we do in our scholarly work is dependent on having a close
connection between the demonstration school and the College of Education.”
[His reply:] “That is a very convincing argument. But I’d very much appreciate
it if you’d bring me all of the papers that have been written using the demonstration
school as a basis for research. If that stack’s sufficiently high, you win the
argument. If the stack’s not very high, you lose the argument.” Happily, the stack
50 | Breaking the Mold