leaving behind secure jobs in places where they had tenure and a settled life.
Most in their fifties, they loaded up their books, teaching awards and belongings
and headed to Tallahassee to begin anew.
The allure of a clean slate drew teaching veterans, including Graham Patrick,
an award-winning teacher from the Medical College of Virginia. Former PIMS
faculty members Charles Ouimet and David Balkwill, both of whom had been
recognized among FSU’s top teachers, took on the leadership of the biomedical
sciences department.
By the end of 2001, halfway through the first academic year, the school was
still so small that a large living room could hold all of the faculty and staff, along
with the entire student body.
Still, the school’s faculty resources actually surpassed those of PIMS, which
had been approved by accreditation officials as providing an equivalent education
to that of first-year students at the University of Florida. But because some
of the former PIMS faculty retained their appointments in the College of Arts
& Sciences instead of the newly formed College of Medicine, they were not
counted by accreditation officials, who also wanted to know how the second,
third and fourth years of the curriculum would be delivered.
Based in part on what appeared to be a lack of faculty resources, the medical
school was denied initial provisional accreditation in February 2002. The news
hit the students hard. Suddenly, camera-wielding television news crews, along
with print journalists, crowded into a small hallway space outside the office of
then-dean Dr. Joseph Scherger, who still had anxious students coming to him
with dozens of questions about what next and what if.
The trailers that housed the offices of the dean and about half the faculty and
staff stood beside the nursing building. On Feb. 18, 2002, the front page of the
Metro & State section of The St. Petersburg Times carried the headline “Striving
to meet standards” above a photograph of the outside of the trailers.
A small cadre of devoted faculty, staff and administrators began meeting
religiously to hammer out solutions to the six accreditation standards (out of
126 on which medical schools were judged) that were holding up accreditation.
President of FSU from 1994 to 2003, Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte played a key
role in the development of the medical school, and his devotion to the cause was
unfailing.
An appeal to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) brought
the areas of concern from six down to two. Then, after only a few months – in
October 2002 – the medical school earned provisional accreditation. Students in
the inaugural class now were essentially guaranteed they would be eligible to sit
for the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam and enter residency, both requirements for
obtaining their medical licenses.
Still, there was plenty of work to do, and not many people around to do it.
The curriculum remained just one step ahead of the students.
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