MU | F e a t u r e s
I
t was a leap of faith, they all say now.
And hardly a tiny one.
Even for Manchester University, which has
never feared marching to the beat of its own
drummer, launching the Pharmacy Program in 2012 was
a venture into the unknown, informed by MU’s steadfast
commitment to its mission of both academic excellence
and its service to the wider world. And in that venture
were events that were calculated and some that were the
pure serendipity that seems to appear when something is
just meant to be.
Above: Tamarah Gourgue ’18
fills a syringe.
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Somewhere in this story, Whitney Caudill stops in
Cincinnati and calls her mother in Virginia, saying she’s
still four hours from Fort Wayne and there’s no way she’s
moving that far to help get the Manchester Pharmacy
Program off the ground. Somewhere else, Joe Bonnarens
– who wasn’t even looking for a job – tells his wife, no,
they’re not moving to Manchester University in Indiana
from the University of the Pacific in Seattle, even if the
opportunity sounded intriguing.
Four years later, as the doctoral Pharmacy Program
prepares to graduate its first class, Caudill is Manchester’s
vice president for strategic initiatives and external
relations and Bonnarens is the pharmacy associate dean
for student affairs. They have offices in a gleaming
82,000-square-foot facility on Dupont Road in Fort
Wayne, which happened because former MU President
Jo Young Switzer asked for a $35 million grant from
Lilly Endowment Inc. that hardly anyone thought
Manchester would get.
Manchester got it. And it got Caudill and Bonnarens –
neither of whom thought they’d be where they are,
but who now can’t imagine being anywhere else.
“Manchester went about this in such the right way.
How they set it up. How they planned it out. How they
thought it out,” Bonnarens says.
“A transformational program,” Caudill says.
It’s more than that. It’s a testament to Manchester’s
essential personality of compassion, passion and
fearlessness, and the mission from which it springs – a
mission that fairly leaped out at Raylene Rospond when
she agreed to come to Manchester in 2014 after 17 years
at Drake University.