Topics, April 12, 2007
Leadership at Public Health and Health Professions
Toward a more diverse and equitable HSC
Creating our own opportunities
Leadership at Public Health and Health Professions
Bob Frank’s announced departure from the College of Public Health and Health Professions to become provost at Kent State University is one of those good news-bad news situations. We’re happy for Bob and his wife Janet. He has done an outstanding job here as dean and Kent State’s selection of him validates what many of us already knew – that he has the vision and skills to contribute to the success of a major university at the highest levels. On the other hand, we will miss his leadership of the college at a point when it is still in the midst of its transition from perhaps the nation’s leading health professions college to one that also has a major academic program in public health as a core activity, and whose immediate influence reaches all of the Health Science Center colleges as well as IFAS.
Bob has continued the trajectory of excellence and uniqueness that was really started by this college many years ago. During his tenure, the college has risen to be ranked as one of the top two or three colleges of health professions, proving that it is as academically oriented and productive as any other component of the Health Science Center. Beyond that, Bob’s leadership was absolutely crucial to taking on the challenge of expanding our public health initiative. Doing something of that magnitude is daunting. It requires a college’s faculty to get outside their comfort zone to look toward the future of what the college could be. And it requires taking some calculated risks to make it happen. Bob was able to communicate that exciting vision and he had the stamina and perseverance to stick to it and achieve the goal.
Bob will assume his responsibilities at Kent State on July 3rd. This timing allows a fairly organized, prospective discussion with the college’s leadership group, chairs and faculty about the state of the college and its anticipated future, the nature of the search process and the characteristics we want in the next dean. I will be meeting with the college’s leadership group on April 18th and with the whole faculty on April 27th. I expect to announce both the formation of a search committee as well as an interim dean shortly thereafter.
Perhaps more than any other UF college except Arts and Sciences, PHHP encompasses a diverse set of academic disciplines, and hence there will be a wide range of opinions about what characteristics the next leader ought to have. In the midst of the buildup of the public health components of the college, our focus will be on maintaining the strength that we already have achieved in a top-tier health professions college while we continue to assemble the building blocks of a robust public health initiative. So the balance of the individual or the team that he or she puts together will be important. This will be the key challenge for the immediate future.
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Toward a more diverse and equitable HSC
Although he won’t officially begin work as the new dean of the College of Medicine until May 15, Bruce Kone has been returning to Gainesville for a number of planning meetings. I wanted to use this opportunity to expand on my public comments about one of Bruce’s traits that especially stood out during the recruitment process: his commitment to diversity and equity in the faculty.
As chair of internal medicine at UT Houston, Bruce championed diversity. He actively and aggressively identified leadership talent in the ranks of his departmental faculty and from outside among minority groups and specifically looked for ways those talented individuals might contribute to his team. I would describe his approach as the Vince Lombardi method of recruiting, and that is finding the best players, regardless of their particular skill set, and then fitting them into the team in a way that makes sense. Rather than focusing exclusively on recruiting a strong-side linebacker or a right-handed quarterback, he went out and looked for unique and exceptional talent whether they were left-handed or right-handed and whether they played linebacker or quarterback. If they were good, he made a place for them on the team. I think that’s a little bit of being willing to go out on a limb in order to address the objective of diversifying his faculty and his leadership team, with the ultimate result being the value added of having diverse people from diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences contributing to the education, research and clinical missions.
That kind of commitment and creativity will be needed in the months and years ahead, as we seek a more diverse and equitable Health Science Center. On April 9, Dr. Rebecca Pauly began working to help us do a better job in these areas in her new role as associate vice president for equity and diversity.
Rebecca has been involved in efforts related to equity and diversity at the faculty level throughout her career, including most recently as division chief of general medicine in the department of medicine, and her interest in this area was further kindled by a fellowship on this topic. So as we began to discuss strategies for addressing faculty diversity and issues related to equity, Rebecca came forward as someone with some good ideas and passion for working on the problem. It was a case of the right person, right time, right goal. Because these issues are so important not just at the Health Center but also across the university, we created this position in order to have an individual who gets up in the morning thinking about working on these sorts of problems, with the time and the energy to explore best practices around the country and the creativity to try a variety of approaches and find out what works best at the University of Florida in 2007.
I believe the colleges in the Health Center are in general doing a reasonable job in recruiting and enrolling diverse students. While there’s always more work to be done, we’ve made more progress in student affairs in our six colleges than we have in diversifying our faculty and our leadership teams. The strategies, however, for addressing a diverse student body versus addressing the creation of a diverse faculty and leadership groups may be somewhat different. And I believe more robust effort needs to be put into place to achieve more diversity at the faculty level.
Coming from a field like pediatrics where a little more than half of the workforce consists of women, I would think that the faculty in academic pediatrics nationally or the leadership in pediatrics would be out ahead of the curve. Yet it’s been striking to me over the last decade that while modest advances have been made, it hasn’t been to the degree that one would expect, and we need to understand why that is. Scan the world, not just at the University of Florida, scan the world of division chiefs, of department chairs in pediatrics, in obstetrics-gynecology, in internal medicine. Scan the world of deans and vice presidents and you will see that composition of the faculty is not reflected in the leadership. We need to push that along. Things are changing, yes, things are evolving, but evolution isn’t good enough. We need to catalyze this change. So I’m really looking forward to Rebecca hitting the ground running and making a difference for the Health Center and the University.
Creating our own opportunities
With the state legislature moving toward adjournment in early May, I receive a lot of questions about how the Health Center colleges are faring. I think the answer is that we should be appreciative for what the legislature appropriates to the university each year, knowing that some years will be better than others, and we should continue to aggressively make our case with the legislature for our Health Center programs that will benefit the state of Florida. On the other hand, state funding for new Health Center programs looks extremely tight right now. The message I’m sending is that the University of Florida and the Health Science Center colleges have got to focus ever more aggressively on expanding the different kinds of revenue streams that support our mission. The idea that we are going to grow and expand and achieve what we dream to achieve by relying on an ever-increasing state budget is becoming a kind of bad dream. We need to wake up from that dream and we need to develop and expand a variety of other sources of support for our education and research and service missions.
What are those other sources? Clearly philanthropy represents a huge opportunity. Florida is a rich state with many wealthy individuals who desire to contribute to activities that change our society for the better. In my view, there’s no better steward for those resources than the University of Florida and its Health Science Center. Beyond that, I think that looking toward public-private partnerships, including industry and corporate partnerships in research and in some areas of clinical service, is going to be ever more important as well. The opportunities we are creating with Scripps and Burnham are probably the best examples of this kind of public-private partnership, but there are others as well. Certainly the commercialization of technologies that our faculty invent and the royalties the university earns from that will play an increasingly important role in our bottom line. And despite the gloom and doom about federal funding for competitive research, I am optimistic that through recruiting the best talent, the talent that has a proven track record of successfully competing, that we can be successful in growing the extramural research dollars from federal agencies. We have to leverage our resources even more going into the future and find partners to co-venture with in constructing buildings, recruiting faculty and implementing new programs.
Like it or not, the legislature continues to think about funding universities based on undergraduate enrollment growth. The dominant mindset in Tallahassee is that the state university system needs to be about the access of more high school graduates to a college education, which means growing the number of undergraduate enrollees. Meanwhile, the University of Florida already has nearly 40,000 undergraduates. We are capacity-constrained at this moment. Our vision for the university is to be the leader of the statewide university system in terms of academic excellence rather than just having the largest undergraduate enrollment. Florida's best high school graduates should not have to choose to leave the state to get the highest quality college education. It should be obvious that realizing that vision for UF isn’t going to happen through state funding increases for enrollment growth; it’s going to happen by diversifying our revenue streams.
So my message is we’ve got to get on with it. Wringing our hands and complaining that the legislature doesn’t understand us and doesn’t value what we do is not accomplishing anything. Let’s do what we do best and compete. Our competition isn’t the other 10 universities in the state. We’re competing for the best minds and the best talent around the country, competing for grants and contracts that are being sought by scientists at the nation’s top academic health centers, and competing for the best and brightest students from Florida and beyond. We have to create our own opportunities, and there’s no better time to start than right now.