Alfalfa to Ivy by Joseph B. Martin

Author:Joseph B. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
Published: 2011-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

The author with colleagues Dean Haile Debas (left) and Hospital Director William Kerr (right) at UCSF, 1995.

When I returned to Harvard in the summer of 1997, it was with the full confidence in the leadership of the two universities, both at the trustee (Stanford) and regent (University of California) level and of the senior administrative staff in both hospital settings. I expected the approved merger to move forward with growing pains, no doubt, but ultimately for the benefit of everyone—students, staff, faculty, and, of course, the patients. How wrong I was.

The first signs of trouble arose after the appointment of Peter Van Etten from Stanford as CEO of the new enterprise, leaving UCSF’s Bill Kerr at a disadvantage to bring the troops along from the northern campus. The second error was to place the administrative staff in office buildings halfway between the two campuses, near Candlestick Park in South San Francisco, where ownership of the combined entities by faculty never fully emerged. I shared my perspective with Steve Hauser, who responded:

You did not mention the decision by Bill Kerr not to assume the role of CEO, after it was assumed by all that he would take this on. Bill’s notification to us that he would not take on this role was a major blow to the confidence of faculty at both institutions.

Steve then went on to say:

As the merger evolved in its early months, another problem was a failure to project a consistent vision in terms of the ultimate organizational relationship between the institutions, or the range of possibilities that would be reasonable to consider. It was difficult to plan coordinated clinical services without an understanding of how ambitious our academic synergies could be or should be.

In short, the plan unraveled in a painful way over the next two years despite all efforts by community leaders such as Warren Hellman and Regent Howard Leach, on the UCSF side, and trustees like Isaac Stein on the Stanford side. After my move back to Boston in 1997, I was succeeded by Haile Debas, who served as chancellor for a year before the appointment of J. Michael Bishop. I kept in touch with all of them, doing what I could to encourage my colleagues Haile Debas and Bill Kerr to press on. The failure was the result of several emerging contentious issues that are skillfully outlined in detail by John A. Kastor in his book Mergers of Teaching Hospitals in Boston, New York, and Northern California.11 Significant among these concerns was a growing reluctance by the department chairs to fully execute the details that would integrate clinical services, which had been such a powerful initial motivation for the merger. The exception was in pediatrics, where Larry Shapiro, chair of pediatrics at UCSF, and Harvey Cohen from Stanford sought arrangements that were clearly of benefit to the faculty and patients. Another reason for the failure was a growing perception that the UCSF infrastructure in information technology lagged behind modernization already partially executed at Stanford. This raised concerns that a siphoning of funds might result from the south campus to the north.

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