Medical School Dean Is Audited

The University of California has launched an audit of UC San Francisco’s School of Medicine and its renowned dean, Dr. David Kessler, after an anonymous complaint was circulated about his financial stewardship of the school.

The university auditor is examining the salaries Kessler pays his senior staff, the financial commitments he has made to researchers and the amount of money he earns from outside consulting and speeches.

Kessler, a former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said there’s no merit to the complaint. When he became dean in September 2003, he said, he asked detailed questions about the school’s financial resources.

“And I have stayed within that almost exactly,” Kessler said. “In fact, in some ways, it’s striking how exact I have been to that previous plan. There’s no credibility to the assertions in the letter.”

The audit, which is standard practice when any complaint is filed within the university, should be completed in several weeks, UC spokesman Brad Hayward said.

“We’ve reached no conclusions at this point,” Hayward said Tuesday. “We’re withholding judgment until our review is complete, and we certainly encourage others to do the same.”

Hayward said the auditor’s office is asked to look into about 100 complaints a year across the UC system. He could not say how many of them are against deans.

Kessler’s special assistant, Doug Levy, said the letter “makes false claims based on a wrong premise and wrong information.”

For instance, Levy points out that the letter contends that Kessler committed to giving four prominent researchers $80 million to build or keep their labs at UC San Francisco, depleting the medical school’s reserves. In fact, Levy said, the school committed $31.1 million to the researchers, all of it initiated before Kessler arrived.

The anonymous letter accuses Kessler of granting lavish salary increases to his most senior staff, some in excess of $100,000. Levy did not dispute that some officials received large raises under Kessler, but said officials are paid salaries comparable to their peers at other medical schools.

Kessler, who earns $540,000 as dean, also has earned money from consulting arrangements and speeches, which the complaint says takes his time away from the school.

In a financial disclosure form filed in November, Kessler said he earned between $51,006 and $510,000 for outside lectures. In addition, he reported earning between $30,003 and $300,000 by serving on three boards, including that of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a healthcare philanthropy. Drew Altman, chief executive of the Kaiser foundation, called Kessler “the most ethical and fiscally prudent and responsible person that I’ve ever worked with.

“If you know David Kessler and the kind of leadership he provides, that just sounds like a charge from Mars to me,” Altman said, referring to the complaint.

As commissioner of the FDA from 1990 to 1997, Kessler was well-known for leading a major investigation into the tobacco industry, speeding up drug approval and establishing nutritional labeling for food. Prior to his arrival at UC San Francisco, he was dean at Yale School of Medicine.

Levy would not speculate on the letter writer’s motivations. But, he said, “Dr. Kessler has implemented a culture of openness within the School of Medicine, and some people may be uncomfortable with that.”