Aren’t Doctors Supposed to Be Smart?
UC Irvine’s medical school has had big dreams for a long time. It looked north and saw UCLA, UC San Francisco and Stanford. It looked south and saw UC San Diego. It wanted to be like them, in the front ranks of America’s medical schools.
Scandal after scandal isn’t the way to get there.
For outsiders, trying to penetrate what goes on behind closed doors in a medical school is like trying to crack the Vatican. People of power and influence run the place, and fiefdoms are not lightly surrendered.
But you don’t have to be an insider to see that the spate of bad publicity at UCI in recent months has potentially damaging consequences. How, you may ask, can this kind of stuff happen when smart and presumably dedicated people are running the show?
It’s the culture, smarty.
A medical school stands near the top of the food chain in college circles. In the same way that we laymen know that doctors are a lot smarter than we are, so do university officials. Not to mention that med schools generate millions of dollars in research funds and help establish a school’s reputation.
You give people like that wide latitude.
“It’s fair to say these faculty often are treated like Brahmins,” says Jennifer Washburn, author of “University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.”
“They are the elite, they give the institution its credibility, its name. They bring in patients, they bring in revenue, they’re responsible for the institution’s reputation, and so [university officials] don’t want to lose those star medical faculty.”
While Washburn’s book, published last year, generally deals with problems different from the ones plaguing UCI, her research provided her a good look at the generic American med school culture.
Doctors may be pursuing research -- sometimes on the cutting edge -- running clinical trials, seeing patients and teaching classes. In general, they aren’t people who cotton to being told what to do. “Anybody in the university world would sort of acknowledge that managing the doctors is difficult,” Washburn says.
UCI’s recent problems have involved its operation of transplant programs, the licensing status of its top two cardiologists, and the granting of a radiology residency to a student whose father made a large donation to the department. Going a little further back, the school was embarrassed by problems in its willed-body program and by a major scandal at an off-campus fertility clinic.
At 40 years old, UCI is a young school. Reputations take a long time to forge, generally. But by the late 1980s, UCI officials weren’t shy about their intent to challenge the stars in the UC galaxy. Rereading some of my notes from then, I see that UCI ranked 58th in the country in 1987 in the amount of funding from the National Institutes of Health. As of 2004, the latest figures I found, UCI had climbed to 53rd.
It’s probably best to be wary of any top-100 list, but we can conclude that UCI is making slow progress. But its in-state rivals -- UCSF, UCLA and UCSD -- are in the top 15 of the NIH rankings.
And now the scandals. “I would certainly say, with the number of scandals that have come to light over these years,” Washburn says, “it would make it more difficult to recruit really top professors right now. It has a huge black eye. I think a lot of star researchers and medical faculty they’d want to recruit would think twice about going to UCI because of this loss of public trust.”
Makes sense to me, but let’s leave UCI on an up note. It recently announced the hiring of stem cell researcher Peter Donovan. He came from Johns Hopkins University, one of the country’s elite institutions.
Maybe the blue-chippers aren’t put off by UCI’s bad publicity.
Or, in what would be better yet for UCI, they don’t read the newspapers.
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.
