Universitas, all of us.
A good notion. One that has not
been unshakeable. To the contrary, all
of us are aware of, if we have not been witness to, much of the change or shift
going on around us and the many tremors that result as our traditions are challenged
by forces without and within the university community. We are concerned that our academic freedoms
are under assault, that many of the very factors which drew us and shaped us in
our academic careers are being undermined by forces that don’t understand us
and care little about the principles that form the foundations of our lives. Or do they?
We live in the present and work toward the future, but the
university has come out of the past. It
has continued to shift, evolve and respond to the challenges handed it from
every direction. It has survived
regents, administrative and fiscal woes, and assaults from every direction over
its long history. It has done so because
of the community of people that make up its body – us. It will continue to do so, but we must face
the issues. What will we do about us and our university? “Mankind is waiting and longing for those who
can accomplish the task of untying what is knotted and bringing the underground
waters to the surface.”- Albert Schweitzer.
This quote stands at the top of the University of Iowa Faculty &
Staff web page and seems to challenge us as we look to our future.
I bring to the task of untying these knots a long and varied
experience in this and other academic environments. Involvement in early AIDS trials at the NIH
gave me experience in investigative work at a national level and led to a
career in academic medicine. Later study
in business administration provided insight into a new realm and most
importantly, perspective. This new
perspective has compelled me to seek many new opportunities in departmental,
college, and university administration.
The position of vice-president of our faculty senate at this critical
juncture is a challenge and an opportunity which I am eager to embrace. An opportunity to bring these underground
waters to the surface.
Where will we take our university? What problems are foremost in our minds? How
will we prioritize, analyze, and solve them in a way that will offer the
greatest good, maintain those traditions that are of value and discard those
that are not, and provide the opportunity to maintain and protect those
academic freedoms that are so vital to us?
At this juncture I see as the greatest challenge that of a growing sense
of disenfranchisement among the faculty.
This sense wears many faces. It
is the face of faculty retention and recruitment, dissatisfaction over
salaries, time to teach and do research, promotion policies that fail to value
the diversity that we so claim to value, lack of recognition of effort and
service to the university without which it cannot exist, all the while working
to the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, us, all of us. I would like us, the Faculty Senate, to focus
on self-renewal, recommitment to our core values, and the empowerment of the
faculty. With this as a foundation we
can effectively address the above challenges and regain the franchise that is
ours. Universitas. Let us work together to untie these knots and
experience the vitality of these underground waters for the good of our
university.
Biosketch:
I have spent the last 24 years in an academic environment,
completing three higher educational degrees; BS in Nursing, George Mason
University, Fairfax, VA (1983), Doctorate in Medicine, University of Arizona,
Tucson, AZ (1993), and Master’s in Business Administration, Tippie School of
Management, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (2003). My current academic
position is as an Associate Professor(Clinical) in the Department of Urology
with an Adjunct Faculty position in the Department of Family Medicine in the
Carver College of Medicine (CCOM). I am
involved in a Medical Urology clinical practice at the UIHC and the VAMC,
seeing patients and teaching Medical Students, Urology and Family Medicine Residents,
Physician Assistant Students, Geriatric Fellows and Peer physicians in
didactic, small group and clinic settings.
I organize a recurring regional CME conference for primary care
providers and have recently been involved in teaching Japanese physicians about
Graduate Medical education at