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I recently had a conversation with a retired university administrator about conflicts of interest  and conflicts of commitment  among senior university leaders. The discussion was about the ethics of a full-time dean of a School of Veterinary Medicine in a public institution belonging to the board of directors of a large pharmaceutical corporation, particularly as the corporation in question is closely aligned with veterinary medicine. It was a serious discussion about confli

I didn’t set out to write a series about naming rights. I don’t wake up thinking about branding strategies or naming rights or capital campaigns. I think about people. About places. About the rooms where I first learned something difficult and wonderful. I think about the smell of disinfectant in the clinics. About the hum of fluorescent lights over the necropsy floor. About coffee at 5 a.m. before morning rounds. About the first patient I saved. And the first one I didn’t. W

By now, we’ve walked around the issue from three sides. In Part 1 , we talked about identity - how names quietly shape who we believe we are. In Part 2 , we followed the money - the real financial pressures pushing schools toward large gifts. In Part 3 , we looked at memory - who gets remembered when a single name rises above thousands of quieter contributions. All this leads to the obvious next question: If naming rights feel uneasy… If they compress collective history int

If Part 1  of this series was about identity, and Part 2 was about money,then this part is about something softer and perhaps more personal: Memory. Because naming rights are not just financial decisions. They are acts of remembering. And every act of remembering is also, inevitably, an act of forgetting. How institutions remember themselves Walk through any veterinary college and you can read its history in the walls. A hallway of class photos. A plaque honoring the first d

In Part 1  of this series, I suggested that naming rights are not really about gratitude. They’re about identity. But identity rarely changes on its own. Identity changes when money changes. If we want to understand why veterinary colleges are beginning to carry the names of individuals, we must talk about something less romantic and far more practical: Who pays the bills? The old model most of us trained in For much of the twentieth century, veterinary education in the Unite

For most of my career, veterinary schools had wonderfully plain names. College of Veterinary Medicine. School of Veterinary Medicine. University of X. Functional. Geographic. Almost anonymous. They sounded less like brands and more like public trusts. That wasn’t accidental. It reflected who we were. Veterinary medicine grew out of agriculture, service, and community need - not prestige, not patronage, and certainly not naming rights. Our colleges belonged to states and pro

These are deceptively simple questions: Who is driving this new generation of veterinary professionals? Who is motivating and encouraging them? Are we missing such thought leaders altogether? My answer may surprise some. In my view, it should be : The American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC). And yet, I am far from convinced that it is. The Organization That Should Lead The AAVMC  exists precisely to occupy that space. It convenes deans. It shapes academi

I was not prepared for the tone of some of the replies to my recent blog posts: Who will teach them? https://lnkd.in/guYjJctY  and https://lnkd.in/dFeGdPGy Some of the replies were not merely critical. They were weary. Sharp. Disappointed. At times openly hostile toward specialists, university professors, and academic institutions. It stopped me. Because I have spent my professional life in those spaces - teaching, mentoring, examining, arguing for standards, defending schola

After more than forty years in veterinary medicine, I have learned something simple. Buildings don’t teach. Technology doesn’t teach. Curriculum documents don’t teach. People teach. The recent discussion around veterinary school expansion has generated a remarkable range of thoughtful responses. Some focused on general practitioners. Others on specialists. Some on externships. Some on diversity. Some on AI. Some on faculty pay. Some on day-one competence. If we step back, ho

Every time a new veterinary school announces expansion, the headline sounds reassuring. More seats. More graduates. More veterinarians. Problem solved. Except it isn’t. Because the real bottleneck isn’t simply the number of students. It’s the people who teach them. And even more specifically, it’s the specialists . A recent viewpoint in Veterinary Ophthalmology makes this point clearly: The veterinary specialist faculty shortage is not all about the numbers. That phrase caus

When professions change, the change is rarely dramatic. There is no single day when everything is different. No meeting where someone announces that the old system has ended and the new one has begun. Instead, the shift happens quietly. A practice sells. A network forms. A management agreement appears. A pricing system standardizes. A new graduate signs a contract that looks entirely ordinary. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the center of gravity of the profession moves. Se

In Part 1 of this series on   Captive Strategies in Veterinary Medicine , we looked at the structures beneath modern veterinary practice. The legal and organizational frameworks that allow corporate groups to control hospitals while often preserving the appearance of local ownership. In Part 2 , we examined the financial engine driving those structures. The logic of consolidation, valuation, and predictable revenue that has transformed veterinary medicine into an attractive i

In Part 1  of the series on Captive Strategies in Veterinary Medicine , we looked at the architecture of modern veterinary consolidation. The legal structures, ownership models, and organizational frameworks that allow corporate groups to control practices while often preserving the appearance of local identity. But structures rarely exist for their own sake. They exist because they serve a purpose. In modern veterinary medicine, that purpose is increasingly financial. To und

Walk into almost any veterinary hospital today and it looks familiar. A waiting room. A reception desk. A doctor kneeling beside a nervous dog. A technician whispering reassurance to a worried owner. What you do not see are the structures beneath it. Modern veterinary medicine is increasingly shaped by systems that sit far from the consulting room. Legal frameworks, acquisition models, and corporate architectures designed to control practices without always appearing to do so

The word Acadaemia  is used intentionally, as the Commonwealth spelling seems to fit the story better. There is only one correct spelling in the dictionary: Academia . It is a neat, institutional word. Balanced. Formal. Slightly impersonal. It refers to universities as systems - budgets, rankings, promotion pathways, committees, dashboards, strategic plans. It describes the machinery of higher education rather than the spirit that once animated it. But lately I’ve found myse

Force #9: Honesty and Integrity. In this eight-part series, I have tried to name the forces that leave academic life pale and breathless: Bureaucracy, Metrics culture, Erosion of mentorship, Shrinking autonomy, and The quiet moral injury that comes when meaning is replaced by measurement. But epilogues are not meant to repeat the diagnosis. They are meant to point to something concrete. A symbol  that reveals the deeper pattern. For me, one such symbol is this: A public veter

Force #8: Reclaiming purpose. After weeks of writing about loss, I found myself asking a simple question: Is this just nostalgia? Am I merely longing for a past that can’t return? It’s an easy trap. Especially for those of us who have been around long enough to remember different eras, different rhythms, different ways of working. But I don’t think that’s what this is. This isn’t about going backward. It’s about remembering what mattered, and choosing, deliberately, to protec

Force #7: When values and reality diverge. There is a kind of tiredness that sleep does not fix. It isn’t physical. It isn’t even emotional. It sits somewhere deeper. In the place where your values live. I have seen it in the faces of good people. Not burned out. Not cynical. Just… disappointed . As though something they once believed in has quietly let them down. We talk a great deal about burnout in academic medicine. Burnout sounds clinical. Manageable. Like something you

Force #6: The disappearance of apprenticeship . There are things you learn from books. And there are things you only learn standing beside someone. How to feel the difference between a tense abdomen and a painful one. How to enter a stall quietly so a nervous horse doesn’t startle. How to pause - just long enough - before speaking to a worried owner. No textbook teaches that pause. Someone shows you. And you carry it for the rest of your life. When I think back to my own fo

Force #5: Counting what’s easy instead of what matters. A few years ago, after giving what I thought was a particularly good lecture - the kind where the room leans forward, where the questions keep coming, where you can almost feel understanding settle into place - I walked back to my office feeling quietly satisfied. Not proud. Just content. It had felt like teaching. Real teaching. Later that week, my annual review arrived. Pages of numbers. Clinical productivity. Relative