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Governance is everywhere. Committees convene. Agendas are circulated. Minutes are recorded. Votes are taken. From the outside, the structure appears intact - reassuringly so. There are layers of oversight, clearly defined processes, and a visible architecture of accountability. And yet, there are moments when a quiet doubt emerges: If governance is present, why does it sometimes feel absent? This is not a question of whether governance exists. It does. The question is whether

A gift is never just a gift. At least, not at this scale. When a public university receives a transformative donation - $120,000,000, for example - the immediate response is predictable.   Gratitude Celebration Headlines   The language of generosity flows easily, and understandably so. Such gifts can fund buildings, programs, scholarships, research. They can accelerate progress that might otherwise take decades. But alongside the gratitude, there is another question - quieter

At a public university, decisions do not derive their legitimacy solely from authority. They derive legitimacy from process. And process, at its best, reflects something deeper than structure - it reflects trust . At institutions like the University of California, and within schools such as the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, that trust is meant to be safeguarded by a principle we invoke often, and interrogate too rarely: Shared governance. But what happens when deci

It is tempting to tell this story as one of individuals. A dean joins a corporate board. A chancellor sits at a table where decisions are made that extend far beyond the university. A senior administrator accepts compensation that quietly exceeds what most faculty will earn in years. From a distance, it is easy - perhaps even satisfying - to frame this as a question of personal choice. But what if that is the wrong lens? What if there is another possibility? What if what we a

Accountability rarely disappears overnight. It erodes quietly, through exceptions, justifications, and the gradual acceptance of what once would have been unthinkable. And nowhere is this more evident today than in the intersection of public universities, corporate boardrooms, and conditional philanthropy. There was a time when the boundary was clear.   A senior academic leader, particularly in a public university, was understood to serve a singular mission:   Education. Rese

In 2013, Lieutenant General David Morrison(1) gave one of the most powerful public statements of modern institutional leadership: The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. That line has enduring force because it reaches beyond the immediate context in which it was spoken. It is not only about misconduct. It is about institutional character . It is about what leaders normalize by failing to confront it. And it applies with unsettling precision to the modern univer

Universities have always depended on patrons. In medieval Europe, wealthy families funded colleges and endowed scholarships. In the United States during the nineteenth century, industrialists such as Stanford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie built entire universities through philanthropy. Generosity and education have long been intertwined. But something subtle has changed in recent decades. Philanthropy has increasingly become intertwined not just with support for universities, bu

Philanthropy has become indispensable to modern higher education. Public universities, squeezed by declining state support and rising costs, now depend increasingly on private gifts to fund buildings, scholarships, endowed chairs, institutes, and research initiatives. In that sense, philanthropy is no longer peripheral. It has become central to how many public universities imagine their future. But the more central philanthropy becomes, the more urgent another question become

Philanthropy has long played an important role in higher education. Public universities, especially in an era of declining state support, increasingly rely on private giving to fund buildings, programs, chairs, scholarships, and research. But there is an important distinction that is too often blurred. A gift is one thing. A conditional gift that reaches into governance is something else. A newer form of philanthropy has emerged in which donors seek not merely to support the

There was a time when the dog catcher knew every street. The dog catcher wasn’t just a man with a truck and a looped pole. He was part of the town’s quiet fabric - half warden, half caretaker. The dog catcher knew which gate didn’t quite latch on Maple Street, which old Labrador wandered only on warm afternoons, which child would come running in tears if their terrier didn’t return by dusk. He caught dogs, yes. But more often, he returned them. The measure of his work was not

Shared governance  in an academic institution is a foundational partnership where the faculty, administration, and staff, jointly manage the university's academic and operational missions. As a Professor Emeritus at UC Davis, from the time of my first orientation, I was secure in the knowledge that I was part of a system that prioritized shared governance . Slide from a new faculty orientation Shared Governance at UC Davis Shared governance ensures that faculty hold delegated

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