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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

Force #4: Decisions made far from the clinic floor. There was a time in academic medicine when most decisions were made within earshot. You walked down the hall. You knocked on the department chair’s door, or the hospital administrator’s door if it was a clinical issue. You talked it through. A new piece of equipment. A schedule change. A clinical protocol. A hire. It wasn’t perfect, but it was human. Decisions were made by the people closest to the work. The people who under

Force #3: The quadruple mandate. There is a particular look I have started to recognize in young faculty. It isn’t incompetence. It isn’t indifference. It certainly isn’t lack of commitment. It’s fatigue. Not the ordinary kind. Not the end-of-a-long-week kind that a good night’s sleep fixes. Something deeper. A thinning of spirit. As though the light that brought them into academia in the first place has quietly dimmed. Early in my career, exhaustion usually meant one thing:

Force #2: Administrative drag. Not many years ago, I tried to hire a young neurologist. Bright. Capable. Thoughtful with students. The sort of clinician you recognize immediately. The type who listens carefully before speaking and whose patients seem calmer simply because she is in the room. She wanted to teach. She wanted to build a program. She wanted an academic life. We lost her. Not to salary. Not to a competing offer. We lost her to time. By the time the position descri

Force #1: Financial disparity with private practice There is an easy explanation for the thinning corridors of academia. Money. It is the first thing everyone says, often with a shrug, as if the matter were settled. Of course, they leave. They can earn twice as much in private practice. And it’s true. A boarded neurologist, surgeon, or internist can step out of a university clinic on Friday and, by Monday morning, double - sometimes triple - their salary in specialty practice

When I first visited India 10 years ago, veterinary care felt deeply local. A single veterinarian. A modest clinic. A hand-painted sign. Perhaps a ceiling fan turning slowly above an exam table. Medicine lived close to the community. Today, something more complex is forming. The pet food boom has created momentum, and momentum attracts capital. What begins with kibble rarely ends there. India’s pet market is now drawing two very different forces at once: Global nutrition comp

Until recently, dogs in India ate what families ate. A ladle of rice. Lentils. Chapati ends. Perhaps a splash of milk. Food was shared, not purchased. It came from the kitchen, not a factory. But walk through any modern Indian city today - Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad - and you begin to see something new. Brightly colored sacks of kibble stacked beside soap powders and cooking oil. Pet supplements in pharmacies. Grooming products delivered by app within the hour. Quiet

Last week I read that National Veterinary Associates (NVA) had banned elective declaw procedures across its 1,400 hospitals. My first reaction was simple: Well done NVA! Declawing has always troubled me. Removing the distal phalanx of each digit for “convenience” never sat comfortably beside the oath most of us took to relieve suffering. If fewer cats undergo that surgery, that is almost certainly a humane step forward. But my second reaction lingered longer. Not about the pr

I am prompted to write this essay following a recent article in the Sacramento Business Journal announcing a $120 million gift to the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. According to the university, $80 million of the gift will fund a new small-animal teaching hospital as part of the school’s $750 million Veterinary Medical Complex expansion. UC Davis said its existing veterinary hospital treats about 50,000 patients annually. The expansion is expected to allow care for u

These Words Are Not Interchangeable. Veterinary medicine relies on language not only to describe what we see, but to shape how we think. Few word choices reveal this more clearly than the casual substitution of disease , disorder , and syndrome . They are often used as if they mean the same thing. They do not. To veterinarians, these distinctions matter because they guide diagnosis, investigation, treatment, and prognosis. To clients, they matter because each word carries a d

Some terminology problems in veterinary medicine are obvious. Others are so familiar that they disappear into the background. The way we describe limb location - front , back , fore , hind - falls squarely into the second category. These words are convenient. They feel intuitive. They are widely understood. They are also anatomically weak . Why this distinction matters In veterinary medicine, language does more than describe position. It encodes: Developmental origin, Skel

Universities should celebrate generosity. They should say “thank you.” They should acknowledge the people who make progress possible. But there is a line, somewhere between appreciation and amplification, where gratitude turns into something else. Something louder. Something performative . Something that begins to feel less like stewardship and more like spectacle. And lately, I’ve been wondering whether we’ve crossed that line. In the most recent issue of Activities and Impa

Somewhere along the way, we began saying it out loud. The best veterinary school in the world. It appears in brochures. In fundraising decks. In speeches. On banners at conferences. Sometimes it’s said jokingly. Sometimes aspirationally. Increasingly, it is said as if it were settled fact. And every time I hear it, I wince a little. Not because I don’t love the place. Not because I don’t believe in its people. But because I’ve lived long enough, and worked in enough corners o

Every so often I hear an announcement that sounds, at first blush, entirely good. More opportunity. More access. More care. More growth. This week it was a short “Minute with Mark” message from the dean at UC Davis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ikWbYZqr4 The promise was straightforward and upbeat: Increase the veterinary class by hundreds of students. Treat tens of thousands more animals. Launch new programs. Support new research. It is the kind of language donors like.

This image was created using artificial intelligence and is intended as a conceptual illustration. It does not depict a real building and associated signage. If you were to gather the former professors of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine - those now emeriti and those no longer living – and ask them about the renaming of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine to the Joan & Sanford I. Weill School of Veterinary Medicine : You would not hear a single opinion. But

This six-part series began with philanthropy and ends with governance, but it has been circling a single question all along: What happens when influence accumulates without formal ownership, and without clear accountability? Naming rights and corporate board service are often discussed as separate issues. They are not. They are two expressions of the same structural shift in how power now operates within public institutions. This final essay brings them together. Two Differ