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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

The moment it hit me was not philosophical. It was physical. I had barely left the airport. Outside the terminal, the air felt thick with exhaust and heat. Drivers clustered behind railings holding handwritten signs. Families pressed close around luggage carts piled improbably high. A whistle blew somewhere. A porter shouted. A line of taxis inched forward, each movement measured in feet rather than meters. And then the traffic. Within minutes of leaving the airport, we merg

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

I have come to think of life not as a long road, but as a series of T-intersections. For long stretches, we travel forward assuming the road continues indefinitely. We settle into rhythm. We grow comfortable with direction. We tell ourselves that this is simply how things will be. Then, without warning, the road ends. There is no straight ahead. Only left or right. And no going back. If you hesitate too long, you hit the wall. The Difficulty of Blind Choices What makes these

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

After doing a book reading of my latest children’s picture book, Bin Chicken Abroad , to a 5th grade class, I received thank you letters from each of the kids I had read to. This is one of them: It mentions that I am   perceived as  cool . In fact, it suggests that I may be the coolest . A word from my generation. I was struck by the use of this word by a twelve-year-old. The letter itself is full of everything one hopes for when visiting a classroom. Enthusiasm, sincerity, a

I remember the moment the valley opened. We had been climbing through the Andes all morning, the road tracing ridges where clouds brushed the hillsides and the air smelled clean enough to drink. The land felt ancient and patient. Terraces, scattered farms, eucalyptus leaning into the wind. Then, as we descended, the color changed. At first it was only a glint. Pale rectangles catching the sun. I thought they were ponds, or frost. But around the next bend the truth came into f

After a snowfall in a city, the planners’ intentions briefly become visible. Sidewalks form tidy lines. Crosswalks sit where they were designed to be. The grid asserts itself. But within hours, something else appears. A narrow trench cut through a snowbank. A diagonal track across a lawn. A faint dirt line branching from the official path. Urban planners call these desire paths . The unofficial routes people create when the prescribed one does not quite work. They emerge slow

There are moments in public policy when science quietly accumulates in the background for decades, until suddenly it must step forward and speak with a single voice. In the United States, the Endangerment Finding  was one of those moments. Most people outside environmental law have never heard of it. Yet it sits at the foundation of modern U.S. climate policy, shaping regulations on cars, power plants, methane emissions, and industrial pollution. Without it, much of the feder

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: