The Modern University: Who Decided to Build the Future? (#682)

This essay follows the earlier blog titled Bigger, Better & Already Outdated? What If the Future of Veterinary Medicine Isn't a Building? (https://www.ricklecouteur.com/post/bigger-better-already-outdated-what-if-the-future-of-veterinary-medicine-isn-t-a-building)

UC Davis is building an extraordinary new veterinary medical complex.

Its planned Small Animal Hospital alone is projected to cost $327 million.

It will expand clinical capacity, incorporate sophisticated technology, support specialty medicine, train veterinary students and residents, and provide an environment for clinical research and discovery.

In a previous essay, I asked whether such an enormous investment in centralized infrastructure represents the future of veterinary medicine - or an extraordinarily sophisticated version of its past.

But that question leads inevitably to another.

Who decided?

Who decided that the future of veterinary medicine at UC Davis should be built around a major new physical veterinary medical center?

And perhaps the more important question:

Who was asked?

This Is Not a Question About Architects

Large university construction projects pass through elaborate processes.

There are feasibility studies. Planning committees. Architectural reviews. Budget approvals. Fundraising campaigns. Design meetings. Clinical workflow discussions. Equipment planning. And regulatory approvals.

There may be hundreds - perhaps thousands - of individual decisions between the first conception of a project and the day the doors finally open.

Undoubtedly, many people participate.

But that can obscure a much more fundamental question.

Who participated in deciding that this was the future UC Davis should build in the first place?

That is a very different question from asking who helped design it.

The Decision Before All the Other Decisions

Imagine that university leadership announces that a new veterinary hospital is needed.

Faculty are subsequently invited to meetings. Clinicians discuss operating rooms. Students may be asked about educational spaces. Architects consult users about workflow. Committees review designs. Donors become involved. Administrators discuss financing.

Eventually, hundreds of people may legitimately be described as having been consulted.

But there is a problem.

The most important decision has already been made.

We are building the hospital.

Everything that follows concerns what kind of hospital will be built.

How large should it be? What services should it contain? How should patients move through it? Where should imaging be located? How many operating rooms are required? What teaching spaces should be incorporated?

Those are important questions.

But they are downstream questions.

The upstream question is:

Should the future of veterinary medicine at UC Davis be organized around this scale of investment in centralized physical infrastructure at all?

That is the question that should have preceded all the others.

Consultation Before Decision

This distinction matters far beyond UC Davis.

Modern universities speak frequently about consultation.

They establish advisory committees.

They hold town halls.

They circulate plans.

They solicit comments.

They appoint faculty representatives.

They invite stakeholders to participate in implementation.

All of these activities can be worthwhile.

But consultation has meaning only in relation to when it occurs.

Consultation before a decision can influence the decision.

Consultation after a decision can influence only its implementation.

The two should not be confused.

A university can therefore conduct an extensive consultative process while leaving the fundamental strategic decision largely untouched.

That may satisfy procedural expectations.

It does not necessarily constitute shared decision-making.

Who Were the Stakeholders?

A project of this magnitude will influence veterinary medicine at UC Davis for generations.

So who had standing to participate in the original strategic conversation?

Certainly the Dean and senior university administrators.

Certainly clinical faculty.

But the circle should surely extend much further.

What about basic-science and nonclinical faculty? Students? Residents and interns ? Veterinary technicians and nurses? Alumni? Referring veterinarians throughout California?

General practitioners? Private veterinary specialists? Veterinary professional organizations? Animal owners? Shelter veterinarians? Food-animal veterinarians? Public-health veterinarians? Researchers? Those working in rural and underserved communities? Those developing distributive models of veterinary education? Those studying access to veterinary care?

And perhaps particularly important: were people invited into the discussion who were prepared to challenge the premise itself?

A stakeholder process consisting primarily of people who already accept the proposed solution is not much of a test of the solution.

What Was the Question Put Before Them?

This may be even more important than identifying who participated.

Suppose faculty were asked:

What should the new Veterinary Medical Center contain?

That is consultation.

But compare it with asking:

What should the UC Davis veterinary clinical enterprise look like in 2050?

That is strategic consultation.

The first question begins with a building.

The second begins with a mission.

Those starting points can produce very different answers.

If we begin with the assumption that we need a new hospital, we naturally discuss operating rooms, intensive-care units, imaging suites, examination rooms, teaching spaces and laboratories.

But if we begin by asking how UC Davis can best educate veterinarians, train specialists, generate knowledge, advance animal health and serve society over the next fifty years, a much wider range of possibilities appears.

A hospital may still be part of the answer.

Perhaps even a very important part.

But it is no longer automatically the answer.

Were the Alternatives Considered?

Veterinary medicine is changing rapidly.

Specialty medicine has expanded enormously outside universities.

Private specialty hospitals now possess MRI, CT, intensive-care units, advanced operating facilities and specialist teams that once existed predominantly within academic institutions.

Some train residents.

Some participate in clinical research.

Clinical education is becoming increasingly distributed.

Telemedicine separates expertise from geography.

Artificial intelligence may further weaken the relationship between expert knowledge and physical location.

Veterinary schools struggle to recruit and retain clinical faculty.

Students graduate with substantial educational debt.

Animal owners increasingly confront the cost of sophisticated veterinary care.

These are not minor developments.

They potentially change the role of the university veterinary teaching hospital itself.

So were they part of the conversation?

Was UC Davis presented with alternative visions?

Was there a serious proposal for a smaller academic tertiary-care nucleus surrounded by a large network of affiliated specialty and primary-care practices?

Was a genuinely distributed clinical education model considered?

Was there discussion of creating a statewide network of community teaching partners?

Could private specialty hospitals have become formal extensions of the university's clinical training enterprise?

Could some of the resources required to sustain enormous physical infrastructure have been directed toward faculty positions, scholarships, clinical educators, simulation, telemedicine, data networks, rural veterinary medicine, shelter medicine or access to veterinary care?

Perhaps all of these possibilities were considered and rejected for good reasons.

If so, those reasons would be fascinating to know.

But that leads to a simple question:

Where is the record of that debate?

The Most Revealing Question

There is one way to test whether consultation occurred at the truly strategic level.

Ask this:

Was there ever a point at which UC Davis could realistically have decided not to build the new Veterinary Medical Center?

Not cancel it because funding disappeared.

Not postpone it because construction costs increased.

Not redesign it because circumstances changed.

But actually conclude:

The profession is changing.

There is a better way to invest in the future of veterinary medicine.

If that option was genuinely on the table, then the process was strategic.

If it was not, then much of what subsequently occurred may have been consultation about implementation rather than consultation about direction.

That distinction matters.

Buildings Create Their Own Future

The existing UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital opened in 1970.

Think about how different veterinary medicine was when that hospital was conceived.

• CT was not part of routine veterinary medicine.

• MRI was not available.

• Veterinary oncology was in its infancy.

• Many contemporary specialties were only beginning to develop.

• The modern private veterinary specialty hospital barely existed.

• Telemedicine did not exist.

• Artificial intelligence belonged largely to science fiction.

• The corporate transformation of veterinary practice had not occurred.

• Pet insurance was negligible.

The veterinary profession of 2026 would have been almost unimaginable to those planning a veterinary hospital in the 1960s.

Yet their building helped determine how generations of veterinary students were educated and how academic veterinary medicine at UC Davis developed.

Now we are doing it again.

A hospital completed around 2030 may still be operating in 2070.

That makes today's decision profoundly different from an ordinary administrative decision.

It is an intergenerational decision.

Who Owns an Intergenerational Decision?

• The administrators making today's decisions will eventually leave.

• Deans serve finite terms.

• Chancellors leave.

• Provosts change.

• Department chairs rotate.

• Faculty retire.

• Students graduate.

• But the building remains.

• So do its operating costs.

• Its maintenance requirements.

• Its staffing requirements.

• Its need for clinical caseload.

• Its equipment replacement costs.

• Its organizational structure.

• And perhaps most importantly, its gravitational pull on institutional priorities.

Once several hundred million dollars have been invested in a veterinary medical complex, future administrations do not begin with a blank sheet of paper.

They inherit a physical definition of what their predecessors believed veterinary medicine should be.

That is why decisions of this magnitude cannot be regarded simply as administrative decisions.

They are decisions about institutional identity.

And institutional identity belongs to more than the administrators temporarily entrusted with managing it.

The Public University Adds Another Dimension

UC Davis is not a private veterinary corporation.

It is a public university.

That distinction matters.

A private company ultimately has owners.

Its leadership may decide that a new hospital is necessary and invest accordingly.

A public university has a more complicated constituency.

• Faculty are not simply employees delivering a corporate product.

• Students are not simply customers.

• Alumni are not merely donors.

• Veterinarians throughout California are connected to the institution professionally.

• Animal owners rely upon it.

• The state has an interest in the veterinarians it educates.

• Society supports the institution because the university is expected to create knowledge and serve the public good.

That does not mean every stakeholder gets a veto.

Institutions could not function that way.

Leadership must lead.

Decisions eventually must be made.

But the larger and more irreversible the decision, the stronger the argument for genuine consultation before institutional commitment.

Leadership Is Not the Same as Ownership

There is sometimes an understandable administrative response to arguments like this:

Someone has to decide.

Of course.

• Shared governance cannot mean universal agreement.

• Consultation cannot mean paralysis.

• Leadership cannot consist simply of asking everyone what they want and calculating the average.

• A Dean should have a vision.

• A Chancellor should make decisions.

• Administrators are appointed partly because institutions require leadership.

But leadership and ownership are not synonymous.

The responsibility of leadership is not merely to choose a future.

It is also to ensure that the institution has seriously examined which future it should choose.

That requires dissent.

It requires alternatives.

It requires uncomfortable questions.

And occasionally it requires inviting people into the room who think the central premise may be wrong.

Perhaps UC Davis Did All of This

There is an important caution here.

• Perhaps UC Davis conducted exactly this kind of process.

• Perhaps faculty extensively debated alternative models of clinical education.

• Perhaps community veterinarians were consulted.

• Perhaps private specialty practice was examined as a potential educational partner.

• Perhaps the implications of distributed education were thoroughly considered.

• Perhaps affordability, workforce shortages, artificial intelligence, telemedicine and changing models of specialty medicine were incorporated into long-range planning.

• Perhaps multiple futures were considered before the Veterinary Medical Center emerged as the preferred strategy.

If so, that history deserves to be documented and celebrated.

It would demonstrate precisely the kind of thoughtful institutional planning that a project of this magnitude deserves.

But if that occurred, we should be able to answer some straightforward questions.

• Who participated?

• When?

• What alternatives were considered?

• What assumptions about the future of veterinary medicine were used?

• What arguments were made against the centralized model?

• How were those arguments evaluated?

And ultimately:

Who made the decision?

Transparency Is Not Opposition

Asking these questions should not be interpreted as opposition to the new Veterinary Medical Center.

That is an important distinction.

The hospital may prove to be an extraordinary success.

It may become one of the world's great centers of veterinary clinical medicine.

It may produce discoveries we cannot presently imagine.

It may train generations of exceptional veterinarians and specialists.

The question is not whether the building will be impressive.

It almost certainly will be.

The question is whether the process that produced it was sufficiently broad, sufficiently strategic and sufficiently forward-looking for an investment intended to shape the institution for perhaps half a century.

Those are legitimate questions precisely because UC Davis is a great veterinary school.

Great institutions should be capable not merely of defending their decisions.

They should be capable of explaining how they reached them.

From "What Should We Build?" to "What Should We Become?"

Perhaps this is the larger lesson.

Universities naturally think in terms of projects.

• A new hospital.

• A new laboratory.

• A new classroom building.

• A new research center.

  
  

Buildings are tangible expressions of progress.

But strategy should precede architecture.

The first question should never be:

What should we build?

It should be:

What should we become?

Then:

• What will the profession need?

• What will society need?

• What will students need?

• What can the university uniquely provide?

• What should be provided by partners?

• What should remain physically centralized?

• What can become distributed?

• What assumptions are we making about the future?

• What happens if those assumptions are wrong?

Only after answering those questions should we ask:

What must we build to make that future possible?

Who Decided to Build the Future?

The new UC Davis Veterinary Medical Center will eventually open.

There will be ceremonies.

There will be speeches.

There will be tours.

There will undoubtedly be extraordinary clinical spaces and technologies.

And there will be photographs of an impressive new physical expression of veterinary medicine.

But long after the ribbon is cut, another question will remain.

When UC Davis committed hundreds of millions of dollars to infrastructure intended to serve veterinary medicine for generations, who participated in deciding what that future should look like?

Were stakeholders asked what kind of veterinary school UC Davis should become?

Or were they asked what kind of veterinary medical center UC Davis should build?

Those questions sound similar.

They are not.

One invites stakeholders to help choose the future.

The other invites them to help construct a future that has already been chosen.

And that may be the real test of shared governance in the modern university:

Not whether stakeholders were consulted after a great decision was made.

But whether there was still a decision to be made when they were consulted.

Next: The Modern University: If You Build It, Will They Come?The $327 Million Question Facing the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Complex.

Glossary of Terms

Stakeholder

A person or group substantially affected by, invested in or capable of being affected by an institutional decision. In the context of a veterinary school, stakeholders may include faculty, students, staff, alumni, referring veterinarians, veterinary specialists, animal owners, professional organizations, donors, government and the broader public.

Shared Governance

A university governance principle under which responsibility for important institutional decisions is shared among administration, faculty and other appropriate constituencies rather than residing exclusively within a centralized administrative hierarchy. Shared governance does not mean that every participant has equal authority or a veto.

Consultation

A process through which people affected by a proposed decision are invited to provide information, opinions or recommendations. The significance of consultation depends greatly upon when it occurs and whether the resulting input can still influence the fundamental decision.

Consultation Before Decision

Consultation conducted while genuine alternatives remain available. Stakeholders may therefore influence not merely how a decision is implemented but which course of action is ultimately chosen.

Consultation After Decision

Consultation that occurs after the fundamental direction has already been established. Participants may have meaningful influence over design or implementation while having little ability to reconsider the underlying strategic choice.

Strategic Consultation

Consultation about an institution's fundamental direction—for example, asking what the veterinary school of 2050 should become—rather than simply asking how a predetermined project should be designed.

Implementation Consultation

Consultation concerning how an already approved strategy or project should be carried out - for example, the configuration of clinical spaces, workflows, equipment or teaching facilities within a hospital that has already been authorized.

The Decision Before the Decision

The essay's term for the fundamental strategic choice that precedes hundreds of subsequent planning decisions. In this case: not what the new Veterinary Medical Center should contain, but whether this model of veterinary medical center represents the best investment in UC Davis's future.

Administrative Authority

The formal power granted to university leaders and governing bodies to make and implement institutional decisions. Possessing authority to make a decision does not by itself answer whether broader consultation would have been appropriate.

Legitimacy

The degree to which an institutional decision is regarded as appropriately reached and worthy of acceptance. Legitimacy may depend not only upon whether proper authority existed but also upon transparency, participation, process and consideration of competing perspectives.

Transparency

The availability of meaningful information about how decisions are made, including who participated, what alternatives were considered, what criteria were used and how the final decision was reached.

Accountability

The obligation of decision-makers to explain and accept responsibility for decisions and their consequences.

Faculty Consultation

The involvement of academic faculty in institutional decision-making. Its significance depends upon whether faculty are merely informed, invited to advise on implementation or given an opportunity to influence the fundamental strategic choice.

Representative Consultation

A process in which selected individuals or committees are treated as representing a larger constituency. Its legitimacy depends partly upon how representatives are selected, what authority they possess and whether the larger constituency has meaningful opportunities for input.

Public University

A university established and supported as a public institution with responsibilities extending beyond its administration and immediate employees. Its mission generally encompasses education, research and service to society.

Institutional Mission

The fundamental purposes the university exists to serve. In this essay, an important principle is that infrastructure should be designed to advance the mission rather than allowing existing infrastructure eventually to determine the mission.

Institutional Strategy

A long-term set of choices about what an institution seeks to become and how it will use its resources to achieve that future.

Institutional Commitment

A decision whose consequences extend well beyond the people who originally made it. Large capital projects create financial, staffing, operational and strategic obligations that may persist for generations.

Intergenerational DecisionA decision made by one generation of institutional leaders whose consequences will be inherited by several subsequent generations. A veterinary hospital constructed around 2030 may still shape UC Davis veterinary medicine in 2070.

Irreversibility

The degree to which a decision becomes difficult or prohibitively expensive to undo. Large buildings represent relatively irreversible strategic commitments compared with programs, partnerships or networks that can often be modified more readily.

Alternative Futures

Different plausible ways an institution might accomplish its mission. Meaningful strategic planning should consider competing models rather than simply determine how best to implement one preferred model.

The Counterfactual Question

The question: Was there ever a realistic point at which UC Davis could have decided not to build the Veterinary Medical Center? It provides a useful test of whether stakeholders were consulted about the fundamental strategy or merely about its implementation.

“What Should We Build?” versus “What Should We Become?”

The central distinction of the essay. The first begins with infrastructure and asks how it should be designed. The second begins with institutional purpose and asks what infrastructure - if any - is necessary to achieve it.

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