lord999,
You got my curiosity up with your previous post. I understand if you would rather keep it private, but I am curious what did UMN do to their pharmacy students that was so particularly shocking?
It's no secret, it's an openly known problem that isn't an accreditation issue, but something that has changed the relationship between the school and its students and alumni. There's a longer talk about the problems of being in academic management, but the short form is like this. You're a dean and your mission is to keep the college solvent. You can do it by:
1. Getting state support for teaching
2. Getting fed support for research
3. Getting private donations (particularly from alumni)
The fact is that with your faculty, if you want them to go after research, it pays the bills far more than the state support for teaching at the moment, but you lose your best and brightest to research, and their priorities specifically are not teaching ones at the undergraduate (PharmD) level.
That's the reality everywhere. The following two were Minnesota-specific:
1. We kept *((#ing up something called a CTSA Grant from NIH that would pay for research support (you need help to get those grants, and research bureaucratic and clerical support is what this pays for as well as trainees). Every single one of our rivals, Mayo to the South and our heated rivals Wisconsin to the east got theirs in the first round. It widened the competitive gap between Wisconsin and Minnesota quite a bit to the point that we were losing good faculty there from all the professional schools. We were getting desperate, and the main criticism from the review committee was that our programs did not do enough research per faculty to merit that sort of support (as well as politically being inept.)
2. We had just survived a series of cuts due to the current state government and we put ourselves on HHS probation thanks to that nimrod Najarian. That debacle really cut the heart out of most of our motivated researchers to leave or deemphasize (meaning the kept enough to stay around, but didn't do reach stuff).
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Into that environment, UMN did (and still does) an extremely competent job on the clinical (PharmD faculty and Admin) sides of the training. The sciences side because of the faculty depth chart and politics, sent an openly known racist and sexist deadweight professor for most of the pharmacology and medicinal chemistry (a department still that loathes teaching the undergraduates although won't surrender their position because it'll get their funding cut). There were complaints left and right over the situation that went unsolved. The lack of addressing those teaching issues really affected the alumni relations and contributions (even adjusted for the higher debt rates with our peer institutions) and really hurt our relations with some of the feeding rotation sites as UMN didn't do as good a job maintaining those relations in the same timeframe. The only 'good' outcome was that there is not a competitor pharmacy school opening up in Minnesota, but on the other hand, I think UMN lost a generation just like Iowa did in the 80s-early 90s from bad relations. Coming from a non-research school, I was surprised at just how different the environment was for a research intensive school, but also about the choices made. It really pushed me out of straight academia and into government as I don't see a good way out even now.
Nick Popovich at UIC has similar problems (including opening a competitor school on state funding right in the same city), but managed to keep that from really affecting relations too far negatively. Of course, this may be the grass is greener, but I've been a part of other research intensive schools (OHSU and UW) that haven't made the same choices that UMN did. UMN is a fantastic graduate school, but it's the last school I'd send my kids to for PharmD training of all the pharmacy schools I've known (and that includes my shake and bake alma mater).
She's still there. and yes she still reads line by line. ahahahaha
also i retract my statement about those other professors. I just checked my syllabus and apparently I had them too. I really don't remember them since they disappeared after the first few quarters..
to the OP, also make friends with your upperclassmen. like there's old exams rolling around for certain classes and answer keys to some classwork stuff. (ceutics, pharm calc)
there's also certain lecturers that you MUST listen to/record (olsen, veltri, barletta) and other lecturers that you can totally skip (rowles).
LOL, I'm shaking laughing right now. God, that's now 20 years of her reading line by line to groaning PharmD students then as of this fall. I'm sure after Rowles passes, they'll be playing her lectures until there isn't a school anymore. I'm hoping though after 15 years, Jordan can actually do basic math (our year was her first year, and her exam problems were all terribly constructed.)
But yes, 'retracting' your statement, don't feel bad that you don't remember. They're so gormless for those subjects, you instantly forget about them after the classes and they are the joke classes. However, if Johnson's still teaching that PBM class, I'd recommend you take it purely for the stories. I learned a lot of 'history' and also how things actually get done in our industry due to that class. It's what got me on the path I do now (as well as having the worst DI professor ever (and yes, Haber's predecessor was far, far worse and mean-spirited).
