Progress in Action
Oregon Health & Science University seemed stuck in the backwaters of the nation’s academic health centers when Dr. Peter Kohler became its president in 1988. Its hospital hemorrhaged money, served rusty water from its faucets, and sometimes forced women in its cramped maternity ward to deliver babies in hallways. Legislators proposed bills to close it. Roofs leaked, walls cracked, and researchers struggled in dark, ill-equipped labs.
Kohler and his young administrative team came up with a radical plan to help OHSU take control of its fate as a semi-independent public corporation. Over the next two decades, OHSU more than doubled its research, clinical and classroom space; tripled its employees; quadrupled its research grants; and expanded its operating budget five-fold, reaching the top echelon of the nation’s medical research universities.
Read an excerptPurchase OptionsAbout the Author
William Graves has worked more than three decades as a daily newspaper journalist, including 23 years at The Oregonian in Portland. He is co-author of a book on education reform, Poisoned Apple, a graduate of the University of Puget Sound and Western Washington University and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He and his wife, Karin, have three adult children and live in Beaverton, Ore.
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