We ve fallen a little behind in this to some extent because we haven t been quite as hammered by some of the efforts in managed care as other areas of the country. For example, in California the change in the practice of medicine from a business standpoint is so pervasive and so critical that schools have created modules to help students understand this. We recognize now that we have to teach you about he science and clinical practice of medicine, but also how medical practice is organized, how its paid for, and how this influences the way you practice. We have gathered some of these teaching modules from other schools, we are looking at them now. There was a time when this wasn t critical, but those days are over and we need to teach you more about the economics and business practice of medicine, and we are looking into that as we speak.
Diversity is an important issue.
Its something that we value very highly at our medical school and at our university. However, we need to broaden our faculty representation through a number of underrepresented minority groups, such as African American and Asian. We need to shore up our ranks of senior women in the medical school. Its easy to say that these things take time and all of this will come to pass, but we just cannot wait for it to self correct. We need to do things to make sure that we are attracting the very best people from a broad range of backgrounds and its one of the most important priorities I have for the upcoming year.