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. State support for the university was on the decline as was maintenance on its aging buildings. Roofs leaked, walls cracked, and researchers struggled in dark, ill-equipped labs. So 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. And they sold the plan to the Legislature and state leaders. Free from constraints of the state and its university system, the health center’s creative and entrepreneurial power exploded. 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. This remarkable story offers a case study and possible model for other public universities and academic health centers now facing the same social and economic forces that drove OHSU to transform.

"I know of no other academic health center or major public research university that ever made a change as radical as OHSU made in 1995: It left the state and the state system of higher education to operate largely on its own as a private corporation with a public mission. The architect of this change was Dr. Peter Kohler along with his leadership team, whose story unfolds in this excellent book, a worthwhile read for anyone with connections to academia or government.” — Phil Knight, Chairman Emeritus, Nike Inc.

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Author's Note
• Introduction: A Singular Path to Change
• Chapter One: Setting the Stage
• Chapter Two: A Transformation Plan
• Chapter Three: Selling the Plan
• Chapter Four: The Legislative Battle
• Chapter Five: Transition: The First Year
• Chapter Six: Research: Path to Prominence
• Chapter Seven: Reaching for the Top
• Chapter Eight: OHSU Inc.
• Epilogue: A Model for Transformation?
• Key Players in OHSU's Transformation
• Timeline
• Index

Copyright © 2017 by William Graves. This book is distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and publisher are credited.

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.