UMDNJ Investiture of Dr. William F. Owen Jr.

William F. Owen, Jr., MD
President, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey

May 20, 2009—Trustees, Faculty, Administration, Staff, Students, Families, Honored Guests, and Friends: With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept the confidence expressed by my investiture as the fourth president of the nation’s largest and deservedly proudest health university, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

To the love of my life, our University’s first lady and my first lady, Alice Owen, and to my children Lauren and Will, who too are new graduates this month, “I love you all very much. I'm so proud of you and hope that you are proud of your mom and me.”

First, let me first express my gratitude to my life partner, who truly was always there to guide me and support me and to be the person to whom I could always come – who still speaks to me even after living in Massachusetts, North Carolina, Illinois, Tennessee, and New Jersey.

I also express gratitude to our Presidential Selection Committee and our terrific Board of Trustees, who made this most recent journey possible for my family and me.

A special recognition to my closest professional colleague in this enterprise, Chairman Bob Del Tufo, who truly is one of the premier leaders in our State  a man, whom I’ve observed, is as much at ease with past and current governors, presidential candidates who’ve become groundbreaking American Presidents… just as much as with the ticket handler whom he sees nightly on the Amtrak train that he rides home to his wife, Kate. Bob, thank you.

As you can tell by my use of “y’all, sir, and ma’am”, I was a little brown boy who grew up playing in the streets of Memphis, Tennessee  a hot, lazy city on the banks of the Mississippi River known as the home of King Cotton, the Delta Blues, Aretha Franklin, BB King, Elvis Presley, and pork barbecue. It was there that I first became interested in medicine.

Memphis was replete with Japanese plum trees, whose large, sweet purple fruit became my first patients. For it was on these subjects that I tried to convince my friends that it was more fun transplanting the pits from one plum to another than playing basketball or having water balloon fights. After all, we could pretend that they were human hearts. I remember collecting shiny pieces of colorful broken glass from the street and implanting them into the plums in lieu of eyes.

I am the last generation to experience the institutionalized segregation that defined so much of the deep South. In 1969, less than one year after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis for having too deep a belief in a unified America, my parents sent me away to prep school in New England so that I would grow up being egalitarian. There I met people like The Duponts, The Becks, The Bushes, The Fords, The McConnells, The Kennedys. I thought THE was their first name. For the next decade and a half, I attended Brahmin schools where the buildings weren’t just named after a President; the Headmaster or school leader proudly touted the fact that the buildings were named after alumni who went on to become presidents. Everbody seemed white and wealthy. Me on the other hand, I felt like a loose raisin in a big old bowl of French vanilla ice cream.

My parents sent me away because they did not want me to view our country as a mean spirited place that defined people by their differences. They wanted me to be classless, egalitarian, color-blind, and hindered only by an average intellect and an eccentric personality. I was told, “Boy, you’re of average intelligence. That means that half the room is gonna be smarter than you.”

It was the promise of access and success, recognizing that limitations occurred more by aspiring too low than too high, and heralding the nobility and goodness of most people that allowed me to dream of standing with you today.

I arrived at UMDNJ two years ago at a defining moment for our great institution. We had only a final opportunity to prove that we deserved to be called “university.” Talented faculty were leaving the university for a seemingly more stable and better resourced environment; key leadership positions were serviced by interim leaders; the State’s largest safety - net clinical care provider (which was our hospital) was under dire financial stresses; and those who trusted in us felt jilted  they were deeply hurt and angry. Is it any surprise that many we had historically counted as friends viewed UMDNJ as unworthy of being kept intact? The proposed Balkanization of UMDNJ was not opportunism, but a solution that reflected apt frustration with our plight.

And although these enormous challenges were years in the making, and so not of our creation, we must own some of the fault for not managing them better than we did. We stumbled by trying to dodge dirt clods thrown over the fence at us. We must share blame because we knew that UMDNJ was better than those dark days, but we let ourselves become victims.

Detractors openly suggested that UMDNJ could not drive change because UMDNJ did not want to change. They said that we were married to the old, self-serving ways of bad ethics, that we wore them around us like an old blanket that had picked up a bad smell. Everyone but us could smell it. I was told early in my tenure that UMDNJ was spoiled… that we are whiners.

But I challenge those critics to tell that to Professor Mike Conti at New Jersey Dental School, who started his career at UMDNJ as a dental technician student on our Scotch Plains campus. Dr. Conti teaches and inspires his students with the zeal and enthusiasm that one sees only in extraordinary teachers. He keeps to his mission because of his silent oath of excellence to his students.

Tell that to Nurse Suzanne Milano at The University Hospital, who routinely leaves the hospital late after her shift has ended from a frenetic and often over-crowded emergency room. She stays late so that she can help yet another patient who is too poor or too confused to receive care elsewhere.

Tell that to Ms. Hattie, the proud housekeeper who comes to work each morning before most of us are awake to clean the floors and pick up the previous night’s trash. Ms. Hattie is only weeks away from retirement but works as hard as the new worker trying to make a good impression for the boss. She keeps doing her best because she knows that it’s right for our patients and students.

Multiply these three stories times 5,000. This is the 15,000 wonderful team members who are at UMDNJ. This is the UMDNJ that I know. This is the UMDNJ of which I am proud and honored to lead today. We’ve accomplished much together despite their saying that “UMDNJ could not change.”

My pride in leadership of this extraordinary state asset is not measured by our ending the deferred prosecution agreement during our first six months together. Nor is it gauged by the University’s being accredited by every agency during our first year together. Success is not computed by our students receiving the highest grades in the country on their certification exams or their being recruited by top health employers for work or further training. Pride is not drawn for me by our faculty’s discoveries and inventions that have attracted broad attention in publications like Time magazine, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

No. Our success and the resultant source of my pride are derived from patients like LaRoy, an elderly African-American man that I met in Newark. LaRoy was severely crippled by multiple operations to treat the diabetic complications that ravaged his leg, his employability and his wallet  but not his spirit. It was LaRoy who said in conversation without knowing who I was, “I’ve been treated bad a lot in my life. When I go to UH, I can’t describe it but they make me feel like somebody. I get treated good there.” And success for me comes from the student Omar at our medical school in Camden who says, “This school is special. The faculty are like nowhere else that I’ve been. They really care about me. Think of it  me, a student!” It is these kinds of people and their kinds of stories that motivate me and make me get up each morning saying, “I’ve got the best job in the world.”

I think it is fair to say that we did not want the hand that we’ve been dealt. But that is life. And the hand that we’ve been dealt is far better than the hand played out by so many that we serve. I think about the child with leukemia being treated at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, hoping that her birthday gift will be another birthday. Or the lifelong partner with Alzheimer’s, whose spouse is being counseled at the Center for Successful Aging – being told how to remember and celebrate the biographical person with whom they spent their life and not to resent the current state of affairs. Our hand is certainly better than that given the person who never missed a day of work but now finds himself unemployed  afraid to be sick because illness without insurance equals bankruptcy in America in the absence of a safety-net provider like The University Hospital and the University Physicians Associates in Newark.

I am proud of what we’ve done at UMDNJ, but I am also disappointed that we have not been able to do more. And I am certainly not satisfied. Nor should you be. We’ve still much to do.

As President of UMDNJ, I intend to keep our promises to our constituents. And what are those promises?

It’s a promise that we will make you proud and want to embrace UMDNJ as your statewide asset. It’s a promise to be good stewards of your resources. It’s a promise that performance will be defined by the quality of the work, rather than the quality of the relationships. It’s a promise that our singular goal is to develop a next generation of great dentists, great doctors, great nurses, great physician assistants, great respiratory therapists, great nutritionists, great health scientists, great physical therapists, great occupational therapists, great  etc. And it’s a promise that the credo for our behavior will be what we were taught by our grandparents as simple right and wrong.

As President of UMDNJ, I intend to keep our promise to the faculty and staff of UMDNJ alive. And what is that promise?

It’s a promise that the environment where you practice your healing art or execute your craft of teaching and discovery, whether it is discovering a new gene, testing a new drug, or synthesizing old knowledge in new ways to capture a young person’s attention, will be valued and rewarded. It’s a promise that your work environment will support you in these endeavors and not be a hindrance or embarrassment. It’s a promise that you will be protected from retaliation if you identify and report something wrong or share how something can be better. It’s a promise that your opinions matter and that you’ve an obligation to drive positive change.

As President of UMDNJ, I intend to keep our promises to the community of New Jersey alive. And what is that promise?

It’s a promise that we will be responsive to the medical and economic needs of New Jersey’s unhealthy communities.

At a time in which job insecurity is the norm, and managing employees’ fear of job displacement has become a core competency of human resources, we will also be an economic asset to New Jersey’s communities, from our campuses in Newark to Camden, from Scotch Plains to New Brunswick, from Stratford to Piscataway. When it is cheaper to pay minimum wage than it is to pay a fair wage with health insurance, is it any surprise that that the rolls of the uninsured grow in America and approach 50 million? We uniquely can make New Jersey attractive for businesses by a promise of maintaining a healthy workforce so companies will have a better bottom line. It’s a promise to remain focused on what we do best – keeping and making people well.

Several of our campuses are located in communities in which health disparities are the norm. They are in neighborhoods where preventable diseases are a scourge. As Dr. Scott Morris pleaded of our profession, “Every doctor in America learned their art on the body of a poor person. Shouldn’t we give something back?” I promise that we will continue to give something back for the honor of learning and caring.

As President of UMDNJ, I intend to keep our promise to the students of UMDNJ alive. And what is that promise?

It’s a promise that your professors will care about the quality of your education as if they are guiding their own children. It’s a promise that your aspirations will be embraced and the question will be, “How do we make certain that this happens for you?” It’s a promise that we welcome your input on better ways to teach. It’s a promise that we will do our best to manage the spiraling costs of your education, so that passion rather than debt burden determines your chosen specialty and practice location. It’s a promise to arm you with compassion, strengthen you with humanism and inspire you with empathy.

Trustees, faculty, staff, students and friends, our work will not be easy. We want an exciting new beginning for UMDNJ that goes beyond simply graduating more healthcare professionals for New Jersey. We do not simply want to make new discoveries, write more grants, and publish more scholarly papers. We do not want to simply treat more sick people who cannot afford or cannot navigate our complex healthcare delivery system. These are all noble and important deeds. But they are minimum expectations from America’s largest publicly funded health university. For me, that’s like saying to the train conductor, I am proud that your trains run on time.

Instead, I want us  the citizens of New Jersey want us  to do much more. They want their unique state asset to create a social product of egalitarian healthcare. Positive change happens because people demand it — because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership and a new aspirational outcome. On this day, I comfortably declare that for UMDNJ and for New Jersey, this is that moment of great expectations being accepted.

I love my profession, - and so do you, - and so do even our detractors. I suggest that they continually challenge us not by trying to be mean, but rather by expressing disappointment that we have not achieved even more success. Let us then agree that improving the human condition by improving human health is not an issue to be debated like the definition of an African-American. The times are too serious and the stakes are too high for such frivolity.

And to the Class of 2009, I want to conclude by talking about the biological versus the biographical. Many professors will tell you that the time of your graduation is the summit of knowledge for you. It’s a point at which the breadth of information you carry about human health is broader than it will ever be. At UMDNJ, you received an extraordinary education. And for some, it may be true that in the future you will continue to learn about an individual area in healthcare to an even greater extent. But this perspective on your skills as health practitioners assumes that your only measure of knowledge is the biological. I hope this is not the case. Always remember the person – the biographical. It is the biographical that makes the biological unique. So as you go forward to the next phase of your career, writing history rather than living it, we know that you’ve learned the biological; and we ask that you do not forget to always embrace the biographical. As said by Sir William Osler of Johns Hopkins University, America’s first great experiment in health education at the turn of the 20th century, “It’s far better to understand the man, than the malady that afflicts him.”

So UMDNJ, in the near future we will face tough new choices. What was lost in those dark past days can't just be measured by tallying lost faculty, counting diminished revenue, or profiling declining infrastructures. What seems most to have been lost is our sense of higher purpose and the audacity to believe in accomplishing them. And when I go home late and tired, I remind myself that we have been given a sacred trust, whether through laying on hands, speaking a kind word, or molding an opinion through a new idea.

I remind myself that we do not inherit tomorrow from our parents…we do not learn the future from our teachers …we do not earn tomorrow from an employer. Rather we borrow the future as we prepare to give it back to our children. I want to give them something of value. It will be called UMDNJ.
On behalf of Alice, Lauren, Will and me, thank you for this great gift and this magnificent opportunity.
Enough of my day – Class of 2009, ready for your day?

William F. Owen, Jr., M.D.
President