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94 / Chapter 4 him as “brilliant,” for example, also said that he had “made some unwise decisions” and that “sherif has to make deals, and lets others clean up the mess.” Another faculty member observed that when he and other Camp AHerF attendees had listened to a presentation by sherif in 1995, “quite a few [of the attendees] understood that there was no business plan [in place] . . . [that] it was a house of cards . . . that will fall.” in even more acerbic words, a department chair contrasted “the business world” with “sherif’s style.” “in the business world,” he began, “there are 20 things to do, 10 things they would like to do, and 5 things they can do.” in contrast, he said, “sherif’s style [and] thus Allegheny’s style, [is to identify] 20 things to do and we will do all 25.” “We have built the top of the skyscraper without a foundation,” he stated emphatically when we talked with him in winter 1998. “this is a giant ponzi scheme . . . and they did it in a lousy philadelphia market.” the senior university administrator who characterized sherif as a “financial genius” also characterized him as “an empire builder” who, partly driven by “an ego factor,” was a “high risk, high stakes” player in his quest to build the country’s largest nonprofit health care system. the financial packages being offered to sherif’s new recruits and the high salaries paid to senior management at AHerF also were sources of concern to this interviewee. He had urged sherif to slow the pace of recruitments, he confided to us in fall 1997, and to “cut the salaries of everybody [earning] above $250,000 a year,” including the CeO. sherif’s response, he continued, “was that when you’re on a roll you keep going. you don’t send out negative messages.” “i suppose,” our interviewee reflected, “it’s like a crap shooter at the table at Atlantic City. He holds on to the dice and may keep winning for a while, but eventually he will crap out.” During a conversation in spring 1998, shortly before sherif was fired, this same interviewee again commented on the CeO’s costly acquisitions of physician practice groups and star recruits. “every time some of us said stop [to sherif], the response was ‘we’re on a roll.’” “We rolled, all right,” he added, with a grim smile. that fall, talking about AHerF’s financial collapse and bankruptcy declaration, his words echoed those of a number of faculty. sherif, he said, “built a house of cards that was bound to collapse. the modus operandi was a financial shell game, and sherif reached the point where he didn’t have money to move around any more.” Mixed Reviews: Educational Commitment AHerF’s mission statement heralded education as one of the organization’s central purposes (“to learn, to teach . . .”), and sherif often talked about his commitment to education and educational excellence in the programs under Allegheny’s aegis. the actual degree of that commitment, however, was another area in which he received mixed assessments. some medical school faculty who were heavily involved in teaching praised sherif for his emphasis on the importance of education. Allegheny, one person affirmed, “Our Maximum Leader” / 95 “is very committed to education,” while another faculty-educator stated that, with respect to support for teaching, “Allegheny puts its money where its mouth is.” some two months after sherif had been fired, a senior medical school administrator acknowledged that she was getting “personally angrier and angrier” about “what he did to the [medical] school.” “the one thing i miss,” she went on to say, “was his commitment to the academics,” a commitment that she saw as so strong that “he gave money to it that didn’t exist.” Others, however, were not convinced that sherif, and hence Allegheny, placed a high premium on education as a core mission. in the opinion of a basic-science course director, teaching was a priority for departments, “because they are filled with people who are interested in education.” But “i don’t think it’s a priority for the administration [judging from] the budget cuts they have made” and from their dictum “to do more with less.” A similar assessment was voiced by another faculty member, who believed that “AHerF pays lip service to education” but “money is the bottom line.” sherif provided a glimpse of his perspective on what should guide the selection of medical students and their education...

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