In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

122 / Chapter 6 East versus West: MCP-HU and AGH the conflicts and competition that flared up between AGH and mCp-Hu from the time of the medical school’s formation throughout AHerF’s bankruptcy proceedings emanated largely from pittsburgh, but it was not a unilateral flow from west to east. the sometimes acrimoniously vented turf wars involved finances; views about the respective importance of the two institutions to their corporate “parent,” which at times was reminiscent of sibling rivalry; the internally perceived and externally recognized prestige of the two institutions; and the academic status and prerogatives of AGH physicians vis-à-vis faculty in philadelphia. The Health Sciences University’s Schools Because the financial resources required to maintain the operations of a multischool organization—especially the costs of a medical school—are seldom balanced by its revenues, the most contentious matters between the Allegheny university of the Health sciences schools predictably involved money. One of AHerF’s fiscal management assumptions was that the costs of operating its medical school, as well as subsidizing the initiation of its new school of public health, would be partly offset by revenues from its other, more lucrative , schools of nursing and of Health sciences and Humanities. in turn, these pressures evoked resentments toward the medical school and toward AHerF. The Medical School’s Constituencies the innermost arena of merger turf wars was the school of medicine and its constituencies of students, alumnae and alumni, faculty, and administrators . the relationships within and between these groups involved persisting strains that, at various times and for various reasons, flared into open conflicts. The Medical Students mCp and Hu students, as well as their alumnae and alumni and faculty, were steeped in the traditions and values of their respective schools, and loath to see these distinctive attributes lost in the union of their institutions. Other sources of friction, skirmishes, and some pitched battles arose with the beginning of the medical school’s single degree track in 1995. there were issues between the extant mCp and Hu and the consolidated classes about matters including facilities and perceptions about disparities in faculty time and attention. the most serious conflicts, which erupted stridently during the first academic year, were between the students and faculty over the content and quality of their curriculum. Merger Patterns / 123 The Alumnae and Alumni the Woman’s medical College–mCp and the Hu alumnae and alumni formed a new joint organization in 1997: the Alumnae and Alumni Association of the mCp-Hahnemann school of medicine of Allegheny university of the Health sciences. Creating the joint association was a drawn-out and often fractious process, beginning with the formation of an alumnae-alumni transition task force in 1994, with differing and sometimes strongly expressed views among the associations’ members about the pros and cons of uniting the two bodies. The Faculty: Arenas of Competition and Conflict When our faculty interviewees discussed a conflict of cultures they tended to place less weight on the strains that they were experiencing in the fusion of mCp and Hu than on the divisions they saw between the corporation and the university and medical school. there were, however, many faculty and administrators at both schools who took a dim view of the desirability of blending the two institutions, expressed in their opinions about the importance of preserving their school’s identity and protecting their institutional domains and their strong sentiments about which school and its faculty should prove and was proving to be the winner and which the loser in the merger. As the merger unfolded, some of the most severe faculty-versus-faculty fault lines were generated by the often simultaneous “upsizings” and “downsizings” within the medical school and their social system and financial concomitants. “Us versus Them”: The Academy and the Corporation the most pronounced and persisting turf wars engendered by the acquisition and merger were those between the corporate culture of AHerF and the academic culture of its health sciences university, particularly in the medical school with respect to traditional faculty roles in governance. these ongoing conflicts were recognized by those in every level of both organizations with whom we talked at the outset of our study and throughout its duration. two points are important to bear in mind about the cultural breaches between AHerF and mCp-Hu. the first is that the imprint of a hospital-based business management orientation and its effects on faculty in areas such as governance and the exercise of academic freedom were not...

Share