The Board of Trustees paints an inspiring picture: Michigan faces an imminent and dire doctor shortage, and CMU is only doing its part to help.

Constructing a medical school, they say, is both an opportunity and a duty. We’re stepping up to the plate.

The problem is that we cannot afford the bat.

Renovations at the Health Professions Building are slated to cost $15 million; the Board already has committed $1.5 million for additions.

This is only a fraction of the program’s costs. The Board has yet to budget for personnel fees and for a medical partnership. Top-notch faculty comes at a price: The median base salary for U.S. medicine professors is $122,260, according to salary.com.

To draw quality personnel, the university needs to set a comparable salary. But to draw quality students, the university needs to ensure tuition is competitive. Put simply: CMU does not have adequate cachet to draw students and faculty on name alone. Financial incentives will be necessary.

Given those two variables, it’s challenging to see how the medical school will be anything but a money pit, barring an enormous increase in state funding from Michigan. But with the state’s economy thoroughly in shambles, a large appropriation may be a long time coming.

Even if the university can find enough funds to scrape by, the university already was scraping by to begin with – the funds could have been better spent on existing programs to put them above bare subsistence.

The $1.5 million in a reserve budget, now allocated to fund a sliver of this pie-in-the-sky medical school, could have greatly alleviated strain over faculty contracts, and could have been spent on new equipment or tenured faculty spots.

If CMU wants to attain national prominence, it needs to be known for excellence. Excellent programs require substantial investment, and this is financially impossible when CMU so thinly spreads its resources. It’s better to have a handful of stellar programs than an array of mediocre ones.

Not only is it challenging to conceive how the university will fund the medical school, it’s nearly impossible to imagine how CMU will fund it well. The last thing the university needs is a mediocre medical program.

Perhaps CMU has a duty to respond to the expected doctor shortage, but its primary duty is to provide the best education it can.

By funding the medical school while starving its existing programs, the university has met its medical duty only by going derelict on its main one.

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