Ross addresses CMED finance concerns; Yoder shares progress

Central Michigan University President George Ross said an updated budget report for the College of Medicine will be presented at the April 17 Academic Senate meeting.

Along with the updated budget report, CMED Dean Ernest Yoder announced a grand opening will be held for the CMU on-campus medical building on Sep. 21 and 22 and shared an update on fundraising, faculty, accreditation and student admissions.

The announcement came during Thursday’s Board of Trustees meeting held in the President’s Conference Room in the Bovee University Center.

Ross said concerns were expressed by members of both the A-Senate and the Trustee-Faculty Liaison Committee in past meetings, though no faculty members were in attendance to share their grievances at Wednesday’s CMED committee meeting or the board of trustees formal meeting.

“I believe that transparency in the College of Medicine budget is important,” Ross said. “From this end, we will again present all available financial information projections for the College of Medicine at the Academic Senate meeting.”

Ross said although CMED budgetary information has been presented before, the new report will provide an updated version of the CMED budgetary projections.

“Certain members of the Academic Senate and Trustee-Faculty Liaison Committee expressed concerns regarding transparency of the financial operations of the College of Medicine. I heard them; I heard them loud and clear,” Ross said.

“Although there’s been a presentation on the College of Medicine budget to the Academic Senate in addition to the budget documentation prepared for the LCME accreditation visit, there still remains unanswered questions in the minds of some of my faculty colleagues and others. I believe we have to provide all requests for information for the College of Medicine related to its budgetary requirements.”

Vice President of Development and External Relations Kathy Wilbur said fundraising efforts for CMED still remain at about 52 percent, totaling to $13,038,000 of the $25 million goal. The amount is not significantly higher than the fundraising amount announced by the committee almost one year ago, though Wilbur said each percent represents $250,000 and is progress for CMED.

Wilbur said many donors asking for their names to be placed on facility space or with scholarships will be addressed at July’s Board of Trustees meeting and said the donations will be particularly beneficial for scholarship programs.

“We’ll bring forward a number of naming opportunities that the Board of Trustees needs to accept,” Wilbur said. “These are individuals who have indicated interest in naming, whether they are scholarships or some sort of facility space related to our building or potentially even space in the Saginaw area.”

Yoder listed some of the medical school’s established medical center partnerships, which include Saginaw’s Synergy Medical Education Alliance, Covenant HealthCare and St. Mary’s of Michigan and Mount Pleasant’s McLaren-Central Michigan, which recently changed its name from Central Michigan Community Hospital. CMED is working on forming partnerships with six small community hospitals in Michigan’s lower peninsula and seven in the upper peninsula as well, he said.

The advantages of basing a medical school in Mount Pleasant, because of preexisting science and technology resources, though he considered it the “most rural” location of any medical school in the U.S., Yoder said.

“When you look at the resources that are necessary for a successful medical school and you analyze an area like Mount Pleasant, which, by the way, is a really wonderful base for a medical school, albeit, somewhat more rural, in fact, it’s probably the most rural located medical school in the U.S.; there are huge resources here, and most of the resources here are based in the university,” Yoder said.

Yoder said the preliminary stages of student admission are done, and said the report due April 15 to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education has been completed and sent.

“We continue to work with the LCME and on our higher education reports,” Yoder said. “The April 15 report is prepared and on its way.”