Because the management of healthcare institutions had really received little attention from schools of management, and certainly from the Harvard Business School, and little attention in medical schools, a small group of us decided to create a program, a two-year training program in health policy and management at the School of Public Health and that was the first of the new teaching programs that we began. In order to recruit people to teach, since the school did not have many people qualified in that sphere, I went to the Department of Economics at Harvard and to the Harvard Business School and recruited people who joined us, helped conceptualize the programs and then helped teach them.

I mentioned, of course, the... the fact that the problems in the public health arena required experts from other departments, and in this instance it was crucial that we get people whose teaching skills and whose research capabilities were strong. We... we were able to do so, but with some concern expressed on the part of the faculty where I heard so often X or Y has had no public health background. That being a reflection in the view of many members of the faculty, a reflection of a person's lack of... of likelihood of succeeding in addressing public health problems. This demand for a public health background with relatively less attention to the capability in the discipline in which individuals were trained led to a fair amount of concern on the part of the faculty, with the new dean. When, for example, I was asked to put together a committee to evaluate a faculty member whose formal training had been in economics, but had been working at the School of Public Health in an area of health economics, when I was asked to put together a committee, and did so with members of the Economics Department, that was found troubling by some of my colleagues. The committee found this individual not worthy of a tenure slot and he was passed over. An even more troubling event took place a year later when the person who was in charge of one of the major public health programs that involved a background in chemistry and biology was nominated for tenure, I appointed a committee to evaluate his suitability for tenure.