Keys to the Asylum : A Dean, a Medical School, and Academic Politics [Paperback]

Daniel K. Bloomfield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0970102208 | ISBN-13: 978-0970102201 | Edition: 1

He wanted to innovate, they wanted him to toe the line

So why did they give him the KEYS TO THE ASYLUM?

Daniel K. Bloomfield, M.D., didnt know he was entering an academic bedlam when he accepted the job as founding dean of a new medical school. Dr. Bloomfield was a cardiologist working in private practice when the University of Illinois College of Medicine offered him a deanship. He was lured by the chance to work in an exciting initiative to establish regional medical schools in Illinois and by the implied promise that his one-year school would eventually become a full four-year medical program.

Dr. Bloomfield found instead an administration that wanted him to suffer quietly while it dragged its feet on its promises and turned a deaf ear to his requests for more funding. Suffer quietly? Boy, did they have the wrong man!

In Keys to the Asylum: A Dean, a Medical School, and Academic Politics, Dr. Bloomfield recounts his14-year battle to secure the future of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign. Spawned by the fiscal largesse and idealism of the late 60s, the school was shaped by the diminished expectations of the recessionary 70s.

Determined to turn out doctors who saw patients as people rather than flesh-and-blood machines, the unrelentingly optimistic dean drove the effort to forge an innovative curriculum, fought to turn his one-year school into a full four-year program, and developed a highly acclaimed joint Ph.D.-M.D. program. The resourceful dean accomplished these goals despite chronic underfunding from the unsympathetic and often hostile bureaucrats in Chicago, enmity from his fellow deans, and the constant specter that, at any moment, the administration would shut down the school.

He says of his book, It is a story of clashing academic personalities: of leaders strong and weak, of intrigues that take place in the name of academic quality and fiscal responsibility, and of deception both deliberate and accidental.

This dramatic story gives readers an inside look into academic politics, the passions these internecine battles ignite, and the toll they take on educators and students alike. Dr. Bloomfield shows how passion and commitment beats bureaucracy and the status quo every time.

The story of a deans fight to save the medical school he founded.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Daniel K. Bloomfield hadnt given much thought to medicine as a career. He had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in June 1947 and was contemplating making the U.S. Navy his career in 1949, when his father suggested that the 22-year-old should interview at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine to determine whether hed be interested in medicine. The student was pleased with what he saw, and the school must have been equally pleased with him. He graduated from the school in 1954 with his M.D. degree.

Dr. Bloomfield took his internship and residency at Beth Israel Hospital, a Harvard teaching hospital in Boston. While at Beth Israel, he met and married his wife, Frances. After two years there, he spent a summer substituting for a general practitioner at a rural practice in Providence, Kentucky, and developed an appreciation of the doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Bloomfield took a third year of internal medicine residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Trained as a clinical cardiologist, he entered a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in biochemistry at the Harvard Department of Chemistry with Professor Konrad Bloch, where he gained an understanding of the pressures academic research scientists face. He then spent a year as an Honorary Assistant Registrar at the National Heart Hospital in London.

Dr. Bloomfield returned from England in 1960 and joined the faculty of his alma mater as an Established Investigator (research scientist) for the American Heart Association and received a National Institutes of Health grant to study the metabolism of cholesterol in the rat. After four years, Dr. Bloomfield decided he was more of a clinician than a research scientist and resigned his fellowship with the Heart Association.

He was one of six founding members of the Community Health Foundation of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964. It was the first prepaid medical practice in Ohio. With a deepening interest in education and community affairs, Dr. Bloomfield ran for and was elected to a post on the school board of Cleveland Heights-University Heights in 1965. He accepted a teaching post as a full-time cardiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Cleveland in 1967, which allowed him to pursue both cardiology and an academic career.

In 1970, as he opened a private cardiology practice, Dr. Bloomfield received the call that led to his greatest challenge, to become the founding dean of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign. He accepted the position and spent the next 14 years as a crusader for the school. After his resignation as dean in 1984, he joined the schools faculty, where he shared teaching and committee work and began his research on this book. Although he retired in 1996, he continues to teach to this day. Dr. Bloomfield has three children and lives with his wife of 45 years in Champaign, Illinois.

Product Details

• Paperback: 488 pages
• Publisher: New Medical Pr; 1 edition (August 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0970102208
• ISBN-13: 978-0970102201
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,068,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Journey through Academia, September 14, 2000

By 

N Gleason, Boston - See all my reviews

This review is from: Keys to the Asylum : A Dean, a Medical School, and Academic Politics (Paperback)

Dr. Bloomfield, Founder and Dean of a new and innovative medical school at the University of Illinois, describes the challenges and frustrations of creativity within a bureaucratic state system. His description of the hurdles he had to leap, and especially the lack of support (primarily financial) offered to him, would make most people cave in. Balanced with these frustrations is the extraordinary success he was able to achieve. It is a credit to him and to his colleagues that so much was accomplished. And that is what makes the story bearable. I would encourage university administrators and those interested in innovative approaches to medical (and other professional) disciplines to read this book.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review for medical administration, March 25, 2001

By 

S. Smith (Louisville, KY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Keys to the Asylum : A Dean, a Medical School, and Academic Politics (Paperback)

This interesting story, part autobiography and full of history, details the incipient days of founding a medical institution. Literally from the ground up, Dr. Bloomfield describes how an idea, great innovation, procuring the funding, and convincing the politicians resulted in the beginning construction. His Part II, "The Act of Creation" goes to the heart of finding the curriculum and the students to use it. Tension and relief bob up and down as the unchartered meets the new sailors. Then the bureaucracy gravitates and its inertia sometimes slows, other time really impedes the progress. Nevertheless, there is something to say for the distillation process, which in the end seems to come up with the right mixture of what should and what could be done.

What comes through the pages is the love for education, the purity of intent that Dr. Bloomfield had. Battling with detractors, some with power and others with jealousy seemed to invigorate his pugnacious side. When he found the good guys, nestled among the many people with whom he had to deal, he had genuine concern for their thoughts and suggestions.

Lessons take many forms and the path to this school showed many roads to take for projects we might consider. Reading about this effort and enjoying the success in the epilogue, I could find many useful suggestions and tactics. Such books bear the signature of the great medical administrators who steered the medical schools in the 60's to 80's in some very troubled times.