QU continues M.D. quest - Westfair Communications

Care to have a significant impact on public discourse on health and science issues ”“ oh, and have your name exist in perpetuity?

All it takes is $25 million.

That is the amount Quinnipiac University is seeking for naming rights to its new medical school in Hamden, which will be only Connecticut”™s third after the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven and the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington, which marks its 50^th anniversary this year.

Already offering degrees in nursing and other medical careers, Quinnipiac is focusing the new medical school to ready students for careers in primary care medicine, a challenge for universities nationwide as tuitions have soared far faster than compensation for general care doctors.

“Their major goal is to train physicians (and) internists who want to remain in Connecticut,” said Rick Silver, senior partner in the Stamford office of Silver Golub & Teitell L.L.P., and a Quinnipiac trustee and founding member of the medical school”™s board of visitors. “Quinnipiac has an excellent program in nursing, so there is (a) base to work off.”

Quinnipiac, of course, is not the only one considering such a focus: Three in four existing medical schools launched or considered initiatives to encourage primary care as a career choice, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

As of 2008, Connecticut ranked ninth nationally for primary care physicians on a per capita basis, according to AAMC”™s Center for Workforce Studies. Still, Connecticut has more challenges than many states; about one in four active physicians here were at least 60 years old as of 2008, AAMC researchers found. Connecticut ranked 42^nd nationally for the percent increase in medical school enrollment over the preceding decade, at just over 2 percent, and 45^th nationally for the percentage of medical school graduates it placed in jobs within its borders, at 35 percent.

The question becomes whether Quinnipiac will help chip away at that third data point when it matriculates its first class in 2013.

The Quinnipiac naming rights gift threshold is only one of many fundraising goals, which include everything from amounts needed to endow deanships and faculty, to $1 million “presidential scholar” gifts to create an annual full ride for a student. Quinnipiac has pledged to match any gifts of $500,000 or more.

Leading Quinnipiac”™s faculty recruitment and curriculum formation is Dr. Steven Wikel, who comes from the Center for Tropical Diseases, Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Wikel is a onetime instructor at the UConn School of Medicine, where Dr. Bruce Koeppen was a dean before becoming dean of Quinnipiac”™s school of medicine.

For the fiscal 2009 year ending in June that year and excluding government grants, Quinnipiac reported $2.9 million in gifts and other contributions. The university closed fiscal 2009 with $430 million in net assets, down nearly $30 million from fiscal 2008 in large part due to declines in investment income in the wake of the market crash of 2008.

At deadline, the Internal Revenue Service had yet to post online Quinnipiac”™s results for 2010, and university spokespeople had not provided additional information on the medical school and its fundraising campaign.

Contributions to all U.S. charitable organizations nationally increased 2.1 percent in 2010 as adjusted for inflation, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University and Giving USA Foundation.

As Quinnipiac gauges fundraising in a still-recovering economy, for inspiration it can look to a few major gifts in the past several years by donors just down the road. Indiana University notes that multiple Connecticut philanthropists have made gifts in recent years exceeding $25 million to single institutions, including SAC Capital founder Steven Cohen and spouse Alexandra, who in 2008 donated $50 million to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and Greenwich resident Mario Gabelli”™s $25 million gift last year to Fordham University, which renamed its undergraduate business school after the Gamco Investors Inc. CEO.