Officers of the University of California Regents ca 1920s.
his first task was to restore the power of the deanship at the UC School of Medicine and select an individual of sufficient vision and strength of personality to sustain a dramatic reform program. During the 1920s, the school had gone virtually leaderless during the many years of uncertain negotiations with the General Education Board. After Herbert Moffitt's retirement from the deanship following WWI, the office was filled only briefly by George Whipple before his departure for Rochester. President Barrows served as acting dean from 1921-1923, and Lionell Schmitt, director of the University Hospital, served as acting dean for the next four years.
On December 13, 1927, President Campbell presented a plan to the Regents asking that the popular San Francisco physician Dr. R. Langley Porter
Dr. Langley Porter
be brought out of retirement to lead the medical school in a program of reform. The Regents quickly approved Porter's appointment and President Wheeler enhanced the new dean's authority by mandating that the advisory board of the medical school should advise the University president through the dean's office. Heads of finance and appointees in the school were ordered to report to the dean rather than the president, and in the future the dean would serve as the sole representative of the president of the University to the faculty, students, and nurses.
One of Campbell's primary concerns as he recruited
University President William Campbell
Langley Porter was the need to reorganize a curriculum that suffered gaps and duplication due to the geographical separation between east and west bay instruction. The new dean shared his concerns. Upon his arrival in the summer of 1927 Dean Porter did a quick survey and described the medical school as "a disintegrated institution," with special weakness in the second-year teaching of the clinical sciences of bacteriology and pharmacology. He proposed that the second year of preclinical science teaching be brought back to San Francisco and received immediate regential approval for the move. In early 1928, the Departments of Bacteriology and Pharmacology were transferred from Berkeley to new labs outfitted on the third floor of the medical school building.
Although the school remained geographically split, Dean Langley Porter still held the power of appointment over all medical educational activities at both Berkeley and San Francisco, and he quickly began to strengthen both the clinical and scientific sides of the curriculum through recruitment and appointments. He appointed Dr. Ian MacClaren Thompson from to chair the Department of Anatomy, and J. M. D. Olmsted from Toronto to chair the Department of Physiology. John B. Saunders came from Edinburgh to teach anatomy and other necessary courses on both campuses. On the clinical side, the Dean appointed full-time professors to head medicine (William J. Kerr) and Surgery (Howard Naffziger), and Chauncey Leake was recruited from Wisconsin to create a new Department of Pharmacology to be located at San Francisco.
By the end of the decade, with an effective new dean in office and a board of regents committed to reform, President Campbell addressed the campus community with optimism, announcing that "it is confidently hoped that the wise administration of the medical school and the devoted service and splendid abilities of the dean and the faculty of the school, will in due time cause our
University of California President Robert G. Sproul in 1931.
medical school to take its place in the front rank of the world's greatest
service institutions." A new university president, Robert G. Sproul, succeeded
Campbell in 1930, and financial limitations put further consolidation plans on hold throughout the Depression, but Dean Porter persisted in his ambitious vision for a single merged medical center at Parnassus that would train four types of competent physicians: able practitioners, health officers, specialists, and investigator/teachers.
