Dean's Update
May 9, 2025 - Aron Sousa, MD
Friends,
Last week, we celebrated the graduation of our 2025 class of PhD, MS, and MPH students. I do not think we have ever had so many master’s students attend the university’s graduation ceremony. What joyous and wonderful events those graduations were.
We continued the celebrations this week with the Student Awards Program on Tuesday. The college’s donors have funded 117 scholarships to 123 students providing $937,629 in financial support to our students. Our student debt continues to be amongst the highest in the country, and I so appreciate all the support of our alumni, faculty, staff, and friends who help support our students. This has been a record-breaking year for new scholarship pledges. For the first time, we have crossed $5 million in gifts in a year with a couple of months to go before the fiscal year turns into a pumpkin. Our small but mighty advancement team does a great job, and they are efficient! We spend under four cents for each dollar we raise. Give to scholarships here, hint, hint.
And, we close out the academic year with the MD graduation tomorrow. I am excited to have Elizabeth Hertel, Director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, as our commencement speaker. Also during the ceremony, we will celebrate faculty award winners chosen by the students, flip some tassels, promote our military physicians, and hood 182 new Spartan MDs. It is always a wonderful day!
Grant dolor continues. So, we are launching the CHM Research Rescue Fund to help protect our research teams as they sit in federal bureaucratic limbo. This is an opportunity for anyone interested in having an immediate, high impact to bridge funding for research areas that have either lost funds or are the most at risk for funding loss. If you are inclined to make a gift to bridge the loss or potential loss of funding for the most vulnerable research, then you may make a gift here or reach out to Mary Shirkey.
This week brings budget news from the university. Like institutions across the country, we need to address the rising costs of everything from health care to eggs. The university does buy a lot of eggs, and those kinds of cost increases add up, but health care is the real driver of our need to reduce expenses in the colleges. Some of those savings will be from limiting raises for people making more than $200k, which seems only appropriate and fair.
The colleges, including ours, have been charged to cut general funds 9% over two years with at least a 6% cut in the first year and the balance in the second. We met with the chairs yesterday, and we are working on the plan. I’ve been through larger cuts more than once. What is new to us is the confluence of these cuts with the possibility or probability of Medicaid cuts, reductions in federal grants and thus indirects, and the future of state appropriations. More soon.
So many of us are saddened by the death of John Mulder, MD, who was the director of the Division of Palliative Medicine in our Department of Family Medicine, a national leader in hospice care, and a founding light for palliative and hospice care organizations in West Michigan. Many, many families were helped through his care and service. We all benefited from knowing him. He was a naturally engaging mentor and teacher for all of us. John was a lung transplant patient, and he always appreciated and seemed astonished to be alive so as to enjoy being useful and helpful. He passed when his transplant was not able to withstand pneumonia. I understand he was his usual thoughtful, gentle, appreciative self throughout his brief illness and that he was teaching about palliative care, his own, until the end– none of us are surprised.
Julie Phillips, MD, MPH, our chair of Family Medicine, remembered him to her faculty, and I was touched by what she said:
I feel so blessed to have known him. He really mentored and cared for me, personally, and tried to help me as a leader and as a friend... I keep drafting emails to his address. I miss my friend. I didn't really get to say goodbye - which makes it harder. I've been listening to his podcast ("Palliative Matters") just to hear his voice. But even better, is listening to his music. … This one is my favorite, even though it is making me cry right now.
Serving the people with you,
Aron
Aron Sousa, MD, FACP
Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine