ATHENS, Ga. --- Dean Barbara Schuster and her staff moved into new offices Friday in the renovated building that will house the Medical College of Georgia's Athens campus for the next few years.
The first class of about 40 students is scheduled to begin in August 2010 in the old O'Malley's bar building, now rechristened the Interim Medical Partnership Building.
"It's a remarkable building," Ms. Schuster said as workers installed the final touches and staff members unpacked books, checked phone lines and found bathrooms in the new building, built as a cotton and wool factory in 1857.
University of Georgia campus architects left the original brick walls exposed and, in one section, the original hardwood floors.
The building might have the most modern teaching spaces on campus.
Digital video cameras peer into small classrooms that look like doctor's examination rooms so professors can monitor medical students meeting with volunteers posing as patients.
Students will be able to see and talk to counselors and advisers at MCG's main campus in Augusta over the Internet. Athens faculty and administrators can attend committee meetings in the same way with MCG colleagues in Augusta, Ms. Schuster said.
By Oct. 1, about 15 faculty members and other full-time employees will be working in the building; in a year, when classes begin, the number will be about 25 to 30, Ms. Schuster said.
Administrators say the school might move as early as 2012 to its permanent home, now occupied by the Navy Supply Corps School. UGA hasn't announced what will happen to the interim building then.
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When clases begin the school will only have 25 to 30 employees? Yeah, buddy.
"Interim Medical Partnership Building" has a misplaced modifier-"Interim," which should be placed between "Partnership" and "Building" to form the "Medical Partnership Interim (or Provisional/Temporary) Building." If the medical partnership is really temporary, this building title "puts the lie" to repeated Board of Regents statements about the permanence of the medical partnership and would suggest that the MCG Athens Campus would have morphed from an MCG "satellite" to an "independent entity." I believe Georgia deserves better governance.
I don't know what you mean, JackRabbit, about Georgia deserving "better governance," but whatever you mean, I agree, because it is quite poor lately. Now there is no way that Athens will ever accept the term "satellite" for any length of time. What we will have will be one government medical school system with multiple campuses. In the near term there will be the Augusta campus and the Athens campus. Way down the road you might find a third campus cropping up somewhere such as Albany, Cartersville, or Savannah (maybe Statesboro instead of Savannah if Statesboro could grow up a little).
Dont' worry, in a few years everyone from the augusta campus will be there. It should take about that long to shut this one down. If you didn't know it, that's the plan. If you have never noticed, most of the funding for just about everything in Georgia goes to an area north of Augusta. Goodbye MCG Augusta.
Well, realistically, there is no way MCG Augusta will close, but there is only so much money to go around. It will be hurt in many ways by loss of funding. The model for what will happen is MUSC in Charleston and USC Medical School in Columbia. USC opened against the wishes of Charleston people and ended up being a second rate school that continuously has poor evaluations.
So would you think that the Athens campus will be similar to Columbia and will have poor evaluations? Are the people who do the evaluations non-biased?
Hey LL....Sure there are national organizations that rate the schools fairly. Athens won't be able to match the facilities and staff in Augusta in our lifetime. The idea of starting another school in this economic setting is not wise. I'll only say one thing positive about the Athens school. They are attracting some UGA Foundation money to get this thing going.