Murmurs: Druker Leaves Knight Cancer Post

DRUKER LEAVES KNIGHT CANCER POST: Amid the turmoil that has engulfed Oregon Health & Science University for the past two years comes a body blow to the city’s largest employer and the state’s flagship medical school and teaching hospital. On Dec 3, as WW first reported on wweek.com, Dr. Brian Druker, OHSU’s best-known figure and the CEO of the Knight Cancer Institute, abruptly resigned his leadership position. Druker’s discovery of Gleevec, the breakthrough leukemia drug approved by the FDA in 2001, might be the biggest moment in OHSU history, and it spawned the creation of the cancer center with a $500 million challenge grant from Phil and Penny Knight. Druker will continue to run his lab and see patients at OHSU, but he says he will be “looking for opportunities where I can continue to make an impact on patient’s lives and on the world.” He nodded to dysfunction at OHSU in his resignation message. “I still have more I want to do to advance cancer research and improve patient care,” Druker wrote. “With much reflection, I have concluded that at this time those goals are no longer achievable at OHSU. We have lost sight of what is crucial and forgotten our mission.” Read what else he said to WW.

GRAND JURY SAYS COUNTY JAILS STILL IN CRISIS: A Multnomah County corrections grand jury has released the latest scathing report documenting deficiencies at local jails, following an unprecedented series of inmate deaths beginning in 2022. “The Multnomah County jail system is in crisis and at risk of jeopardizing public health and safety,” the report says. The seven grand jurors who toured the county’s three jails and one prison in recent months highlighted two ongoing problems: short-staffing and aging facilities. Corrections deputies still face mandatory overtime on a weekly basis, leading to plummeting staff morale and more frequent lockdowns for inmates. WW has reported on the dangerous conditions created by staffing shortages for more than a year (“Cell Death,” Aug. 16, 2023). Grand jurors faulted a lack of accountability in the county’s human resources department. “The primary issue lies in the HR’s hiring process and underfunding for HR staff,” they note. Meanwhile, the downtown jail is rapidly decaying. A January ice storm left it without power for four days. Nearly 250 tickets requesting maintenance remain open, and 33 toilets are leaky or broken. The county is currently mulling replacing the facility entirely, the jurors report. They recommend the county create an “interdepartmental staffing task force” and start work on a feasibility study to replace its two aging adult jails.

STATE BAR DISMISSES COMPLAINT AGAINST SCHMIDT: It may come as little consolation to Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, but the Oregon State Bar has dismissed an election-eve bar complaint that former longtime Multnomah County prosecutor Chuck French filed against Schmidt in April. In his complaint, French alleged that Schmidt misrepresented the facts in the cases of two convicted murderers for whom he asked then-Gov. Kate Brown to grant clemency. Schmidt told the bar he depended on his staff to provide the appropriate information to the governor. The complaint captured a fundamental disagreement between Schmidt, who won election in 2020 on a reform platform, and more conservative prosecutors such as French, who criticized Schmidt’s approach as soft on crime. In the May primary, voters sided with the latter view, choosing one of Schmidt’s senior prosecutors, Nathan Vasquez, to replace him by 7 percentage points. While voters went with Vasquez, the bar’s assistant general counsel, Linn Davis, told French in an Oct. 18 letter that the bar was dismissing his complaint. “Your concerns do not support a reasonable belief that Mr. Schmidt engaged in lawyer misconduct,” Davis wrote. “There is no sufficient evidence that Mr. Schmidt had reason to believe he could not rely on the work of his staff.”

LATEST SCHOOL BOND DRAFT INCLUDES LIGHTS AND SEATS AT GRANT BOWL: The rumble at the Grant Bowl might finally be drawing to a close. Grant High School is the only 6A school in Oregon without lights on its athletic fields, meaning students often have to miss class to commute to far away fields for their nighttime games (“Degraded Asset: Grant Bowl,” WW, Aug. 22, 2023). The Grant Bowl Community Coalition, a group of parents, coaches and other stakeholders, has long pushed for lights and seating at the bowl. But a Nov. 6 draft plan for the May 2025 Portland Public Schools bond did not include mention of athletic renovations at the school. Virginia La Forte says she and other members of the coalition were shocked. But in the latest bond planning memo, presented at a Monday facilities committee meeting, Portland Public Schools staff propose allocating $75 million to athletics improvements at a number of schools, including lights and seats at Grant. Marshall Haskins, PPS’s athletics director, says the improvements are “just getting us done what we said we were going to do originally.” Other schools in the plan include Roosevelt and Franklin high schools and West Sylvan Middle School. School Board member Gary Hollands, whose zone encompasses Grant, warned against the board repeating mistakes that led to so many incomplete high school athletics facilities. “Roosevelt was built 10 years ago almost; now we’re back here finishing up something that happened 10 years ago. We should not make that same mistake today for 10 years later on,” he says. La Forte says adding Grant back into the conversation is “strongly encouraging.” But, she says, “we’re a little wary because we see it coming in and out.”