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FROM: Peter Stott
TO: OHSU Board of Directors
DATE: Friday, Oct. 25, 2024
SUBJECT: New President
CC: Tim Boyle, Dan Lavey, Joaquin Cigarroa, Brian Druker, Kelly Hale, Patrick Kilkenny, John von Schlegell, Jordan Schnitzer
WHAT IT SAID: “I would strongly encourage and ask that the board take a time out and appoint an acting President to replace Dr. [Danny] Jacobs. A national search would be warranted and particularly in light of the potential merger of OHSU and Legacy. This institution needs the best leadership possible. Your current nominee may in the end be that person, but PLEASE do it in a responsible manner. It has been a difficult six years for the institution, so a new permanent leader doesn’t need to be appointed tomorrow. Thank you for your consideration. Respectfully, Peter Stott”
WHY IT MATTERS: The next president of Oregon Health & Science University has a big job to do: merge OHSU, an academic medical center, with Legacy Health, a nonprofit hospital system, to create the biggest employer in the Portland metro area, with 32,000 employees.
That’s on top of running OHSU day to day, a job that proved challenging for President Jacobs, who resigned in October after a series of gaffes that destroyed morale on Pill Hill.
Some of the wealthiest, most influential business leaders in Portland didn’t want to leave anything to chance with Jacobs’ successor, according to emails obtained by WW and interviews with some of the key players. They lobbied Gov. Tina Kotek and the university board to scuttle the immediate appointment of an OHSU insider, as planned, and instead conduct a national search.
The day after Jacobs resigned, the board said it would appoint pediatric neurosurgeon Nate Selden to a three-year term as president. Selden had just become dean of the university’s medical school in June.
Among the business leaders who pushed OHSU to pump the brakes: Peter Stott, CEO of local trucking company Market Express LLC: real estate developer Jordan Schnitzer; and Tim Boyle, CEO of Columbia Sportswear. Members of the group wrote to the OHSU board because it chooses the president. They contacted Kotek because Oregon’s governor appoints the board.
“The purpose of my email was solely to ask the board to be thoughtful in selecting a new leader,” Stott said in an email to WW. “In the end, the candidate they were promoting might be the right person, but until you do a proper search (which they had not), we would not know. In my judgment, the current board had not done a good job over the last several years, and this looked like more of the same.”
The campaign achieved its goal. The board had planned to anoint Selden at a meeting on Friday, Oct. 25, one day after Jacobs resigned. That morning, though, Gov. Kotek put out a statement saying it would be “a mistake to push through a decision of this magnitude without appropriate due diligence” and that the rushed timeline would “compromise” OHSU’s future.
The statement had heft in part because Kotek hadn’t weighed in on the university’s future, despite a rocky year that brought union disputes, botched leadership, and mishandled disciplinary action against a doctor accused of surreptitiously taking upskirt pictures of a student during class. Soon after the governor called for a search, OHSU scrapped plans to appoint Selden without one.
Elisabeth Shepard, a spokeswoman for Kotek, says the governor acted on her own initiative. “The governor regularly consults with other leaders, including business leaders, on a range of issues and makes her own decisions on behalf of the office,” Shepard says.
Whether or not they influenced Kotek, the concerned citizens got their way.
“Under Joe Robertson OHSU gained a reputation as a world class institution,” Boyle said in a text to WW. “But I had heard so many complaints from OHSU team members that I thought the governor should be aware of the growing concerns. It’s a critical state institution that should always get attention at the highest levels.”
Schnitzer agreed. His family has long supported OHSU. The Harold Schnitzer Diabetes Health Center is named for his father, who suffered from the disease.
“We keep stumbling in Oregon,” Schnitzer said in an interview this week. “We’re not showing the kind of leadership we need. We keep throwing up roadblocks to best practices.”
One member of the group went so far as to suggest a candidate to Kotek and the board, a person familiar with the matter said. The name floated: Dr. Robert Robbins, a cardiothoracic surgeon who ran the department at Stanford University and then became CEO of Texas Medical Center in Houston, the largest complex of its kind in the world, with 50 million square feet of space and 120,000 employees. Until September, Robbins was president of the University of Arizona.
Reached by phone, Robbins said he would be interested in the top slot at OHSU.
“It’s one of the leading health science centers in the country, and a crown jewel for the state,” Robbins said. “There will be a lot of people who are interested in the job.”