The Houston Chronicle reported yesterday that Dr. Peter Traber is expected to leave his role as President of Baylor College of Medicine. The article says that Dr. William Butler, a former President of BCM, will be announced Wednesday as Traber’s interim replacement.
This is good news for BCM. I don’t think Traber ever understood that BCM’s competitive advantage derives from it’s location within the world’s largest medical center. Prior to the Traber era, the Texas Medical Center grew by taking advantage of a network of mutually beneficial relationships between the participating institutions. BCM supplied world-class faculty and trainees, who benefited from the breadth of experience and opportunities offered by the other top-ranked institutions in the TMC. Each institution was thus freed to focus on what it did best to the benefit of all, and BCM’s fate has always been inexorably linked to the success of the other TMC institutions.
These mutually beneficial relationships worked because BCM did not compete economically with the other institutions. Traber challenged these relationships by choosing to build a hospital for BCM. Following such a plan might have produced financial benefits, but jeopardized BCM’s best resource for creating educational and research value. As a result of the broken ties, BCM lost many of its star faculty to the other TMC institutions.
Ironically, Traber’s financially-motivated strategy has put BCM in greater financial difficulty. According to the Chronicle article, the college has been operating in the red for the last two years, and the endowment has shrunk by 30% or $400 million.
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