Building and Sustaining a Multiuniversity and Multicampus Program or School of Public Health

This quite academic paper contains useful thoughts and lessons:

Drawing from New Jersey's successful efforts and from other less successful efforts, we offer lessons learned for those who will consider a multiuniversity and multicampus program or school of public health. These lessons include building a faculty collaboration, senior administrative support, and external constituencies and developing a set of documents that institutionalize processes, logistics, and other operations. In our experience, building and sustaining faculty support is the greatest challenge, followed by protecting existing resources and securing additional resources when administrators in the host universities change. (Am J Public Health. 2008;98:1556-1558. doi:10.2105/ AJPH.2008. 136705)

After briefly describing the development of the former New Jersey graduate program that evolved into a graduate school of public health, we describe the lessons that we learned for building and sustaining a school of public health through a multiuniversity partnership. We provide examples of some efforts that failed- without giving the names of the institutions, however, and with the caveat that we participated as outsiders in these efforts and therefore cannot be entirely certain that our expressed reasons for why they failed are accurate.