Med school names for sale

Medical schools, like sports arenas, are no strangers to branding. But is it a good idea?

Dr. Jay S. Loeffler of Massachusetts General Hospital and Dr. Edward C. Halperin of the University of Louisville School of Medicine pose the question in a Journal of the American Medical Association commentary, prompted by reports that the University of Minnesota is seeking as much as $150 million in exchange for naming rights.

Massachusetts' four medical schools appear content with their own brands, but in Rhode Island Brown University transformed its medical school into the Warren Alpert Medical School last year after receiving a $100 million donation. Ten of the 15 medical schools that changed their names after a substantial gift did so in the last 10 years, the authors note.

All told, 19 of the 126 US medical schools are called something other than their host institution's medical school. Two honor a scientist (Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University) and a saint (San Juan Bautista School of Medicine).

Some name changes are trickier than figuring out what to call the "new" Boston Garden after its sponsor merged with another bank. Take Wake Forest University. After 57 years it excised Bowman Gray's name from the medical school, distancing itself from the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company where he was a former president. And the authors cite the new Touro College of Medicine in New Jersey, which received a major donation from a convicted felon.

Then there's the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, named for a leader of the pharmaceutical and medical equipment giant Johnson & Johnson. Although even the harshest critics of big pharma might not lump drug and device makers in with tobacco companies or criminals, the authors report no push-back there, even in an era when academic researchers are scrutinized for their ties to industry.

Not so at the University of Iowa, whose faculty rejected a $15 million gift from the Wellmark Corporation rather than rename its School of Public Health after the insurance company.

"There is an intrinsic risk involved for the schools in the future if the donors or foundations are discovered to be involved in activities deemed unsavory or illegal," the authors write. "It is not unreasonable to think that some US medical schools are currently named after someone who will be found, in the future, to have been involved in less-than-respectable activities."

Or in the past.

Brown, they point out, was named in 1804 after its first benefactor, Nicholas Brown Jr., whose family's wealth derives in part from the slave trade in the 1700s.

The late Warren Alpert, whose foundation also gave $20 million to Harvard Medical School and whose name adorns a building on the HMS quad, made his fortune at the convenience store chain Xtra Mart.