KCOM honors founder

The board of Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine voted early this month to establish the A. T. Still University of Health Sciences to incorporate KCOM and the other schools that are part of it.

The added name will not change KCOM academically, said Bill Castles, assistant vice president of public relations, college communications and marketing at KCOM.

"There will be no curriculum changes, or really the way the school is run," Castles said. "Basically, what you will see is ... centralized public relations and marketing, centralized admissions, centralized computing services."

Dr. Gerald Osborn, vice president for medical affairs and dean at KCOM, said the curricula at the schools are being reformed, which has nothing to do with the new university name.

KCOM's name has changed several times since it was founded in 1892. Castles said the university will be named after A. T. Still, the founder of KCOM and of osteopathic medicine.

Senior Laura Main is part of Truman's Pre-Osteopathic Scholars program, which provides early acceptance at KCOM for Truman biology students as sophomores. She said the new name will affect the association between Kirksville and osteopathy.

"I think people don't realize that Kirksville is the founding school of osteopathic medicine," Main said. "A lot of people attribute its foundation to A. T. Still and not to a particular school. I think that might bring it out more."

The Arizona College of Health Sciences and the online School of Health Management are divisions of KCOM. The college also will be opening Arizona College of Dentistry and Oral Health next fall. Castles said KCOM had to create a corporate entity to encompass these four schools.

"The accrediting agency told us that we needed really to have a university name above these schools," Castles said. "It just was not making sense organizationally to have a medical school and a health science school and a school of health management online all reporting to a medical school."

Osborn said the new university name will unite the schools in a beneficial way.

"The hope and the intent of creating this overall university structure is really to enhance our operations in everything that we do," Osborn said. "We're hoping it will enhance and promote cooperation between the colleges."

Osborn said the new university structure will not create a change in operation.

"We had been functioning as a university anyway, and I think this just really provides us with the kind of clarity that outsiders now will be able to appreciate more clearly," Osborn said. "We're really hoping it enhances our national exposure and enhances our image."

Castles said the new name will attract more students and increase awareness of the schools.

"Where you're going to see a lot of the impact is in our ability to attract and recruit even more students, because there are some students who want only to apply to a university," Castles said. "It truly identifies us as a university with multiple programs all related to the health sciences."

Junior John Epema, a pre-osteopathic scholar, said he does not think the new name will affect admissions at KCOM.

"It's just a name," Epema said. "When you actually look up information about a school, you just kind of go over the name and look at the facts about it."

Senior Joseph Brooks, another pre-osteopathic scholar, said the change will not affect students at KCOM.

"It won't mean anything for the med students," Brooks said. "It will be more of a legalistic change than a pragmatic change. People will still use KCOM to refer to the med school like they have in the past."

Castles said other osteopathic schools also are changing their names or adding entities, like KCOM is doing.

"What KCOM has done is really what other colleges, especially in the osteopathic profession, have done in recent years as they have seen that they have expanded their programs to generate additional revenues to help support their institutions," Castles said.

Brooks said the addition of the new name is part of the evolution of KCOM.

"It's just adapting to that growth; it's not really changing its philosophy in any way," Brooks said.

Castles said he expects the name to take effect after the beginning of 2003.