There seems to be one constant in UC Irvine's medical programs: scandal.
For more than a decade, UCI officials have repeatedly ignored red flags, downplayed serious problems, misrepresented facts and punished or fired people who exposed wrongdoing, according to interviews with current and former employees, court records and UCI's own audits. And time and again, UCI's woes end up in headlines and in court.
"I don't think we're dealing with isolated problems and bad actors only," said new UCI Chancellor Michael V. Drake, a physician who inherited the problems when he took over in July. "There are times when we have not lived up to our values."
Drake rejected the idea that the school's moral compass was broken, pointing to the thousands of people who had been successfully treated at the hospital and rankings that place UCI Medical Center, in Orange, among the top 100 U.S. hospitals.
"Those values are there, and those values are operative, almost always," Drake said.
Drake's leadership will be tested this week as a panel of experts issues its report on problems at the hospital, triggered by revelations that 32 patients died awaiting liver transplants because no full-time surgeon was on staff and viable organs were turned down.
Chancellors and administrators who came before him may have thought problems could be fixed solely by firing bad employees. Not Drake. His approach, he said, is to "take a big step back and then to look broadly" at the university as a whole. What he will find, critics say, is a university that has failed to repair its damaged core.
"We can all be forgiven for occasional lapses of judgment, but the rapidity and extensiveness of this would suggest that there's an endemic management problem," said Kerry Fields, who teaches business law and ethics at USC's Marshall School of Business. "There's just too many examples of poor ethical decision-making."
Former internal auditor Mohamed Abo-Hebeish said UCI "has lost its conscience, its sense of social responsibility as a public institution."
Problems in UCI's medical programs were first exposed in 1995 when it was reported that doctors at the Center for Reproductive Health had stolen eggs and embryos from women and implanted them in other patients, several of whom gave birth.
Other problems since then have included misplaced cadavers, the sale of cadaver body parts without consent, and research violations at the Chao Cancer Clinic.
