摘要：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 multi-campus 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. SINCE 1997, THE NUMBER OF graduate public health schools and programs has grown remarkably, from 32 to 40 accredited schools and from 25 to 69 accredited graduate programs. Nearly all of these programs and schools use a single-university model. We describe an exception to this traditional model—the establishment of a multiuniversity and multicampus public health academic educational initiative in New Jersey. This initiative resulted from compact geography, a history of cooperation among faculty, and the need for graduate and undergraduate public health educational programs. The endeavor has been sustained by ongoing cooperation among the partners. To date, no other universities have been able to build and sustain an accredited graduate school of public health sponsored by a multiuniversity partnership. Nevertheless, this model probably provides the best framework for areas with geographically dispersed faculty and student bodies, a need for public health training but insufficient resources to immediately offer programs, and government, for-profit, and not-for-profit political and financial support. Some novel models have been created in other professions—for example, ones that adapt an engineering curriculum to meet community needs 1 , 2 or that provide education for specialists in autism. 3 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.
