Until the early 1970s, graduates of the venerable two-year School of Medicine at the University of North Dakota had to transfer elsewhere to complete the final years of their medical degree. Many never returned to the remote, high plains state where doctors were scarce.
A grassroots campaign aiming to expand the medical school into a four-year, degree granting institution met strong opposition in 1971. It might have failed—and the medical school surely would have closed—if not for the energies of two men.
Dr. Robert Eelkema, the de facto leader of the grassroots campaign, was a regular handball partner of a combat marine veteran named Tom Clifford who happened to be president of the university and one of the state’s most powerful leaders.
With Eelkema’s gift for finding federal funds and Clifford’s political savvy in bypassing legislative stumbling blocks, the two men rallied enough support to expand the state’s medical school into today’s nationally recognized community-based program that supplies almost half of North Dakota’s physicians. |
