Creative Ventures Research Articles

Regarding “Status of PharmD/PhD Programs in Colleges of Pharmacy”

The need for faculty in US schools of pharmacy has increased dramatically over the last decade as the result of the opening of new schools, expansion of the student population in existing programs, and the expansion of competing career opportunities for existing faculty. The recent report of Gourley and colleagues1 describes an innovative dual degree (PharmD/ PhD) program which was designed to attract and prepare professional pharmacy students to become the faculty of the future. Unfortunately in their introduction they provide erroneous information regarding a bill (S. 648, “A bill to amend the Public Health Service Act with respect to health professions programs regarding the practice of pharmacy”) that was introduced by Senator Reed to address the perceived need for pharmacists to work in critical shortage areas by establishing a loan repayment program for individuals with a pharmacy degree who agree to work for a minimum of 2 years in such areas. The bill also would have established a loan repayment program for pharmacy school graduates and near-graduates who were willing to serve on the faculty of a pharmacy school for at least 2 years. The key error regarding S. 648 is the author's statement that “The pharmacy manpower shortage has become such an issue that Congress has taken action to ease the shortage. In 2003, Congress passed the Pharmacy Education Aid Act.” Unfortunately, the Congress did not pass this Act and it was not signed into law by the President. The facts are S. 648 was introduced in the Senate on March 18, 2003, and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The bill was modified in Committee and reported to the full Senate by Senator Gregg, Chairman of the Committee (report No. 108-189) on November 6, 2003. It passed the Senate with an amendment by Unanimous Consent on November 25, 2003. The full text of the measure as passed by the Senate and as referred to the House of Representatives on December 8, 2003, can be found in the Congressional Record on pages S16054-16057. The bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Health of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on December 17, 2003, and resided there without subsequent consideration until the end of the 108th Congress. Thus, in essence the bill “died in committee.” Under S. 648, as it passed the Senate in late 2003, the Health Resource Services Administration (HRSA) would have been able to enter into contracts with students or graduates who agreed to work for a minimum of 2 years at a school of pharmacy. HRSA would reimburse participants up to $35,000 per year for their outstanding loans. The school hiring the participant however would have been required to match federal payments, and would not have been able to reduce the faculty member's salary to account for the loan repayments. Based on information from HRSA, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expected that there would not be much participation by pharmacy schools in the faculty loan repayment program because of the matching requirement. Indeed CBO estimated that the number of participants in the faculty loan repayment program would reach a maximum of 30 in 2008. This program as it was drafted thus had little potential to address the real and expanding needs that are now evident some 3 years later. No similar legislation to date has been introduced in the 109th Congress and thus the momentum to address the shortage of pharmacists including faculty has waned. There is thus definitive need for the development and expansion of innovative programs such as the one described in this report by Gourley and colleagues. Dual degree programs and other creative ventures offer the potential for schools of pharmacy to compete for the best of their graduates. Although the outlook at the federal level for future support of health professions educational programs--especially faculty loan repayment programs--appears to be bleak, initiatives at the state level, if supported by faculty, academic administrators, and the pharmacy community, as a whole may be a viable means to address the imbalance between the expanding need for pharmacy faculty and the limited supply available from our existing programs. Gary R. Matzke, PharmD School of Pharmacy, Medical College of Virginia/Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia

Creative Ventures

Creative Ventures

Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (review)

270 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:3 John Mullan. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. viii + 261pp. $75.00. This book illustrates Umberto Eco's observation that there is no such thing as a text perfectly closed to open-ended readings, for even formulaic sentimental texts, under Mullan's gaze, yield a multiplicity of implications. His stated purpose is modest: "What was originally posed as a capacity for sociability was eventually realized in the most private of experiences. If nothing else, I hope I can explain this paradox" (p. 17). He achieves considerably more: his interdisciplinary approach to die language of sensibility reminds his readers of its pervasiveness in eighteenth-century England, while his sustained focus on a single facet of sensibility—its imputed effect of "sociability"—enables him to make new and promising distinctions between major and minor documents of sensibility— including sermons, philosophical and medical treatises, letters and journals, as well as novels. The first and last chapters analyse philosophical and medical discourses crucial to the developing "language of feeling" in the century; the other three chapters discuss the novelists who made much of that language in their fictions: Richardson (chap. 2); Mackenzie and Goldsmith (chap. 3), and Sterne (chap. 4). In all chapters Mullan works to demonstrate that sociability, along with the much-discussed allied terms "benevolence" and "sympathy," was a persistently distant, even receding goal for the proponents of sensibility. Their constructs of sociability were all "fragile" (p. 8); indeed, their actual representations of sensibility in life and literature tended in the opposite direction, towards reclusiveness, melancholy, misanthropy ("the alter ego of feeling," p. 121), and various other forms of mental and physical pathology. Chapter 1 argues for David Hume as the representative philosopher of sensibility; he emerges from a discussion of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hartley, and Adam Smith as the philosopher who had, on die one hand, the most faith in sympathy as a basis for sociability and, on the other hand, the keenest awareness both of society's failure to achieve sociability and of philosophy's failure to escape its own solitariness. Mullan envisions Hume as a troubled man who lived with unresolved contradiction between his private and public selves: a sceptic who believed in the possibility of "immediate and complete communication" (p. 30) through sympathy; a hypochondriac and recluse who struggled to be a real-life model of sociability. Mullan believes that novels had a considerable advantage over philosophy in representing sensibility: they could freely admit the rare, fictive, even Utopian, nature of ideal sociability. Eighteenth-century novels generally celebrated what was rapidly becoming a cultural myth: "a parable about the uncorrupted powers of feeling" (p. 116). But even as they did, they demonstrated unresolved problems at the heart of that myth: the persistent ambiguity of the verbal and non-verbal signs of sensibility; the uncertain effects of the powers of feeling; and die subsequent undermining of sentimental fiction as an effective "vehicle for values and aspirations" (p. 1 17). Mullan defines the sentimental novel as an unstable "conflation" of "the morally instructive " and "staged exquisite scenes of feeling and distress" (p. 58). However, these components seem held together in an uneasy truce in his account of die creative ventures of novelists of sensibility. According to Mullan, such scenes of distress constantly slipped away from their authors' designated moral instructiveness into ambiguity, in great part because the main non-verbal instrument of the language of sensibility was the "massively sensitized feminine body" whose main signs were the highly suggestive "gestures and palpitations, sighs and tears" (p. 61). Richardson addressed this ambiguity by creating a series of supplements aiming to fix the meaning of tiiose signs and to prevent their misinterpretation: Pamela became a parable of the providential conversion powers of a young woman's sensibility; Clarissa a reconstruction of that parable as a story REVIEWS 271 of tragic failure—"die apotheosis of a sensibility too pure to be reconciled to the world" (p. 66); and Sir Charles Grandison a dubious attempt to "redeem Clarissa's harsh logic" by reasserting the possibility of virtuous men and happy families. Sterne's Tristram Shandy developed an equivalent model of...

Research models for the evaluation of interim programs

Basic evaluation research of interim programs conducted to date has employed three of four conceptual models. In the present article, the authors (1) identify these four conceptual models, (2) briefly outline significant studies that have been conducted using three of them, and (3) explore the possible advantages of one model which has not been used or reported in the literature of higher education. It is hoped that some insight into the possible ways to evaluate interim programs was provided, that further thought about objective evaluation programs was initiated, and that creative ventures into areas not yet researched were stimulated.