UCSF School of Pharmacy

Commencement Address to the Class of 2003

Robert L. Day, PharmD
Associate Dean, UCSF School of Pharmacy

June 21, 2003

Good morning, everyone.

I have a confession to make: I am still working on my speech, and I wonder if you could help me out? I need to know which of our guests has traveled the greatest distance to be here for this occasion, and more specifically, from where?

Please shout it out. Great. Thank you. (Responses were Vietnam, Philippines, Las Vegas) That helps a lot. (Write it down) There, it's finished.

Nearly a year ago, Dean Koda-Kimble asked if I would be today's commencement speaker. I was so shocked and flattered that I accepted without a moment's hesitation.

The fact is I've done this before. On my last day in kindergarten, Mrs. Slater asked me to say a few words and so I stood before my classmates and -- according to my mother -- said, "it's been real good fun here, but we're big kids now and now we have to share our toys, too." And I sat down.

I intrinsically felt that my speech today needed to be a little longer and perhaps have more substance to it and thus began an eleven-month period of fretting over what I should say. I intend to share a little of that process with you.

Although I don't think that Dean Koda-Kimble knew about my kindergarten experience, my guess is that asked me because she knew that over the course of my career, I have written or collaborated on five commencement speeches and about 20 major addresses for a few of pharmacy's most prominent leaders. So she probably figured that I was a natural for the part.

Wrong!

What she didn't know about me is that writing for others is a snap because I am not responsible for the aftermath. If the speech stirs up a hornet's nest, or bombs -- and two, for sure, have -- the speaker -- and not I -- will take the blame. When that happens, I can protect my ego by blaming it on the presenter -- it was a terrible delivery, you know, he flubbed the jokes, looked like he was going to throw up and etc.

And I could blame the audience, too (really not up to its intellectual challenge, you know, must have been on drugs, etc.) Not my fault, nope, not ever.

But this time I would stand responsible for my words and when that realization fully set in, I began to lose confidence. The truth is that I feared that bomb #3 could be on its way, only this time it would come out of my mouth.

Worse yet, I am not some imported stranger who could sneak off into obscurity afterwards. I work at UCSF and I could hear the whispers of my colleagues after I passed them in the hallways: "Sad case, you know, worst commencement speaker we've had in the 130-year history of the School."

And so I devised a strategy for minimizing the damage. I had to stop Dean Koda-Kimble from fluffing up my credentials when she introduced me. If she fluffed, I would have much farther to fall when I bombed.

On the other hand, if I could convince her to radically ratchet down her description of me, people would shrug and say, "well, what could you expect from someone like that anyway?" So to help her and myself out: I wrote up my own introduction, e-mailed it to her and pleaded with her to use it. This is what it said:

Hi, I'm Dean Koda-Kimble. With today's commencement speaker, we scraped the bottom of the barrel, as he has never amounted to much and is internationally unknown. And rightfully so.

Although he is old and mostly over the hill, he was available, of course he was available. And because he is local, we wouldn't have to buy him an airplane ticket or hotel room.

Furthermore, I realized that even if the audience could understand his mumbling, shallow presentation, no one would remember what he said five minutes after he ended the ten or so minute ordeal he would put us through. So why, I asked myself, not?

It is with the deepest of apologies, therefore, that I now present today's commencement speaker, Dr. Bob Day.

Instead, she did, well, what she did. Thanks for nothing, Dean Koda-Kimble.

Eleven months ago I tentatively touched the keyboard of my computer in hope of unleashing some deeply profound or moving keystrokes to share with you. Nothing much happened. As the months passed, all I came away from my computer with was a burning sensation in the pit of my stomach.

About a month ago, I read an article that listed people who had been commencement speakers.

Tom Brokow at Connecticut College. Kurt Vonnegut at Rice University. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright at UC Berkeley. Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo at Stanford.

I mentally added, "Bob Day at UCSF" to the end of that list but it just didn't have the same ring of authority to it.

And I could almost hear the words of some disappointed person in today's audience saying, "To be here for this important occasion, I have traveled all the way from (Vietnam) and they give me a Bob Day? A who?"

I wished that I hadn't read the article.

About three weeks ago, my brain still registering empty, I admitted to myself that I had never received any formal instruction on commencement speech writing, and so I solicited the advice of some of the School's leaders.

Associate Dean Brian Alldredge suggested that my presentation be meaningful and relate to the profession.

Department Chair Kathy Giacomini recommended that I make one or two good points and leave it at that.

Associate Dean Lorie Rice said that I should set myself up as a role model and describe how I got to where I am. That, I explained to her, would take about ten seconds, including lots of time for questions.

I learned something good from that experience, however. What I learned was to never to ask Brian or Kathy or Lorie for that kind of help again. Or, in fairness, to tell them first that I will kid them about their answers in my commencement address.

So I turned to outsiders. In a newscast, NPR Commentator Neal Conan recommended a couple of jokes, followed by a self-deprecating anecdote, and finally, an inspirational sendoff.

Great advice. In fact, you have probably already noted that I have been closely following his recommendations.

Finally, in desperation, I scanned the Internet and came across the name of a well-known civil servant who has presented quite a few commencement speeches over the last few years. At last, an experienced, government-employed commencement speaker, I thought.

And so I called him, knowing that he would feel some responsibility about helping me out. (Turn on tape recorder)

(Transcript of phone call:)

(phone ringing)

Voice: The White House.

Me: Hello. President Bush, please.

Voice: (Long Pause) Who is calling?

Me: Robert Day.

Voice: What is the purpose of your call?

Me: Well, I have to give a commencement address and since President Bush has given a few of them, too, I thought he could give me a few pointers.

Voice: (Pause) I'm sorry, President Bush is not available. (Hang up.)

Well, that wasn't particularly productive, so I obtained copies of some of his commencement speeches.

At Ohio State's commencement, President Bush began with a joke: "I congratulate all the parents who are here today. It's a glorious day when your child graduates from college; It's a great day for your wallet, too."

He liked that joke so much that he also used it in his commencement address at Yale. I liked that joke, too, and if you think about it, it does -- however subtly -- demonstrate his compassion for the underprivileged.

I noticed something else in the scripts of his speeches: the words "applause" or "laughter" were inserted in parenthesis here and there. Although that seemed kind of presumptuous, I suppose that when you are one of the most powerful people in the world, you can pretty much dictate how people should react to your words. As a fictitious example, he might say:

"Hi, I'm President George W. Bush," (applause). Hey, how about my cabinet members, Ashcroft, Cheney, Powell and Rice? (Applause)

Around the Oval Office I call them my weapons of mass deception. Only I CAN find them. (laughter) (hissing).

I discovered that the First Lady also gives commencement speeches and she liked her husband's wallet joke so much that she used a variation of it in her address at the Georgetown School of Nursing. (Note to myself: it's OK to use other people's material.)

And then she got up close and personal with: "I bet when you graduates were dissecting cats in Dr. Angerio's class four years ago, you never thought this day would come."

And, she added: "After grading some of your papers, he probably didn't either."

(Note to myself: in your presentation, get up close and personal. Question to myself: what's this thing the Georgetown School of Nursing has about cutting up cats?)

She liked the dissection joke so much that she used it again at the Fort Campbell High School Commencement, only Professor Angerio became Coach Lange and the dissectees were frogs. I liked that joke, too.

OK, enough research, I finally thought. Time, at long last, to strike out on my own. So here it is, the real thing, but it will be more effective if we pretend that I have just been introduced.

(Clear your throat)

Thank you, Dean Koda-Kimble.

Well, this is really a great day for everyone's wallets isn't it?

Didn't like that one, OK, how about this one: And Class of 2003, boy, I'll bet that when you were dissecting that left recurrent laryngeal nerve in Dr. Sutherland's anatomy lab four years ago, you thought this day would never come.

Didn't like that one, either. OK. Note to myself: in the future, no jokes. Closer to the target, no jokes copped from the first lady...or the first gentleman, either.

I would like to set something straight: How many people in this room have heard that we are the #1 school of pharmacy in the nation? Can I see a show of hands, audience, too?

That's pitiful and its time to set the record straight. We are NOT -- emphasize, NOT the #1 school of pharmacy and no one should leave this hall believing that grossly inaccurate appraisal. What we are is the first, second, third, fourth and fifth best school of pharmacy in the nation. In other words, we are so good, that our closest competitor is a distant sixth best school of pharmacy.

Now that I have squandered the majority of the minutes I have been allotted for this presentation, it's time to get to what Neal Conan called "the inspirational send-off." So, brace yourself and please cross your fingers with me, hoping for the best, because here it comes. (Cross fingers and wag them.)

If you were to get to know me, you would learn that I am deeply proud of our School, and it is not because I am one of its faculty. No, truthfully, it's because I am one of its graduates, class of 1958, beyond any question, one of the finest classes this school ever produced. I said one of the finest, because I believe this to be true of every class we have graduated.

To be frank, I did not feel as intensely proud of the School when I was a student. Although I knew that UCSF was a good school, insofar as I knew then, it was pretty much like the 70 other schools of pharmacy around the nation. And also, as far as I knew, the nation's annual crop of graduates was pretty much the same, too.

But I was wrong on both counts.

This school -- and we, its graduates -- were not the same as the others. We were different, but it took more than a few years for me to fully appreciate how much, because that's how long it took for me to acquire the experience to appreciate the difference.

The school, I would learn after graduation, had a different kind of faculty than other schools; at that time it had four times as many scientists as pharmacists, and that was just the opposite of the ratio at other schools.

The school was occasionally derided for this. How could non-pharmacists train pharmacists, its academic critics asked?

And at the time I was a student, its curriculum was different, too, more heavily steeped in the sciences than any other school in the nation. And, unlike the majority of the other schools of the nation, the curriculum was in a constant state of flux as the faculty were always tinkering with it in search of a Holy Grail that had eluded pharmacists for centuries: a role in patient care.

Along the line, before and after my graduation, the School made mistakes.

At one time, it trained its graduates to be highly knowledgeable in pharmaceutical chemistry, in the hope that they would be able to look at a drug's chemistry and predict which was the best drug to use. That came to a dead end.

Then it changed its focus on the product, and trained its graduates to be drug product specialists who knew everything about a drug product -- including how it was formulated -- so that they could not only recommend the drug of choice, but the drug product of choice. That, too, was a dead end.

But in the long run, even the dead ends were important, as each became a tributary that fed into a much larger role. For that reason, many of them can be found in the curriculum today.

More importantly, rather than discouraging the faculty, the dead-ends served as a stimulus to move on to the next experiment. The next one was a lollapalooza: it was called clinical pharmacy.

I said that the School's graduates were different, too, and they were. From our first day at School we had been infused with the notion that in a decade or so, 75 percent of everything we had learned would be obsolete.

And the reason we -- unlike the students of other schools -- had been required to carry such a heavy load of science courses was that our faculty believed that the partnership of practice and science was the key to the future of pharmacy. Pharmacy would change, we were taught, and if we had any sense whatsoever, we would not only keep up with the changes in science and practice, we would bring them about.

And if pharmacy didn't change, then we might as well forget about the future, because there wouldn't be any.

Change, therefore, didn't frighten us nearly as much as the status quo. And maybe this is the appropriate time to tell you that I am not only talking about my class, the class of 1958, but every class that preceded and followed it because this been going on for a long time.

Whether you realize it or not, you have now become part of a conspiracy against the status quo that began 1869 in the gas-lit back room of Steele's Drug Store in downtown San Francisco. That was when and where a handful of far-sighted pharmacists decided that there should be a School of Pharmacy in California and specifically in San Francisco, as the nearest such school sat on the banks of the Mississippi River.

And they decided way back then that it should be a radically new kind of school, and that its curriculum should be scientific as well as practical because these visionary practitioners fully believed that path to the future of pharmacy would be paved with the sciences.

They, too, were dissatisfied with the way things were. Almost immediately, they and the graduates of the school they founded would bring change to the profession by setting in motion the California State Board of Pharmacy and the California Pharmacists Association, and by setting examples for the nation.

Over the first century of its existence, the school -- initially called the California College of Pharmacy and later the UCSF School of Pharmacy -- would lead the nation in terms of curriculum as it moved from a two-year to a three- to a four-year course of study, and as the degree it offered evolved from PhG, graduate pharmacist, to PhC, pharmaceutical chemist, to BS to PharmD.

While it missed out on being the first to offer the PharmD Degree in the United States -- USC gets that credit -- it started the planning process before USC did, but was delayed by the University's massive academic bureaucracy. So we came in a tight second. But we caught up.

The sweeping changes in organized pharmacy that originated in California in the 1960s and spread across the nation were spearheaded by UCSF students and graduates.

And the most important change that took place in pharmacy practice in centuries -- clinical pharmacy, that long sought-after Holy Grail of patient care -- had its origins in UCSF faculty and graduates, and it, too, would spread not only across the nation but around the world. The profession has never been the same since.

And so, for you, our wondrous class of 2003, as of today, the free ride is over. Because of what your predecessors have accomplished, you pop out of here as the most skilled, new graduates of your kind in the nation.

But you can no longer hang on to their coat tails of those who have blazed the paths you will initially walk. You are expected to carry your own weight now and to make certain the next generation of pharmacists can learn and thrive on the advancements you will bring to the profession and to patient care.

Believe it or not, you already know how to do that and that is why we picked you out of the six hundred or so. You are just not conscious of it. Inside each of you is seed that has been planted there by the very nature of the curriculum you have completed and the traditions of this institution, of which you have now become part.

The seed may take a few years to germinate and mature, but its emergence is as inevitable as spam e-mail. So when it happens, whenever it happens, go with it and make us proud.

It was real good fun to be here, but you are big kids now and now you have to share your toys with others.

Go do it.

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