4
COM Outlook . Spring 2015
Over the past
several months,
there have been
numerous com-
munications
emanating from
NSU President Dr.
George Hanbury,
the various deans,
myself, and others
in regard to NSU’s
Vision 2020 and
the bright future that lays ahead for our university.
For the past several years, we have been transitioning
from an educational institution that provides quality educa-
tion to one that is striving to provide nationally recognized
and preeminent education. Similarly, there has been much
talk about our emphasis on research, which is yielding some
significant results.
All you have to do is drive into the university directly past
the Health Professions Division to bear witness to the sophisti-
cated and rapidly rising 225,000 square-foot Center for Collab-
orative Research that will help us meet our goals of becoming a
highly productive and recognized research university. It isn’t the
bricks and mortar that count, however. It is what we intend the
bricks and mortar to accomplish in regard to the educational
goals set forth by Dr. Hanbury’s Vision 2020 strategic plan.
On a similar note, the assemblage of knowledge we are
presenting to the world, and the creation of new methods of
care based upon the discovery of new knowledge that comes
from research, indicate that we are on the cusp of achieving
great things. This is why the bricks and mortar that will com-
prise the new research center are symbolic of what is about
to happen here.
It’s not that we haven’t been involved in research for years,
because we have. Consequently, I give a lot of credit to the
many researchers that have been working at NSU for years
with a significant amount of success, but not with all the tools
that are necessary for them to have this broad spectrum of op-
portunity and presentation of information.
The progress, however, does not stop there. If you shift
your view southward from the Health Professions Division
to neighboring University Park Plaza, you will see the initial
elements of a hospital complex being constructed. The first
step in this process is an emerging emergency room/urgent
care center that the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA)
is establishing on the south parking lot of University Park
Plaza, which is really the intent of HCA to place its footprint
on this acreage for the purposes of transferring a 54-year-old
hospital named Plantation General to our campus.
In December, many of you heard about the first big step in
this process, which involved the approval by the Agency for
Health Care Administration that Plantation General Hospital
should be given the opportunity under state statute to relocate
to the NSU campus, thus creating a new 200-bed hospital on
this campus that will surround the emergency room that is cur-
rently under construction.
Thanks to these exciting developments, we are now
looking at the elements of not only research, but also at the
components of knowledge and compatibility of this knowledge
with the new methods of caring for a person’s health. From a
health care perspective, this relates to the palliation of pain,
the experience of elongating someone’s life, and providing
patients with a sense of better health, which in the long term
means saving lives.
Ultimately, what are we really looking at now when we
discuss Nova Southeastern University? First and foremost,
we see the goals of becoming a preeminent institution based
on the knowledge and capabilities our graduates possess.
Of course, we want our faculty members and our academic
infrastructure to be recognized as exceptional as well. The
primary goal, however, is to seed this knowledge in the
minds of our graduates who received their education at an
institution that now has a very significant research compo-
nent and a very significant research medical hospital looming
on the horizon.
We have become an outstanding university that provides
quality education, comprehensive health care, and cutting-
edge research discoveries, which, when viewed in their total-
ity, add up to a better humanity.
HPD
Chancellor’s
Communiqué
By Frederick Lippman, R.Ph., Ed.D.
