The College of Veterinary Medicine, North Carolina State University: A Personal Perspective of Its Founding

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Chapter vii

Coming of Age, 1986–1989

Our Mountain Becomes a Mesa

“All experience is an arch, to build upon.” - Henry Brooks Adams

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By the summer of 1986, we had graduated our second class of veterinarians and selected
the fourth class with seventy-two students, the Class of 1990.76 Our greatest and longest lasting problem was the shortage of space—a shortage that had surfaced within a few months of
occupying the new building. We could not expand the program without additional space, and
I thought about the problem constantly.
Several times in recorded history seemingly impossible problems have been solved when
some person, or a small group of persons, chose unusual paths to reach solutions. Their peers
who repeatedly failed may have been more intelligent, more experienced, and maybe even
better educated, but they did not stand back and take a fresh overview of an old problem, an
old system, or a well-established body of knowledge. Maybe that is what the founders of our
country did in developing the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Obviously, they thought
“outside of the box.” I could not count on that happening to us, but I hoped that a new thought
or idea would lead us around the obstacles we faced. I believed, as I do now, that the potential
for a new way always exists.
I wished that I could free my thought processes from tradition and break into a different
mode, or that I could convince myself that we had already done so. When I was in groups like
the AAVMC deans, I frequently felt “different” from the group consensus on issues. An issue
of importance to the others was often less important to me by several orders of magnitude or

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