A Permanent Home For Life West
by Gerald
Clum, DC
My thanks and best wishes to Dr. Harrison for the opportunity to bring
the readers of American Journal of Clinical Chiropractic up to date with
some of the developments at Life West and in the profession at large.
About twenty years ago, I met Don Harrison and Dan Murphy for lunch in
the San Jose, California area. It was my first opportunity to meet Don
and to become acquainted with his interests and passions in
chiropractic. From that initial meeting came the first recognition of
Chiropractic Biophysics for continuing education purposes and this was
followed by the development of the first undergraduate Chiropractic
Biophysics course offering in chiropractic education. It has been an
amazing twenty years for Don and the Biophysics community as well as for
Life Chiropractic College West. Don has made the move back to Wyoming
and maybe the move to close the loop, the move back to the Bay Area,
will follow!
Over the past twenty years, Life West has grown from the smallest of the
chiropractic colleges in the country to the largest chiropractic
institution or program in the Western United States. Through those
years, we have seen the College evolve and grow organizationally and in
influence throughout the profession. Today some 2,800 Life West alumni
dot the globe and have become a part of the explosion of the
chiropractic profession over the past thirty years.
In more recent times, the big news at Life West has been the acquisition
and development of a permanent home for the College. While we haven’t
been nomadic as an institution, we have moved around a bit, especially
our clinical facilities. Since 1981, the College has enjoyed the use of
four different clinical facilities. Each had its own qualities and
characteristics and each had its own weaknesses. Our instructional
facilities expanded from our main campus location in San Lorenzo to
include another satellite campus in Hayward. But those days are behind
us and we now occupy a state of the art 210,000 square foot complex in
Hayward, California that has become the combined administrative,
instructional and clinical home of the College.
For anyone who has built an office or a home, you can begin to get a
glimpse of what building a campus is like. After years of planning, we
embarked on the development of what we refer to as “the campus for the
new millennium”. The magnitude of this project is what has made it
unique. We are not talking about a building, or a renovation of a
portion of a campus; we are talking about an entire campus—admissions to
alumni and back again!
I won’t bore you with the blow-by-blow of the process but will give you
an idea of the end result. Imagine a classroom environment with natural
lighting in every lecture facility, with integrated instructional
delivery systems including computer projection, digital slide
projection, VCR, DVD and “Elmo” style overhead capacity. Now imagine
every classroom being linked by audio and video. Then let’s think about
the special need student; someone who is hearing impaired for example.
In each lecture facility there is FM broadcast capacity, so all the
student needs to do is drop by the Learning Resources Center, pick up a
receiver (about the size of a Walkman) and crank up the volume as high
as necessary!
That is the instructor’s side of the podium; how about the student’s
side of the deal! Well, imagine custom designed seating with a hinged
back feature that has been engineered for long-term seating. How about a
desktop surface offering over 30 inches of personal workspace that
offers power and data access at the tabletop! A long way from heavily
engraved half-tablet arm wooden seating many of us knew back in our
chiropractic college days.
That’s the stage and the setting but the show is what really counts.
Let’s factor into this equation faculty like Jim Hawkins or Sue Ray or
Dan Murphy or Malik Slosberg. Then let’s look at courses designed around
the skills that someone like Bill Ruch or Greg Plaugher brings to the
table. The bottom line is an educational opportunity that is
unparalleled in chiropractic education! That is the opportunity
available at Life Chiropractic College West.
Challenges for the Future
Chiropractic education is at a crossroads in the United States. The
technology of education has advanced at warp speed; information
availability has exploded and delivery options have expanded
tremendously. But in many ways, chiropractic colleges cannot make the
most of these opportunities. Chiropractic educational innovation is
constrained on many fronts but most noticeably on the chiropractic board
aspect of the discussion.
Boards of examiners remain steadfast in their dedication to the “butts
in the seats” approach to education. In this model, a given number of
hours spent in a classroom equates to knowledge and understanding. In
reality, what those hours equate to is an inefficient instructional
format that saps joy and enthusiasm from the hearts and souls of faculty
and students while someone racks up hours for the record. Self-directed
learning is out of the question, case study methods are questionable,
and practical real world models of learning are not even considered
under the status quo of the state board consciousness. As an example, in
California, students must spend prescribed hours on the study of
syphilis but not a word needs to be said about HIV or AIDS.
Chiropractic education needs to be allowed to be about the practice of
developing and implementing the most creative and innovative structures
for the education and training of tomorrow’s chiropractors and not be
worried about the trade school mentality holdover of “X” hours of this
subject and “Y” hours of that subject. Think about these matters for
just a moment. Consider how your education and your career would have
been affected if in your second or third quarter you spent one month
full-time in three different chiropractic offices. Consider how much
more effective you could be with your time if more than one
instructional model was available to you. We could take the competency
base of tomorrow’s chiropractors through the roof if the administrative,
regulatory and legislative shackles were removed.
Today’s chiropractic students have been educated in a flexible
environment more or less from the time they left elementary school. But
when they enter chiropractic college, after a minimum of three years of
undergraduate study, they are confronted with arcane and unprecedented
institutional attendance requirements (remember, counting the “butts in
the seats”), curricular models that address one type of learner, and a
host of educationally unfounded but regulatorally imposed mandates. We
deserve a better opportunity—as institutions and as a profession.
What Can You Do to Help?
Visit as many chiropractic institutions and programs as you can. Make it
a point to become more familiar with chiropractic education in the 21st
century. Offer input to the chiropractic institutions and programs with
which you align yourself. Make your thoughts known in a positive,
constructive and supportive fashion—they get more attention that way!
Inquire of your state as to its requirements for chiropractic education,
ask to be placed on the mailing lists for any board matters related to
chiropractic education, and be ready to offer input when you have the
chance. If the opportunity comes up for you to be appointed to a board
of examiners, take advantage of it.
Feel free to call on the institutions and programs with which you see
yourself aligned, get the thinking of the administrators on education
related questions that are coming forward. Think about those questions
and ask yourself what purpose and whose agenda do they serve. A
political response to an educational need is fundamentally flawed, as is
an educational response to a political need—make sure they don’t cross
over.
In Conclusion
At Life West, we are as bullish as ever about the future of the
chiropractic profession. We are even more excited about the
opportunities for instructional effectiveness that lie before us. We
need to be given the latitude to seize those opportunities without each
state board second guessing educators and clinicians as to the fine
print of the process. These things can come to pass through the
involvement of people on state boards who make up the rank and file of
the profession as opposed to those who represent a continuing political
solution for non-political problems. Call on us for help, counsel and
guidance.
Finally, come visit us in California! We are 18 miles from San Francisco
International Airport and 22 miles from Union Square in the heart of the
City. Monterey and Carmel are 90 minutes away, Muir Woods is less than
an hour and over and back to Yosemite is a day trip. Location,
facilities, program and people all driven by a spirit of loving service
and a dedication to bringing chiropractic to the world—come visit,
thanks for reading! Gerry
The president of Life Chiropractic College West, Dr. Gerard Clum is
chairman of the Advisory Committee charged with disseminating to the
chiropractic profession the results of the landmark Mercy Center
Conference of the Commission on the Establishment of Guidelines for
Chiropractic Quality Assurance and Standards of Practice. He served on
the original steering committee for the commission and was one of the 35
members who met at the Mercy Conference Center in Bur-lingame,
California, in January to draft suggested practice protocols for doctors
of chiropractic. Dr. Clum is the current president of the Association of
Chiropractic Colleges. He serves on the board of the International
Chiropractors Association (and is a past vice president of the ICA) and
of the Council on Chiropractic Education. This spring he was honored as
the 1992 ICA "Chiropractor of the Year" for his life-long contributions
to the field and for his recent accomplishments in securing national
funding for chiropractic educational loans and developing new
post-graduate programs.