PART 2 Bryan Slinker

Kerry and Tom were already set to come up, so I joined the meeting. They’d approached us in part because we already knew how to do this. We had a long-standing program that began with Idaho in the mid-1970s, and then a couple of years later, we added Oregon, so we had the WOI program, Washington, Oregon, Idaho.

We started talking about general principles and goals for the program. Ken White and Noelle Cockett began to outline how they could garner support from within the university and the state, and they were quite confident that university support would translate to legislative support. They also had the support of the state veterinarian, the Utah Veterinary Medical Association, and the ag industries in the state. And just a few years before Tom and Kerry approached us, Oregon State did what Utah State's doing now and garnered support for an independent four-year school, so it was a good time for us to think about reinstituting a larger regional program. And it just went from there.

I wasn’t unfamiliar with the legislative process, and Ken was very comfortable with it. I obviously had no connections, but we decided, I think correctly, that Ken and I would make a better case showing that we really could work together. There were meetings with key committees and chairpersons in their offices, and Ken and I jointly testified before different committees that had a hand in education or budget in the state of Utah. We each had our own part to play. I’d answer when I had the obvious answer from the Washington State perspective, and Ken and I would riff off each other. It was the usual process, just me tagging along with Ken or occasionally Noelle, as they did the things you would do to lobby for state support for such a program.

I don't know that we would have known to approach Utah on our own, but as soon as they did, we ran with it. And as we got to thinking about how Utah was playing out, we thought it might make sense to include Montana in the mix. We approached them and talked to Utah about it too, because it created a larger program, and everybody had to succeed in it. And it all worked out.

I think there were multiple reasons for that, including the effort from our universities and the support they were able to garner from the states. But it also helped that we had experienced doing this. I was actually a student from Idaho who went to Washington State University's vet school in the original version of the WOI program. We have a long history of working well in in these kinds of partnerships and managing curriculum so that everything fits together.

The other thing that had happened in the years before Tom and Kerry approached us was that I’d been involved in WWAMI, known as “Wammie.” That's Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho, and it’s a multi-state medical education program at the University of Washington that also includes WSU. They had a long history predating any of our veterinary programs, and they knew how to make a distributed program succeed. We learned a lot about how they did examinations and handled faculty development, and that gave us a wealth of knowledge. We were able to combine that with our own history of education in veterinary medicine and melded those experiences with the goals of Utah and ultimately Montana in how we structured our programming.