Wednesday PM

This has turned into a yucky day. Rain and impending cold.

I had to attend another Continuing Professional Education program this AM. Three hours on "Professional Ethics". I think that the state has come up with a new requirement to have a minimum of three hours of the annual required total of forty hours be on ethical conduct. This is all Enron fallout. The profession needs to show reform and this educational update requirement gives them something to report to the state and federal governing bodies.

I guess that the concept is okay, but this program was a complete waste of my time. The Yahoo who was the instructor may or may not have been involved with the development of the course workbook. The workbook led you through interactive stuff that you might have done in junior high school. Not as a 57 year old with 30+ years in the business.

I read the papers, did a couple 0f crosswords and chatted up other dis-interested parties in the back row. Fortunately, the guy didn't try to draw me into any of the discussions. It would not have been pretty.

I may not make it over to the Augie game. It doesn't start until 7:30, and that gets way to close to my bedtime.

The U of Iowa is having a difficult time with the search for a new President. The search committee recently declined to offer the job to any of the four finalists, and the relations between the faculty and the Board of Regents (which governs all of Iowa's state universities) got so bad that Governor Vilsack delayed some of his own political stuff to have a closed door session with some of the players last weekend. The paper today says that the situation has cooled some, but no one has any information on a solution.

The interesting point raised in the DM Register today was the relationship of Wellmark (a big Iowa health insurer) and it's influence through the interconnected ties of the Board of Regents and it's own Board of Directors. Lots of crossover, and Wellmark paid the U Hospitals a couple hundo mil last year. Like everything else in the world, you need to follow the money.

The position of President of Iowa has been a stepping-stone in the last fifteen years to some pretty attractive presidencies at higher profile places like Michigan, Cornell and Dartmouth. I guess that that speaks well of Iowa on the one hand, but why are they leaving? Is it just the money?

There was also an article in today's Register about the Des Moines Area Community College's dental hygienist's program. They have like a two or three year wait to get into the program, and then they have graduates who can't find a job. The dentists whom I know have mixed feelings about the hygienists. The hygienists often want to work limited hours, at a high rate and there tend to be plenty of them around. I don't think that we have a shortage of dentists around here, and my guess is that staffing is not that much of a problem. I guess I can see why there may not be that many new jobs developing each year.

Everyone is crying to find nurses. And they're laying off teachers at the end of each fiscal year around here. I guess it pays to figure out a profession that has some shortages on the employment side before setting a course.

How can we get rid of a few lawyers?

Have a great evening.

Be careful out there.