A narrative record drawn from the College’s archival sources
President-Elect, AOCOO-HNS
Version 11.2 | October 2026
The Board adopted the Institutional Memory Project on 10 August 2026. This edition is part of that project.
Current version available to members pending Board consideration of public posting.
I started this project because the College's own story was harder to find than it should have been. What existed was scattered and dated: a history our Historian wrote years ago, a short account on the College website, old board minutes, files sitting in inboxes, and an archive left with a former manager. Much of it was one handoff away from being lost. I did not want it lost, so I set out to gather what survived and keep it in one place, and to keep it current.
This volume is where that has reached so far. It is a foundation to build on, not a finished account. The Board adopted the Institutional Memory Project on 10 August 2026. This edition is part of that project. The early years are reconstructed from the documents that remain; the recent years are still being filled in; and any chapter here can be deepened as more of the record comes to light. I used current tools, including AI, to help assemble and cross-check it, but the authority is always the documents, and the people who lived this history, not the tools.
The College's Historian, Wayne F. Bizer, DO, wrote the history the middle decades rest on. I am grateful for it, and his own section follows.
Much of what follows was reconstructed from minutes, reports, and correspondence. Those sources are precise about decisions and almost silent about everything else: the conversations in hallways, the reasons behind a vote, the people whose work never reached a motion. That is where you can help. If you have papers, photographs, programs, newsletters, or correspondence tucked away, or a recollection of an event described in these pages, or a story about a colleague who deserves to be remembered, I would be grateful to hear it.
Corrections are as welcome as additions. Where the record was thin or inconsistent, I have said so rather than guessed, and some names, dates, and spellings remain uncertain. If you can settle one of them, please do.
Please write to me at yuliba@gmail.com. Contributions of any size will be credited in the edition that follows.
Julia Agapov, DO, MD, FAOCO
President-Elect, AOCOO-HNS
This is an organizational-behavior history of the American Osteopathic Colleges of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (AOCOO-HNS) and its predecessor organizations. It asks how the organization actually functioned over time, what it prioritized, what it finished, and where its momentum stalled, rather than cataloguing its documents.
On the dates. The organization dates from 1908, when the American Osteopathic Association formally organized its EENT Section; 1916, 1944 and 1995 mark later institutional milestones. Being a history of the organization rather than of the specialty, this volume dates itself from that founding. It opens, though, with the years that came before: organized osteopathic eye-ear-nose-and-throat activity is documented from 1900, when specialists first presented a program at the Association’s annual convention, and those origins are set out as background to the founding. The reconstructed chapters close in 2018, and the current era is carried forward through 2026 in Part IV; the record will be extended as more is compiled. The years 1936 to 1938 have no chapter of their own; they fall within the thin evidentiary stretch of the middle decades, not through oversight.
Sources and method. Each period is reconstructed from the surviving record, and every factual statement is tied to a source, cited by its archive identifier (for example, “[1]” pointing to a file such as -271) in the notes at the end of each chapter. Appendix C explains the citation system and lists the source families. The evidence is uneven across the century, and this history says so plainly rather than papering over the gaps. The modern era (1999-2018) rests on a full run of primary minutes: Board of Governors, Executive & Finance Committee, Foundation, and committees. The founding era (roughly 1900-1944) rests on primary documents preserved by the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine. The middle decades rest chiefly on the history written by the College’s own Historian.
How this edition is made. This history is drawn from a growing, structured collection of the organization’s records: board and committee minutes, meeting programs, newsletters, leadership rosters, correspondence, photographs, and recorded recollections. Software tools, including AI, are used to help read and index that collection, cross-reference it, find gaps and inconsistencies, and reassemble the narrative as the record expands. The tools assist the work; they are not its authority. Every statement rests on a documentary source or a clearly identified recollection. The Board adopted the Institutional Memory Project on 10 August 2026. This edition is part of that project.
On living memory. The next phase of the project is to capture living institutional memory while former leaders and members who took part in earlier periods are still able to share it. Recollection is recorded as recollection, kept distinct from the documentary record, and checked against documents wherever that is possible.
A note on the principal source. The history written by Wayne F. Bizer, DO, the College Historian, is the principal source for the years between 1944 and 1998. It is cited throughout as the work of its author, not absorbed into this text. Its origin, his method, and his own account are set out in the dedicated section that follows.
A note on the Museum materials. The founding-era chapters draw on scanned documents held by the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri: founders’ histories, board reports, correspondence, a 1928 founding plan, a 1942 board booklet, and a first-hand account of the 1944 amalgamation. These are genuine primary documents, but they were read here from digitized transcriptions rather than the original pages. Exact names, dates, and quotations from this era should therefore be treated as provisional until checked against the original scans, and known inconsistencies are flagged in the text rather than silently resolved.
On judging an earlier era. Dr. Bizer opens his history with a caution this volume adopts. The pioneers of these specialties practiced in an age without antibiotics, modern anesthesia, or contemporary imaging, in a profession that was itself treated as a cult by much of organized medicine. Their treatments and claims must be read against what was available to them, and, as he reminds his reader, the physicians of the next century will judge today’s medicine in the same way. Where this history records that an early claim lacked scientific support, it does so because the founders themselves said as much, and often more bluntly.
A note on structure. For most of its life the organization was a federation, not a single body. Keeping the constituent Colleges, the Foundation, and the later management arrangements distinct is essential; the history does so throughout. Where a claim rests on a secondary or compiled source, that reliance is stated, and such sources are attributed and corroborated where possible. The founding and mid-century chapters are grouped by era, reflecting a sparser record; from 1999 onward, where the documentary record is continuous, each year is given its own chapter, so that the people who lived that history can find their own place in it.
A debt to the primary historians. This organization has been unusually well served by members who wrote down what they saw. C. C. Reid, T. J. Ruddy, A. C. Hardy, A. B. Crites, A. A. Martin and C. P. Snyder each recorded events in which they took part, and Dr. Bizer drew on all of them. So does this volume, wherever their own writings survive. The habit lapsed for a long stretch in the middle of the century, and the cost of that lapse is one of the themes of the closing chapter.
A debt to a later steward. The College also owes a particular debt to Donald Morris, DO, who kept Dr. Bizer’s history in circulation, carrying it forward with his own annotations in The Scope through years when no one else was recording the College’s story, and who in 2026 provided from his own files a substantial archive of minutes, programs, reports, and correspondence that supplied much of the primary evidence for the modern chapters.
This volume rests, for a substantial stretch of the century, on the work of one man. It is worth setting out what that work is, and how it came to exist. What follows is drawn entirely from the document itself.
The lecture, given twice. Dr. Bizer delivered the history twice, each time as the A. B. Crites Memorial Lecture. The first was on April 14, 1994, at the seventy-seventh Annual Clinical Assembly in Orlando, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1944 amalgamation; the typescript survives (-341). He gave it again, expanded, on May 2, 2002, at the eighty-sixth Annual Clinical Assembly in La Jolla, California, “A History of the American Osteopathic Colleges of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery,” the fuller version that is the principal source for the middle decades. The assembly ordinals follow the meeting programs, which give the seventy-seventh for 1994 and the eighty-sixth for 2002; the base year of the series is not firmly fixed, and the two counts differ by one. In 2013 the Board retired that lecture’s name, recording that the fund was depleted and that “many of our current members do not know who A. B. Crites was.” Crites had been treasurer of the certifying board, an examiner at the 1944 amalgamation, and one of the primary historians on whom Dr. Bizer drew. The lecture that preserved the College’s history was itself among the things the College forgot.
How it began. In the summer of 1993 a housecleaning project in the basement storage area of the College office in Dayton, Ohio turned up what Dr. Bizer called “a small treasure of archival information.” The box contained minutes and newsletters, programs from annual meetings, news clippings and photographs, official documents and other memorabilia, and a copy of the Society’s old journal. It was boxed up and sent to him to evaluate for its historical significance. “This presentation,” he wrote, “is the result of that housecleaning.”
How he worked. To the Dayton materials he added the rare-book rooms of three osteopathic colleges, at Chicago, Kirksville and Kansas City, where he located and reproduced early journal articles; and conversations with senior leaders who had lived the events, among them Joseph H. Wyatt, Ed Hersh, Charles Schrimpf, Alvin D. Dubin and Ralph Connell. In researching the organization he found earlier historical work by C. C. Reid, T. J. Ruddy, A. C. Hardy, A. B. Crites, A. A. Martin and C. P. Snyder, and wrote that he had “drawn heavily from these early DO historians.”
His method, in his own terms. Dr. Bizer set out a distinction this volume has adopted. A primary historian records events in which he took part; a secondary historian records events described to him by a participant; a tertiary historian writes from the recorded histories of the first two. He placed himself in the third category and thanked the first: “Without their help and the documents that they archived for us, most of this presentation would have been lost forever.” For the years he served on the Board of Governors, however, he is a participant himself, and the reader should know which is which. His citations to the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association are preserved in this text wherever he supplies them.
His purpose. He dedicated the work “to the thousands of Osteopathic Physicians who have come before us and who have given so much of themselves to advancing our profession through their tireless study, unending professional accomplishments, and boundless dedication to teaching,” and hoped it would “serve as an endless monument to the memory of those who made Osteopathic Medicine … the great professions that they are today.” That is a different purpose from the one this volume serves, and it is not a lesser one. A reader who wants the physicians’ story told as heritage, rather than as record, should go to his work directly.
His memoir. In 2023 Dr. Bizer published a memoir, The One-Armed Soldier. Much of it is personal, but it also carries many of the College’s own stories, the mentors, the colleagues, and the losses that never reach a set of minutes. Where those recollections bear on this history they are drawn on and attributed, and the book is listed in the sources for readers who want the fuller, personal account.
A caution about the text. The manuscript, as it survives, is a working draft. It carries author’s placeholders, occasional inconsistencies, and in one place a question mark where the author could not establish who had held the presidency in 1995. That question has since been resolved: the two-college structure and the 2001 past-presidents list show that both Dr. Bizer and Dr. Sherbin held office that year, each of one of the two Colleges. The instinct behind the question mark, to leave a thing open rather than close it by guessing, is one this volume still follows.
Acknowledgment. This history was first assembled in July 2026 from the College's files, without contact with Dr. Bizer, and nothing here should be read as his endorsement of it. He was reached through the Executive Director in August 2026, is living and retired since 2015, and has been willing to help; he confirmed the account here and supplied his three lecture slide decks (-325, -326, -327), the original manuscript behind his history (-328), and the 2026 correspondence (-329). His review of the chapters covering the years in which he served is now under way, and any correction he offers will be carried in the next version.
Origins
1900-1944
Organized osteopathic eye-ear-nose-and-throat work began not as an institution but as a traveling conversation: a handful of specialists presenting lectures and clinics at the osteopathic profession’s annual conventions. Out of that grew a formal Section within the American Osteopathic Association in 1908, with forty-two charter members, and eight years later a dedicated society of its own. From the outset the field defined itself by two things at once, osteopathic manipulative technique and a determination to be taken seriously as surgeons.
The earliest account comes from one of the founders. T. J. Ruddy of Los Angeles recorded a steady procession of appearances at American Osteopathic Association conventions: Chattanooga in 1900, Milwaukee in 1902 with a paper on “the Relation of Cervical Lesions to Diseases of Ear, Nose, Throat and Eye,” then Denver, Pittsburgh, Kirksville, St. Paul, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago and Kirksville again through 1913.[1] Interest grew until, at the 1914 Philadelphia convention, the Association dismissed its afternoon sessions so that all of its roughly six hundred delegates could attend the program mounted by “a handful of specializing osteopaths.”[1]
The path to a Section ran through the Association itself. In 1907 the AOA adopted a resolution suggesting that educational subsections be organized around specialties and meet at the annual convention; the following year, at the 1908 Kirksville convention, the Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Section held its first meeting. Forty-two people enrolled as charter members and their names were recorded in the Association’s journal. C. C. Reid of Denver, who had issued the call for the meeting, was elected chairman, with W. B. Dobson of St. Louis as secretary.[2] Section programs followed each year, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Kirksville, Philadelphia, and their attendance came to rival the general sessions, reaching as many as three hundred.[1][2] At Detroit in 1912 lantern slides by Ruddy on nose and throat work and by Reid on diseases of the eye proved popular enough to be shown to the whole convention.[2] By the 1913 Kirksville meeting the Section nearly filled the amphitheatre of the American School of Osteopathy, and the first specialists whose practice was devoted exclusively to the field were beginning to appear.[2]
The founders were few and are named repeatedly across the record: C. G. Reid and C. C. Reid, T. J. Ruddy, A. C. Hardy, Leland S. Larimore, W. V. Goodfellow, John Deason, J. D. Edwards.[1][2] Their practice was distinctive, osteopathic manipulation applied to diseases of the eye, ear, nose and throat, but they did not shrink from surgery; from 1902 onward some of them accepted invitations to observe surgical clinics across the United States and Europe and to operate themselves.[1] They were also candid among themselves about the quality of their own literature. Writing in 1914, C. C. Reid judged that at least half of the tonsillectomies performed in the previous decade had been unwarranted by the history and pathology of the cases.[2]
The society, precisely dated. On the evening of July 31, 1916, at the Kansas City convention, a large number of Association members assembled to hear the Section’s program. At its conclusion T. J. Ruddy came forward and moved a resolution: “Believing that the time has come for a special organization in the Osteopathic profession along the lines of eye, ear, nose, and throat work … that we now proceed to organize and be known as The American Osteopathic Society of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology.” Discussion was open and only four or five votes were cast against. C. C. Reid was elected president, Ruddy vice-president, C. L. Draper secretary, J. H. Bailey treasurer and W. V. Goodfellow auditor, with Larimore, Deason, Charles A. Ross and Edwards chairing committees. Dues were fifty cents a year.[2] The Society was to run independently while maintaining its alliance with the Association, to mount a full three-day program before the general convention, to publish its own journal, and, pointedly, to take responsibility for maintaining the AOA Section from year to year rather than competing with it.[2]
A note on a resolved discrepancy. An earlier reading of this history placed the Society’s founding in 1926, on the authority of one founder’s recollection. The detailed account above, together with Dr. Bizer’s four-era chronology, establishes 1916 and leaves no separate body founded in 1926. The “1926” appears to be an error of transcription or memory, and is recorded here as such.[1][2][3]
[1] -268 (T. J. Ruddy, “History of Organized Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology in the Osteopathic Profession, 1900-1921”). [2] -281 and -282 (Wayne F. Bizer, DO, “A History of the AOCOO-HNS,” 2002, and installments 3-4), drawing on C. C. Reid’s contemporaneous accounts in the Journal of the AOA. [3] -273 (C. G. Reid, “History of the International Society of O.&O.L.”, the source of the 1926 date). Museum of Osteopathic Medicine documents read from transcription.
For a dozen years the Society grew steadily: a journal, a rising membership, an annual succession of presidents drawn from across the country. It also policed itself. When members made extravagant claims for manipulative cures of deafness, other members rebuked them in print. And in 1928 the Society turned that instinct into machinery, proposing an examining board that would test candidates and certify specialists, a decision whose consequences reached well beyond these two specialties.
The presidency passed annually and the roster maps the specialty’s geography: Ruddy at Columbus in 1917, John Deason of Chicago at Boston in 1918, Leland S. Larimore of Kansas City at Chicago in 1919, then J. D. Edwards, H. J. Marshall, W. V. Goodfellow (who presided at Los Angeles in 1922), C. C. Taliafero, Jerome E. Watters, Charles M. LaRue, Glen S. Moore, A. C. Hardy and E. C. Brann through 1928.[1] Membership stood at 122 in 1917; some 250 attended the 1919 program at Chicago, whose lectures were printed in the Society's bound journal, a single copy of which survives, recovered from the basement of the College's Dayton office.[1] Dues rose from fifty cents to a dollar in 1918 and to three dollars by 1922.[1] The Society’s journal, the Journal of Osteopathic Ophthalmology, Rhinology and Otolaryngology, appeared several times a year and then bi-monthly, with Ruddy long its editor, Eva Magoon elected editor in 1927 and LaRue in 1928.[1]
Larimore is worth pausing on. Elected fourth president in 1919, Larimore (1884-1979) remained active in the organization’s leadership for some thirty years, served as president of the osteopathic societies of three states, and became the organization’s first executive secretary, the earliest holder of the office that would run through A. A. Martin in the 1960s to Alvin D. Dubin at the century’s end.[1]
The self-policing is documented and blunt. In 1924 W. V. Goodfellow published “Caution in the Prognosis of Deafness,” writing that the profession, “or at least some of its members, have gone off on a tangent, where some of the more sober-minded cannot follow,” and concluding that “whatever permanent progress osteopathy is to make will be made upon a firmer foundation than cheap publicity based upon exaggerated inaccurate statements.”[1] Dr. Bizer, reviewing the same era’s case reports, judges that in the light of modern medicine most of their assertions are without scientific merit, while insisting that their authors “were not charlatans or cultists, but rather were physicians sincerely dedicated to the care of their patients by the only tool available to them.”[2] Both judgments belong in the record, and the second governs how the first should be read.
Formal training did not yet exist. There were no residencies; a physician either paid for a course or attached himself to a practitioner and learned by watching.[1] Courses filled the gap: C. C. Reid ran a two-week session for general practitioners wanting to become EENT specialists and held certificate number one himself, and in 1926 A. C. Hardy advertised a refraction course at Kirksville with the frank promise that it might raise a country practitioner’s income from twelve hundred to two thousand dollars a year.[1][2]
The era's specialty had a name that now sounds strange. J. D. Edwards, the 1920 president, ran a St. Louis practice “limited to osteopathic ophthalmology and otolaryngology” and built on what was then called finger surgery, telling referring physicians that “over 90 per cent of the cases referred to this office during 1924 were materially benefited, if not entirely cured.” The claim reads today as the very overreach Goodfellow had warned against, and it sits in the record beside his warning without being reconciled, which is how the period actually was.
The decision that outlasted everything else. On July 24, 1928 the Society’s ethics committee laid a plan before its board of trustees. It resolved that an examining board be established, of five to eight specialist members elected by the Society, which would receive applicants, test their ability “to recognize the pathology and make a diagnosis as to the needs of the case, surgically and otherwise,” and examine their surgical technique “by actual demonstration of operations on patients.” A code of ethics was to be adopted and observance of it weighed in granting certificates. The resolution was tabled for a year, and adopted at Des Moines in 1929, where Ruddy became the first man elected to a second term as president.[1][3] Rather than an internal housekeeping measure, this was, in Dr. Bizer’s words, “the birth of the concept of certification of credentials by examination in the osteopathic profession.”[1] The instinct had been there from the beginning: the founders’ first response to the question of who counted as a specialist was to raise the barrier rather than lower it.
A connection worth recording. The College archives hold documents of incorporation for the American College of Osteopathic Surgeons, filed in Adair County, Missouri in January 1927. They name John Deason of Chicago as that body’s vice-president and A. C. Hardy of Kirksville as a member of its board of trustees. Both men were then leaders of this Society, and Hardy was its president that same year.[1] The surgeons’ college was therefore not a neighboring institution but partly the work of the same hands, a fact that explains a good deal about the approaches made to it in 1930, in 1939, and again in 2016.
[1] -282 (Bizer, installments 3-4) and -281 (Bizer, 2002); the 1994 lecture typescript -341 independently confirms the 1919 Chicago convention, Larimore as fourth president, ~250 members, and the 1922 Los Angeles meeting. [2] -281. [3] -274 (Plan and Resolution presented to the O.&O.L. board of trustees, June 24, 1928, Kirksville, the Denver copy, which names the body “the American Board of Osteopathic Otolaryngology” where Bizer’s copy gives “the American Osteopathic Board of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology”; the two surviving copies differ, and the dates given for the committee’s action differ by a month). Also -269, -273, and -347 (C. C. Reid, “Evolution and History of the American Osteopathy Society of Ophthalmology and Oto-Laryngology, 1916-1929”). Edwards practice notice -348; Larimore and Watters dates -344, -352.
In the first half of the 1930s the certification machinery became real, and the specialty acquired an unusual shape: four organizations running at once, each serving a different level of training. The advanced society and its examining board set standards that the rest of the osteopathic profession would follow. In the same years the specialists began to argue about their place among osteopathic bodies, and opened the first documented conversation about joining themselves to the surgeons.
The board Ruddy had been asked to assemble met for the first time in Philadelphia in early July 1930 and established a permanent organization, its trustees elected to staggered six-year terms so that one seat turned over each year. Its officers were C. G. Reid as president, Ruddy as vice-president and J. D. Edwards as secretary-treasurer, with A. C. Hardy, Larimore and H. J. Marshall as trustees.[1][2] Two structures emerged in quick succession. On July 5, 1930 the International Osteopathic Society of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology was formed as an “advanced society,” open to members who devoted themselves exclusively to the specialty and had distinguished themselves as teachers and leaders; admission required twenty major case reports and written, oral and practical examinations, and its Fellows were entitled to write F.I.S.O. after their names.[3] On July 28, 1931 the examining board was constituted as the International Board of Osteopathic Ophthalmology and Otorhinolaryngology, made independent of the Society, and soon renamed the American Osteopathic Board of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology.[3] At Seattle that July the board adopted two forms of certificate and granted its first fellowships, dividing the examining among the founders: Ruddy on the eye, Edwards on the ear, C. G. Reid on the nose, Hardy on the throat.[1][2]
For the next fourteen years four bodies existed side by side, and the division of labor was deliberate. The AOA Section remained an educational forum for general practitioners. The American Society served those trained as general practitioners who spent much of their time on EENT work. The International Society was the body of certified specialists who practiced nothing else. The examining board certified admission to it.[3] C. C. Reid, who had been first president of the Section and first president of the American Society, became first president of the International Society as well.[3]
The claim this period has on the profession. Dr. Bizer states the significance plainly: the International Society and its examining board “pioneered in creating standards for the training of specialists, and in determining, by examination and investigation, the qualifications of those desiring recognition as specialists. In so doing, they set the pattern” that the osteopathic profession would follow.[3] Rather than a parochial achievement, this is the organization’s largest documented contribution to osteopathic medicine as a whole. By 1942 the certifying board sat among a dozen such boards under Association supervision, and the model, credential review, written and oral examination, demonstrated operative skill, an ethics requirement, was the one the profession adopted.[4]
By the middle of the decade the organization had found its voice as an advocate, and its difficulties as a neighbor. In his 1934-35 president’s report at Cleveland, Ruddy pressed a resolution urging the Association to move its annual convention out of July and August, when specialists felt bound to stay home for vacationing patients, into early June or late September, and noted that the six-year-old body was now “entitled to a seat and voice in the AOA House of Delegates.”[5] The same report records bitter friction with the older society over which body could claim major surgery, and letters arguing that there were simply too many organizations.[5]
An early sign of a recurring instinct. In March 1930 a special committee, its letter signed by Reid as chairman, was investigating “the feasibility of becoming related to the American College of Osteopathic Surgeons,” with a proposition to be decided at the Dallas meeting.[6] Read alongside the 1927 incorporation papers, this is less an overture to a stranger than a conversation within a shared leadership. Rather than an isolated episode, it is the first documented instance of a question the organization would return to across its life: at moments of felt smallness, whether to align with the larger body of osteopathic surgeons. It surfaced again in 1939, and once more, in a different form, in 2016.
[1] -269 (I.O.E.O. history and 1932 president’s report). [2] -273 (C. G. Reid history). [3] -282 (Bizer, installments 3-4). [4] -275 (A.O.B.O. Booklet of Information, November 1942). [5] -270 (President’s Report, Cleveland, 1934-35). [6] -278 (Reid letter, March 15, 1930); on the 1927 incorporation see -282. [7] -309 (1932 Official Program, Museum of Osteopathic Medicine).
The late 1930s and early 1940s were years of self-examination under outside pressure. The Association signaled that formal certification was becoming a condition of the profession’s standing, and the specialists, few in number, weighed whether to fold themselves into the larger osteopathic College of Surgeons. At the same time the certifying board matured, with a full slate of officers by 1942 and, in 1943, a pointed internal argument about how demanding certification ought to be. The merger did not happen; the standards debate never really ended.
The clearest window into the merger question is a pair of 1939 letters from A. B. Crites of Kansas City to Dr. C. C. Reid. In January, Crites reported that Association officials, meeting in Cincinnati, had made plain that specialist certification was necessary “in order to gain for Osteopathy its proper status in governmental consideration,” and observed that a body of “but twenty odd qualified Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat men” alongside “seventy some Surgeons in the College” made weak argument material; a merger, he urged, would make the College “at once larger” and draw in more qualified members.[1] In February he congratulated Reid on a tentative plan, noting that although it was only implied, the plan meant “the I.S.O. will be no more,” and suggesting the point be stated outright.[2] He added a wary postscript: that “Goodfellow and possibly others” favored abandoning the older society entirely to enter the College of Surgeons, “which is surely carrying matters too far.”[2]
What became of it. The merger into the surgeons’ college was not consummated. Rather, the two osteopathic eye-ear-nose-and-throat bodies would amalgamate with each other five years later, in 1944. The 1939 episode is best read not as a failure but as the second appearance of the organization’s recurring question about the surgeons, a body its own leaders had helped incorporate twelve years earlier, and the second time it drew back.[3]
Meanwhile the certifying board settled into a recognizable institutional form. Its November 1942 Booklet of Information, issued over the signature of secretary C. Paul Snyder of Philadelphia, lists a full executive board: C. G. Reid of Denver as president, holding both DO and MD degrees, Snyder as secretary, A. B. Crites of Kansas City as treasurer, and A. C. Hardy of Kirksville, L. A. Lydic of Dayton and T. J. Ruddy of Los Angeles as members, with a credentials committee of Hardy, Lydic and Snyder. The booklet situates the board among the Association’s dozen specialty boards and traces the specialty’s section to 1907-1908.[4]
If the 1942 booklet shows the board at rest, a memorandum of January 28, 1943 from Ruddy to its members shows it arguing. The advisory board had recommended that all not-yet-certified candidates simply take an oral examination followed by a clinical one; Ruddy dissented, expressing “discontent with what we have inherited as a plan” and pressing for something more rigorous: explicit written standards of fitness rather than vague appeals to “high standards,” a requirement that candidates devote half their time to post-graduate study and research with a certified summary of their training, and a proposed bylaw barring membership after 1943 to anyone without formal post-graduate osteopathic training.[5] The recurring subjects of his certification papers, the twenty-five and fifty-dollar fees and the insistence that written and surgical examinations be held at conventions rather than in the field, recur here and in his undated letters on the same theme.[6]
[1] -279 (Crites to Reid, January 18, 1939). [2] -280 (Crites to Reid, February 11, 1939). [3] -271 (1944 amalgamation account); on the 1927 ACOS incorporation see -282. [4] -275 (A.O.B.O. Booklet of Information, November 1942). [5] -277 (Ruddy memorandum, January 28, 1943). [6] -272, -276 (Ruddy certification letters).
In the autumn of 1944, in Kansas City, the osteopathic eye-ear-nose-and-throat societies became one. Over three days of examinations and late-night sessions a combined constitution was drafted, debated and adopted, and a new College, with a nine-member Board of Governors, was launched in a single afternoon. For the organization whose modern life this history traces, 1944 is the institutional birth.
The groundwork was laid in the summer. From July 13 to 15, 1944, in Chicago, the officers and trustees of the International Society and the older Society met in special session for three days to consider a plan of amalgamation; general plans were outlined and tentatively accepted, and all members of both organizations were invited to attend.[1][2]
The account of what followed comes from C. C. Reid, who was present as a member of the certifying board. The week began with the examinations themselves, held October 9 through 13: A. B. Crites examined candidates on the throat, A. C. Hardy on the ear, L. A. Lydic on the eye, standing in for Ruddy, and C. G. Reid on the nose.[2] Reid was struck by “the high class of the young doctors,” and equally by the labor of the boards of the two societies, who worked “from about seven o’clock in the evening until near midnight” on three consecutive nights to prepare the amalgamation.[2]
The instrument of union was a combined constitution and by-laws, drafted by A. C. Hardy as chairman of the committee and interpreted, point by point, before the assembled societies, with L. A. Seyfried presiding.[2] After amendments it was adopted by the two societies jointly and then by each separately, and, in Reid’s dating, the amalgamation was launched at about half past two on the afternoon of Thursday, October 12, 1944.[2] “There was a moment when we were two,” he wrote, “and the next one when we were one.”[2] The new body took the name the Osteopathic College of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, and it “at once elected nine to constitute the Board of Governors,” who withdrew immediately to begin setting up the machinery of the College.[2]
Those nine are on the record. Elected for one year: C. C. Reid of Denver, L. A. Lydic of Dayton, T. J. Ruddy of Los Angeles. For two years: L. A. Seyfried of Detroit, A. B. Crites of Kansas City, J. E. Leuzinger of Philadelphia. For three years: C. P. Snyder of Philadelphia, A. C. Hardy of Kirksville, R. S. Licklider of Columbus. Snyder was elected the College’s first president, Hardy vice-president and Leland S. Larimore secretary. Membership was divided into Seniors, Juniors and Associates, the last admitted without examination and without a vote; Fellowships were made honorary and carried the designation F.O.C.O. Dues were fifteen, ten and five dollars.[1][3] The new College assumed the educational, research and certification functions of its predecessors and continued to sponsor the Association’s EENT Section, and it chose to publish supplements to the Association’s journal rather than a magazine of its own, with A. G. Walmsley as editor.[1][3]
The through-line. Reid closed by measuring the distance travelled: “When we set up the section of Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat in 1908 we were a zero … There has been an evolution through thirty-six years.”[2] That 1944 College, governed by a Board of Governors, built on examined certification, formed by combining two specialties under one roof, is the direct institutional ancestor of the two-college federation renamed AOCOO-HNS in the 1990s, whose modern record fills the chapters to come.
[1] -281 (Bizer, 2002), citing C. C. Reid in the Journal of the AOA, vol. 44 no. 4 (December 1944) p. 181, the first Board roster at vol. 44 no. 3 p. 153, and A. C. Hardy’s account. [2] -271 (C. C. Reid, “My Impression of the O.&O.L. and I.S.O. Combined Meeting, Kansas City, October 11-14, 1944”). [3] -281.
The Bridge
1944-1998
A note on this part. The half-century between the 1944 amalgamation and the modern minutes is documented chiefly through one source: the history prepared by the College’s own Historian, Wayne F. Bizer, DO, working from an archive box recovered from the Dayton office basement in 1993, from the rare-book rooms of three osteopathic colleges, and from conversations with senior leaders. The chapters that follow rest on his account, cited to him throughout, with his citations to the Association’s journal preserved where he gives them. Two cautions apply. His manuscript is a working draft, and individual dates and figures should be treated as provisional. And for the years he lived through as a Board member and Historian he is a participant rather than a distant researcher, which makes him more valuable and requires the reader to know it.
The new College spent its first fifteen years absorbing two shocks. The first was pharmacological: penicillin and the antibiotics that followed nearly emptied the ear, nose and throat practice, and the College tilted heavily toward ophthalmology. The second was a tragedy. In 1949 a child died during a live surgical demonstration at the annual meeting, and the practice of examining candidates by operating on strangers, which had been central to certification since the beginning, ended permanently. What replaced it is, in altered form, the system still in use.
The College carried forward the functions its predecessors had built: certification through the osteopathic board, fellowships, continuing education, annual scientific assemblies, and sponsorship of the Association’s EENT Section.[1] Its meetings kept their old character. Live surgery had been integral to the annual clinical symposium from the outset, and it would be impossible, Dr. Bizer writes, to count the number of live surgical demonstrations and live certification examinations performed at those meetings.[1]
How the audience saw the work is now documented. A newspaper photograph of one such demonstration, identified for this project by Dr. Bizer, shows a large mirror angled above the operating field to make it visible to the room, with telescopes trained up at the mirror to enlarge the view when the surgery was small.[5]
Then medicine changed under them. Joseph H. Wyatt recalled how the arrival of penicillin and the other antibiotics “nearly made the specialty of ear, nose and throat unnecessary”; mastoid surgery in his own practice fell from about fifty cases a year to none. There was real concern that otolaryngology would die out altogether as the College became roughly three-quarters ophthalmology. The rising interest in facial plastic surgery, Wyatt thought, may have saved the careers of many good ENT men of that day.[1]
Certification in this period was an ordeal by design. Candidates were required to perform live surgery at a local hospital during the annual meeting, observed by a group of examiners, with no advance knowledge of what procedure they would be asked to do or on whom. Wyatt remembered one candidate being told over dinner in Kansas City that he would perform a cataract extraction at nine the following morning, and not finishing his meal.[1]
The year it ended. In 1949 a surgical procedure to “pin back” the ears of an eight-year-old child, demonstrated during the meeting, ended in the child’s death from anesthetic complications. Recollections differ on who was operating: Wyatt remembered Dr. Lyman Lydic of Dayton; Francis Funk, who was in the room, thought it may have been Ralph Licklider, and recalled that the trouble began immediately with the anesthesia and the operation was never actually begun. An excerpt from the November 1950 minutes of the hospital records a $25,000 suit against two osteopathic physicians and the anesthesiologist, settled out of court. The practice of live surgical demonstrations and examinations at annual meetings was, in Dr. Bizer’s phrase, “forever terminated.” Thereafter examining teams visited candidates and observed them operating on their own patients in their own hospitals; that in turn was eventually abandoned in favor of the chart review that satisfies the practical examination today.[1] Rather than a footnote, this is the clearest instance in the whole record of an external shock permanently altering College practice, and the origin of a certification method still in use three-quarters of a century later.
The same year the College began addressing basic-science education directly, launching a home-study course in the basic sciences as related to ophthalmology and to otorhinolaryngology, offered as two separate courses that no subscriber could take concurrently.[1] Ralph Licklider of Columbus, who had been president in 1940, was elected the thirty-fourth president in 1949.[1]
The College's reliance on outside teachers had a fragile side. In 1960, Dr. Bizer records, MD speakers were warned that it was unethical to address the osteopathic assembly, and that year's program collapsed within weeks; the 1960 clinical assembly listed no MD speaker at all. It was an early sign of the professional boundary that the recognition story would spend the next four decades crossing.[6]
[1] -281 (Bizer, 2002), drawing on interviews with Joseph H. Wyatt and Francis Funk and on an excerpt from the November 1950 minutes of Doctors Hospital supplied by its president. [2] -311 (1948 banquet program, Museum of Osteopathic Medicine). [5] -350 (demonstration photograph) and -351 (Bizer's identification of the mirror-and-telescope viewing method); provisionally tied to the era's assemblies. [6] -341 (Bizer 1994 typescript, part D; the 1960 program collapse).
In 1961 the State of California granted osteopathic physicians the MD degree, and the osteopathic profession declared that anyone who accepted it was no longer a member. For this College the arithmetic was brutal: nearly a fifth of its members, including six of its thirty-seven living Fellows, became ineligible in a single year. The organization admitted its California colleagues to that year’s convention as guests without voice or vote, canceled two years of convention plans, and continued. It is the closest precedent in the record for the anxiety that would return with single accreditation half a century later.
The mechanism was straightforward and unforgiving. By act of the state legislature, California DOs would be granted the MD degree, but the certification of osteopathic specialists would not be recognized. Ralph Connell, president as the crisis broke, recorded that most of the College wanted to let the California members remain, but that the Association made this impossible: one could not be an amalgamated MD and remain an Association member, and one could not belong to a specialty college without Association membership.[1]
The losses were counted. A clearing committee chaired by Laurence M. Blake reported on September 20, 1961 that the College had lost six of its thirty-seven living Fellows, four of forty-two diplomates and eighteen of sixty-eight candidates: twenty-eight of one hundred and forty-seven members, nineteen percent.[1] Blake’s own recommendation was procedural restraint, treat the departed as delinquent in fees, defer action, follow the rules of evidence and exclude hearsay, and he closed with a line worth preserving: “Ours is the oldest of the specialty groups. This may prove the opportunity for exhibiting leadership by masterful parliamentary strategy.”[1]
The Association was less accommodating. In a letter of September 11, 1961 to A. A. Martin, executive secretary of the College, the Association’s executive director wrote that if the California DO-MDs were permitted to attend as guests “they should not be given voice nor vote in the business meetings of the college,” and enclosed a list of those now ineligible, among them George Blasdel, E. W. Davidson, George DuPont and Clyde Gillett, men who appear elsewhere in this history as officers, authors and founders of a corneal-transplant charity.[1] The College newsletter told members that “our numbers have decreased, but there is no reason for despair,” that the Board of Governors had protected the College by advance planning, that it remained financially sound, and that it “will emerge from this crisis stronger than it has ever been.”[1]
The Board met at length in Miami and made the practical decisions: the 1963 and 1964 convention plans were canceled and the College joined the Association’s combined convention from 1963.[1] Dwight Streitenberger of Kansas City, who had trained under A. B. Crites, was elected the forty-sixth president at the first convention after the amalgamation; John S. Sheets of Philadelphia followed in 1962, in what Dr. Bizer describes simply as recovery from the California problem.[1]
Why this chapter matters to the modern reader. A letter circulated to California colleagues at the time, by the chairman of the profession’s advisory board for specialists, put the objection in terms that would be recognizable to anyone reading the College’s minutes in 2015: certification, he wrote, “is a recorded standardization and proof that the expert is qualified,” and the merger agreement contained no provision for specialists, “only honeyed words.” The osteopathic specialist and his training programs, he feared, were “to go by the board.”[1] Rather than draw the parallel too tightly, the mechanisms of 1961 and of single accreditation differ substantially, it is enough to note that the existential question is the same one, and that in 1961 the organization lost a fifth of its members to it and carried on.
[1] -281 (Bizer, 2002), quoting the clearing-committee report of September 20, 1961, the AOA executive director’s letter of September 11, 1961 to A. A. Martin, College newsletters of 1961, and the advisory-board chairman’s open letter.
These are the quietest years in the record and, in one respect, the most productive. The residency programs founded in Detroit in the 1960s matured into a national training base; the presidency rotated through a generation of physicians who would still be shaping the College decades later; and a fund and an award were established in the name of a founder of that training system. Among the presidents of this period is Alvin D. Dubin, who took the chair in 1980 and would return to the organization’s service as its executive for most of the following two decades.
The training story belongs to Detroit. In 1961 Joseph H. Wyatt had begun what his 2008 biography records as the first osteopathic ophthalmology-only residency, at Detroit Osteopathic Hospital; Patrick G. Murray joined him the following year, and the program’s first resident was Jesse Cardellio. In the early 1980s Murray organized a residency consortium across several hospitals in the Detroit area, an arrangement that answered the chronic scarcity of osteopathic training positions. By the century’s end roughly a hundred osteopathic ophthalmologists had come through that lineage, and the consortium was directed by Michael Rubin, who would be the College’s combined president in 1999.[1][2]
The presidency in these years moved annually and the roster is a directory of the College’s later leadership: Harley Galusha of Tulsa in 1973, then Harold D. Groves, Leonard D. Lewis, Charles F. Libell, Harold M. Ward, Patrick G. Murray in 1978, Robert C. Belf, and in 1980 Alvin D. Dubin. Brian D. Borland, Charles F. Schrimpf, Everett E. Wilson and Stanford L. Kunkle followed. In 1985 the office went to Jesse Cardellio, Wyatt’s first resident of 1961, and in 1986 to Henry Sonenshein.[2]
Two of these names recur in the College’s honors. A gift of $50,000 from a vision-technology company established the Patrick G. Murray, DO Fund, and Edward Murray was later appointed to head its awards program.[2] The certifying board, meanwhile, was growing: under its chairman from 1975 its membership expanded from nine, and by 1985 it had issued some 302 certificates.[2]
The period also holds a marker in the longer recognition story. In September 1978 an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission wrote to the AOA to withdraw mailing language that had implied osteopathic physicians were not qualified ophthalmologists, and the College reprinted the apology for its members that winter. The following June, on the merger of the two allopathic academies, DOs gained full membership in the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the step that Sanford Moretsky's council seat would formalize a decade later.[4]
What the quiet years contain. It is tempting to pass over a period whose minutes have not survived in quantity. Rather, the training arithmetic is the point. A specialty that in 1913 had almost no physicians practising it exclusively, and that in 1961 lost a fifth of its members in a single legislative stroke, had by the mid-1980s certified three hundred specialists and built a multi-hospital consortium to train more. The College’s later anxieties about membership and relevance are better understood against that achievement.
[1] -266 (AAO EyeNet, “A Story of Pioneers,” 2008). [2] -281 (Bizer, 2002), including his presidential roster and extracts from Board of Governors minutes. [3] -349 (Wyatt biography, 2008; the 1961 residency). [4] -345 (1978 FTC apology, reprinted in the College newsletter, Winter 1979); newsletter record also -343, -344, -346.
The federation this history examines was not created in a single act. Between 1988 and 1995 the Board of Governors discussed a new name, voted to incorporate, renamed the organization, gained voting seats on the allopathic academies’ councils, and finally agreed in concept to divide itself into two colleges linked by a joint board. The motive was largely external: formal standing with the allopathic academies required a corporate form the College did not have. Along the way, in 1994, the Board found its own bylaws contradictory and commissioned the first formal job description for its executive director.
The proximate cause was the relationship with the allopathic academies. In September 1988 the Board discussed a name change to indicate two different organizations, prompted by Sanford L. Moretsky and the American Academy of Ophthalmology; John R. Alway was at the same time developing relations with the otolaryngology academy and had secured four-month resident rotations at the Cleveland Clinic.[1] In April 1989 the Board moved and passed that the organization should incorporate, “in order to protect the leadership in matters of organizational liability and so conform with the guidelines of the American Academy of Ophthalmology to cement a formalized relationship.” Moretsky reported that the academy’s leadership was receptive, that College residents could take its home-study course, and that the College held two seats on the council of the academy of that period (not the modern American Academy of Ophthalmology) with floor privileges but no vote. The reason for incorporating was stated without ornament: “We will gain voting privilege when we become incorporated.”[1]
The renaming followed at the same meeting: it was moved and passed to rename the organization AOCOO-HNS, with separate letterhead for each division. By September 1989 the otolaryngology side had become a voting member of its own academy’s council.[1] The internal consequences were taken up in parallel. Henry Sonenshein called for term limits and new blood, noting that of the fifteen members of the Board only three were neither officers nor past presidents; in 1990 the composition was examined again, seven past presidents, four current officers, four ordinary members, and the Board accepted a schedule prepared by Wayne Bizer for the orderly retirement of past presidents, running from 1991 to 1995.[1]
The decisive meeting was in April 1994. The Board recorded that the College’s constitution, by-laws and rules and regulations were “severely out of date and often in conflict with each other,” and appointed Alvin D. Dubin, DO, its executive director, to rewrite and submit new documents. At the same meeting it appointed Donald Dushay, DO to prepare a contract for Dr. Dubin “that will completely spell out the duties, expectations, and reimbursement,” which Dr. Bizer notes would mark the first formal job description of the executive director in the modern era. And it agreed in concept to the structure that defines the modern organization: separation of the College into an eye college and an ENT college, each with its own officers and board of governors, “linked together by a common Joint Board of Governors” concerned with conventions, finance and shared activities, each college authorized to run its own business.[1]
The presidency in these years ran through Lawrence C. Hazen (1988), Norman A. Simpson of Trenton (1989, the seventy-fourth), Theodore P. Mauer of Philadelphia (1990), Moretsky of Phoenix (1991), Alway of Dayton (1992), Oran G. Anderson of Warren (1993) and Richard J. Davies (1994). The 1995-96 presidency is now resolved. In the two-college era each College elected its own president, and the 2001 past-presidents list (-331) records both for 1995: Wayne F. Bizer, DO led the ophthalmology College and Michael Sherbin, DO the otolaryngology College. That two-college structure explains Dr. Bizer’s own “Sherbin, Bizer??” query.[1]
In 1995 the organization took the name and shape it carried into the modern record: the American Osteopathic Colleges of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, two constituent Colleges under one corporate umbrella, with a Board of Governors composed of the Colleges’ own officers, fiscal responsibility held at the umbrella level, and administrative autonomy left to each College.[2][3]
The recognition arc, in the representative's own account. Two things happened in 1994 beyond the bylaws overhaul. In April, at the seventy-seventh Annual Clinical Assembly in Orlando, Bizer delivered the College's history as the A. B. Crites Memorial Lecture, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1944 founding; it was the first of his two deliveries, the later one in 2002, and the source from which much of this history descends.[6] And the eye College elected him its representative to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, seating him on the Academy's Physician Advisory Council, the body that vetted proposals before they reached the membership. Moretsky had won the first voting DO seat on that council in 1989; the story now had a DO in the room when it mattered.[5]
His moment, by his account, came in 1997. The Academy, long in contest with optometry, proposed rebranding its members as “Eye-MDs” on cards, stationery and office doors. Osteopathic members were full and equal members but were not MDs, and were forbidden by the laws of all fifty states from misrepresenting their degree. Given no warning before the meeting, Bizer chose not to fight the branding but to name its cost: “we are full and equal members of this organization, and the laws of all 50 states and our national medical organizations forbid misrepresentation of our degrees. By enacting the ‘Eye-MD’ re-branding, you single us out and abridge our lawful membership.” He recalled his residency chief, Joseph Wyatt, who in an earlier era had entered the Academy's meetings on a book salesman's borrowed badge, and his own progress from a badge marked “Guest” to one marked “Member.”[7] He closed by declining to oppose the rebrand while refusing ever to use the term, and recalled a standing ovation. He was elected deputy section leader of the council's subspecialty portion for 1998 and 1999, and a year or two later the Academy recognized osteopathic certification as equivalent, opening Fellow status to qualified DO ophthalmologists. Dr. Donald Morris recalls that the Academy maintained a separate osteopathic-fellow category for many years and then, in recent years, ended the distinction quietly, so that all Fellows now hold the same status; the timing awaits documentary confirmation. Bizer frames the whole passage in five stages, excluded, then guests, then members, then certification recognized, then Fellow, and claims only a small part in the last. This is his recollection, recorded as such; the dates await documentary confirmation, and the Fellow-status year in particular is his estimate.[5]
A quieter judgment sits inside the story. Bizer believed the Eye-MD branding faded less from any speech than from referral economics: optometrists, who send ophthalmologists many of their patients, would read “Eye-MD” on a door as a barrier and send those patients elsewhere. The term is rarely seen today.[5]
Two things this chapter settles. First, the 1995 structure was the culmination of a seven-year process rather than a single decision, and its driving purpose was external recognition: a vote on the allopathic academies’ councils, obtainable only by a body properly incorporated. Second, the bylaws problem is older than it appears. Found contradictory in 1994 and rewritten then, the governing documents were rewritten again in 2017, and in 2026 a President-Elect reading the current draft identified some twenty-eight internal inconsistencies. Rather than a lapse belonging to any administration, it is a recurring condition of an organization whose governing documents are revised by whoever is available to revise them.
[1] -281 (Bizer, 2002), quoting Board of Governors minutes of April 17 and 19 and September 10, 1988; April 9 and September 9, 1989; April and September 1990; April 14, 1991; and April 1994. [2] -182 (AOCOO-HNS published history; secondary). [3] -266 (AAO EyeNet, 2008; secondary). [4] -324 (BOG/EFC motions, 1996-2000). [5] -354 (Bizer oral history, 2026, drawn from his 2023 memoir -353): the AAO Physician Advisory Council, the 1997 Eye-MD episode, and the recognition of DO certification for Fellow status; recollection, dates to verify. [6] -341 (1994 A. B. Crites Memorial Lecture typescript, Orlando; Bizer's first history delivery). [7] -349 (Wyatt biography; the borrowed-badge account).
The Modern Record
1999-2018
A note on this part. From 1999 the record becomes continuous, and the history changes character with it. Each year from here forward has its own chapter, reconstructed from the minutes of the Board of Governors, the two constituent Colleges, the Executive & Finance Committee, the Foundation, and their committees. Because these are the years within living memory, people are named as the record names them, for the offices they held, the motions they moved, and the work they did.
Nineteen ninety-nine set in motion the decision that would shape the organization for the next two decades: to bring its own administration in-house. Dr. Dubin was not new to the organization’s service, he had been its president in 1980 and its executive director since at least 1994, but from 1999 he would run it from the College’s own office rather than alongside an outside vendor. In September the combined Board of Governors voted not to renew its outside management vendor and to move the College into its own office, confirming Alvin D. Dubin as Executive Vice President at a salary of $50,000. The year also shows the federation working exactly as designed, with two Colleges, a combined Board, and a Charitable Fund each meeting and electing in parallel. Long-range planning and an awards database were named as priorities; both would recur, unfinished, for years to come.
The year opened with housekeeping that, in hindsight, reads as an organization trying to write itself down. At the Executive & Finance Committee meeting of February 6, the leadership renamed the “Procedural Manual” the “Organizational Manual” and agreed to prepare a leadership handbook for incoming presidents; it funded a second phase of website development at $4,200 through the vendor DeepInteractive, stood up a long-range strategic-planning ad hoc committee, took up recruitment of non-member DOs with yearly exit letters, and confronted a bylaws question about term limits for members-at-large.[1]
By the April committee meeting the tone had turned financial. Investments were being transferred to Legg Mason under Dr. Dubin’s oversight, and the committee recorded the pressure plainly, expenses were rising while “incomes are not increasing at the same rate”, setting cost-reduction targets across the Directory, the Newsletter, the Journal, and Annual Clinical Assembly speakers. The same meeting noted overtures toward a closer relationship with the American College of Osteopathic Surgeons and a liaison with the osteopathic certifying board.[2]
The two Colleges held their annual boards on April 20. The College of Ophthalmology seated its slate under Michael Rubin, approved a $3,000 reception with the American Academy of Ophthalmology, weighed the “EyeMD” recognition question, and gave a vote of confidence to international residency-rotation outreach.[3] The College of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, under W. Hadley Hoyt III, pursued collaboration with its allopathic academy while resolving to “maintain the College Osteopathic identity”, a phrase that would recur, in various forms, for the next twenty years, and adopted an attendance rule for the program-director workshop.[4]
The combined Board of Governors met on April 21. It emphasized long-range planning; approved the second website phase with a members-only chatroom and separate ophthalmology and otolaryngology email lists; outlined Charitable Fund awards and formalized a mechanism for an annual College donation to the Fund; set a best-paper award at $1,500; and recorded a “very productive” March meeting with the allopathic otolaryngology academy, including reciprocal web links.[5] At the reorganization meetings on April 24, each College installed its own officers separately, confirming that these were routine annual turnovers rather than any merger, and Dr. Rubin was inducted as combined president, setting out a mission that included starting an awards database, expanding regional continuing medical education, and increasing resident participation. Among the newly elected members-at-large of the ophthalmology College was Carlo DiMarco, a name that would recur in the organization’s leadership for years.[6][7][8]
At the September 18 mid-year meetings in Chicago, the Colleges pursued their own agendas: ophthalmology took up a membership database and a change to its award structure, a DO speaker bureau, placing osteopathic physicians on editorial and advisory boards, and improving the AOA relationship through a standing three-year delegate; otolaryngology addressed committee involvement with its allopathic academy, a dispute over facial plastic surgery, a resident handbook, practice-support content on coding and workplace safety, and the Charitable Fund’s “Legacy Society,” brochure, and resident travel grants.[9][10]
It is worth being careful about what happened next. At the combined Board of Governors meeting that same day, the members voted not to renew the contract of their outside management vendor, Practice Affiliates, the agreement would end in May 2000, and to move the AOCOO-HNS into its own office. In the same meeting they set Dr. Dubin’s salary as Executive Vice President at $50,000, recommended an external audit, created a Committee on Osteopathic Fellowship Training, and established an Auxiliary.[11] In the minutes this reads as a matter of cost and control, not as a milestone. Rather, it is the quiet beginning of the two-person administrative model, Dubin and, alongside him, Administrative Director Debra Bailey, that would carry the organization for the next seventeen years, and whose eventual loss would define its most difficult period. Dr. Dubin’s own service reached further back still: president of the College in 1980, and its executive director by April 1994, when the Board asked him to rewrite bylaws it had found “severely out of date and often in conflict with each other.”[12] What ended in 1999 was the outside management contract, not his tenure.
[1] -112 (EFC, Feb. 6, 1999). [2] -115 (EFC, Apr. 1999). [3] -113 (AOCO annual board, Apr. 20). [4] -114 (AOCO-HNS annual board, Apr. 20). [5] -116 (combined BOG annual, Apr. 21). [6] -117 (AOCO reorganization, Apr. 24). [7] -118 (AOCO-HNS reorganization, Apr. 24). [8] -119 (combined BOG reorganization, Apr. 24). [9] -120 (AOCO mid-year, Sep. 18). [10] -121 (AOCO-HNS mid-year, Sep. 18). [11] -122 (combined BOG mid-year, Sep. 18). [12] -281 (Bizer, 2002), quoting Board of Governors minutes of April 1994. [13] -324 (BOG motions, Apr. 24 and Sep. 18, 1999).
By 2000 the AOCOO-HNS was operating as a federation of two Colleges under combined governance, run by a two-person administrative core. The year makes that structure unusually visible: on a single September day the organization held four separate meetings. The books were sound and dues were left unchanged, and a committee was formed to examine the relationship between the College and its charitable arm. The year closes with the proposal that would reorganize everything, a plan to move all of the College’s educational work into its Foundation.
The earliest document in the continuous archive is a committee record of January 29, 2000, and it already shows the organization’s habits. A resident liaison committee and a resident handbook were in development, a long-range planning committee was at work, and Dr. Rubin asked that “a summary of unfinished business” become a standing agenda item, a small but telling acknowledgment that items tended to carry over. The office was still at 3 Mackoil Avenue in Dayton, and the outside vendor remained in place pending the transition voted the previous September.[1]
At the annual meetings in early May the federation was on full display. The College of Otolaryngology held its own board on May 2 under W. Hadley Hoyt III, and the combined Executive & Finance Committee met the same day under Michael Rubin.[2][3] On May 3 the combined Board of Governors formed an Organizational Structure Ad Hoc Committee to review the relationship between the College and the Charitable Fund, contributed $1,000 to the osteopathic profession’s unity campaign, continued relationship-building with the American Academy of Ophthalmology, and, revealingly, made the production of timely minutes, within thirty days, a formal standard for staff evaluation.[4]
The annual membership meeting of May 5 records the whole federation at once: separate slates for the College of Ophthalmology under Glen Hatcher and the College of Otolaryngology under Samuel Baldone, a combined Board of Governors under Rubin, and the AOCOO-HNS Charitable Fund, the Foundation’s precursor, under Hoyt. Dr. Dubin reported the organization “financially and fiscally sound,” with no need to increase dues.[5] At the reorganizations on May 6, Hoyt inducted Baldone as the otolaryngology College’s new president, and the combined Board reorganized in turn.[6][7][8]
The clearest single view of how this organization worked comes from September 8, 2000, when four separate meetings were held in sequence: a mid-year Executive & Finance Committee convened at 7:10 in the morning under Vice-President Hatcher; then the College of Ophthalmology’s own board under Hatcher; then the College of Otolaryngology’s board under Baldone; and finally, at one o’clock, the combined Board of Governors under Baldone.[9][10][11][12] The staff who held this machinery together are named in these same minutes, Debra Bailey as Administrative Director and Alvin Dubin as Executive Vice President.[10][11]
One development in December points forward. At the final committee meeting of the year, on December 2 at the Dayton office, Dr. Dubin set out goals to transfer all of the organization’s educational activities, the journal, the annual meeting, the exhibitors, and continuing medical education, to the Foundation, and to have the Foundation share the cost of executive services.[13] The minutes present this as an efficiency. Rather, it is the origin point of the College, Foundation division of labor, and of the flow of funds between the two, that would still be visible, and increasingly contested, in 2018.
[1] -050 (Jan. 29, 2000). [2] -051 (AOCO-HNS annual board, May 2). [3] -052 (EFC, May 2). [4] -053 (combined BOG annual, May 3). [5] -054 (annual membership meeting, May 5). [6] -055 (reorganization, May 6; header/body label inconsistent). [7] -056 (AOCO-HNS reorganization, May 6). [8] -057 (combined BOG reorganization, May 6). [9] -058 (mid-year EFC, Sep. 8). [10] -059 (AOCO mid-year board, Sep. 8). [11] -060 (AOCO-HNS mid-year board, Sep. 8). [12] -061 (combined BOG mid-year, Sep. 8). [13] -062 (EFC, Dec. 2).
Two thousand one is the year the College formally handed its educational and revenue-generating work to its Foundation. In April the combined Board of Governors approved a corporate restructure, effective July 1, moving the annual meeting, exhibits, continuing medical education, and the corporate-affiliate and public-education programs under the Foundation, which gained its own president. First proposed by Dr. Dubin the previous December, the change created the division of labor, and the inter-entity finances, that would shape the organization for years. The year closed under the shadow of September 11, which pushed the mid-year meeting to late October and turned attention to assembly attendance.
The restructure moved quickly from proposal to decision. At the Executive & Finance Committee meeting of February 3, Dr. Dubin’s reorganization goals were restated with a July 1, 2001 effective date; the committee endorsed them and asked for a full Board vote. The same meeting advanced collaboration with the allopathic otolaryngology academy, sharing resident documents and arranging to meet its executive board, and directed best papers to the osteopathic professional journals.[1]
The Colleges held their annual boards on April 24, ophthalmology under Glen Hatcher and otolaryngology under Samuel Baldone, with the combined Executive & Finance Committee meeting the same day under Baldone.[2][3][4] The full Board acted on April 25. It approved the new corporate structure, effective July 1, under which the annual meeting, exhibits, continuing medical education, and the corporate-affiliate and public-education programs would operate under the Foundation. The Foundation gained its own president, Glen Hatcher, and an executive-services management agreement between the College and the Foundation was to be developed. The transition also touched the treasury: Treasurer Allen resigned owing to illness, and Dr. Fuller stepped in as acting treasurer.[5] The Colleges and the combined Board installed their officers at the reorganizations of April 28.[6][7][8]
The year’s final quarter was reshaped by events outside the organization. The mid-year meeting was pushed to late October in Detroit, consistent with the travel disruption that followed September 11; the agenda material survives, revised October 23.[9] The October 28 committee record is notably data-driven. In Dr. Dubin’s words, “since the tragedy of September,” the organization increased its efforts on assembly attendance: it contacted 103 allopathic-accredited otolaryngology programs to identify osteopathic residents, singled out members who had attended fewer than three assemblies in five years for regional board outreach, and pursued matching grants from the osteopathic association. Dr. Bizer was slated to deliver a lecture on “The History of the AOCOO-HNS,” and investments were reported down roughly four percent with the market. John Nori took up the combined presidency at this meeting.[10]
The restructure is described in the minutes in purely administrative terms , an executive-services agreement, a division of programs. Rather, it set the template for the rest of the College’s history: a lean membership College and a resource-holding Foundation, bound together by a management agreement and a flow of funds that later boards would find increasingly difficult to keep separate.
[1] -064 (EFC, Feb. 3). [2] -065 (AOCO annual board, Apr. 24). [3] -066 (AOCO-HNS annual board, Apr. 24). [4] -067 (EFC, Apr. 24). [5] -068 (combined BOG annual, Apr. 25). [6] -069 (AOCO reorganization, Apr. 28). [7] -070 (AOCO-HNS reorganization, Apr. 28). [8] -071 (combined BOG reorganization, Apr. 28). [9] -072 (mid-year agenda, revised Oct. 23). [10] -073 (mid-year EFC, Oct. 28).
Two thousand two was a consolidating year. The post-September-11 emphasis on efficiency carried into a streamlined meeting process, staff received a ten-percent raise, and leadership passed at mid-year to Larry McIntire, who set out to strengthen residency programs and to compile the College’s own program and resident history. A year into holding the educational programs, the Foundation was, by a later secondary account, managing real money. The awards database, first named a goal in 1999, was again listed as a high priority, and again left unfinished.
The year’s meetings were deliberately leaner. The Executive & Finance Committee met on February 8 under President Nori for routine business, and the Colleges held their annual boards on April 30 with the combined committee meeting the same day.[1][2][3][4] At the combined Board of Governors meeting of May 1, the streamlined process adopted after the disruption of late 2001 was continued; staff were granted a ten-percent raise; a Foundation fundraising “philanthropic workbook” was put in place; and the awards database was again named a “high priority”, a project first set as a goal in 1999 and still incomplete three years on.[5] The Colleges and the combined Board reorganized on May 4.[6][7][8]
The mid-year meetings convened in Philadelphia, the Executive & Finance Committee on September 12 and the Board of Governors on September 13.[9][10] At the latter, leadership passed to Larry McIntire, whose agenda was pointedly about institutional memory and growth. He focused on new residents, programs, and funding; he compiled a program-and-resident history covering 1985 to 2002, with a plan to reach back to 1970 using association data; and he directed that a leadership handbook be presented to the Board as an onboarding and knowledge document. A website directory-and-CV project was delayed with its vendor, and new residency programs in Las Vegas were noted.[10]
The Foundation’s own figures for this period survive only through a later research brief of a 2002-03 board packet, and so must be read as secondary and unverified. By that account the Foundation held roughly $707,000 in net assets in mid-2002, invested through Legg Mason; a related-entity transfer of $164,399 moved from the College to the Foundation that year; and the Foundation paid $36,000 for “executive management services”, the first concrete figures for the money flow the 2001 restructure had created.[11]
Two threads from 2002 tell the same story about follow-through. Dr. McIntire’s push to write down the College’s history and to formalize a leadership handbook shows an organization aware that its knowledge lived in only a few people. Rather, the awards database, a concrete, repeatedly promised project, had by 2002 gone unfinished for three years, an early instance of the gap between what the College resolved and what it completed.
[1] -075 (EFC, Feb. 8). [2] -076 (AOCO annual board, Apr. 30). [3] -077 (AOCO-HNS annual board, Apr. 30). [4] -078 (EFC annual, Apr. 30). [5] -079 (combined BOG annual, May 1). [6] -080 (AOCO reorganization, May 4). [7] -081 (AOCO-HNS reorganization, May 4). [8] -082 (combined BOG reorganization, May 4). [9] -083 (mid-year EFC, Sep. 12). [10] -084 (mid-year BOG, Sep. 13). [11] -244 (research brief of the Feb. 8, 2003 Foundation packet; secondary, figures unverified).
Two thousand three shows the federation in a steady state, two Colleges, a combined Board, and a Foundation now settled in its educational role. Leadership was stable, with Larry McIntire as combined president and Richard Fuller leading the College of Ophthalmology and the Foundation. The year’s forward-looking act came at its very end: a December conference call that began an effort to change how the Colleges nominated and elected their officers, carrying into a bylaws committee in early 2004 and a membership vote that spring.
For most of the year the record is one of routine continuity. The Executive & Finance Committee met on February 8 on ordinary business.[1] The Colleges held their annual boards on April 28, with Richard Fuller presiding over ophthalmology and Larry McIntire over otolaryngology, and the combined Board of Governors held its annual meeting on April 29 under McIntire.[2][3][4] The membership meeting of May 3 confirmed that the two-College federation, with its separate slates and its Foundation, remained fully in place three years after the restructure; the Colleges and the combined Board reorganized the same day.[5][6][7][8] The mid-year meetings convened in Detroit on September 12.[9][10]
The Foundation’s activity for the year survives chiefly through the same secondary research brief noted for 2002. By that account the Foundation, under Richard Fuller, was actively managing investments and educational programs, weighing an online scientific journal and digital assembly presentations, and considering a patient-services grant program funded at roughly $10,000 a year, evidence of a charitable arm reaching for a mission beyond meeting logistics, though these figures remain unverified.[11]
The year’s most consequential act is easy to pass over. In a conference call on December 19, the College of Ophthalmology, under Craig Cassidy, began a change to the Colleges’ nominating, electing, and voting procedures, to be carried to a bylaws committee in February 2004 and a membership vote that April. Rather than the procedural tweak it appears to be, the more telling detail sits alongside it: the minutes record the ophthalmology board “running thin” on at-large members. More than a decade before the two Colleges became largely pro-forma shells, the difficulty of filling their separate boards was already on the record.[12]
[1] -086 (EFC, Feb. 8). [2] -087 (AOCO annual board, Apr. 28). [3] -088 (AOCO-HNS annual board, Apr. 28). [4] -089 (combined BOG annual, Apr. 29). [5] -090 (membership meeting, May 3). [6] -091 (AOCO reorganization, May 3). [7] -092 (AOCO-HNS reorganization, May 3). [8] -093 (combined BOG reorganization, May 3). [9] -094 (mid-year EFC, Sep. 12). [10] -095 (mid-year BOG, Sep. 12). [11] -244 (secondary; unverified). [12] -096 (AOCO special conference call, Dec. 19; document header mislabels the date as Apr. 28).
Two thousand four was a year of construction. The organization created two new bodies to draw its members into its work, a Council of Residents and Fellows and a Council of Regional Representatives, and both held their first meetings in September. It revised how its officers were nominated and elected, commissioned a needs-assessment survey, planned a facilitated board retreat, and ran a values workshop. It also recorded, plainly, that its own website was “underused and undervalued.” The year’s work was about capacity: building the channels through which members might participate.
The mid-winter Executive & Finance Committee meeting of February 7 set the year’s agenda. It approved establishing the Council of Residents and Fellows and the Council of Regional Representatives; approved the revised election and voting procedures begun by the ophthalmology College the previous December; and planned a facilitated board retreat for June, to be built on a needs-assessment survey scheduled for April. The same meeting recorded a candid judgment on the organization’s digital presence: the website was “underused and undervalued.”[1]
The Colleges held their annual boards on April 17, ophthalmology under Craig Cassidy, and reorganized on April 24 alongside the combined Board of Governors.[2][3][4][5][6] At the mid-year Board of Governors meeting of September 10, under President Paul Imber, the Board referred back to its retreat and created two new subcommittees under its education committee, one for board review, one for educational-needs review. The same minutes record Dr. Philip Shettle’s election as President-Elect of the American Osteopathic Association: College figures were beginning to rise to national office.[7]
The new engagement bodies convened within days. The Council of Regional Representatives held its first official meeting on September 11, electing regional spokespersons and board representatives, Dr. Kenyon for otolaryngology and Dr. Sherman for ophthalmology.[8] The Council of Residents and Fellows held its first meetings on September 12, separately for each specialty, and elected its officers.[9][10] A values-and-behaviors workshop with survey results was also conducted that month, an organizational-development exercise in the same lineage as the long-range planning of 1999 and the retreats to come.[11]
What the year built, and what it did not settle. The councils created in 2004 gave residents and regions a formal voice, and the revised election procedures answered the thin at-large slates noted in 2003. Rather than the end of the engagement problem, though, these were its instruments, and the record of later years shows the councils themselves struggling for participation. The machinery was built in 2004; making it turn proved to be the longer task.
[1] -097 (mid-winter EFC, Feb. 7). [2] -098 (AOCO annual board, Apr. 17). [3] -099 (AOCO-HNS annual board, Apr. 17). [4] -101 (AOCO reorganization, Apr. 24). [5] -102 (AOCO-HNS reorganization, Apr. 24). [6] -103 (combined BOG reorganization, Apr. 24). [7] -104 (mid-year BOG, Sep. 10). [8] -107 (Council of Regional Representatives, Sep. 11). [9] -105 (CRF, Otolaryngology, Sep. 12). [10] -106 (CRF, Ophthalmology, Sep. 12). [11] -108 (values survey/workshop notes, Sep. 2004). Also of this period: -110 (courtesy letter, Feb. 23, 2004).
Two thousand five brought both opportunity and an early warning. The organization’s management group took on the American Osteopathic Board of Surgery, adding significant outside income, and prompting Dr. Dubin to check what that income might mean for the organization’s tax status. A bylaw proposal to unify the presidency across the College and Foundation boards was introduced and then withdrawn for further evaluation. Board members pledged five years of personal Foundation support, a mentorship program was approved, and international clinical work was revived.
The mid-winter Executive & Finance Committee met on February 11 with Vice-President DiMarco in the chair, and its business set the year’s two main themes. First, the management group had added the American Osteopathic Board of Surgery to its duties, effective November 1, 2004; Dr. Dubin was asked to check the impact of that added income on the organization’s tax status. Second, a bylaw was proposed to create a unified two-year presidency spanning both the Board of Governors and the Foundation board, alternating between the two disciplines. The meeting also took up an overhaul of the awards-points system, retreat focus groups on retention, associate members, a review course and mentorship, and a 2004 member survey that echoed one conducted in 1997.[1]
The Colleges held their annual boards on May 2. Ophthalmology, under Carlo DiMarco, adopted a five-year pledge of $500 a year to the Foundation, continued support for the allopathic academy’s surgical scope fund, approved a mentor-and-mentee program, and scheduled the new councils to meet on May 4.[2] Otolaryngology, under Paul Imber, took up subspecialty sections, a program-director workshop and core curriculum, a legislative briefing with its allopathic academy, and the same mentorship program and Foundation pledge.[3]
The combined Board of Governors met on May 3 under Imber. It adopted the five-year, $500-a-year Foundation pledge unanimously; returned to the question of tax and liability arising from managing the certifying boards; advanced an associate, non-voting membership class while removing the affiliate category; and noted that the osteopathic certifying board was building a maintenance-of-certification examination for 2008. The unified two-year presidency bylaw was withdrawn for further evaluation, and a new Board slate was elected with Dr. Manthei as president for 2005-06.[4] The Council of Residents and Fellows met on May 4 in what reads as an inaugural working session, contact information, travel stipends, board-review lectures, surgical-log forms, and the council’s own hierarchy.[5]
At the reorganizations of May 7, Dr. Manthei was inducted in ophthalmology with an advocacy primer modeled on the allopathic academy, a goal of a new Las Vegas ophthalmology residency, and a note on the academy’s change to acknowledge osteopathic physicians; Dr. Madgy was inducted in otolaryngology with committee appointments including a fellowship-training section and goals for communications and regional mini-CME seminars.[6][7] The combined Board’s reorganization is notable for a quiet structural step: the audit and editorial committees were made shared with the Foundation, and advocacy was consolidated into combined subcommittees, with Dr. Dubin as AOA delegate.[8]
A form filed with the American Osteopathic Association in July records the year’s officers for the national body and lists future assembly venues, among them the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota for 2007.[9] At the mid-year meetings of October 25, both Colleges were chasing unpaid Foundation pledges, the same pledges adopted unanimously in May. Ophthalmology revived international clinics, with a Guatemala resident site to be vetted by the Foundation, launched an electronic newsletter, and tracked scope-of-practice fights; otolaryngology recorded that the AOA had denied an office-based allergy fellowship, advanced a second revision of the board orientation workbook with a Dubin-prepared orientation presentation, and planned conference calls for the two new councils.[10][11]
The pattern worth marking here. Within six months, board members unanimously pledged personal support to the Foundation and then had to be chased for it. Rather than a matter of individual delinquency, this is the first clear instance in the modern record of a gap the organization would name explicitly at its 2006 retreat, between what its leadership resolved and what its leadership did.
[1] -123 (mid-winter EFC, Feb. 11). [2] -124 (AOCO annual board, May 2). [3] -125 (AOCO-HNS annual board, May 2). [4] -126 (combined BOG annual, May 3). [5] -127 (CRF, May 4; document mislabeled “CRR”). [6] -128 (AOCO reorganization, May 7). [7] -129 (AOCO-HNS reorganization, May 7). [8] -130 (combined BOG reorganization, May 7). [9] -131 (AOA Board of Trustees annual report form, Jul. 5). [10] -132 (AOCO mid-year, Oct. 25). [11] -133 (AOCO-HNS mid-year, Oct. 25). Also -100 (combined BOG annual, May 3, 2005; filename mislabels the year as 2004) and -109 (CRR member letter, Jan. 2005).
Two thousand six was the most consequential governance year of the decade. The Board approved a consolidation bylaw creating a single president, alternating between the specialties, and bringing the College boards to the Board of Governors meeting, explicitly to resolve College, Foundation conflicts and end the competition between two presidents. It formed a search committee for Dr. Dubin’s eventual successor, moved $100,000 of retained earnings to the Foundation, relocated its offices, and spent $7,500 to digitize resident files. And in September it sat down with a facilitator and named its own dysfunctions out loud.
The mid-winter Executive & Finance Committee of February 10, under President Manthei, opened the succession question that would run for a decade. Dr. Dubin would “continue through 2008,” and was asked to prepare a job description, an application, and a search committee. The same meeting recorded that the offices had been relocated, launched a “Building a Better Board” leadership initiative, and, on the accountant’s recommendation that retained earnings be swept to the Foundation, approved a transfer of $100,000. The associate-member wording was deferred again, and the presidency bylaw was sent to an ad hoc committee.[1]
The Colleges held their annual boards on May 1 and reviewed the proposed bylaw changes, each recording that the Foundation’s own structure would not change; both reaffirmed the five-year Foundation pledge, pursued international missions by email campaign, and supported the surgical scope fund through a $100 voluntary member contribution.[2][3]
The combined Board of Governors met on May 2 and approved the consolidation bylaw. A single president would serve as president of the Board of Governors, alternating specialty by year, and “all college boards” would meet at the Board of Governors meeting; the stated aims included resolving conflicts between the College and the Foundation and ending the competition between two presidents. The Board formed the Executive Vice President search committee under DiMarco’s chairmanship, considering a lay, non-physician director and an associate director for the transition, capped retained earnings at roughly $100,000, and committed $7,500 a year to digitizing resident files. Dr. Rogotzke was elected president for 2006-07.[4] The Executive & Finance Committee that day took up whether the Foundation needed its own management-services agreement, with counsel Josh Prober to advise, and asked for a yearly estimate of staff time spent on “other entities”, the certifying boards.[5]
At the reorganizations of May 6, ophthalmology inducted Dr. Surer and established the “Joseph Wyatt, DO Heritage Lecture” for 2007, on the explicit ground that “the rest of us should not be allowed to forget his leadership.”[6] Otolaryngology inducted Dr. Rogotzke, who under the new bylaw was simultaneously president of the Board of Governors, and pursued a residency core curriculum for recertification.[7][8]
The year’s most revealing document is not a set of minutes. On September 6 in Philadelphia the board met with Dr. Hershey Bell of the Borealis Institute for a facilitated strategic-planning retreat. It produced a vision statement, a revised mission, strategic operating assumptions, and a table of tactics with the Executive Vice President as owner and deadlines in early 2007. It also named what the retreat report called the organization’s “off-course conversations”: apathy, non-compliance with Foundation contributions by leaders, and unfulfilled mentorship commitments.[9] The mid-year College boards the same day recorded that the bylaws had been approved by the AOA Board of Trustees, and appended their own retreat statements, among the negatives, “lack of follow-through,” “lack of communication,” “selecting wrong people,” and a website that was “outdated.”[10][11] The combined Board met on September 7, adopting a board self-assessment tool through Dr. Bell, directing the nominating committee to track attendance, reaffirming the thirty-day minutes rule, and concluding that a Foundation management agreement was unnecessary.[12] In November Dr. Dubin circulated a memorandum asking board members to prioritize the retreat items so that Dr. Bell could “structure the next phase.”[13]
What makes 2006 unusual. Most years in this record show an organization doing its work; 2006 shows it examining itself. The consolidation bylaw addressed a structural problem, two presidents, competing centers of gravity, and the retreat addressed a behavioral one. Rather than treating the retreat’s language as mere venting, it is worth reading precisely: apathy, unpaid pledges by the very leaders who voted them, mentorship promised and not delivered, and follow-through as the recurring failure. These are the same themes the record surfaces, in different words, in 2015 and 2017. The organization diagnosed itself accurately in 2006.
[1] -135 (mid-winter EFC, Feb. 10). [2] -136 (AOCO annual board, May 1). [3] -137 (AOCO-HNS annual board, May 1). [4] -138 (combined BOG annual, May 2). [5] -139 (EFC annual, May 2). [6] -140 (AOCO reorganization, May 6). [7] -141 (AOCO-HNS reorganization, May 6). [8] -142 (combined BOG reorganization, May 6). [9] -245 (Bell/Borealis retreat report, Sep. 6; also summarized secondarily at -246). [10] -143 (AOCO mid-year, Sep. 6). [11] -144 (AOCO-HNS mid-year, Sep. 6). [12] -134 (combined BOG mid-year, Sep. 7; document mislabeled “October 25”, duplicate copy at -145). [13] -146 (Dubin memorandum, Nov. 28).
Two thousand seven was a year of consolidation delivered and audits passed. The single-presidency bylaw took effect, producing one reorganization meeting in place of three, with one president leading both the Board of Governors and the Foundation. The organization passed an Internal Revenue Service audit and earned three-year accreditation from the osteopathic association’s education council. It moved $150,000 to the Foundation and made resident dues free. And in February, almost in passing, its finance committee asked what would happen to its overhead if the American Osteopathic Board of Surgery did not renew, a question that would not become urgent for another eight years.
The mid-winter Executive & Finance Committee of February 8, under President Rogotzke, put the organization’s management income on the record in figures. The certifying-board management fees were stated plainly: the American Osteopathic Board of Surgery at roughly $120,000 rising to $150,000, and the osteopathic ophthalmology and otolaryngology board at roughly $40,000 rising to $50,000, over a three-year term. In the same breath the committee asked what overhead would go away if the surgery board did not renew. The meeting also approved the application and job advertisement for the Executive Vice President (styled chief executive officer) search, made resident dues free effective July 1, 2007, instituted the board self-assessment tool, and approved associate membership for a member vote.[1]
The retreat work of 2006 carried into a February 2007 session, for which two drafts of an agenda survive, a skeletal version and a fuller revision prepared with Dr. Bell. The revision sets out communication attributes, a model relating responsibility to power, an idea-barrier-priority-action framework, and the crafted vision of the organization as “the highest quality specialty medical organization for our members, the public, and the osteopathic profession.”[2][3] Board members’ written feedback on the retreat survives as well, and it is unusually candid: one participant recorded as a highlight the acknowledgment that “the AOCOO-HNS is not perfect and has problems,” calling that recognition “a breakthrough.”[4]
The annual meetings convened at the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota on May 1. Ophthalmology, under Dr. Surer, took an Alcon grant for a cataract curriculum, funded a Dominican Republic mission trip with $2,500 in College discretionary money and resident support from the Foundation, sent a letter on optometric scope of practice, and confronted residency losses: the Chicago college ophthalmology residency was closing for lack of funding and Flint was possibly to follow, with the board concluding that “future funding for ophthalmology programs should remain a primary focus.”[5] Otolaryngology, under Dr. Rogotzke, ran a member-attendance phone survey that identified time of year and school schedules as the leading barriers, and joined the mission funding.[6]
The combined Board of Governors met the same day. It recorded that an Internal Revenue Service audit on March 16 had passed with three minor corrections; that accreditation had been submitted to the osteopathic association’s continuing-education council; that associate and affiliate membership were approved for a member vote; that the executive search had drawn three applicants; and that resident dues were now free.[7] A board-orientation outline prepared for that meeting is a small but telling artifact: it set out to teach incoming board members the AOA relationship, the officer hierarchy, parliamentary procedure, and “how the financial relationship differs from College to Foundation,” along with the required $500 Foundation contribution.[8]
The consolidation became visible on May 3. In place of three separate reorganization meetings, a single combined meeting inducted Dr. Myint as president of both the Board of Governors and the Foundation, and assigned committees for the Board, the Foundation, and each College in one sitting, with monthly committee-reporting deadlines.[9] At the mid-year meeting in Detroit on September 7, the Board transferred $150,000 from the College to the Foundation, recorded that both the tax and accreditation audits had passed, the latter with a perfect score and three-year term, pushed executive-search interviews to June 2008, and funded textbooks for the certifying board. It also noted that evaluations of the executive vice president and administrative director had largely not been submitted in writing.[10]
The year closed with an idea that would resurface. At the December 1 Executive & Finance Committee meeting, held with the Foundation executive committee at the Huber Heights office, the committee recommended creating a separate management company with a management contract, and asked Dr. Dubin to bring restructuring recommendations in February. The same meeting discussed a support-staff role for continuing education and certification at $30,000 to $35,000, and commissioned a ten-year residency and eight-year financial self-analysis to “predict the next three to five years.”[11]
The sentence to remember from 2007. “What overhead goes if AOBS does not renew?” The committee asked it in February, in the ordinary course of reviewing a contract, and the record shows no alarm. Rather, the significance is retrospective: the organization understood, eight years in advance, that a substantial share of its administrative capacity rested on managing other people’s certifying boards, and that the arrangement was terminable. When those boards did leave, after January 1, 2016, the consequences would dominate the organization’s life. The question was asked early and correctly; what the record does not show is a durable answer.
[1] -147 (mid-winter EFC, Feb. 8). [2] -148 (draft retreat agenda, Feb. 2007). [3] -149 (revised retreat agenda, rev. Apr. 2, 2007; also summarized secondarily at -247). [4] -150 (retreat feedback spreadsheet). [5] -151 (AOCO annual board, May 1, Ritz-Carlton Sarasota). [6] -152 (AOCO-HNS annual board, May 1). [7] -153 (combined BOG annual, May 1). [8] -154 (board-orientation outline notes). [9] -155 (consolidated reorganization, May 3). [10] -156 (mid-year BOG, Sep. 7). [11] -157 (EFC with Foundation executive committee, Dec. 1).
The proposal to spin the management work into a separate company, recommended in December 2007, was rejected in February 2008 after review by the organization’s accountant and the osteopathic association’s counsel. The management group would stay as it was. In its place the year brought expansion of a different kind: five new residency programs approved, raised case minimums for ophthalmology residents, a push to secure a certificate of added qualification in sleep medicine, and Dr. Carlo DiMarco’s induction as President of the American Osteopathic Association. The resident council, four years old, was still struggling to be known to residents.
The mid-winter Executive & Finance Committee of February 8, under President Myint, settled the management question. After review by the accountant, Dr. Scholes, and the osteopathic association’s counsel, Josh Prober, the recommendation was to “keep the ADD Management Group in its present form”, the separate management company was rejected. The same meeting set a salary for an executive-vice-president mentee, beginning at $40,000 to $50,000 within a range rising to $100,000 to $120,000; approved new residency programs in Hillsdale, Michigan, Far Rockaway, New York, Erie, Pennsylvania, and Las Vegas, Nevada in ophthalmology, and a fifteen-position otolaryngology program in Detroit; allocated $7,500 to the certifying board; tabled a building purchase; and considered engaging a professional survey company.[1]
The annual meetings convened in Scottsdale on May 6. Ophthalmology recorded national attention to osteopathic ophthalmology in two magazine features, one in the allopathic academy’s own publication, launched a fee-split job board, and reformed its subspecialist education committee to maintain a list of residency and fellowship opportunities.[2] Otolaryngology, under Dr. Brandeisky, advanced an electronic resident portfolio linked to medical records, worked with the board of examiners toward continuous osteopathic certification, and pressed hard for a certificate of added qualification in sleep medicine, warning that “if we don’t organize this we will lose the ability … to test as an independent discipline”; the decline of the otolaryngic-allergy certificate was noted in the same minutes.[3]
The combined Board of Governors met the same day and confirmed the February decision, the management spin-out was rejected and the current structure maintained. It supported the continuing-education support-staff position, approved an organizational chart and streaming video for the website, revisited the professional survey company, and funded residents to attend the allopathic “Day on the Hill.” It also recorded that Dr. DiMarco would be inducted as President of the American Osteopathic Association on July 19, 2008, and that executive-search interviews were set for June 28, with a name to come at mid-year.[4]
The program-director meetings of May 7 are among the most concrete educational records in the archive. In ophthalmology, residency case minimums were raised for the 2008 class, cataract from twenty-five to fifty, glaucoma to fifteen, with retina and cornea minimums established, the subspecialty education committee was reformed, and the editorial committee took a dual charge including the Patrick Murray awards.[5] In otolaryngology, board scores were withheld from program directors to protect privacy in small programs, surgical-category numbers were adjusted, and a question was put to the board of examiners about re-testing all sections after failing one.[6]
The Council of Residents and Fellows held its annual meeting the same day and recorded an uncomfortable finding: survey participation was poor, and there was “a lack of knowledge among residents about the existence and purpose of the CRF.” Its remedies were a resident packet, a case-discussion website, and online case-logging.[7] In June the Foundation explored a charitable partnership with organizations serving the deaf and blind, invoking the success of a “Night for Sight” fundraiser, with a candid caution that the prospective partners might view the College as “deep pockets.”[8]
Two decisions, pointing opposite ways. In February the organization declined to separate its management function into its own company, on professional advice, choosing to keep the arrangement it had. Rather than closing the question, that decision deferred it: the same idea returns in 2016 in a more drastic form, when management is outsourced entirely to another college’s association-management arm. Meanwhile the resident council’s admission that residents did not know it existed shows the limit of structural remedies. The organization was capable of building bodies; keeping them known and used was the harder discipline.
[1] -158 (mid-winter EFC, Feb. 8). [2] -159 (AOCO annual board, May 6). [3] -160 (AOCO-HNS annual board, May 6). [4] -161 (combined BOG annual, May 6, Scottsdale). [5] -162 (AOCO program directors, May 7). [6] -163 (AOCO-HNS program directors, May 7; header and text differ on the convening date). [7] -164 (CRF annual, May 7). [8] -165 (Foundation conference call, Jun. 10; filename differs on the date). Contemporary secondary context: -266 (AAO EyeNet, Jun. 2008).
At its annual meeting in Austin the Board of Governors recorded a fact that would shape everything after it: the Colleges’ budget, resting on membership dues alone, could no longer afford the level of administration the organization had built. Its answer was to shift management and continuing-education costs to the Foundation. The long search for Dr. Dubin’s successor ended without a hire, and in its place the Board approved a living memorial lecture in his name. Five-year management renewals with the two certifying boards were signed, due to expire around 2014.
The mid-winter Executive & Finance Committee met on February 6 under President Brandeisky and recorded the outcome of the executive search: no hire had been made. In its place the Board approved an “Alvin Dubin, DO living memorial” lecture and chair, adopted a new format for evaluating the executive vice president, and developed an online continuing-education process, with legal questions referred to the osteopathic association’s counsel and speaker compliance running at about half. The quarterly report moved to email, separate committee assignments were made for each College for 2009-10, and Dr. Dubin’s title was recorded as executive vice president and chief executive officer.[1]
The annual Board of Governors meeting in Austin on May 5 produced the year’s defining entry. The minutes state that the Colleges’ budget, based solely on membership-dues income, could not afford the current level of administration; the Board responded by shifting management and continuing-education costs to the Foundation. In the same meeting it approved five-year management renewals with both the American Osteopathic Board of Surgery and the osteopathic ophthalmology and otolaryngology board, agreements set to expire around 2014, noted that the hundredth Annual Clinical Assembly would fall in 2016, and recorded tension over osteopathic and allopathic residency training. Jurisdiction over the sleep-medicine certificate went to the certifying board, an affiliation agreement with the osteopathic association was signed, and President-Elect Simonian set out reorganization goals.[2]
The Educational Needs Review Committee met on May 6 and introduced a continuing-education coordinator, Kelly Gillum, to run a speakers’ bureau and track requirements. Its topic ideas included dual MD and DO certification as a potential draw for members, and an audience-response system funded by an Allergan grant; the two specialties then broke to separate tables to plan their own programs.[3]
The mid-year meeting followed on September 11 in Detroit under President Simonian. The Board decided not to participate in the osteopathic association’s 2010 unity meeting, approved the Ritz-Carlton at Manalapan, Florida for the 2015 assembly, and revived a strategic-planning board retreat, to be facilitated by Dr. Franklin Medio and dovetailed with the 2010 mid-year. The resident council took on a monthly newsletter and a sporting event at the assembly, and budget review was deferred to December.[4] The Foundation board met the same day with counsel present: its balanced funds had recovered with the market, a silent-auction fundraiser was planned with a $5,000 gift intended for a deaf-blind coalition at the next assembly, and concern was recorded about low exhibitor numbers.[5]
The sentence that changes the story. “The Colleges’ budget based solely on membership dues income cannot afford the current level of administration.” Rather than a passing budget note, this is the hinge of the organization’s modern finances. From 2009 the Foundation begins paying for work the College cannot, first management and continuing education, later much more, and the two entities, legally distinct, become financially interdependent. Every later argument about transfers, cost-shifting, and whether College and Foundation funds were being kept separate traces back to this decision and the arithmetic behind it.
[1] -166 (mid-winter EFC, Feb. 6). [2] -167 (annual BOG, May 5, Austin; an erroneous copy of this same text is filed as a September document at -169). [3] -168 (Educational Needs Review Committee, May 6). [4] -170 (mid-year BOG highlights, Sep. 11). [5] -171 (Foundation Board of Directors, Sep. 11).
Two thousand ten reorganized how the work was done and who did it. In February the organization established six divisions, each led by a member-at-large reporting monthly, and restructured the College boards; dues rose from $525 to $595. In August the long-deferred succession executed: Carlo DiMarco became Executive Vice President and Alvin Dubin became Executive Vice President Emeritus, under a mentoring agreement, and $325,000 moved from the College to the Foundation. Beneath these structural moves, member conversations were raising a harder question, what membership was actually worth.
The mid-winter Executive & Finance Committee and Foundation met on February 5 under President Simonian and established the division structure: Finance, Education, Membership, Socio-Economic, Communication, and Governance, each chaired by a member-at-large with monthly reporting to the committee. The College boards were restructured to five members serving two three-year terms with a seven-year cap; the dues increase from $525 to $595 was activated for July 2010; the Foundation set resident awards of roughly $9,600 plus travel grants; and the regional council noted that residency positions were shrinking.[1]
At the Foundation executive committee in May, Dr. Dubin was appointed Director of Education, giving continuing-education oversight a dedicated head, and the Educational Needs Review Committee was slated for dissolution with the medical education committees revitalized in its place. The deaf-blind silent auction, two years in the making, was canceled after a poor member-donation response and the collapse of expected support from a Florida association; the money already pledged was reserved.[2]
The ophthalmology College board of May 4 records something the organization had not previously written down so plainly. One-on-one member contact had surfaced “questions regarding the value of attending the ACA and maintaining membership,” and the board set out its answer: without membership there would be no continuing education, no board of examiners, the only osteopathic certifying board for these specialties, and no residency inspection, so that “DO certification is not supported.” The same minutes record apathy on the education committee.[3]
The annual Board of Governors meeting of May 4 assigned six division chairs, Advocacy, Governance, Information Technology, Membership, Postgraduate Training, and Professional Programs, approved the College-board restructure, folded the editorial committee into the education committee, and provisionally approved the certifying board’s continuous-certification program. Members-at-large were still elected separately by specialty, and Kristin Reidy was newly elected in ophthalmology; Dr. DiMarco was present.[4] The ophthalmology program directors, meeting on May 5, recorded fragmented residency funding and “fewer and fewer lecture hours in medical schools devoted to our specialties,” proposing sponsorship of student clubs and arguing that residents be taught “the value of membership” because “our organization’s survival depends strongly upon retaining all our graduates.”[5]
The reorganization of May 7 inducted Dr. Steehler and confirmed Dr. Dubin as Director of Education, with the Foundation’s needs-review committee absorbed into the College education committees.[6] The May retreat produced two suggestions, a $50,000 lifetime membership covering all future dues and registration, and a committee-interest application form, a thin yield for a retreat.[7] In August a conference call worked through the mechanics of the division structure in two phases, with bi-monthly reporting and division chairs mentoring committee chairs.[8]
The mid-year Board of Governors meeting of August 27 in Detroit executed the succession. The roll call reads “Carlo DiMarco, EVP, Alvin Dubin, EVP Emeritus,” and a contractual agreement and memorandum of understanding with both men was approved. The Board transferred $325,000 from the College to the Foundation, heard from all six divisions, combined the communications committees, and noted that the allopathic academy was “removing the opportunity for DO fellowships.”[9] By the November executive call, division-chair reports were in their second review cycle, a new professional website with a content-management system and job board was in final development, membership showed a slight increase weighted toward dues-payers, and the 2015 assembly had been moved to the Ritz-Carlton Grande Lakes in Orlando.[10]
Two structures, one purpose. The divisions and the succession answer the same problem from different directions: how to make an organization run by volunteers, with two staff, do more than it could. The divisions distributed responsibility with reporting deadlines; the succession tried to transfer an individual’s accumulated knowledge through a mentored handover. Rather than judge either scheme now, it is worth noting what the record later shows, the succession, executed in 2010 with a memorandum of understanding and weekly calls, was the more carefully engineered of the two, and it was undone in 2014 by a death no plan anticipated.
[1] -172 (mid-winter EFC and Foundation, Feb. 5). [2] -173 (Foundation executive committee highlights, May 3). [3] -174 (AOCO College minutes, May 4). [4] -175 (annual BOG, May 4). [5] -176 (ophthalmology program directors breakout, May 5). [6] -177 (BOG reorganization, May 7). [7] -178 (retreat suggestions, May). [8] -179 (executive committee conference call, Aug. 5). [9] -180 (mid-year BOG, Aug. 27, Detroit). [10] -181 (executive committee conference call, Nov. 30).
Two thousand eleven was a year of managed handover. Dr. DiMarco and Dr. Dubin held weekly Monday calls under a two-to-three-year mentorship, a defined list of executive duties was drawn up, and the memorandum of understanding formalizing the arrangement was to be signed at the May meeting. Plans were also laid for a successor to the Administrative Director. The organization adopted a revised mission statement, began planning its 2016 centennial in earnest, and recorded that its $45,000 continuing-education coordinator position remained unfilled.
The mid-winter Executive & Finance Committee of February 11, under President Steehler, reviewed the division-chair reports gathered through two conference calls and worked through the year’s budget adjustments: the office lease rising from $17,000 to $22,500, some $24,000 for storage and furniture, and information-technology costs. In the same list sits a line worth marking, the $45,000 continuing-education coordinator position “remains unfilled.” The committee also restructured the education committee, added a contested “Joseph Wyatt Lecture” with the rule that all named lectures must be funded, and tracked compliance with the osteopathic association’s health-and-viability requirements. The roll shows DiMarco as executive vice president and Dubin as emeritus.[1]
Two versions of the administrative to-do list from this spring survive, and the fuller one records the transition’s paperwork plainly: a “memorandum of understanding to be signed by Steehler or Gossage at the May 2011 BOG”, the DiMarco and Dubin transition agreement, alongside program-director succession planning, foreign graduate-education grant liability, and a review of the orientation workbook.[2][3]
The annual Executive & Finance Committee meeting of May 2 recorded a management-group update: office space had increased, and one-time equipment, furniture, and storage costs were shared with the two certifying boards, a reminder of how entangled the organization’s overhead was with the boards it managed. The same minutes note that “a successor for the Administrative Director is planned this year,” and report the executive transition’s progress: weekly Monday calls between DiMarco and Dubin under a two-to-three-year mentorship. The education committee was building a three-to-five-year lecture grid.[4]
The annual Board of Governors meeting in Tucson on May 3 carried a formal transition progress report, the weekly calls, a defined list of executive duties, and the two-to-three-year horizon. Members-at-large were still elected separately by specialty, the osteopathic association had officially approved the board-restructure bylaws the previous July, and the continuous-certification program was going to members. The minutes are signed with DiMarco as executive vice president and Dubin as emeritus.[5] At the reorganization of May 6, Dr. Gossage was inducted, Dr. Rochen having resigned, with Dr. Imber filling the term, and set goals to engage the resident council, write a monthly president’s blog, support the allopathic academy’s advocacy and ambassador programs, and organize a committee retreat for future planning.[6]
The mid-year meetings convened in late August. The Executive & Finance Committee of August 25 reviewed the mission statement, appointed Dr. Simonian as College representative to the postgraduate training review council, and approved a response to a matter involving the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery.[7] The Board of Governors met on August 26 in Detroit and adopted the revised mission statement. Membership showed “minimal growth” against “normal attrition” but strong retention, with roughly ninety percent of graduates converting to membership, and a member-benefits list was requested. The hundredth assembly in 2016 was designated a “Banner Year” and gala at the Phoenician in Scottsdale. The minutes track a series of graduate-education policy shifts, one resolution rescinded in favor of a two-step successor, independent inspectors coming in 2013, academic sponsorship through the osteopathic training institutions, and quality and funding pressures from federal health reform, with ophthalmology and otolaryngology “under-represented in training.” A new ophthalmology program was approved at Oakwood South Shores, and residents were again described as “lacking” involvement.[8]
The Foundation board met the same day, pursuing the Phoenician for the centennial gala, adding a modest grant-writing line at $1,200 with instructions to pursue unrestricted grants, changing the assembly format by dropping Sunday sessions in favor of a banquet and band, and approving a board retreat for early December at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens. It declined Dr. Crew’s request for a surgical-simulator grant on the principle that resident grants be “equal and balanced.”[9] The November to-do lists for both entities record the follow-through: mid-winter agendas, nominee statements, the completed response on the cosmetic-surgery matter, the member-benefits list still to be developed, a rescheduling of the board retreat, and an updated resident survey.[10][11]
What the unfilled post signifies. The organization had identified continuing education as its future, it had a coordinator role budgeted at $45,000 and a lecture grid stretching three to five years out. Rather than a hiring delay, the vacancy is better read as a statement of capacity: the same body that could not fund its administration from dues in 2009 could not fill the one staff position dedicated to the work it called central. The role reappears, still unfilled, in the record of 2015, when dues were raised specifically to pay for it.
[1] -183 (mid-winter EFC, Feb. 11). [2] -184 (administrative to-do list, short draft, ~Mar.). [3] -185 (administrative to-do list, full version, ~Mar.). [4] -186 (annual EFC, May 2). [5] -187 (annual BOG, May 3, Tucson). [6] -188 (BOG reorganization, May 6). [7] -189 (mid-year EFC, Aug. 25). [8] -190 (mid-year BOG, Aug. 26, Detroit). [9] -191 (Foundation Board of Directors mid-year, Aug. 26). [10] -192 (post-August AOCOO to-do list, Nov. 10). [11] -193 (post-August Foundation to-do list, Nov. 10). Contemporary secondary context: -267 (Simonian, Ophthalmology Management, c. 2009).
In September the osteopathic association’s education bureau told the Board plainly that the profession was “in a crisis regarding graduate medical education.” The organization was already living that crisis in miniature, tracking program closures and unfunded residency positions. Against that pressure the year produced two more hopeful firsts: an inaugural Women in Leadership gathering, and a grant-writer whose work brought in outside corporate money. The Foundation, meanwhile, admitted its fundraising had stalled and deferred its charitable committee to a strategic plan not yet written.
The mid-winter Executive & Finance Committee of February 10, under President Gossage, approved a $250,000 transfer from the College to the Foundation and the contract for the 2016 assembly at the Phoenician, with a caveat about economic conditions. The executive transition was reported as “going well,” with DiMarco and Dubin now speaking daily, and succession planning was slated as a 2013 faculty-development topic. A new fellowship application process was adopted, requiring membership, certification by the osteopathic board, attendance at three assemblies, and meritorious service, the member-benefits list requested the previous year was completed and posted, and correspondence on “residency concerns and program closures” went from DiMarco to the osteopathic association’s executive director. A Women in Leadership meeting was planned.[1] The administrative to-do lists that spring track the follow-through, including the completed transfer and Dr. Gossage’s “100 Year Drive to Keep the Foundation Alive.”[2][3]
The Foundation held its annual meeting at Indian Wells on May 7. Its balanced funds were up 3.9 percent, but its fundraising was candidly described as stalled: “a charitable endeavor that will create passion in the College membership must be created.” The hundred-year drive had produced no action; the charitable contributions committee was deferred to the strategic plan; grant-writing was under way with instructions to pursue focused and unrestricted grants; and three foreign graduate-education grants of $2,000 each were awarded.[4] The Board of Governors met the following day, scheduling strategic-planning sessions into the September meeting, reporting the weekly executive calls, and implementing the new fellowship process. Members-at-large were still elected separately by specialty, and the Colleges still held three separate membership meetings.[5]
Two documents from that week deserve individual notice. The ophthalmology program directors’ breakout lists the residency interview schedule for that fall across roughly eleven programs, Grand Rapids, Oakwood South Shores, the Wyatt Eye program at St. John Providence, Tulsa, Erie, Dayton, Columbus, Las Vegas, New York, Philadelphia, and Bradenton, a useful snapshot of the training base at its widest.[6] And on May 9 the first Women in Leadership gathering convened, organized by Dr. Simonian and Dr. Libby Smith, with seventeen attendees ranging from residents to senior members. Its minutes state the case directly: women made up about ten percent of the Colleges’ membership and had been “historically grossly underrepresented in leadership positions.” The meeting included an organizational chart, a six-region quilt made by Judy Davis, and testimonials, and closed with “overwhelming support to expand this forum.”[7]
At the mid-year meetings in Dearborn on September 7, the Foundation reported that its grant-writer had produced a $6,000 Alcon corporate grant for the mid-year seminar, with more applications in progress, while the charitable contributions committee remained on hold pending the strategic plan; William Lynch made a contribution to the Alvin D. Dubin Legacy Lecture fund.[8] The Board of Governors recorded the osteopathic association’s judgment that the profession faced a graduate-medical-education crisis, with unfunded positions and self- or corporate funding now permitted. Continuous osteopathic certification would begin implementation on January 1, 2013. Membership showed minimal growth, and the Board asked for a breakdown by age. Women in Leadership would continue into 2013, Dr. Reidy was appointed a councillor of the allopathic academy for 2013-15, and a shortage of volunteers to chair programs was noted.[9][10]
The year’s two directions. Read together, 2012 shows an organization under external pressure it could not control, unfunded residencies, closing programs, a profession-wide accreditation crisis, while making internal progress it could: a grant-writer bringing in corporate money, a fellowship process with real criteria, and a new forum for the ten percent of members who had been largely absent from leadership. Rather than resolve the tension, the record simply holds both. The Foundation’s admission that no charitable endeavor existed to “create passion” in the membership is the year’s most honest line, and its charitable committee’s deferral to a plan not yet adopted is the year’s most characteristic act.
[1] -194 (mid-winter EFC, Feb. 10). [2] -195 (administrative to-do list, ~Feb., Mar.). [3] -196 (administrative to-do list, Mar. 21). [4] -197 (Foundation annual, May 7, Indian Wells). [5] -198 (annual BOG, May 8). [6] -199 (ophthalmology program directors breakout, May 9). [7] -200 (Women in Leadership, inaugural meeting, May 9). [8] -202 (Foundation mid-year, Sep. 7, Dearborn). [9] -203 (mid-year BOG, Sep. 7). [10] -204 (administrative to-do list, ~Sep., Oct.).
Two thousand thirteen is the year the organization saw its future clearly and wrote it down. In May it adopted a strategic plan and created a Presidential Advisory Council explicitly charged with serving as the organization’s “historic memory.” In September, in a facilitated planning session, it acknowledged in writing a “real decrease in income from executive management after January 1, 2016”, dating the revenue collapse more than two years before it arrived. The same year the ophthalmology College’s annual meeting lasted about five minutes, and a memorial lecture was renamed because members no longer knew whom it honored.
The Foundation’s mid-winter meeting of February 8, under President Burk, set the keynote for the assembly, the osteopathic association’s executive director, with member questions about single unified accreditation collated in advance, and then made a small decision with large resonance. The A. B. Crites Memorial Lecture was renamed simply the “ACA Keynote,” for two stated reasons: its funds were depleted, and “many of our current members do not know who A. B. Crites was.”[1]
At the annual meetings in Orlando in early May the strategic plan came to fruition. The Executive & Finance Committee of May 6, under President Burk with Dr. Franchi as president-elect, approved a $250,000 College contribution to the Foundation, adopted online voting through a survey platform, and launched a volunteer-leadership survey.[2] The Foundation board the same day reviewed and approved the strategic plan as amended, with costs and budgets to be prepared before full implementation, and recorded its accountant’s advice that while the tax authorities set no required annual charitable-spending amount, regular spending was prudent.[3]
The Board of Governors met on May 7 and approved the strategic plan, introduced by Dr. Dubin and presented by the facilitator, Dr. Franklin Medio. The same minutes contain a valuable factual anchor: counsel Joshua Prober stated that the Foundation’s “creation … began in 1995”, the clearest evidence in the record for a founding date long left uncertain. Online voting was introduced, Dr. DiMarco updated the Board on single-accreditation negotiations, and demographic work showed 45 percent of members aged between 25 and 45, prompting attention to family-friendly venues.[4]
The same week reveals how far the two Colleges had receded as governing bodies. The ophthalmology College’s annual meeting on May 7 ran roughly five minutes with five people present: it accepted a resignation, appointed Judy Davis to the unexpired term, and adjourned.[5] The program-director breakouts, by contrast, were substantive. The otolaryngology session refocused second-year caseloads on general practice, questioned the first-year general-surgery requirement, and moved surgical logs from paper diagnostic codes to an electronic procedural format.[6] The ophthalmology session placed its own case minimums side by side with the allopathic council’s, cataract at 86 against the College’s 50, and weighed raising them, an early instance of the College measuring itself against the standard it would soon have to meet.[7]
At the reorganization of May 10, Dr. Franchi was inducted with the smooth implementation of the strategic plan as his stated goal, and the Board created the Presidential Advisory Council: five to seven senior leaders, Chambers, Gaunt, Gossage, Imber, Myint, and Robbins, to advise on strategic plans and to serve “as a historic memory … guidance … on such topics as succession.”[8]
The mid-year meetings in Detroit on September 20 are the most consequential in the modern record. The Board of Governors recorded the strategic plan as finalized, the advisory council as operating with two meetings held, and the accreditation negotiations stalled by “the inability of the ACGME, AACOM and AOA to come to an agreement.” It also recorded that the Ritz-Carlton had overbooked, so that the 2015 assembly could not be held as planned, with Mr. Lynch and Dr. Dubin to renegotiate. A website and social-media push was under way, and a quality-improvement committee was to be eliminated if still inactive by May 2014.[9]
The Foundation met the same day and held the second phase of strategic planning in a facilitated format, producing three actions. The first concerned residencies, including alternative funding of $70,000 to $100,000 per resident. The second concerned continuing education, online delivery and board review. The third was headed financial viability, and its language is worth quoting as the record has it: the group agreed to “acknowledge a potential significant increase in the cost of doing business,” that “revenues from management [are] going down,” and, verbatim, to “acknowledge that we have a real decrease in income from executive management after January 1, 2016.” The same session planned a hundredth-anniversary giving campaign with voluntary dues add-ons of $100, $500, or $1,000, a donor banner, and a gala.[10] The resident council, meeting the next day, announced a Facebook page and a new-member welcome packet.[11]
Three documents, one theme. The strategic plan, the Presidential Advisory Council, and the September financial-viability session were all attempts to see ahead and remember behind. The Council’s charge, to be a “historic memory” on questions like succession, is the most explicit institutional-memory device in the entire record. Rather than credit or fault the organization for what followed, the historian’s obligation here is to note the sequence: in September 2013 the leadership named the exact date on which its management income would fall, and it did so in the same year it created a body to hold its memory and adopted a plan to guide its future. What the later record shows is that the date was met, the plan lapsed, and the Council disappears from the minutes after 2014. The failure was not one of foresight.
A note on the Crites Lecture. The February decision to rename the A. B. Crites Memorial Lecture because members did not know who he was is a small administrative act with a long echo. The founding-era documents examined in Part I identify him: A. B. Crites, DO, of Kansas City, treasurer of the osteopathic certifying board in 1942, the throat examiner at the 1944 certification examinations, and in 1939 the leading advocate of merging the specialty society into the College of Osteopathic Surgeons. A founding officer’s name outlived the memory of who he was by roughly seventy years, and the organization’s response was to retire the name rather than recover the man.
[1] -205 (Foundation mid-winter, Feb. 8). [2] -023 (annual EFC, May 6; filename mislabels the year, a correctly named duplicate is filed at -207). [3] -208 (Foundation annual, May 6). [4] -210 (annual BOG, May 7, Orlando). [5] -209 (AOCO College annual meeting, May 7). [6] -211 (otolaryngology program directors breakout, May 7). [7] -212 (ophthalmology program directors workshop, May 8). [8] -213 (BOG reorganization, May 10). [9] -214 (mid-year BOG, Sep. 20, Detroit). [10] -215 (Foundation mid-year and strategic-planning phase two, Sep. 20). [11] -216 (Council of Residents and Fellows mid-year, Sep. 21). On Crites’s identity, see Part I: -275 (Board booklet, Nov. 1942), -271 (1944 amalgamation account), -279 and -280 (Crites letters, 1939). The 2013 Annual Clinical Assembly program (-359) is preserved in Dr. Morris’s archive.
Two thousand fourteen was moving along its planned course, a strategic plan in implementation, a professional membership survey, a hard-fought venue dispute, until late August, when Executive Vice President Carlo DiMarco died. The mentored succession built over four years ended in an emergency conference call, and Alvin Dubin, who had handed the office over in 2010, was unanimously asked to resume it. In the same autumn the Foundation opened a file titled “Future of AOCOO-HNS,” because the certifying boards it managed were relocating to Chicago after December 31, 2015.
The year opened in Orlando on February 7. The mid-winter Board of Governors signed the contract for the 2017 assembly at Red Rock in Las Vegas, retained an attorney over the Ritz-Carlton dispute, the overbooking discovered the previous September, now carrying an estimated $98,000 loss, disbanded the quality-improvement committee and replaced it with an administrative dashboard, and tracked strategic-plan implementation across assembly videotaping, a website redesign, member surveys, and leadership development. Among the fellowship applicants approved that day, the minutes record the name of Julia Agapov, DO.[1] The Executive & Finance Committee met the same day on the machinery of governance itself: divisions and committees needed clearer charges and oversight, the board should be restructured with more members-at-large, and a leadership pipeline should run through the program directors, who were asked to “identify graduates with values needed for future leadership.”[2] The Foundation formed a fundraising committee under Gossage and Lynch, approved Donald Morris as ophthalmology education chair, set resident awards at about $7,500, and denied a patient-services grant while abolishing the program that had made it.[3]
External pressure was building through the spring. In late March, notes from the osteopathic association’s accreditation review committee, reported by the College’s Dr. Simonian, recorded that the examining boards would move their headquarters to Chicago “by the end of the year,” and that a motion recommended all specialty colleges create a membership category for allopathic program directors; AOCOO-HNS had none, which was causing inspection deficiencies.[4] In April the Pennsylvania osteopathic association circulated a resolution demanding transparency from the national association on its accreditation memorandum with the allopathic council, and no implementation until the House of Delegates approved.[5]
At the Scottsdale meetings in May the organization did steady work. The Foundation on May 5 formed a hundredth-anniversary ad hoc committee under Gossage, McIntire, and Lynch, and approved up to $10,000 for the Ritz-Carlton litigation.[6] The Board of Governors on May 6, under President Franchi, endorsed the Pennsylvania resolution for a member vote, recorded DiMarco as executive vice president with Dubin emeritus, and commissioned professional membership surveys.[7] The resident council met on May 7 and reported that the procedure-logging system was “antiquated and outdated”, and, more tellingly, that residents avoided raising issues “out of respect for program directors and fear of repercussions.”[8] At the reorganization of May 10, Dr. Haupert was inducted with a goal aimed squarely at the participation problem: “20% of members do 80% of the work.”[9]
Two documents from midsummer deserve to sit side by side. On July 1 an administrative to-do list recorded the fate of the strategic plan’s review: “Administration emailed BOG members on 6/16 asking … ideas/comments/critiques of the SP. To date no responses have been received.”[10] Three weeks later the professional membership survey was delivered, 252 respondents from a membership of 1,104, and a finding that members wanted to volunteer but were “uncertain how to become more involved,” with recommendations for information sessions and incentives.[11] The organization asked its board for comment and got silence; it asked its members and learned they were waiting to be asked.
In mid-August the office met in Huber Heights, DiMarco, Dubin, and Bailey together, to work through bank signers, tax filings, Ohio incorporation, the Foundation’s Illinois incorporation, insurance, and a review of the strategic plan’s phases.[12] It is the last record of the three of them at work. Within days DiMarco was gone. An emergency Executive & Finance Committee conference call unanimously named Alvin Dubin executive vice president and chief executive officer; he accepted, called for “one voice” during the transition, and the committee commissioned expert legal and accounting review of the Foundation’s “present and future status.”[13] The record carries an unresolved inconsistency here that is better noted than smoothed: the emergency call is dated August 19, while the October minutes record the death as August 25.[13][14]
At the mid-year meetings in Detroit on October 10, the Board formally recorded DiMarco’s death and Dubin’s resumption of the office, and began succession planning again from the beginning. It also confirmed the Ritz-Carlton loss at about $98,000 and questioned the role of the regional representatives’ council.[14] The Foundation opened the file that names the coming problem. Under the heading “Future of AOCOO-HNS,” it recorded the revenue that would be lost once the certifying boards relocated to Chicago after December 31, 2015, and formed a committee. It also created the DiMarco Chaired Lecture Series, raised the resident travel grant from $250 to $300, and seated counsel Joshua Prober and Mr. Lynch on its board.[15] The resident council, meeting the next day with some fifty-seven attendees, reported that the website had “a new look” with the 2014 assembly videos posted, the strategic plan’s technology projects delivered, while job postings sat three years stale and the email lists were disordered.[16]
What the year cost. The succession executed in 2010 was the most carefully engineered piece of governance in this record: a memorandum of understanding, a defined duties list, weekly calls, a two-to-three-year mentorship. It ended in a single week. Rather than a failure of planning, 2014 is a demonstration of the limits of planning, and of how thin the organization’s bench was, since the only available answer was to ask a man who had already retired from the post to take it up again at sixty-eight days’ notice. The Foundation’s “Future of AOCOO-HNS” committee, formed the same autumn, shows that the leadership understood both problems at once: it had lost its executive, and it was about to lose the income that paid for its administration.
[1] -011 (mid-winter BOG, Feb. 7, Orlando). [2] -014 (EFC, Feb. 7; header mislabels the year). [3] -018 (Foundation mid-winter, Feb. 7). [4] -041 (AOA postgraduate training review committee notes, Mar. 27). [5] -019 (POMA resolution, draft Apr. 28). [6] -017 (Foundation annual, May 5, Scottsdale). [7] -010 (annual BOG, May 6). [8] -026 (CRF, May 7). [9] -013 (BOG reorganization, May 10). [10] -028 (post-May to-do list, updated Jul. 1). [11] -021 (2014 annual membership survey, Sondergeld and Stone, Jul. 31). [12] -009 (administrative office meeting, Aug. 12-13). [13] -022 (EFC conference call, Aug. 19; a mislabeled duplicate is filed at -206). [14] -012 (mid-year BOG, Oct. 10, Detroit; header mislabels the year). Morris's archive holds the amended primary text (-355). [15] -016 (Foundation mid-year, Oct. 10; header mislabels the year). [16] -027 (CRF mid-year, Oct. 11). [17] -356 (management company's May 2017 executive-director report, Morris archive; the hundred boxes, the database merge, the reconstructed minutes; abstracted, confirm against original). Also of this year: -008 (AOA single-accreditation resolution), -015 and -020 (administrative to-do lists), -024 (committee tasks 2014-15), -025 (assembly debrief), -029 (ophthalmology program directors breakout).
With the loss of management income now fourteen months away, 2015 was the year the organization assembled its answer. A formal paper proposed online and simultaneous-broadcast continuing education; dues were raised fifty dollars expressly to hire a coordinator for it; the centennial fundraising drive was earmarked to pay for it; a new Foundation committee was formed to take over the College’s educational budget; and the strategic plan was rewritten around a single idea, that continuing education must become, in the Foundation’s own words, “the lifeline of the organizations.” Dr. Dubin received a $60,000 bonus for resuming the executive office, and the relocated assembly went ahead in Orlando.
At the mid-winter meetings in Orlando on February 6, the Board of Governors reviewed the accreditation merger and heard President-Elect Sibia’s goals for the coming year: develop additional revenue, monitor the merger, and improve continuing education through online and board-review offerings. It approved a $60,000 bonus to Dr. Dubin “for taking on the duties of EVP following the demise of Dr. DiMarco,” and left executive succession to be discussed by the president and president-elect.[1] The Foundation, meeting the same day, took the year’s most consequential structural step: it formed a Foundation Oversight Committee, Sibia, Franchi, and Lynch, whose stated preliminary goal was “to explore shifting AOCOO-HNS educational budget responsibilities to the Foundation.” It also directed the proceeds of the hundred-year drive toward online continuing education, and disputed a $1,485 invoice from the Ritz-Carlton’s representative.[2]
The administrative to-do lists from that spring record both diligence and its limits. Most items were done; the letter to the hotel went out on March 2; Dubin and Bailey were to review the College-to-Foundation budgets in Chicago in mid-April. But the strategic-plan refinement report, emailed to the board twice in March, drew a single response, from Dr. Reidy.[3][4]
The annual meetings convened at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, the venue secured after the Ritz-Carlton overbooking, in early May. The Foundation on May 4 approved a $25,000 gift to the Macula Vision Research Foundation, restated the College-to-Foundation shift of educational expenses in its budget, continued the strategic-plan refinement, and noted that the hotel’s representative had not answered the March letter.[5] The Board of Governors on May 5 elected Sibia president and Scheiner president-elect; recorded that only two specialty colleges had opposed the accreditation merger at the previous July’s House of Delegates; framed the plan’s refinement around a continuing-education thrust with possible added staffing; and recorded that the national association’s certifying-board services staff would take over meeting arrangements and on-site support for the osteopathic ophthalmology and otolaryngology board, and possibly the surgery board, the management income beginning to leave, on schedule.[6]
At the reorganization of May 9, Dr. Sibia was inducted, restating his three goals. The Board raised dues by fifty dollars to $645, the minutes state the purpose plainly, “to hire a CME coordinator”, launched the hundredth-year Foundation drive with unanimous board support, commissioned a membership survey on the accreditation merger, and installed Dr. Simonian as chair of the education council after Dr. Robbins’s resignation.[7] The resident council met at the assembly with seventeen attendees, taking up unification and a new resident survey.[8]
In the summer the mitigation acquired a written blueprint. The otolaryngology education committee met by telephone on June 16 to plan the 2016 assembly around clinically-focused “how I do it” lectures, a longer practice-management workshop, and a possible thyroid-ultrasound certification course.[9] Two days later Dubin and Bailey produced a paper titled “Creation of New CME Programming.” It proposed simultaneous live and online delivery through a virtual-training platform for subspecialty members, framed explicitly to “increase revenue” and to reach rural and solo practitioners, allopathic physicians, and non-physician professionals, with board-review courses developed alongside the certifying board, and weighed the drawbacks candidly.[10]
At the mid-year meetings in Detroit in September the plan narrowed to one idea. The Board of Governors on September 11 removed strategic-plan budget items, professional survey help and the young-member group, and recorded that “the future of the College is CME.” It also noted that the residency review committees now accepted osteopathic program directors, that seven votes had been cast against the merger at the House of Delegates, and that the hundredth assembly would be held at the Phoenician in Scottsdale in May 2016; Dr. Siddens resigned and Dr. Morris was appointed.[11] The Foundation met the next day, spoke of “difficult decisions regarding the future of the College,” and put the matter in its starkest form: continuing education “must become the lifeline of the organizations.” It eliminated the young-member group, set guidelines for named lectures, and considered engaging a continuing-education consultant on stipend.[12] The resident council met the same day with about fifty-seven present, including students, discussing single accreditation and online educational tools.[13]
The autumn to-do lists are the year’s most revealing documents. A one-day strategic-plan refinement session was scheduled for November 21 at a hotel near Chicago’s airport. Named lectures were underfunded against the new guidelines. The website vendor was changing again. And two entries record the administration’s position with unusual candour: it asked whether it should simply “ignore” a Board directive to push program directors toward allopathic accreditation, and reported that the continuing-education ad hoc committee had received “no answer” from leadership.[14][15]
Why this matters for the story that follows. It is tempting, knowing what came next, to read 2015 as a year of drift. The record does not support that reading. The mitigation was specific, funded, and multi-part: a written program for online education, a dues increase dedicated to staffing it, a fundraising drive earmarked to it, a governance mechanism to move its costs to the Foundation, and a strategic plan rewritten around it. Rather than absence of a plan, what the 2015 record shows is a plan being built by two people, Dubin and Bailey, while the board that had commissioned it answered one email in three. Whether the plan survived does not turn on its quality. It turns on who was left to carry it.
[1] -217 (mid-winter BOG, Feb. 6). [2] -218 (Foundation mid-winter, Feb. 6). [3] -219 (post-meeting to-do list). [4] -220 (post-meeting to-do list, updated Mar. 17). [5] -221 (Foundation annual, May 4). [6] -222 (annual BOG, May 5). [7] -223 (BOG reorganization, May 9). [8] -224 (CRF at the assembly, May). [9] -225 (otolaryngology education committee, Jun. 16; an identical copy is filed at -226). [10] -227 (“Creation of New CME Programming,” Jun. 18). [11] -228 (mid-year BOG, Sep. 11). [12] -229 (Foundation mid-year, Sep. 12). [13] -230 (CRF mid-year, Sep. 12). [14] -231 (post-September to-do list, Oct. 13). [15] -232 (post-September to-do list, updated Oct. 15).
In its hundredth year the organization celebrated at the Phoenician and decided to stop managing itself. The certifying-board income was gone after January 1. By February the Board was in contact with the American College of Osteopathic Surgeons about management services; in May it voted to enter an agreement with them; and in October, after a competing proposal, it reversed course and contracted instead with the American College of Osteopathic Emergency Physicians, $275,000 a year, effective January 1, 2017. Dr. Dubin, who had asked to step down in July, agreed to stay a final mentoring year. The centennial assembly drew 571 registrants, down from 607.
The year’s course was set at a special strategic-planning meeting held on December 5 and 6, 2015, whose decisions the February records carry forward. The Executive & Finance Committee met on February 4 and recapped it: contact had been made with the American College of Osteopathic Surgeons about management services, and its tax return released for review; a “backup plan” was sketched in which the College kept its own administration but outsourced professional input; accreditation by the allopathic continuing-education council was priced at $25,000, to be funded by the Foundation; meetings would be consolidated; member services would be redefined to include allied health and allopathic physicians; and executive succession went to executive session.[1]
The Board of Governors met the next day and turned those items into decisions. It authorized exploring management by the surgeons’ college, including release of the tax return; approved pursuing dual accreditation at $20,000 to $25,000 to enable allopathic associate membership; canceled the mid-winter meeting altogether, consolidating it into the mid-year from 2017; considered Chicago for the 2017 mid-year; approved a $250 gift-card honorarium for education-committee work; approved a $120,000 retention bonus to Dr. Dubin; converted the mandatory $500 Foundation contribution to a voluntary one; and challenged the national association’s appointment of a residency review representative without College input.[2] The Foundation, meeting the same day, agreed to fund the $25,000 accreditation on counsel Prober’s reasoning that continuing education was properly the Foundation’s remit. Its minutes also record Dr. Dubin’s own wish to step down on July 1, and his agreement to remain one more year with Sibia and Gossage mentoring part-time; associate and allied-health membership were drafted, with the note that both the surgeons’ and the emergency physicians’ colleges already carried such bylaws, pending a national vote in July.[3]
The centennial assembly convened at the Phoenician in Scottsdale in early May. The Foundation reported 571 registrants against 607 the previous year, and a centennial drive total of $61,385; the education committee was under a “change of manager” as Dr. Morris centralized it.[4] The Executive & Finance Committee on May 2 reviewed two management proposals, from the surgeons’ college and from Ruggles Service Corporation, discussed when Dr. Dubin would step down, and recorded that seven residency programs had applied for allopathic accreditation with none yet accredited.[5] On May 3 the Board of Governors heard a presentation from Linda Ayers, the surgeons’ college chief executive, and approved a motion to enter an administrative-service agreement with them. It elected Scheiner president and Reidy president-elect, kept the 2017 mid-year at the Westin in Detroit, and set the 2019 assembly for the Grand Cypress.[6]
The education committee met on May 4 in its new consolidated form, with Dr. Morris chairing the whole of it and rotating specialty moderators, Dr. Coleman for ophthalmology, Dr. Farrugia for otolaryngology, quarterly telephone meetings, a 2017 mid-year reoriented to the business of medicine, a new resident scientific session, and joint accreditation to allow both allopathic and osteopathic credit “to attract MDs.”[7] At the reorganization of May 6, Dr. Scheiner was inducted with two goals: an informed membership on the accreditation merger, and broadening education “to outside physicians.” The rebuilt subspecialty education structure named Dr. Julia Agapov as ophthalmology chair for the 2016 mid-year and the 2018 assembly.[8]
Then, in the autumn, the decision was remade. At the mid-year Board of Governors meeting of October 7, the amended minutes are the authoritative text, the emergency physicians’ college presented: Janice Wachtler, its executive director, with Stephanie Whitmer, its director of affiliate management. On cost and on readiness for the accreditation the College wanted, $275,000 against the surgeons’ $325,000, and further advanced toward joint accreditation, the Board approved a motion to enter a management agreement with them instead, effective January 1, 2017. In the same meeting Dr. Everhart reported that the membership’s greatest concern was “the future relevancy of the AOCOO given the ACGME merger.” Dr. Dubin and Ms. Bailey both still signed the minutes.[9] The Foundation met the same day, approved the year-end financials and the coming budget, awarded six foreign graduate-education grants, and recorded that its Oversight Committee, formed in February 2015 to take over the College’s educational budget, had “nothing new to report.”[10]
What the Board chose, and what it was choosing between. The 2016 decision is often remembered as a move to Chicago. Read from the minutes, it was something more specific: the abandonment of the physician-executive model that had run the organization since 1999. No individual successor had been found in three searches; Dr. Dubin himself had raised the idea of “a non-physician executive director like ACOS and ACOEP.” Rather than hire a person, the Board hired an institution, a peer college’s association-management arm. It considered three: the surgeons’ college, a commercial firm, and the emergency physicians’ college, choosing the last on price and technical readiness. The alternative it did not seriously test was the “backup plan” sketched in February, keeping its own administration and buying professional help around it. Whether that road was viable cannot be known. What the record establishes is that in the hundredth year of its existence, with its own staff still in place and its centennial gala just held, the organization contracted out its institutional memory.
A note on the surgeons’ college. The May vote to enter an agreement with the American College of Osteopathic Surgeons has a precedent that no one in the room is recorded as mentioning. In 1930 a committee of the specialty’s founders investigated “the feasibility of becoming related to” that same body, and in 1939 a tentative plan would have folded the specialty society into it entirely. Both times the specialists drew back. In 2016 they voted to join it in a narrower way, as a client, and then drew back again.
[1] -233 (EFC and strategic-planning special meeting, Feb. 4). [2] -234 (mid-winter BOG, Feb. 5). [3] -235 (Foundation mid-winter, Feb. 5). [4] -236 (Foundation annual, May 2). [5] -237 (annual EFC, May 2). [6] -238 (annual BOG, May 3, the Phoenician). [7] -239 (Education Committee, May 4; filename differs on the date). [8] -240 (BOG reorganization, May 6). [9] -242 (mid-year BOG, Oct. 7, amended and authoritative; the superseded original is filed at -241, with duplicate copies at -252). [10] -243 (Foundation mid-year, Oct. 7; duplicate copies at -248 and -253). On the 1930s precedent, see Part I: -278 (Reid letter, Mar. 15, 1930) and -279, -280 (Crites letters, 1939). Dr. Morris’s archive supplies the primary Board of Governors minutes of October 7, 2016 (-355).
The outsourced arrangement began on December 1, 2016 and was noticed for termination on November 20, 2017. In between, the year ran from optimism to disillusionment: a new website and logo, the largest assembly attendance in the College’s history, and a president reporting the organization “now stabilized”, then an accounting firm unable to close the books, a board demanding to know how its money had been spent, and a unanimous vote to give six months’ notice. Dr. Dubin retired at the end of June, and Ms. Bailey was already gone. The bylaws were rewritten to admit allopathic physicians as members.
The new arrangement is visible from the first meeting of the year. At the Executive Committee on February 3, four staff of the management company were present, Janice Wachtler as executive director, Stephanie Whitmer as administrative director, Kristin Kennedy for education, and Adam Levy for events. The company had assumed control on December 1, 2016, and the Huber Heights office in Ohio had closed on December 31. A new website and logo were under way, a single association-management database, and member benefits including a bank-lending arrangement and an insurance exchange; the organization was applying for foreign-corporation status in Illinois.[1] The manager's own May report later put concrete numbers to that handover: more than a hundred boxes of files, supplies and equipment unpacked from the Ohio office, five separate Access membership databases merged into one, and more than twenty years of minutes never before put in finished form at last reconciled.[17] The Foundation the same day recorded the Dayton information transferred to Chicago and a continuing-education department building needs assessments, and noted that only one ophthalmology program had yet achieved allopathic accreditation.[2] The audit committee found the prior year’s financials in order and proposed combining audit with finance; it also explained an end-of-2015 spike in postage, the cost of shipping the certifying boards’ material to the national association.[3]
At the assembly in May the mood was confident. The Executive & Finance Committee of May 9 heard President Scheiner report the organization “now stabilized with a new home, logo, website,” and Dr. Dubin frame the move to the management company as the fulfillment of the strategic plan; attendance was the largest in the College’s history. A board-honoraria proposal was tabled, twenty-three governance policies were adopted under the national association’s health-and-viability program, and the organization was still using its Dayton accountant. The meeting also recorded a blunt warning about the membership pipeline, keep young physicians, “or it will be the death knell.”[4]
The Board of Governors met on May 10 and recorded the departure that closed an era: Dr. Dubin would retire at the end of June 2017, after roughly eighteen years. The financial picture was mixed, income down $18,265 even though dues receipts rose about $5,800, and the management company had logged more than 1,700 hours. The insurance exchange was approved, the regional-representatives council was judged obsolete, and revisions to the orientation manual and bylaws went to the bylaws committee. Two programs now held allopathic accreditation.[5] At the membership meeting of May 12 the numbers were put before the members: the College’s bottom line about $733,000, the Foundation about $6,000,000. On single accreditation the College acknowledged it “has little control” over the process, and turned instead to member relevance and continuing education; “orphan residents” would be protected, and the 2020 end date might be extended.[6] The reorganization the same day swore in Dr. Reidy as president, with goals to redefine the relationship with the national association, retain members, and revamp continuing education. Its committee slate carries a quiet casualty: the Presidential Advisory Council, listed through 2016-17, is blank for 2017-18.[7]
By high summer the handover was complete in fact as well as form. The minutes of a June conference call on accreditation are authored by Ms. Wachtler as executive director, and list Ms. Whitmer as administrative director of AOCOO-HNS; Ms. Bailey, in the post since 1999, no longer appears. The subject was survival: officials of the national association and of the allopathic academy intervened to help community ophthalmology programs meet accreditation requirements, under a commitment described as “No Resident Left Behind,” with one program in particular struggling.[8] On July 6 the bylaws committee worked through a full rewrite, drafted by the management company, which created an associate class for allopathic physicians and an affiliate class for allied-health professionals, established an “executive director” office, added a dissolution clause, and described the organization as incorporated in Ohio and doing business in Illinois. The draft also carried a clause defining a retired member as one permanently retired from the practice of emergency medicine, the manager’s own template showing through. The same minutes record that the remote accountant had been “basically MIA for a month” and that assembly finances were late and inaccurate.[9]
In the autumn the confidence of May was gone. The Executive & Finance Committee of October 12 recorded that the accounting firm could not close either the fiscal year or the July-to-September books. It approved board honoraria at $250 a day, adopted a new three-class budget format including a mandatory College donation to the Foundation, and, reviewing the management agreement, moved to demand a face-to-face meeting with the management company and an explanation of “how money was spent if not given to staff.” A strategic-planning session was set for February in Chicago, and severance was arranged for a former Dayton staff member.[10] The Board of Governors met the next day and approved the rewritten bylaws: allopathic physicians admitted as associate members through either accrediting body, the new and affiliate categories removed, board service restricted to Fellows, and the emergency-medicine language corrected. The revisions would go to the members and then to the national association in July 2018. An ethics-hearing procedure was adopted, a new research paper award created, an honorary membership granted to a prominent allopathic surgeon, and a change of accountant was pending.[11]
A conference call on November 1 kept the existing accountant through the coming fiscal year pending a review, redesigned the banquet and mid-year meeting, planned the 2020 assembly for San Diego, and set the February strategic-planning session to be led by the management company’s own executives. It also recorded that the Foundation Oversight Committee, created in February 2015, was still working out its “purpose and function.”[12] Three weeks later, on November 20, the Executive Committee met by telephone with two past presidents invited, and its minutes are the plainest document in the modern record. The company, they wrote, “was designed and functioned to manage the 4,500 members of the ACOEP,” and its approach “was not addressing the concerns of our 800 member organization.” A single point of contact had never surfaced. If the executive director retired or two named staff left, no one appeared cross-trained to take over. There was trouble communicating with the bank and the accountant, and the website and social media went untended. Outsourcing newsletters and award plaques seemed “expensive and unnecessary given $23,000 fees.” There was concern that College and Foundation funds might not be kept entirely separate. The contract was $275,000, but with staff travel and outsourcing the real cost was nearer $325,000, and the company had signaled it wanted another $50,000. The committee voted unanimously, two abstaining, to give the six months’ notice the contract allowed.[13]
Eleven months, from stabilized to terminated. It would be easy to read 2017 as a story of a bad vendor, and the minutes do not support that reading either. The company delivered much of what it was hired for, a new website and logo, a single database, member benefits, a bylaws rewrite, record attendance, 1,700 hours of work. What it could not deliver was fit. Rather than incompetence, the November minutes describe a scale mismatch: an operation built for 4,500 members applied to 800, at a price that grew, with no single person who knew this organization. The one thing the arrangement could not replace was the thing it had displaced, two people who knew every member by name. That is the year’s lesson, and the Board drew it within twelve months.
[1] -254 (Executive Committee, Feb. 3). [2] -255 (Foundation Board Committee, Feb. 3). [3] -256 (Audit Committee, Feb. 3). [4] -257 (Executive & Finance Committee, May 9). [5] -258 (annual BOG, May 10; an identical copy is filed at -259). [6] -260 (annual membership meeting, May 12). [7] -261 (board reorganization, May 12). [8] -250 (conference call on accreditation, Jun. 26; the filename gives Jun. 28). [9] -251 (Bylaws Committee, Jul. 6). [10] -262 (Executive & Finance Committee, Oct. 12). [11] -263 (mid-year BOG, Oct. 13). [12] -264 (Executive Committee conference call, Nov. 1). [13] -265 (Executive Committee, Nov. 20).
In January the Board voted unanimously to end the outsourced arrangement in June and to hire a small firm in its place, Monstully, LLC, of New Mexico, led by Ralph McClish, at a flat annual fee with no access to the organization’s bank accounts. The handover took effect on June 16. By September the new administration had adopted a strategic plan, seen the rewritten bylaws approved by the national association, and created a procedure to do something no procedure should have to do: bridge the gap left by one departed employee’s knowledge of the membership.
The winter’s planning had been under way since the previous December, when board members completed surveys and a strengths-and-weaknesses exercise ahead of a February session facilitated by the management company’s own staff. Their answers name the year’s preoccupations: the impact of single accreditation, the loss of osteopathic postgraduate programs, membership relevance and attrition, working with allopathic colleagues, and the leadership pipeline. One respondent set the previous administration, “Debra and Dr. Dubin”, against the current one and flagged confusion over who was actually running things day to day.[1][2][3][4]
On January 16 the Board of Governors settled the matter by conference call. It voted unanimously to terminate the existing management agreement effective June 15, 2018, and to engage Monstully, LLC of New Mexico, led by Ralph McClish, effective June 16. Fifteen selection criteria were recorded, among them a single point of contact, the accreditation goal, growth in allopathic membership, and fiscal control. The new arrangement was a capitated $340,000 a year for three years, all-inclusive, against the prior $275,000 plus expenses and a requested increase; the new manager would have no access to bank accounts and no check-writing authority. The minutes are careful to record “no fault” with the outgoing company, it was simply the wrong fit for a small organization.[5] A request for proposals from that quarter puts the organization’s scale on the record: roughly 1,450 members, an assembly of about 850 and a mid-year meeting of 100 to 150, with single accreditation named as the central concern; the contact was the president, Dr. Reidy.[6]
The final meetings under the old arrangement took place at the May assembly. The Executive & Finance Committee of May 1 introduced Mr. McClish as incoming executive director alongside the departing staff, and noted that the board had engaged more closely with the allopathic academies that year.[7] The Board of Governors met on May 2 with sobering numbers: dues revenue was down fifteen percent, as members moved to retired and life categories and others did not renew, while expenses rose with the management fee and the new honoraria; the Foundation stood at about $6.2 million. The bylaw changes went forward for a member vote, and the Board asked for a clear statement of the membership classes.[8] The reorganization that followed installed Dr. Dennis Kitsko as president, with Dr. Judy Davis president-elect and Dr. Reidy immediate past president, and introduced the incoming staff, Mr. McClish, Ms. Bernadette Jaramillo, and Ms. Mackenzie Enriquez, as the members’ new points of contact. The informal notes of that meeting capture the tone of a fresh start, including a Sunday-morning breakfast set aside so the board could give the new manager feedback directly.[9]
The first full set of minutes under the new administration, in September, reads as a consolidation. The Board of Governors recorded that the rewritten bylaws had passed the national association, confirming that the approval requirement was real and had been exercised, and adopted a strategic plan for 2018 through 2020 built on communication, events, and member benefits. It donated $120,000 to the Foundation and $10,000 to the allopathic academy’s scope-of-practice fund, and continued the commitment to orphaned residents.[10] The Executive & Finance Committee found the Colleges “financially healthy,” recorded Dr. Kitsko thanking Dr. Reidy for the hard decision to change managers, proposed a standing policy of annual College donations to the Foundation, and, by a vote of two to three, defeated a motion to end the mid-year continuing-education conference, with Dr. Sibia taking the chair of it instead.[11] The Foundation, holding about $6.0 to $6.2 million, adopted the aim of donating three to five percent of its principal each year, finally gave its Oversight Committee a formal charge, and appointed an attorney, Roger Morris, to serve on the board without vote and on the committee with one.[12] In August the membership division had reported a strong assembly turnout and reforms to the awards process.[13]
One sentence from September carries the weight of this book. Among the year’s administrative reforms, the Board created a self-reporting system for member awards, and stated its reason: to bridge “the gap between Debra Bailey’s institutional knowledge and 1500 unfamiliarity with our members.”[10] Rather than a note about paperwork, this is the organization writing down, in its own minutes, what it had lost. For nearly two decades one person had known which members had served, published, taught, and deserved recognition. When she left, that knowledge did not transfer, and the remedy was to ask the members to report themselves. The Foundation Oversight Committee finally receiving its charge in the same meeting, three and a half years after its creation, belongs to the same story: things that had lived in people’s heads had to be rebuilt as procedures.
[1] -001 (invitation to the planning session). [2] -002 (completed planning survey, Suzanne Everhart). [3] -005 (completed planning survey, Donald Morris). [4] -006 (completed strengths-and-weaknesses exercise). [5] -042 (BOG conference call, Jan. 16). [6] -004 (request for proposals, management services). [7] -043 (Executive & Finance Committee, May 1). [8] -044 (annual BOG, May 2). [9] -045 (board reorganization, May 2, informal notes). [10] -047 (BOG, Sep. 7). [11] -048 (Executive & Finance Committee, Sep. 7). [12] -049 (Foundation Board of Directors, Sep. 7). [13] -046 (Membership Division quarterly report, Aug.).
The chapters before this one keep interpretation to a minimum, offering one signposted observation each and otherwise letting the documents speak. This closing chapter does the opposite: it steps back and names the patterns that run across a century. Everything in it rests on evidence set out earlier, and the reader who disagrees with a reading here can go back to the year in question and judge for themselves.
Foresight was rarely the problem. The organization saw its difficulties coming, often years ahead, and said so in writing. In February 2007 its finance committee asked what overhead would disappear if the surgery board did not renew its management contract. In September 2013 a planning session resolved to “acknowledge that we have a real decrease in income from executive management after January 1, 2016”, naming the date more than two years out. In 2014 the Foundation opened a file headed “Future of AOCOO-HNS.” In 2015 it assembled a specific, funded response. What the record does not show is a mechanism that carried any of this through to a durable result. The recurring failure was not in seeing; it was in finishing.
The organization diagnosed itself, accurately, in 2006, and again. At a facilitated retreat that September the board named its own “off-course conversations”: apathy, non-compliance with Foundation contributions by the very leaders who had voted them, and unfulfilled mentorship commitments. Its written feedback added “lack of follow-through” and “lack of communication.” Those same themes appear in 2005 (pledges voted unanimously in May and chased by October), in 2014 (a request for board comment on the strategic plan that drew no replies), in 2015 (a refinement report answered by one board member), and in 2017 and 2018 (a Foundation committee that took three and a half years to define its purpose). The diagnosis was correct and repeated; the treatment did not hold.
Institutional memory was a recurring anxiety, and a recurring loss. A leadership handbook for incoming presidents was proposed in 1999 and directed again in 2002. A program-and-resident history was compiled in 2002. In 2013 the board created a Presidential Advisory Council explicitly charged with being the organization’s “historic memory … on such topics as succession”; it disappears from the committee slate after 2016-17. In February 2013 the A. B. Crites Memorial Lecture was renamed because “many of our current members do not know who A. B. Crites was”, a founding officer of the certifying board, an examiner at the 1944 amalgamation, forgotten within seventy years. And in September 2018 the board created an awards self-reporting system to bridge “the gap between Debra Bailey’s institutional knowledge and 1500 unfamiliarity with our members.” The organization knew its memory was fragile, said so for two decades, and lost it anyway.
Two entities, one purse. The 2001 restructure moved the annual meeting, exhibits, continuing education, and corporate programs to the Foundation for reasons the minutes describe as administrative. By 2009 the Board recorded that dues income alone “cannot afford the current level of administration,” and began shifting management and education costs to the Foundation in earnest. Transfers followed, $100,000 in 2006, $325,000 in 2010, $250,000 in 2012 and again in 2013, $150,000 in 2007, $120,000 in 2018, alongside a Foundation Oversight Committee formed in 2015 expressly to absorb the College’s educational budget. In November 2017 the concern surfaced that College and Foundation funds “might not” be kept entirely separate, and the 2018 contract answered it structurally: no bank access for the manager, the accountant reporting directly to the board. Two legally distinct organizations had become financially interdependent, and it took seventeen years and an outside manager for the boundary to be drawn in writing.
The pull toward the surgeons, three times refused. In March 1930 a committee of the founders investigated “the feasibility of becoming related to the American College of Osteopathic Surgeons.” In 1939 a tentative plan would have folded the specialty society into that college entirely, “the I.S.O. will be no more.” In May 2016, facing the revenue cliff, the Board voted to enter an administrative-service agreement with the same body, and in October reversed itself. Each approach came at a moment of felt smallness, and each ended in withdrawal. The three episodes are not equivalent, two concerned structural merger, the third a management contract, but the instinct, and the retreat, rhyme across eighty-six years.
Members were willing; the organization struggled to use them. The 2014 professional survey found that members wanted to volunteer but were “uncertain how to become more involved.” That finding explains a long series of earlier and later efforts: the councils of residents and of regional representatives created in 2004, one of which admitted in 2008 that residents did not know it existed and the other of which was judged obsolete by 2017; the Women in Leadership forum begun in 2012, which recorded that women were about ten percent of members and “historically grossly underrepresented in leadership positions”; a 2014 president’s observation that “20% of members do 80% of the work.” The organization was good at creating bodies and less good at keeping them known and used.
An honest account should not end only on failings, because the same documents record real achievement. The founders built certification standards from nothing between 1928 and 1944, and the College still holds the only osteopathic certifying route in these specialties. Graduate training grew from one residency in 1961 to a national network, with roughly a hundred ophthalmologists trained in the Detroit lineage alone. Case minimums were raised, curricula written, program directors convened, and residents examined for eight decades. The organization passed a tax audit and earned a perfect accreditation score in 2007. It reached its centennial solvent, with a Foundation holding some six million dollars. It admitted allopathic physicians as members in 2017-18 after decades of debate. And when its outsourcing experiment went wrong, it recognized the error within eleven months and corrected it, which is faster than most institutions manage.
This account ends with the September 2018 minutes because that is where the assembled record ends. The years since, the arrangement with Monstully, the completion of single accreditation in 2020, the pandemic, the continuing question of what an osteopathic specialty college is for once its accreditation function has passed to a unified system, lie beyond the documents gathered for this project. They are also, unlike most of what appears above, within the memory of people still serving.
That is an argument for continuing the work rather than closing it. The founders wrote their own history: T. J. Ruddy set down the first two decades, C. G. Reid the origins of the society, C. C. Reid the amalgamation of 1944 as he watched it happen. They understood something this record repeatedly demonstrates, that an organization which does not write itself down will forget, and that what it forgets it will have to learn again at cost. If this volume is useful, its usefulness lies less in the century it covers than in the habit it might restart.
This chapter draws on evidence cited in full in the chapters above. Principal references: -147 (2007 overhead question); -215 (2013 financial-viability session); -016 (2014 “Future of AOCOO-HNS”); -227 (2015 CME programming paper); -245 and -146 (2006 retreat and follow-up); -126 and -132 (2005 pledges and their pursuit); -028 (2014 unanswered strategic-plan request); -220 (2015 single response); -213 (Presidential Advisory Council); -261 (its lapse); -205 (Crites lecture renamed); -275, -271, -279, -280 (Crites identified); -047 (Bailey’s knowledge gap); -068 (2001 restructure); -167 (2009 dues shortfall); -218 (Foundation Oversight Committee); -265 (fund-separation concern); -042 (2018 fiscal controls); -278, -279, -280 (1930 and 1939 approaches to the surgeons’ college); -238 and -242 (2016 vote and reversal); -021 (2014 membership survey); -105, -106, -107, -164 (the councils); -200 (Women in Leadership); -013 (“20% of members do 80% of the work”); -266 (Detroit training lineage); -153 (2007 audits); -263 (allopathic membership approved).
The Current Era
2019-2026
A note on this part. The chapters before this one were reconstructed. They were assembled, years or decades after the fact, from minutes and documents that survived in archives, in a recovered office box, and in the work of the College Historian. This part is different in kind. It is drawn from the College's current records, the minutes, agendas, reports and financials as they were produced, gathered here while the events were still recent. Most of it was assembled from current board materials provided by the Executive Director. The discipline is the same as the rest of the volume: every statement is tied to a source, and confidential detail, meaning financial figures and compliance specifics, is kept in the source register and not quoted or itemized here, though the structural facts it bears on are discussed.
And it is unfinished, openly so. The reconstructed history could be written once because its era had closed. The current era has not. Some years here are thin, and a few records are still being sought. As fuller access to the College's own files is obtained, these chapters will be filled in and carried forward. This part will grow with the organization it describes.
By 2019 the College's administration had settled into its third era, a small team working under a management company, Monstully, LLC. The governance record for the year is thin in this register: what survives here is financial reporting, which is held Restricted, and the College's continuing work through the AAO Council. The membership decline that later reports date to 2018 had begun to register.
The management of the College had passed through three arrangements in a short span: a long in-house era in Dayton, Ohio; a transitional period under ACOEP, also called 1500 Management; and, from 2018, Monstully, LLC. By 2019 Monstully was in place, and the year's financial reports were prepared under it.[1][2] Those reports carry the detail of the arrangement, and they are held in the register as Restricted; they are not reproduced here.
The wider relationship. The College continued to work through the American Academy of Ophthalmology Council. Later council reporting records that by 2020 the College had achieved jointly certified MD and DO continuing medical education and had opened membership to MDs, steps whose groundwork belongs to this period.[3] Scope-of-practice advocacy, chiefly against optometric surgical expansion, continued as it had for two decades.[4]
The record of 2019 has since been recovered in part: Executive Committee teleconferences on 4 April, 14 May and 5 September, and the combined Mid-Year meeting in Atlanta on 20 and 21 September, which brought together the Board of Governors, the Executive Committee and the Finance Committee. A separate full Board meeting was planned for November; those minutes are not yet in this register.
The year’s work. The Committee spent much of 2019 refining the College’s awards, defining a resident President’s recognition certificate, a Humanitarian Award, and a “Friends of the College” category, and tightening the awards ceremony after member feedback. It approved a new Fellow, Michael Rasansky, and weighed a $50,000 request from Dr. Troy Creamean toward equipment for an African hospital where ENT residents train, which it tabled for fuller review. In September it booked the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans for a coming Assembly, timed to avoid Mother’s Day weekend. That booking became the 2021 meeting, which the pandemic forced online; the 2020 Assembly was separately set for San Diego, and cancelled.
An even hand. In May the Committee voted $10,000 to the American Academy of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, to match an earlier contribution to the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s Surgical Scope Fund, keeping the two specialties’ advocacy on an equal footing.
The Mid-Year meeting. The fuller record of the year is the combined Mid-Year meeting held in Atlanta on 20 and 21 September, covering the Board of Governors, the Executive Committee and the Finance Committee. Much of it turned on a candid question about the organization’s future. With membership falling, the leadership weighed whether the Mid-Year meeting could continue and discussed drawing closer to the allopathic academies, through shared sessions, sponsored lounges and a standing presence at their meetings, as a way to keep the specialties visible while the College’s own numbers thinned.
Governance and finance. The meeting approved changes to the Foundation’s bylaws and created a three-member Investment Committee, Judy Davis, Carl Shermetaro and Donald Morris, to add checks on the organization’s funds. The Finance Committee agreed to engage a new accounting firm and to run an outside audit each year for three years, discussed setting aside reserves, and took up how the cost of management should be shared between the College and the Foundation, resolving to put that split into a written policy. It also assigned a set of governance policies to individual board members to draft, and the nominating committee advanced two names who would later lead, Lyndsay Madden and Carissa Wentland.
-361 College financial report, ACA 2019. (Restricted; figures held in the register, not reproduced here.) -362 Foundation financial report, 2019. (Restricted; figures held in the register, not reproduced here.) -367 Reports to the AAO Council (Donald Morris, Councilor), 2020 and 2024. -363 Advocacy letter on the ACGME and AOA merger rules and their effect on autonomous DO residencies. -421 Executive Committee minutes, 4 Apr 2019. -422 Executive Committee minutes, 14 May 2019. -423 Executive Committee minutes, 5 Sep 2019. -424 Combined Mid-Year meeting notes (Board of Governors, Executive Committee, Finance Committee), Atlanta, 20-21 Sep 2019.
The pandemic cancelled the 2020 Annual Clinical Assembly and moved the Board's work onto video calls. The Board voted to hold the 2021 assembly fully virtually, amended and signed the AOA Affiliate Agreement, and recorded a set of member-facing changes: joint MD and DO continuing-education credit, membership opened to MDs, and free dues for students and residents.
The 2020 Annual Clinical Assembly, planned for San Diego, was cancelled because of COVID-19, and event-cancellation insurance was recovered.[1] The Board met by Zoom. At its 24 September 2020 meeting it voted to hold the 2021 assembly fully virtually and asked the Foundation to repay a loan to the College.[2] The specific sums belong to the financial record and are held Restricted.
The cancellation. The decision came in stages. On 10 March the Board met and judged it too early to act. On 17 March the Executive Committee weighed its options, with the event-cancellation insurer offering no assurance it would cover the loss, and authorized counsel to open cancellation talks with the San Diego resort. After San Diego County barred gatherings over fifty, an emergency Executive Committee call on 19 March recommended cancellation, and the full Board reconvened on 24 March and, on the advice of counsel, declared it impossible for the Mission Bay Resort in San Diego to host the live meeting under California’s emergency restrictions. It then cancelled the virtual meeting as well, judging there was too little time to build a strong program, and resolved to issue full refunds, with the option to donate a fee to the Foundation. The annual membership meeting was cancelled too; the election results, the bylaw changes, and the financial statements went to members by email.
The Affiliate Agreement. At the 8 December 2020 meeting the Board invited the AOA's chief executive to speak on the ACGME merger and on the AOA Affiliate Agreement, then amended the Agreement to add signature lines for the President and Executive Director and signed it.[3][4] The Agreement recites that affiliates are separately incorporated, but that the AOA reviews affiliate bylaw amendments and, where appropriate, forwards them to its Board of Trustees for approval.[5] That review clause becomes important to the 2026 bylaws question at the end of this draft.
Member-facing changes. The council record for 2020 sets out several changes made as the field adapted: jointly certified MD and DO continuing-education credit was achieved, membership was opened to MDs, dues were made free for students and residents, and a contribution was made to the AAO Surgical Scope Fund.[6] Read together, these are the beginning of the era's central response to a shrinking membership: widen the audience and lower the barrier to joining.
A note on the website. Asked at the December meeting who owned the College’s website, the Executive Director said that at the end of any management arrangement he would turn the site over to the membership, its database, its web address, its logo and its content, apart from the hosting. It is the clearest early statement in the record of where the College’s digital property belongs.
The Foundation’s year. Much of the Foundation’s 2020 went to the financial fallout of the cancelled assembly: recovering its hotel deposit, weighing an insurance settlement for the lost meeting, and taking contributions from the Colleges to cover member refunds, while holding to a fiduciary caution against drawing down its capital in a downturn. The specific sums are held Restricted. In July the Foundation also created its first and only named award, the Dubin Award, honoring Alvin D. Dubin, with a companion fundraiser, the Dubin Circle.
-391 Executive Director report, 25 Nov 2020 (McClish). -389 Board of Governors minutes, 24 Sep 2020 (carried in the Dec 2020 board book). -387 Board of Governors agenda, 8 Dec 2020. -388 Signed Board of Governors minutes, 8 Dec 2020. -392 AOA Affiliate Agreement (blank template). -367 Reports to the AAO Council (2020 entry). -390 College financial statements as of 1 Dec 2020. (Restricted; figures held in the register, not reproduced here.) -426 Board of Governors minutes, 10 Mar 2020. -427 Board of Governors minutes, 24 Mar 2020. -428 Board of Governors minutes, 2 May 2020. -429 Executive Committee minutes, 17 Mar 2020. -430 Executive Committee emergency minutes, 19 Mar 2020. -431 Executive Committee minutes, 21 Apr 2020. -432 Foundation Board of Directors minutes, 21 Jul 2020. -433 Foundation Board minutes, 1 Sep 2020. -434 Board book for the 22-24 Sep 2020 meetings (reports and financials; financial detail and the related-party bonus held Restricted).
The 2021 Annual Clinical Assembly was held entirely online. The register also holds, from this year, the executed management and administrative services agreement between the College and Monstully, LLC, a related-party arrangement whose terms are Restricted. The board book records plainly that no 2020 annual meeting had taken place.
The 2021 assembly ran fully virtually from 30 April to 2 May.[1] The board book for the combined business meeting carried the President's final report, committee and council reports, the award winners, and the re-organization at which the incoming officers were seated.[2] It also recorded, in as many words, that no 2020 annual meeting had taken place, a small but honest marker of the disruption.[2] A Board of Directors meeting on 24 February 2021 is preserved in the same packet.[3]
The New Orleans plan. The 2021 Assembly had been booked for the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans. On 1 September 2020 the Foundation voted to convert it to a fully virtual meeting, judging that New Orleans could not host it safely and that many physicians’ employers would not permit travel. The hotel contract carried a substantial cancellation fee, which the board accepted only as a worst case while directing staff to negotiate it down and to offer New Orleans a later year. The venue returned to the calendar in 2025.
Students and research. In September the Foundation took up two paths into the specialties. Brian Hofland, of Research to Prevent Blindness, proposed an ophthalmology student research fellowship, $30,000 a year over five years, which the board chose to weigh further before committing. On the otolaryngology side, the Medical University of South Carolina offered to place osteopathic physicians who had not matched into its research fellowship. Both aimed at the same problem, keeping a path open into two shrinking specialties.
Advocacy on two fronts. The College kept its scope-of-practice advocacy even between the specialties, matching its $10,000 to the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s Surgical Scope Fund with $10,000 to the otolaryngology academy through Paul Imber. In September it added $2,500 to Safe Eye America, a patient-facing complement to the surgeons’ fund, and began looking for an otolaryngology equivalent.
Stronger controls. The year also brought firmer financial governance. An outside firm, Hinkle and Landers, audited the books, and the board removed management and staff from access to the Foundation’s investment account, leaving that account in the board’s hands alone.
The management agreement. The register holds the executed Management and Administrative Services Agreement between the College and Monstully, LLC, dated 5 February 2021 and signed by the President, the President-Elect, and Monstully.[4] The instrument itself, with its fee and its other commercial terms, is a related-party contract and is held Restricted; this draft records that the arrangement exists and was formally executed, and no more. The structural point matters and is not Restricted: the company that manages the College is owned by its Executive Director, so the College's day-to-day administration and its institutional memory now sit with a single outside party.
Dr. Agapov is listed in this year's agenda as chair of the Advocacy Committee.[1]
-393 Board of Governors agenda, 30 Apr 2021 (virtual 2021 ACA). -405 Board of Governors board book, 30 Apr to 1 May 2021 (reports and attachments). -404 Board of Directors minutes, 24 Feb 2021. -403 Management and Administrative Services Agreement, AOCOO-HNS and Monstully, LLC, 5 Feb 2021. (Restricted; figures held in the register, not reproduced here.) -366 Membership meeting agenda and oath, 1 May 2021. -433 Foundation Board minutes, 1 Sep 2020 (vote to make the 2021 Assembly virtual). -435 Executive Committee / Foundation minutes, 13 Jul 2021. -436 Foundation / Executive Committee minutes, 28 Sep 2021.
The Board returned to meeting in person while keeping a video option. It modernized its elections, replacing mail ballots with electronic ballots. Online voting had in fact been adopted once before, in 2013 (recorded in that year's chapter), but by 2022 that earlier action was no longer part of the College's working knowledge and the change had to be made again, a small illustration of how a practice can lapse when the record of it is not kept. The Board also added a diversity, equity and inclusion committee, and recorded for the first time in this register a rough figure for the membership decline: about seven percent a year since 2018. Legal counsel was retained. One meeting from this year, 27 August, is referenced but not in hand.
The 22 January 2022 meeting, by Zoom, formed a Student Research Fellowship committee and planned child care for the coming assembly.[1] The 11 May 2022 meeting, at the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico with a video option, added a diversity, equity and inclusion action item and, in its board book, carried the membership counts for the year: 585 active members, 140 senior, 199 residents and 398 students as of mid-April.[2][3]
Election modernization. The board book carries an amendment to Section 3 of the bylaws: mail ballots were replaced by electronic ballots, and the voting window was moved.[3] It is a small change with a long tail, since electronic voting later interacts with the wider 2026 bylaws rewrite. The 2023-2024 election was still run on a mailed postcard ballot, so the change took time to reach practice.[4]
A decline named, and counsel retained. The 12 November 2022 minutes, whose header misdates the year as 2023, record a membership decline of about seven percent a year since 2018. Counsel was retained to pursue a standing otolaryngology cause: a letter, drafted and placed on legal letterhead, urging that osteopathic otolaryngologists be allowed to sit for Complex Pediatric Otolaryngology certification, with a reply still awaited.[5] The Executive Director's notes for the same board book give a slightly later count: 603 active members, with senior, life, resident and student figures alongside.[6] Compliance and financial detail from this period, including a late-filing matter, sit in the register as Restricted and are not set out here. The minutes also approve the minutes of a 27 August 2022 meeting; those minutes are not in this register, and their absence is logged as an open item.[5]
The custom member system. By Dr. Kristin Reidy’s recollection, before the custom system the College’s membership, dues and continuing-education records were kept by hand by the in-house staff, Debra Bailey and Alvin Dubin, and tracking expenditures was nearly impossible. Under President Dennis Kitsko the Board selected Ryan Showers, of 6G Web Design in Albuquerque, to build a system in its place. A Web Design and Development Agreement between 6G Web Design and the Colleges was signed on 23 February 2022 by Ralph McClish, as Executive Director, and Ryan Showers. The system runs on the OctoberCMS platform and tracks continuing education and payments by specialty, showing each member the content for their own College, ophthalmology or otolaryngology. A version 4 rebuild was in progress as of 2026.
-396 Board of Governors minutes, 22 Jan 2022. -394 Board of Governors agenda, 11 May 2022. -395 Board of Governors board book, 11 May 2022 (carries the electronic-ballot amendment and the membership counts). -402 Board election postcard, 2023-2024 election (mailed). -399 Board of Governors minutes, 12 Nov 2022 (header misdates 2023). -401 Executive Director notes from the Nov 2022 board book (membership counts). -397 College financial statements, 28 Feb 2022. (Restricted; figures held in the register, not reproduced here.) -398 College financial statements, 31 Mar 2022. (Restricted; figures held in the register, not reproduced here.) -400 College financial statements, 31 Dec 2022. (Restricted; figures held in the register, not reproduced here.) -419 Web Design and Development Agreement, 6G Web Design and the Colleges, 23 Feb 2022. -420 Kristin Reidy, email to the Foundation board on the system’s origin (recollection), 7 Oct 2026.
The assembly returned to full strength in San Diego, drawing more than three hundred members in person alongside a virtual audience. The Executive Director told the membership that the College had come through the housing crisis, the ACGME merger and the pandemic, and that the membership losses since 2019 were stabilizing.
The 2023 assembly was held at the Park Hyatt Aviara in San Diego, with overflow at a second hotel; both sold out.[1] The Chief Operating Officer's report records attendance of 305 members, 17 non-members and 81 residents and students, with 48 residents among them, and 60 attending virtually, together with corporate sponsors.[1] After three years shaped by cancellation and virtual meetings, an in-person assembly at that scale is itself a marker of recovery.
The stabilizing claim. In his report to the membership on 26 April 2023, the Executive Director thanked the outgoing President and said the College had survived the housing crisis, the ACGME merger and the pandemic, and that the membership hits taken since 2019 were now stabilizing.[2] This is the management's own account rather than an independent finding, and the register treats it as such. Whether the decline in fact levelled is a question the later membership counts and the 2026 dues restructuring speak to.
Governance modernized. The 2023 meetings brought a run of governance changes. The April business meeting took up a new grant policy, and in September the board approved three bylaw changes: moving the College and the Foundation from a fiscal to a calendar year from 1 January 2024, with pro-rated dues to ease the shift; extending electronic voting to the Secretary-Treasurer and member-at-large elections each March, in place of mailed ballots; and replacing gendered pronouns in the bylaws with neutral language.
The future in question. The board also opened a wider question. It tabled a proposed re-branding of the Annual Clinical Assembly pending two membership town halls in November, convened to gather member views on the future of the organization. The year’s counts gave the question weight: by August the rolls held about 494 dues-paying members, with roughly two hundred more unrenewed, a continued thinning rather than the levelling the spring report had claimed.
A letter held. On the certification front, the board held back the letter its counsel had drafted urging Complex Pediatric Otolaryngology eligibility for osteopathic physicians, choosing to wait for new leadership at the otolaryngology academy before pressing it.
-382 Chief Operating Officer report for the 2023 ACA (attendance and sponsors). -380 Executive Director report to the membership, 26 Apr 2023. -381 Board of Governors agenda, 26 Apr 2023 (full officer roll). -437 Board of Governors minutes, 26 Apr 2023 (Park Hyatt Aviara). -438 Board of Governors minutes, 12 Aug 2023. -439 Board of Governors minutes, 23 Sep 2023. -440 Board of Governors board book, 11 Feb 2023.
The Board met in February, at the May assembly in Myrtle Beach, and again in August. The 1 May 2024 minutes, long recorded as not available, have since been recovered, together with the February and August records; one mid-year meeting was never minuted.
The Board met three times on the record in 2024. On 20 February, by video, it approved the September 2023 minutes and reviewed the year’s finances, the management fee, the accounting transition then underway, and grants, including support for osteopathic student research. On 1 May, at the Hilton Myrtle Beach Resort, with Lyndsay Madden in the chair and Julia Agapov as secretary, it approved the February minutes, reviewed College and Foundation financials, weighed a possible partnership with the osteopathic association, and took up a research grant. These May minutes were for a time recorded as not available; they have since been recovered, closing the gap the earlier editions noted.
At its August meeting the Board, by then calling itself the “Big Board,” turned to dues collection, approving member-lookup software subject to counsel, and took up a plan to revitalize committees by recruiting from both specialties, a website modernization expected that autumn, an education-committee retreat to the coming assembly’s city, and resident engagement. The Executive Director explained that one recent meeting had not been minuted because its discussion was sensitive, and the Board agreed to reconstruct the record. The Foundation also began, in 2024, the most consequential governance change of the era. At its July meeting the Foundation Advisory Committee proposed separating the Foundation from the Colleges and giving it a board of its own, drawn from past presidents, so that its assets would be protected and kept directed to osteopathic ophthalmology and otolaryngology even if the Colleges were ever to dissolve or be absorbed. The proposal drew immediate concern that the Board of Governors would lose its hold on the Foundation’s funds, and the board took it under review rather than act. The question carried into 2025. Financial specifics from these discussions are held in the register and are not set out here. The AAO Council reporting for 2024 continued.
-384 Board of Governors' Guide to the 2024 ACA. -383 Board of Governors agenda, 14 Aug 2024 (notes the 1 May 2024 minutes not available). -367 Reports to the AAO Council (2024 entry). -441 Board of Governors minutes, 20 Feb 2024. -442 Board of Governors minutes, 1 May 2024 (recovered). -443 Foundation minutes, 18 Jul 2024 (bylaws review; counsel-sensitive detail Restricted). -444 'Big Board' minutes, 15 Aug 2024 (reconstructed; counsel-sensitive Foundation detail Restricted).
This is the best-documented year of the era in the register. The Board moved to an independent audit, formalized how it chooses meeting sites, launched a student and resident research initiative, and worked through a difficult question about the Foundation: whether it should be a separate, autonomous body or stay integrated with the College. The record for the year points both ways, and this draft keeps both.
Formalizing the machinery. The 30 April 2025 meeting in New Orleans formed a meetings committee to formalize how meeting sites are chosen and began a committee-efficiency effort.[1] An emergency Executive Committee on 1 July 2025 was called specifically to choose an auditor, with three firms presenting; the move to an independent audit is itself a governance maturation.[2] An Executive Board in March reviewed the 2023 and 2024 financials and the investment portfolio; the figures are held Restricted.[3] The Executive Committee in May approved a student and resident research initiative, using a publishing channel and a national research database, and set the 2027 assembly venue.[4] An Executive Board in April considered a pre-residency scholarship proposal without reaching a motion.[5]
The Foundation question, resolved. The separation the Foundation Advisory Committee had urged in 2024 came to a head in 2025. On 10 April the Foundation Board wrote to the committee declining its specific proposal for an autonomous board, and for a time the integrated structure held. The direction, though, had been set. Over the year the Foundation adopted revised bylaws under which it is not controlled by the Colleges, no more than a third of its directors may also sit on the College board, and its fiscal year follows the calendar. In the autumn a separate Foundation Board of Directors took shape, and on 14 December it was seated with its own officers, electing Edward Scheiner as President and Robert Peets as Treasurer, the Executive Director serving ex officio. The Foundation, long treated as part of the College, now had a board of its own. How distinct the two bodies are in practice is the oldest question in this record; by the end of 2025 it had a clearer answer than at any point before. The dollar figures bound up with this change are held in the register and are not set out here.
Audit, an executive office revisited, and the fellowships. The year brought other formal steps. The Board moved to an independent audit, selecting an outside firm after hearing three. It revived the idea of an Executive Vice President, an office dormant since Dr. Dubin left it in 2017, forming a committee to shape the role. And the Foundation was by now funding, each year, both the ophthalmology student research fellowship with Research to Prevent Blindness and its otolaryngology counterpart at the Medical University of South Carolina, the two paths first taken up in 2021.
The wider relationship. The incoming AAO council advisor, Austin Taylor, asked in December whether the College wished to co-sponsor an AAO advisory recommendation, a sign of the College acting as a participant in the Academy's policy process rather than a bystander to it.[9]
-369 Board of Governors minutes, 30 Apr 2025 (New Orleans). -371 Emergency Executive Committee minutes, 1 Jul 2025 (auditor selection). -370 Executive Committee minutes, 28 May 2025 (research initiative; 2027 venue). -378 Executive Board minutes, 30 Apr 2025 (scholarship proposal). -386 Foundation Board letter to the FAC, 10 Apr 2025 (declining the autonomous-board proposal). -375 Board of Governors agenda, 29 Oct 2025 (new Foundation Board; Foundation bylaws). -373 Foundation Board of Directors minutes, 14 Dec 2025. -379 Correspondence, 4 Dec 2025 (AAO advisory co-sponsorship). -372 Executive Board minutes, 11 Mar 2025 (financial review). (Restricted; figures held in the register, not reproduced here.)
The Board restructured dues to remove the cost barrier for early-career members, carried forward a rewrite of the bylaws that removes the College's explicit AOA linkages, and adopted this institutional memory project as an official project of the College. A tension over budgeting and committee funding, held Restricted, ran alongside the year's work.
The dues reset. At the 29 April 2026 meeting in Phoenix, under President Timothy Winter, the Board restructured membership dues so that first and second year College members join free and third year members pay half.[1] This is the clearest expression of the era's central strategy, meeting a shrinking and aging membership by lowering the barrier for the youngest members, and it follows directly from the free student and resident dues adopted in 2020.
The bylaws rewrite. The governing documents have been rewritten three times in three decades, in 1994, 2017 and 2026, a rhythm that itself says the documents tend to fall out of date faster than they are maintained.[2] The 2026 draft removes the explicit AOA linkages the earlier bylaws carried.[3] That runs into the Affiliate Agreement signed in 2020, which reserves to the AOA a review of affiliate bylaw amendments and, where appropriate, their forwarding to the AOA Board of Trustees for approval.[3] Whether AOA approval is required for the 2026 bylaws, and whether an approval provision is restored, is an open question in the register and is a governance matter for the Board and counsel, not for this narrative to settle. The Executive Committee took the rewrite up again in June 2026, assigning it to a bylaws committee of Douglas Kubek, Zachary Pearce and Austin Taylor and agreeing to use AI-assisted drafting to prepare a working draft; the President-Elect was asked to join the review.
The management arrangement, restated. The 2026 governance record restates the structure of the management arrangement: the company engaged since 2018 is owned by the Executive Director, and an update to the agreement is part of the year's governance work.[3] The dollar terms and the related-party financial flows are Restricted. The structural fact, that administration and institutional memory rest with a single owner-managed outside company, is the reason a project like this one matters, and the Board recognized as much.
This project. On 10 August 2026 the Board adopted the institutional memory project as an official project of the College, carried under new business alongside a practice support initiative.[4] A governance friction over workshop funding and the budget process ran through mid-2026; it is recorded in the register as a structural observation and held Restricted, because it concerns internal correspondence and finances rather than a public fact.[5]
AI tools at the College. The same year, the College began using AI tools for the first time, through Claude for Nonprofits. The President-Elect, Julia Agapov, led a review of where the technology could support the College's work. That review produced a marketing and communications inventory, and it informed the bylaws and operations work of the year. This history was itself assembled with the same tools, over several months and in stages.
Reserves and advocacy. In June 2026 the Executive Committee established a Morgan Stanley investment account for the Colleges, intended to build long-term reserves, with funding levels left to a later decision. The College also continued its support of surgical scope-of-practice advocacy, with a $12,500 donation to the American Academy of Ophthalmology's Safe Surgery Action Fund, formerly the Surgical Scope Fund, ahead of the Academy's 2026 annual meeting.
Communications and access. At its September 2026 meeting, recorded in draft minutes, the Executive Committee took up member communications and the College’s own records. It approved a call for member volunteers to form a marketing and communications committee, and directed staff to begin developing a design and template for a quarterly member-email newsletter, kept separate from SCOPE, while that committee is assembled. That motion authorized preparatory work, not publication of an issue. The committee also granted the three senior officers, the Vice President, President-Elect and President, standing access to the College’s records, including membership lists, bylaws, manuals and minutes, through their terms, with other board members able to request access; the discussion set those operational records apart from the separately controlled financial accounts. On the website, the President-Elect asked who owns and controls the domain; the Executive Director confirmed it belongs to the Colleges, registered through GoDaddy and administered by staff, and agreed to provide the officers the access information, with the developer preparing separate hosting agreements for the Colleges and the Foundation. No motion was made on the website. Separately, the management agreement provides that the organization’s records are College property and are to be returned if the agreement ends.
A clean audit. The 2025 financial statements, the first full audit under the new arrangement, were presented to the Executive Committee in September 2026 by the outside auditors and carried an unmodified opinion covering both the College and the Foundation.
A history lecture. The project took a public step as well. A History of the Colleges lecture was confirmed for the 2027 Annual Clinical Assembly in Orlando. It is planned in two parts, with Wayne Bizer covering the story through 2002 and Donald Morris carrying it forward, the two contributors whose work underlies much of this volume. A College leader, the President-Elect among them, may also take part in presenting or framing the session; the format is still being arranged.
-374 Board of Governors minutes, 29 Apr 2026 (dues restructuring). -289 Consolidated governance memorandum, 31 Jul 2026 (bylaws history; management arrangement; AOA-linkage question). -377 Board of Governors agenda, 10 Aug 2026 (institutional history project; practice support initiative). -376 Foundation Board agenda, 15 Mar 2026. (internal) Governance friction over budgeting and committee funding, mid-2026. (Restricted; figures held in the register, not reproduced here.) -416 Executive Committee minutes, 15 Jun 2026. -417 Executive Committee agenda, 22 Sep 2026. -418 AAO Safe Surgery Action Fund donation confirmation, Sep 2026. -453 Board of Governors minutes, 11 Feb 2026. -454 Executive Committee minutes, 18 Mar 2026. -455 Executive Committee minutes, 22 Sep 2026 (2025 audit; website and domain; marketing and newsletter).
What follows is the analysis you asked for. It reads the era against the century the earlier chapters record, and it marks plainly where a statement is an inference rather than a documented fact. The evidence for the period is thinner than for the 1999 to 2018 run, so several of these observations are provisional and would move if the outstanding minutes arrive.
The decline is the spine of the era. Every other theme organizes around one fact: membership has fallen since 2018, put at roughly seven percent a year in the 2022 minutes, and the counts in 2022 sit well below the figures the older record carried.[1] The management's own account calls the losses stabilizing by 2023, but that is the management's account, and the 2026 decision to make early-career membership free reads less like confidence in stabilization than like a continued response to it.[2] The safest reading the record supports is that the College has slowed, but not reversed, a decline that began with single accreditation and the loss of a guaranteed pipeline of osteopathic residents.
The response is to widen the door. The era's coherent strategy is to broaden the audience and lower the cost of entry: joint MD and DO continuing-education credit and membership opened to MDs in 2020, free student and resident dues the same year, and the graduated dues reset in 2026.[3] This is the same instinct the earlier chapters show forming before 2018, now carried through. Whether it produces members who stay, rather than members who join because it is free, is the open question, and the register does not yet answer it.
COVID was an accelerant, not just a shock. The pandemic cancelled one assembly and forced the Board onto video, but several of the changes outlasted it: electronic ballots replaced mail in 2022, board and committee meetings by Zoom and Google Meet became normal, and a virtual attendance option persisted at in-person assemblies.[4] The era took a forced experiment and kept the parts that lowered cost and friction.
Governance is being formalized, uneven year to year. 2025 shows a Board tightening its own machinery: an independent audit, a meetings committee to formalize site selection, a committee-efficiency effort.[5] Against that sits the plainest evidence of the old follow-through problem, the 1 May 2024 minutes recorded as not available and, in the deeper record, a recurring pattern of decisions that are made and then not tracked.[6] Formalization and drift are both present; the honest reading is that the Board is trying to fix a weakness the century-long record shows is real.
The College and the Foundation, still not fully distinct. The oldest unresolved question in the whole project, how separate the two entities really are, is live in this era. The 2025 sequence, declining an advisory committee's autonomous-board proposal in April yet seating a separate Foundation Board by December, shows the organization working the question in real time.[7] The related-party financial flows between College, Foundation and management company are documented but held Restricted, and they carry tax-status and entity-distinctness implications that belong to the governance and compliance track, not to a public narrative.[8] This draft can say the question is open and important; it should not try to answer it.
Administration and memory rest with one outside party. Across three management eras the in-house Dayton team gave way to a transitional company and then to Monstully, a small firm owned by the Executive Director.[9] That is efficient, and it is also a concentration: the people who hold the College's records, systems and operating knowledge are largely outside the College and under one owner. The roughly one hundred boxes shipped from Ohio in 2017, still not fully inventoried, are the physical form of the same risk.[10] This is, in plain terms, why the Board adopted this project. It is an inference, and marked as one, that a College whose memory lives with its vendor is a College one transition away from losing it.
The professional-identity arc continues. The recognition story the earlier chapters trace from exclusion to parity keeps moving here: joint MD and DO credit, membership opened to MDs, contributions to the AAO Surgical Scope Fund, and co-sponsorship of AAO advisory recommendations.[11] The scope-of-practice fights, chiefly with optometry, continue as they have for decades.[12] The College is acting more as a participant in the larger ophthalmology and otolaryngology world than as a separate osteopathic enclave.
A closing observation. The register's own epigraph fits this era better than any summary I could write: recurrence is a symptom, and follow-through is the finding. The current era shows a College that has correctly diagnosed its problems, membership, governance discipline, entity distinctness, institutional memory, and has begun, unevenly, to act on them. Whether the actions hold is what a fuller account, written from a complete record, will eventually record. This draft is only a first look, and it rests on a record that is still, by the Board's own request, incomplete.
[1] Membership decline since 2018: -399; -401; -395. [2] The stabilizing claim and the dues response: -380; -374. [3] Widening the door, joint MD and DO credit, MDs admitted, free and graduated dues: -367; -405; -374. [4] COVID, virtual meetings, electronic ballots: -389; -395; -383. [5] Governance formalized in 2025, audit, meetings committee: -369; -371; -370. [6] The follow-through gap, 1 May 2024 minutes not available: -383. [7] The Foundation question, autonomy against integration: -386; -373; -375. [8] Detail held in the register, not reproduced here. [9] Three management eras and the owner-managed company: -289; -403. [10] The uncatalogued Ohio boxes: -356 and the open loop in the register. [11] The professional-identity arc, Surgical Scope Fund, AAO advisory co-sponsorship: -367; -379. [12] Scope-of-practice advocacy: -363.
Appendices
Leadership, predecessor organizations, and sources
How to read this list. The organization changed form four times, and the office changed with it: chairman of a Section, then president of a society, then of an advanced society, then of a College, and from 2007 a single president serving both the College and its Foundation. Where the record gives an ordinal (“46th president”) it is preserved. Gaps are gaps in the sources assembled here, not in the succession. Entries drawn from Dr. Bizer’s history are marked; entries from 1999 onward come from the minutes.
AOA Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Section
1908 C. C. Reid, Chairman (Denver) W. B. Dobson, Secretary; 42 charter members
American Osteopathic Society of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology (founded July 31, 1916)
1916 C. C. Reid 1st president
1917 T. J. Ruddy 2nd (Columbus)
1918 John Deason 3rd (Boston)
1919 Leland S. Larimore 4th (Chicago); later first executive secretary
1920 J. D. Edwards 5th (St. Louis)
1921 H. J. Marshall 6th (Cleveland)
1922 W. V. Goodfellow 7th (Los Angeles)
1923 C. C. Taliafero 8th (New York)
1924 Jerome E. Watters 9th (Kirksville)
1925 Charles M. LaRue 10th (Toronto)
1926 Glen S. Moore 11th (Louisville)
1927 A. C. Hardy 12th (Denver)
1928 E. C. Brann 13th (Kirksville)
1929 T. J. Ruddy 14th (Des Moines); first second term
1930 C. C. Reid 15th (Philadelphia); also first president of the International Society
1940 Ralph Licklider (Columbus)
Osteopathic College of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology (from October 12, 1944)
1944 C. P. Snyder first President (Philadelphia); A. C. Hardy, Vice-President; L. S. Larimore, Secretary
1945 C. Paul Snyder 30th; re-elected, second consecutive (wartime)
1949 Ralph Licklider 34th; second term
c.1960 Ralph Connell president during the California amalgamation
1961 Dwight Streitenberger 46th (Kansas City)
1962 John S. Sheets 47th (Philadelphia)
1966 Harry I. Stein 51st (Philadelphia)
1969 Leonard D. Sells 54th
1970 Owen A. Rice 55th if unbroken
1971 Arthur A. Martin 56th if unbroken; trained with A. C. Hardy; long-time Secretary of the College
1972 Harold A. Beckwith 57th if unbroken
1973 Harley Galusha (Tulsa)
1974 Harold D. Groves
1975 Leonard D. Lewis
1976 Charles F. Libell
1977 Harold M. Ward
1978 Patrick G. Murray
1979 Robert C. Belf
1980 Alvin D. Dubin later Executive Director and Executive Vice President
1981 Brian D. Borland
1982 Charles F. Schrimpf
1983 Everett E. Wilson
1984 Stanford L. Kunkle
1985 Jesse J. Cardellio first resident of the Detroit program, 1961
1986 Henry Sonenshein
1987 Saul Bresalier
American Osteopathic Colleges of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (renamed 1989; two-college structure from 1995)
1988 Lawrence C. Hazen
1989 Norman A. Simpson 74th (Trenton)
1990 Theodore P. Mauer 75th (Philadelphia)
1991 Sanford L. Moretsky 76th (Phoenix)
1992 John R. Alway 77th (Dayton)
1993 Oran G. Anderson 78th (Warren)
1994 Richard J. Davies 79th
1995 Wayne F. Bizer (ophthalmology); Michael Sherbin (otolaryngology)
1996 Howard N. Straub (ophthalmology); Hugh P. Scott (otolaryngology)
1997 Gerald H. Kursar (ophthalmology); Warren L. Brandes (otolaryngology)
1998 H. William Ranelle (ophthalmology); Charles L. Kaluza (otolaryngology)
1999 Michael Rubin (ophthalmology; the two Boards of Governors combined this year); W. Hadley Hoyt III (otolaryngology)
2000 Michael Rubin → Samuel Baldone
2001 Samuel Baldone → John Nori
2002 John Nori → Larry McIntire
2003 Larry McIntire
2004 Paul Imber
2005 Manthei
2006 Rogotzke
2007 Myint first president of both the Board of Governors and the Foundation
2008 Myint
2009 Brandeisky → Simonian
2010 Simonian → Steehler
2011 Steehler → Gossage
2012 Gossage → Burk
2013 Burk → Franchi
2014 Robert Franchi → Michael Haupert
2015 Haupert → Sirtaz Sibia
2016 Sibia → Edward Scheiner
2017 Scheiner → Kristin Reidy
2018 Reidy → Dennis Kitsko
2019 Judy Davis, DO
2020 Carl Shermetaro, DO
2021 Donald Morris, DO
2022 Ankur Patel, DO
2023 Robert Peets, DO
2024 Lyndsay Madden, DO
2025 Timothy Winter, DO
2026 Douglas Kubek, DO President; Julia Agapov, DO, President-Elect
The executive office
c.1919, Leland S. Larimore first executive secretary
1950 William Konold first paid Executive Secretary, succeeding L. S. Larimore
1961 A. A. Martin executive secretary
1963-74 Mrs. A. A. Martin Executive Secretary; wife of Arthur A. Martin, DO
1974 Joe Strickler Executive Secretary
c.1989 “Sharon Alexaides” executive secretary, 12-24 months; spelling unverified
by 1994-2017 Alvin D. Dubin executive director, later Executive Vice President and CEO; EVP Emeritus 2010-14; resumed office 2014-17
2010-14 Carlo J. DiMarco Executive Vice President; died in office, August 2014
2016-18 Janice Wachtler Executive Director under 1500 Management (ACOEP), from December 1, 2016
2018-2026 Ralph McClish, Executive Director (from June 16, 2018), and Mackenzie Enriquez, Chief Operating Officer, under Monstully, LLC.
Five bodies, and for fourteen years four of them at once. The sequence below is the one Dr. Bizer sets out, with the dates this history has been able to fix.
1908, Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Section of the American Osteopathic Association
Established following an AOA resolution of 1907 authorizing specialty subsections. First met at the Kirksville convention in 1908 with forty-two charter members. Its purpose was collaboration and organized instruction for Association members interested in the field. It remained an educational forum for general practitioners after the specialty societies formed, and was sponsored by them.
1916, American Osteopathic Society of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology
Founded on the evening of July 31, 1916 at Kansas City on T. J. Ruddy’s resolution. Independent but allied to the Association; a three-day program before the general convention; its own journal, the Journal of Osteopathic Ophthalmology, Rhinology and Otolaryngology. Membership was limited to Association members in good standing. It served physicians trained as general practitioners who devoted substantial time to the specialty. Sometimes called the O.&O.L.
1930, International Osteopathic Society of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology
Formed July 5, 1930 as an “advanced society” for members who practiced nothing but the specialty and had distinguished themselves as teachers and leaders. Admission required twenty major case reports and written, oral and practical examinations. Its Fellows were entitled to write F.I.S.O. C. C. Reid was its first president, having also been first chairman of the Section and first president of the 1916 Society. Sometimes called the I.S.O.
1931, International Board of Osteopathic Ophthalmology and Otorhinolaryngology
Constituted July 28, 1931 to conduct the examinations and grant the fellowships, having been proposed by the ethics committee on July 24, 1928 and adopted at Des Moines in 1929. Made independent of the Society in 1931 and soon renamed the American Osteopathic Board of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology (AOBO, later AOBOO). By 1942 it sat among a dozen specialty boards under Association supervision. Its work, in Dr. Bizer’s judgment, “set the pattern” for specialty certification across osteopathic medicine.
1944, Osteopathic College of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology
The amalgamation of the International Society and the older Society, planned at a three-day conference in Chicago from July 13 to 15, 1944 and ratified at Kansas City on October 12, 1944. Nine members were elected at once to a Board of Governors in staggered terms. Membership was tiered as Senior, Junior and Associate; Fellowships were honorary and carried the designation F.O.C.O. The College assumed its predecessors’ educational, research and certification functions and continued to sponsor the Association’s Section. Period sources give the name both as “Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology” and as “Ophthalmology and Otorhinolaryngology.”
1989-1995, American Osteopathic Colleges of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
Renamed by vote in 1989, with separate letterhead for each division, after a name change was first discussed in September 1988. Incorporation was approved in April 1989 to limit leadership liability and to obtain voting privileges on the allopathic academies’ councils. In April 1994 the Board agreed in concept to divide the organization into an eye college and an ENT college, each with its own officers and board, linked by a common Joint Board of Governors responsible for conventions, finance and shared activities. The two-college federation and the modern name were in place by 1995. A Foundation was operating from the early 2000s; counsel recorded in 2013 that its creation “began in 1995,” and the precise date remains unsettled.
The citation system. Every factual statement in this history is tied to a source document, cited by a bracketed number in the text (“[1]”) which points to an entry in the Historical Record & Sources note at the end of that chapter. Each entry gives an archive identifier, a hyphen and three digits, such as -271. Those identifiers refer to the project's source register, in which each physical document consulted is catalogued with its date, type, provenance and a summary. The register is a working database and is maintained alongside this manuscript; it currently holds over four hundred documents.
Board and committee minutes, 1999-2018 (primary). A continuous run: Board of Governors, the two constituent College boards, the Executive & Finance Committee, the Foundation Board, program-director breakouts, the Councils of Residents and Fellows and of Regional Representatives, the Education Committee, and post-meeting action lists. This is the evidentiary basis of Part III, and the reason each of those years has a chapter of its own. This run was recovered in 2026 from the College's archive folder kept by 1500 Management, the association-management company of the American College of Osteopathic Emergency Physicians (ACOEP) that ran the College's administration from late 2016 to 2018. The current Executive Director granted access to the folder, and the present author downloaded it and assembled the needed files.
Current-era board materials, 2019 to 2026 (primary). The minutes, agendas, reports, and financial summaries for the current era were assembled largely from board materials provided by the Executive Director, and gathered by the present author, Dr. Agapov, from her College email. This is the evidentiary basis of Part IV.
Founding-era documents, 1900-1944 (primary; Museum of Osteopathic Medicine). Histories written by the founders themselves, T. J. Ruddy on the years 1900 to 1921, C. G. Reid on the origins of the society, C. C. Reid’s first-hand account of the 1944 amalgamation, together with presidents’ reports of 1932 and 1934-35, the founding plan of 1928, correspondence of 1930 and 1939 on relations with the osteopathic surgeons, the certifying board’s Booklet of Information of November 1942, and Ruddy’s memoranda on certification standards. These were read from digitized transcriptions rather than original pages; names, dates and quotations from this group should be verified against the scans before being relied upon in print.
The College Historian’s history (participant and secondary). Wayne F. Bizer, DO, “A History of the American Osteopathic Colleges of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery,” delivered May 2, 2002 at the eighty-sixth Annual Clinical Assembly as the A. B. Crites Memorial Lecture, together with two further installments. It is the principal source for Part II. Dr. Bizer classifies himself as a tertiary historian for the founding era, drawing on the primary historians named above; for the years he served on the Board of Governors he is a participant. His manuscript is a working draft, and his own citations to the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association have been preserved in this text wherever he supplies them. The 2002 lecture survives in three slide decks supplied by Dr. Bizer in 2026 (-325, -326, -327), with the original manuscript behind his history (-328) and the August 2026 correspondence (-329). Dr. Bizer’s 2023 memoir, The One-Armed Soldier: My Amazing Adventures with ADHD, Dyslexia, and a Broken Home (-353), is a personal work that also preserves recollections of the College and its people, and is drawn on where it bears on the record.
Published and compiled accounts (secondary). The College’s published history; a 2008 profile of osteopathic ophthalmology in the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s magazine; a first-person article by a College president on the distinctiveness of osteopathic practice; and later research compilations. These are identified as secondary wherever used, attributed as such, and corroborated where possible.
Governance documents. Bylaws and their revisions, the Orientation Manual, and organizational policies, consulted for the structures they establish rather than for narrative.
Where sources conflict, this history records the conflict rather than choosing silently between them; several such conflicts are noted in the text. Where the record is thin, it says so. Where a claim rests on recollection rather than a document, the recollection is attributed. The intention throughout is that a reader who doubts any sentence should be able to find the document behind it and judge for themselves.
Refreshed in Version 3.4. The College-level meetings, one per line in one chronological list: the annual assemblies and their predecessors, the Mid-Winter and Mid-Year meetings, the founding Section meeting, and the International Society (I.S.O.) convention, each tagged by the organization as it existed that year. Governance-committee meetings (Board of Governors, Executive Committee) and the separate certifying board's sessions are kept in the source register but omitted here for focus. A dash means the item is not recorded. Dates for 2009-2018 are approximate windows from the event databases; dates for 1932, 1948 and 1939 are from primary programs and a photograph. The year narratives were given their first full pass in Version 4.6. This table now runs through 2026, and includes the scheduled assemblies of 2027 to 2030; the Part IV chapters carry the narrative detail for the current era.
| Year | Date | Type | Location / venue | Organization |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1908 | EENT Section | Kirksville | EENT Section | |
| 1909 | EENT Section | Minneapolis | EENT Section | |
| 1910 | EENT Section | San Francisco | EENT Section | |
| 1911 | EENT Section | Chicago | EENT Section | |
| 1912 | EENT Section | Detroit | EENT Section | |
| 1913 | EENT Section | Kirksville | EENT Section | |
| 1914 | EENT Section | Philadelphia | EENT Section | |
| 1916 | ACA | Kansas City | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1917 | ACA | Columbus, OH | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1918 | ACA | Boston | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1919 | ACA | Chicago | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1920 | ACA | Chicago | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1921 | ACA | Cleveland | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1922 | ACA | Los Angeles | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1923 | ACA | New York | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1924 | ACA | Kirksville | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1925 | ACA | Toronto, Canada | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1926 | ACA | Louisville | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1927 | ACA | Denver | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1928 | ACA | Kirksville | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1929 | ACA | Des Moines | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1930 | ACA | Philadelphia | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1931 | ACA | Seattle | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1932 | Jul 1-6, 1932 | ACA | Book-Cadillac Hotel, Detroit, MI | O.&O.L. Society |
| 1933 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1934 | ACA | Wichita, KS | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1935 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1936 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1937 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1938 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1939 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1939 | Jun 22, 1939 | I.S.O. Conv. | Dallas, TX | I.S.O. |
| 1940 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1941 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1942 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1943 | ACA | , | O.&O.L. Society | |
| 1944 | ACA | Kansas City | OCOO | |
| 1945 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1946 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1947 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1948 | Jul 15, 1948 | ACA | Eastland Hotel, Portland, ME | OCOO |
| 1949 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1950 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1951 | ACA | East Liverpool, OH | OCOO | |
| 1952 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1953 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1954 | ACA | Detroit | OCOO | |
| 1955 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1956 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1957 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1958 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1959 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1960 | ACA | Denver | OCOO | |
| 1961 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1962 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1963 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1964 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1965 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1966 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1967 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1968 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1973 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1974 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1975 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1976 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1977 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1978 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1979 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1980 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1981 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1982 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1983 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1984 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1985 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1986 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1987 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1988 | ACA | , | OCOO | |
| 1989 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS | |
| 1990 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS | |
| 1991 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS | |
| 1992 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS | |
| 1993 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS | |
| 1994 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS | |
| 1995 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS | |
| 1996 | ~May 1, 1996 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 1996 | Sep 28, 1996 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 1997 | ~May 7, 1997 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 1997 | Sep 13, 1997 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 1998 | ~Apr 29, 1998 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 1998 | Oct 3, 1998 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 1999 | ~Apr 21, 1999 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 1999 | Sep 18, 1999 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2000 | ~May 3, 2000 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2000 | Sep 8, 2000 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2001 | Apr 24, 2001 | ACA | Saddlebrook Resort, Wesley Chapel, FL | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2001 | Sep 15, 2001 | Mid-Year | Detroit Airport Marriott, Detroit, MI | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2002 | Apr 30, 2002 | ACA | Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines, La Jolla, CA | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2003 | Apr 28, 2003 | ACA | Sanibel Harbour Resort & Spa, Ft. Myers, FL | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2004 | Apr 19, 2004 | ACA | Doral Golf Resort & Spa, Miami, FL | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2005 | May 2, 2005 | ACA | Camelback Inn | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2005 | Oct 25, 2005 | Mid-Year | Rosen Centre Hotel, Orlando, FL | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2006 | ~May 1, 2006 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2006 | Sep 6, 2006 | Mid-Year | Embassy Suites, Philadelphia Int'l Airport, PA | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2007 | May 1, 2007 | ACA | Ritz-Carlton, Sarasota, FL | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2008 | May 7-11 2008 | ACA | Marriott Camelback Inn, Scottsdale, AZ | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2009 | Apr 30 - May 10, 2009 | ACA | Hyatt Regency Lost Pines, TX | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2009 | Sep 9-13, 2009 | Mid-Year | Westin Detroit Metropolitan Airport Hotel, Detroit, MI | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2010 | Feb 3-7, 2010 | Mid-Winter | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2010 | May 2-9, 2010 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2010 | Aug 24-29, 2010 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2011 | Feb 8-13, 2011 | Mid-Winter | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2011 | Apr 28 - May 9, 2011 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2011 | Aug 23-28, 2011 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2012 | Feb 7-12, 2012 | Mid-Winter | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2012 | May 3-13, 2012 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2012 | Sep 4-9, 2012 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2013 | Feb 5-10, 2013 | Mid-Winter | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2013 | May 8-12 2013 | ACA | Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress, Orlando, FL | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2013 | Sep 17-22, 2013 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2014 | Feb 4-9, 2014 | Mid-Winter | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2014 | May 1-11, 2014 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2014 | Oct 7-12, 2014 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2015 | Jan 29 - Feb 8, 2015 | Mid-Winter | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2015 | May 6-10 2015 | ACA | Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress, Orlando, FL | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2015 | Sep 8-13, 2015 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2015 | Dec 5-6, 2015 | Special | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2016 | Jan 29 - Feb 7, 2016 | Mid-Winter | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2016 | Apr 28 - May 8, 2016 | ACA | The Phoenician, Scottsdale, AZ | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2016 | Oct 4-9, 2016 | Mid-Year | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2017 | Feb 2-5, 2017 | Mid-Winter | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2017 | May 6-15, 2017 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2018 | Apr 27 - May 6, 2018 | ACA | , | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2019 | May 2, 2019 | ACA | AOCOO-HNS | |
| 2019 | Sep 20-21, 2019 | Mid-Year | Atlanta | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2020 | Apr 29 - May 2, 2020 | ACA | Cancelled (COVID-19) | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2021 | Apr 30 - May 2, 2021 | ACA | Virtual | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2021 | Sep 23, 2021 | Mid-Year | Virtual | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2022 | May 9, 2022 | ACA | Caribe Hilton, San Juan | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2022 | Sep 23, 2022 | Mid-Year | Virtual | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2023 | Apr 26, 2023 | ACA | Park Hyatt Aviara, Carlsbad, CA | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2023 | Sep 8, 2023 | Mid-Year | Virtual | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2024 | May 1, 2024 | ACA | Hilton Myrtle Beach, SC | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2025 | Apr 30, 2025 | ACA | Hilton New Orleans Riverside | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2025 | Sep 12, 2025 | Mid-Year | Virtual | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2026 | Apr 29, 2026 | ACA | Hilton Phoenix Tapatio Cliffs | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2026 | Sep 18, 2026 | Mid-Year | Virtual | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2027 | 2027 | ACA (planned) | Orlando | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2028 | 2028 | ACA (planned) | Miami Beach | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2029 | 2029 | ACA (planned) | Las Vegas | AOCOO-HNS |
| 2030 | 2030 | ACA (planned) | Bonita Springs | AOCOO-HNS |
Sources behind the meeting record. Occurrence and presiding officers come from the Presidential Roster and from Bizer's history (-281/-282) and Reid's founding account (-273). Attendance and specialty counts, 1989-2009, and the leadership roster come from the membership database (-305). Meeting dates 2009-2018 come from the meetings-and-events databases (-308, with the earlier snapshot -310). Specific early dates and venues come from primary artifacts held by the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine: the 1932 Official Program (-309), the 1948 banquet program (-311), and the 1939 I.S.O. convention photograph (-312). The source register now holds over four hundred documents.
Refreshed in Version 3.3. Recipients of the five named awards recorded in the membership database (-305), provisional and drawn from the database rather than each year's minutes; the record begins in 1981 with the Distinguished Service Award. No AOA number is held for these recipients, so entries are by name and year.
| Award | Year(s) | Recipient | Specialty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Distinguished Service | 1981 | Donald Dushay, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 1995 | Henry Sonenshein, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 1997 | H. William Ranelle, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 1997 | Warren Brandes, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 1998 | Howard Straub, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 2000 | Wayne Bizer, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 2002 | Michael Rubin, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 2004 | Samuel Baldone, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2004 | James Gaunt, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2004 | Douglas Hegyi, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2004 | Glen Hatcher, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 2004 | Kirk Steehler, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2004 | Jacques Surer, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 2004 | Michael Sherbin, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2004 | Donald Rochen, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2004 | Christopher Surek, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2005 | Craig Cassidy, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 2005 | Oran Anderson, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 2005 | Robert Chambers, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 2005 | Hugh Scott, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2006 | Paul Imber, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2006 | W. Hadley Hoyt III, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2006 | Steven Marchetta, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2006 | David Short, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2007 | George Vogelgesang, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2007 | Carlo DiMarco, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 2007 | David Madgy, DO | ENT |
| Distinguished Service | 2007 | Rudy Manthei, DO | OPH |
| Distinguished Service | 97 | John Nori, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 1996 | Richard Fuller, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 1996 | John Alway, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 1998 | Glen Hatcher, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2000 | George Vogelgesang, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2000, 2004 | Frank Brettschneider, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2003 | Thomas Brandeisky, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2003 | Shoib Myint, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2003 | Carlo DiMarco, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2003 | Scott Manthei, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004 | Michael Haupert, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004 | Kenneth Rogotzke, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004 | Rudy Manthei, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004 | Jeffrey Holtzman, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004 | Paul Burk, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004 | Robert Franchi, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004 | Erik Kenyon, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004 | Hal Sussman, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004 | John Tedesco, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2004,2007 | Arlin French, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2005 | Ralph Del Negro, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2005 | Benjamin Murcek, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2005 | Steven Kin, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2005 | Robert Peets, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2005 | Steven Sherman, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2005 | Robert Zendler, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2005, 2007 | Sanjay Kamat, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2005,2006 | David Auerbach, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2005,2007 | Joseph Olekszyk, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2006 | Mark Reader, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2006 | Richard Weinstock, DO | ENT |
| Presidential Achievement | 2007 | Sirtaz Sibia, DO | OPH |
| Presidential Achievement | 2007 | Mahmoud Ghaderi, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 1996 | W. Hadley Hoyt III, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 1997 | Douglas Hegyi, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 1998 | George Vogelgesang, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 1999 | Jeffrey Holtzman, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2001 | Richard Fuller, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Paul Imber, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Michael Haupert, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Lawrence Hazen, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Gregory Hogle, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Craig Cassidy, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | David Madgy, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Philip Shettle, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | John Siddens, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Christine Lepoudre, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Brian Ranelle, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | David Ringel, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Peter Schmid, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2004 | Thomas Shirck, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Thomas Brandeisky, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Carlo DiMarco, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Frank Brettschneider, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | David Gossage, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Rudy Manthei, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Robert Franchi, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Gary Giovagnoli, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Richard Klapchar, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Lawrence Nowinski, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Steven Marchetta, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Kent McIntire, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2005 | Michael Tomc, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2006 | Richard Davies, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2007 | Shoib Myint, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2007 | Ralph Crew, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2007 | Kenneth Rogotzke, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2007 | Paul Burk, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2007 | Robert Peets, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2007 | Mark Reader, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2007 | Wayne Robbins, DO | ENT |
| Governor's Achievement | 2007 | Nicholas Sala, DO | OPH |
| Governor's Achievement | 2007 | Edward Scheiner, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1993 | Michael Haupert, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1993, 1994 | Robert Innocenzi Jr., DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1994 | Dale Harrington, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1994 | Jeffrey Sage, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1995 | David Gossage, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1995 | Gregory Rowin, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1996 | John Darrell Balazs, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1996 | Shoib Myint, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1997 | J. Matthew Roberts, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1999 | Grant Geske, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 1999 | Sean Carroll, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2000 | Mathew Cosenza, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2000 | Alan Szczesniewski, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2001 | Christine Cicco, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2001 | Christopher Galang, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2002 | William Jordan, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2002 | Mark Veronneau, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2002 | Benjamin Welch, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2002 | Timothy McCarthy, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2002, 2003 | Thomas Perkowski, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2002, 2003 | Todd Meyer, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2002,2003 | Jason Handza, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2002,2003 | Nicole Mueller, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2003 | Kelly Burchett, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2003 | Brent Scott, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2003, 2004 | Kevin Gietzen, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2003, 2004 | Matthew Citron, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2004, 2005 | Joseph Watson, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2004, 2005 | Jason Wanner, DO | OPH |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2004, 2006 | Troy Major III, DO | ENT |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2005 | Christopher Perry, DO | ENT/FPS |
| Patrick G. Murray | 2006 | Brian Elford, DO | ENT |
| Special BOG | 02 | John Nori, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 1989 | Alvin Dubin, DO | ENT |
| Special BOG | 1996 | Larry McIntire, DO | ENT |
| Special BOG | 1996 | Stanford Kunkle, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 1996 | John Alway, DO | ENT |
| Special BOG | 1996 | Saul Bresalier, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 1998 | Charles Schrimpf, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 1999 | Gerald Kursar, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 2002 | Donald Dushay, DO | ENT |
| Special BOG | 2003 | Michael Rubin, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 2004 | Richard Fuller, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 2004 | H. William Ranelle, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 2004 | Anthony Sala II, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 2005 | Samuel Baldone, DO | ENT |
| Special BOG | 2005 | Charles Kaluza, DO | ENT |
| Special BOG | 2006 | Wayne Bizer, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 2006 | Henry Sonenshein, DO | ENT |
| Special BOG | 2007 | Douglas Hegyi, DO | ENT |
| Special BOG | 2007 | Jacques Surer, DO | OPH |
| Special BOG | 2007 | Warren Brandes, DO | ENT |
A.B. Crites Memorial Lecturers, 2005-2011 (from the 2005-2012 lecture inventory, -360): 2005 John B. Crosby, JD; 2006 Philip L. Shettle, DO; 2007 Hershey S. Bell, MD; 2008 Peter B. Ajluni, DO; 2009 David R. Nielsen, MD; 2010 Alvin D. Dubin, DO; 2011 Donna Surges Tatum, PhD, CAE. This is the College's premier named lecture, the one Dr. Bizer delivered in 1994.
Recipients after 2007. The honor roll above is drawn from the membership database and runs to 2007. Later recipients are being added as the minutes are recovered. From the recovered 2019 records, the 2019 Humanitarian Award went to Dr. Troy Creamean, recognized for his work with an African hospital where ENT residents train. The Foundation established its own named award in 2020, the Dubin Award, honoring Alvin D. Dubin; recipients will be added as they are recorded. The 2021 virtual Assembly recorded two named-award slates: the Patrick Murray Award (otolaryngology: Conor Blanco, Corina Din-Lovinesca, Arron Gravina; ophthalmology: Iain Decker, Danielle Sarlo, Jonathan Go) and the Research Paper awards (otolaryngology: Robert Conway, Anya Costeloe; ophthalmology: Harris Ahmed, Ahmed Rehmani).
Carried from Version 2.9. What was assembled: a leadership roster of about 140 office, board, and award holders from the membership database; the named-award honor roll, back to 1981; and the meeting record, back to 1908 from the presidential line and dated from the databases and primary programs. How it is keyed: every meeting has a stable identifier of the form MTG-YEAR-TYPE, the master key that ties the attendance, activity, and award records to their meeting. People are keyed by AOA number, in place but mostly not yet filled. The gaps, and the intent to close them: the record is deliberately uneven rather than falsely complete; gaps are marked where they occur, and as programs, newsletters, and papers come to light they are logged against the meeting or person already keyed, so the blanks fill in over time. This is why the history and its register are versioned and ongoing. Sources added since Version 2.4 include the primary programs and photograph noted in Appendix D (-309, -311, -312).
Keeping the appendices current. As each new meeting record is recovered, it is read against four lists so the appendices stay complete: the leadership line (Appendix A), the named lectures, the named-award recipients (Appendix E), and the meeting date and location (Appendix D). Anything new is added to both the relevant chapter and the matching appendix, with its source.
Reconstructed from the minutes of the Board of Governors, the constituent Colleges, the Executive & Finance Committee, the Foundation and their committees; from founding-era documents held by the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine; and from the history of the Colleges written by Wayne F. Bizer, DO, College Historian, and from that history as Donald Morris, DO, kept it in circulation and carried it forward in The Scope. All documents in this set, including the source tracker, carry the same version number.
Compiled from the records of the American Osteopathic Colleges of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, its Foundation, and the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine.
Correspondence, corrections, and contributions are welcome and will be credited. They may be sent to the College.
AOCOO-HNS
401 Narcissus Place SE
Albuquerque, NM 87123
(855) 262-6646 (voice/text/fax)
Info@aocoohns.org
Corrections and additions may also be sent to the compiler directly, at yuliba@gmail.com.
This edition is Version 11.2 (October 2026).
The full change record is kept in the source register’s work log.
Versions 1.0 to 1.4 built the reconstructed record, 1908 to 2018, and incorporated Dr. Bizer's 2002 history.
Version 3.5 records the Board of Governors' adoption of the Institutional Memory Project as an official project of the College, on 10 August 2026.
Versions 6.2 and 6.3 added the current era, 2019 to 2026, and merged it into this volume as Part IV.
Versions 7.0 onward are an editorial and consistency pass across the whole volume.
Version 11.2 is the current edition.
Suggested corrections are reviewed against the documentary record before being incorporated.
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