Chapter 13: A Candidate for the Presidency of MD Anderson;

Chapter 13: A Candidate for the Presidency of MD Anderson;

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Description

In this chapter, Dr. DuBois talks about undertaking the process of applying to be MD Anderson's fourth president. In response to the interviewer's observation that many people in the institution felt he was viewed as Dr. John Mendelsohn's heir apparent, Dr. DuBois confirms that Dr. Mendelsohn raised the issue of his retirement from the presidency during their first recruiting conversations. He felt he was "groomed for the role." He then describes the search process and the steps he underwent to apply and interview for the position of president. He notes that he had a lot of support within the institution, but that the Board of Regents makes their own, independent choice, and internal candidates have challenges. (Dr. DuBois explains that he was really focused on the administration of the institution, on making incremental changes within the reality of the institution as opposed to bringing broad visions of institutional transformation, an allusion to the perspective brought by outside candidates. Dr. DuBois sketches the areas of growth he included in the vision he presented to the Board of Regents. Dr. DuBois then talks about going through the final interview process and then getting the news that the Board had made another choice. He explains why he had wanted to job. He talks about his disappointment and initial feeling that he wanted to move on to another institution, but that people within MD Anderson asked him to stay on to help with the transition under Dr. Ronald DePinho.

Identifier

DuBoisR_02_20181114_C13

Publication Date

11-14-2018

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - Overview; Leadership; On Leadership; Personal Background; Overview; Institutional Processes; MD Anderson and Government; Professional Path; Evolution of Career; Personal Background; Finance, Entrepreneur, Biotechnology; Career and Accomplishments; Overview; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; Dedication to MD Anderson, to Patients, to Faculty/Staff

Transcript

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Do you want to talk about kind of moving into the last couple of years of your time there?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Sure.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And the plans for John Mendelsohn [oral history interview] to step down.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Yeah. Even when I was being recruited there, John was honest with me and said he’s not going to be there forever, and so I knew that there would come a time when he stepped down from the role of president. There was no definite date or time when that was going to happen, but during my final two years there, it became obvious that he had decided that he was wanting to do that. He’d been in the role for a long time for a president of such a large, complex institution, so it was understandable. One of the things that we discussed when I came onboard was the possibility that I could eventually take on that role, so that wasn’t a secret to anybody. John allowed me to represent the institution at the Board of Regents meetings, solo, on a couple of those, to see how that went, and get to know some of the UT System leadership better and also do a lot of sort of lobbying in Austin, with the state legislators and stuff like that. I was even involved in some major fundraising efforts, and so I really thank him for giving me that opportunity. So when he stepped down and they started the search for the successor, I did obviously apply for the position, and went through the whole interview process that all of the applicants went through, and at each level was selected to go to the next level. The University of Texas has a very unusual system for doing this kind of thing.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

I was going to ask you to talk about what that is.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

They try to keep everything in secret in the initial phases, until they get to the top two or three candidates, and then the Search Committee refers these top two or three candidates over to the Board of Regents and then they sort of take over in the final stages of the process, interviewing and all that. Believe it or not, they pre-negotiate with all three, what your offer would be, even before they decide who gets the offer. For example, I had several discussions with Ken Shine about what I needed for my laboratory support, what I would need for my salary, and all of those negotiations are done without the knowledge of actually who’s going to get the job.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Do you have any insight into why that happens?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

I don’t know. I think it’s bizarre, because it does get your hopes up, that you’re actually going to get the job. That’s the only time for any job, that I’ve ever gone through that process. The other thing that they demanded and I thought it was really bizarre, was that my wife come with me and also be interviewed by the Board of Regents, because I guess they had had problems with wives or something in the past. But you know that’s a difficult thing to put your wife through, because they always try to be supportive and everything, but I distinctly remember sitting there with my wife and they were asking her questions about her qualifications as a hostess and if we had certain legislators over for a dinner, how she would deal with that. It was a little bit offensive, because she was a journalist, a writer, and had her own career and had just gone through these photography courses at Rice and had started that. I don’t know, that was not a totally positive experience.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

The State Department used to do that in the old days, for ambassadors, they would interview the wives.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Interviewed the wives. Yeah.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

But yeah, it’s really a blast from the past, a different era.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

So I had a tremendous amount of support from the faculty and everybody I interacted with at MD Anderson, and I think that was all fairly positive. The Board of Regents is their own body and they make their decisions based on what they think is best for the UT System. I think what happened in retrospect was I was really focused on some of the things I was involved in with the administrative management of the institution and what we were going to do to improve certain things and what the future held. When you get somebody from the outside, they can weave a completely different picture and talk about massive changes that they want to do to really transform the institution, and I guess I was tied into reality more, based on my experience in making some incremental changes to make improvements, so in the end, I think I probably wasn’t as competitive than some of the outside individuals, just because of my knowledge of what was possible and what we had done and what I expected to accomplish over the next five years. Whereas, you know somebody from the outside could say well, we’re going to cure five cancers in five years and really have a huge impact. So I think it’s difficult. Dr. Mendelsohn had sort of worked out a succession plan for me, because we had gotten to know each other really well. We had gotten to a certain point, and then to get to the next set of expectations over a five-year period, I had really focused on talking about those areas that I wanted to focus on, but they probably weren’t as glitzy as some of the outside candidates portrayed.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What were the areas you wanted to focus on?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

I had already decided that we really needed to do more in tumor immunology and immunotherapy for cancer. I talked about our recruitment that was already underway for Jim Allison. He hadn’t really accepted the job yet, because he wanted to try to see who the next president was going to be, and that was a reasonable response, and how we were going to shore that up, and then continue to improve the impact and quality of the science that was underway, which doesn’t really turn a lot of heads when you talk about that. I thought there were certain things we could do to improve the fundraising effort. I had just been involved in this $150 million gift from the UAE and what we were going to do with that building and how we were really going to transform personalized medicine. I was talking within the realm of what MD Anderson had been doing and within the plans that had already been set in place from Dr. Mendelsohn. I think others could just completely talk about whatever they wanted to do from scratch, because they really weren’t familiar with what the situation was. It is—an internal candidate, I think is in ways less competitive than an external candidate, and for whatever reason, the board decided to go with Dr. Dr. DePinho [oral history interview]. I think he’s an outstanding scientist and very well recognized for his accomplishments, and so that’s just the way they went.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What do you think they had in their minds in selecting him?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

I think because of his achievements and what he had done in the Harvard System, Dana Farber, I think they thought he could bring another focus to the institution in terms of drug development and really raise the notice of the institution in a whole different set of donors outside the Houston area that could bring resources onboard. He had a lot of ties to industry, but Dr. Mendelsohn did as well, and I had some that you know --when I was at Vanderbilt, I developed my own biotech company and eventually sold that, and it did reasonably well. But it’s not something I bragged about or talked about in this process. In retrospect, it might have been something to let the regents know about.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

You didn’t even brag about it to me. [laughter]

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Well, I didn’t enjoy it. You know, I really liked the academic research job that I was doing and for that company, we had a lot of business meetings, we had to talk to investors and it was based on a patent that a friend of mine had gotten at Vanderbilt, and the technology, I think was very good and worthy of this kind of situation.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What was the device or process?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

It was a process to scan the whole genome using a technology called insertional mutagenesis, so that we could go, in a very systematic way, and delete almost every gene within the genome, and then put them back into a cell, and then see what process went awry. We tagged those insertional mutants with a sequence that we could always go back and determine what gene had been affected. It actually got used to detect new targets for treatment of HIV ultimately, and HIV infections. So there was an infectious disease part and a cancer part, and we also identified some metabolic pathways that affect cancers, that eventually became very well studied and you know, it was positive.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Interesting. Who was your partner?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Don Rubin. Don Rubin was an infectious disease person that came to Vanderbilt from the University of Pennsylvania.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And what was the name of your company?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Avatar.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Oh, cool. Why did you choose that name?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Well, because you know, we thought we would be able to predict the important pathways that kind of cause diseases.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Very cool. Who did you sell the company to?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

You know, I had left the institution and I can’t remember. It was a company in Atlanta that took it and I haven’t followed up on it. This was a long time ago. But you know, I was involved in an intellectual property project that was valuable and got translated into the biotech industry, so I knew all about that and what it took to do it.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Now when you—that’s rotten news to get, right, that you haven’t been selected.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

The way they do it is just awful.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Is it? Oh.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

It’s like when they choose the Pope and the white smoke or the black smoke goes up. What happens is they interview everybody in the morning. I think they had three candidates for the final and you’re not supposed to know who the other candidates are, or meet them or talk to them. So they have everybody at different hotels and they send a car, they take you to the UT System office and you go up and interview with the regents, your wife interviews, and then you leave and then after those three interviews, they allegedly vote and decide who gets the job. It’s usually not always unanimous until they decide who the majority of votes go for, and then they revote and make it unanimous, so that it has to be a unanimous decision for the support of the new president, which I think is a good idea. Then, Dr. Shine is supposed to call you and let you know if you got the job or didn’t get the job, but what happens is I think they have a second sort of period of negotiation with the finalist, to make sure that everybody’s on the same page, so that leads into the afternoon. My wife and I, we knew there were only three interviews, we knew each one was an hour, we knew they hadn’t finished by eleven o’clock, and so we were getting towards 2:00 or 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon, hadn’t gotten a phone call, so it became obvious that we weren’t going to get the job, because they were in the process of negotiating with the person that they chose. So you have this long drive back to Houston, which is not a fun thing. Actually, the people in Houston, they really thought that I was going to get the job for some reason. I mean you never know until you go through the process. They had prepared champagne and all this other stuff, and it’s just one of those things you have to face when you go for that kind of thing.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Why did you want the job?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Well I thought, based on my experience as provost and what we had gone through with the economic downturn, and the recruiting, that I really could have a positive impact. Being from Texas and being dedicated to the institution from a very young age, with the experience my aunt had had there, I really was totally loyal and really thought I could take us to the next phase, you know bringing in people like Jim Allison and others, we could quell some of the concerns that people had about the quality of the science. I did get along well with the clinicians and I felt like we needed to make sure that they got properly rewarded for all this hard work that they were doing. I think they felt like I understood where they were coming from and we had a really good relationship with that group. So there were a lot of personal relationships with individuals, that I’ve maintained until today, even after I left. And then, you know cancer prevention is such an important part of the institution, I was definitely in lockstep with those goals and how we could enhance that for the future. I just felt that there would be stability, because I had been involved in all the financial and fundraising things. So there would be long-term stability, there were no real surprises in terms of what to expect with the way the institution was managed. I guess I was a little bit more fiscally conservative than some of the people that were considered, but I thought we had really banked a lot of the reserves from the margin, so I felt like we were in good financial shape and could take some risk going forward if we needed to.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What was going through your mind? And I’m sorry to ask such a personal question, but it’s kind of part of the leadership experience. You’ve gotten your hopes up, you have excellent reasons for wanting this job, and now you have to come back to this beloved institution knowing you haven’t gotten it. That takes a major mindset readjustment, so what was that like?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Well, that was a blow, because you put everything on the table. I worked [many] twelve-hour days there, to do everything I could to support the institution, and then you know, you feel a little bit slighted because obviously, the institution doesn’t support you, but that’s a very sort of primal way to think of it. I think the institution really was thankful for all the work that I did, and a lot of people, after they found out that I didn’t get it, contacted me and really were helping me get through that and said that it wasn’t anything personal, it was the Board of Regents. That’s the way they operate. And having gone through it, that they’re still thankful for everything that I did there and they hope that I stay. At that point I thought, well maybe I should just leave and allow the new person to come in and do their thing. Several people called me and were begging me to stay on and help with the transition, because the new president didn’t really know the institution that well and he didn’t have a lot of administrative experience in the past. I thought that was important, so I stayed on for at least another year, to try to make sure that it was as stable as possible for the transition.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Now, I’m looking at the time and we’re at quarter of nine, and I’m sure you have something to do at nine.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

That’s true.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So I’m wondering if this is a good place to stop today.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Yeah, I think it is.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay, all right, and that way, you can have your transition time and all of that good stuff.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Good. Great.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Well I wanted to thank you for your time this morning.

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Yeah, you’re welcome. So, you’re going to do it again tomorrow?

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yes. I’ll show up at seven again, doe s that work for you?

Raymond DuBois, MD, PhD:

Yeah, sounds good.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay, good, good. All right, well just for the record, I’m turning off the recorder at eight forty-six.

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Chapter 13: A Candidate for the Presidency of MD Anderson;

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