| Abstract/Notes |
The growing acceptance of the DC as a participant in health care is opening doors to governmental and private funding, inviting the political and research leaders to sit at the policy making table. This trend, while creating a clear stage, demands at the same time a new level of responsibility and accountability in the academic domain. Although education was central to chiropractic endeavor in the 1890s, it is in many ways a forgotten stepchild in the 1990s. The success of political activity seems to have placed substantive development of chiropractic schools in the background. Currently, there is a unique opportunity for the coordination of the scholarly functions of instruction, research, and service into a model academy. The characteristics of such a future model institution are illustrated, while realizing that currently existing schools have histories that have spawned barriers to growth, and the external groves of academe, although rich in many areas, have also developed some less than optimal features that must be recognized. A front-running institution, by overcoming internal obstacles in its board, administration, faculty, and student body and by recognizing and turning external constraints to growth to its advantage, may thereby obtain and take responsibility for an unaccustomed prestige and recognition for the profession. This is an opening that chiropractic cannot afford to miss.
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