J&K Fielding, Oscar for the best public health scenario

Jonathan and Karin have been my friends for many years. Jonathan is an influential active member of the editorial committee of the Public Health Reviews. He is editor in chief of the Annual Review of Public Health, which has the highest impact factor for the discipline (8.6). There is nothing ostentatious about Jonathan and Karin’s house in Brentwood, a residential suburb of Los Angeles. Neither we nor their closest colleagues had any idea that, last week, the couple would make a gift of 50 million dollars to the UCLA School of Public Health (video in English of the 1 minute address to students, personnel and the media)!

Jonathan comes from New Yorkand is a paediatrician who graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at HarvardUniversity. He took an MPH (Master of Public Health) at Boston School of Public Health. Later he took an MBA at UPenn. When he was 32, he was appointed state-wide health commissioner of Massachusettsby Michael Dukakis, Governor and future Presidential candidate. He led the first anti-smoking campaigns in the State. Dukakis who now teaches at the UCLA School of Political Sciences said of JF in the Los Angeles Times (article published on 16 February 2012) that “He was talking about prevention and obesity long before anybody else.” In 1979, Jonathan Fielding started at UCLA School of Public Health and still conducts research there, teaching a course on what determines health. In 1998, he began working for Los Angeles County (with a population of nearly 10 million) as head of public health and became director of the separate Department of Public Health created 6 years ago (with an annual salary of $317,000 dollars, according to the LA Times). “He is credited for his proactive on emergency preparedness and bioterrorism and for his response to SARS and other infectious diseases.” In 2010 he was appointed by President Obama to an advisory group on prevention and public health, in particular for preparing the USA’s 2020 health plan (see JF’s speech for the Healthy People 2020 campaign, 12 min video in English).

Linda Rosenstock, my opposite number at the UCLA School of Public Health, renamed the School in their honour the “UCLA Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health. She said that “it is a really extraordinary gift”: the largest ever given to the school, as previous donations had never exceeded 5 million dollars. Substantial donations are sometimes given to business schools, schools of medicine and even certain leading universities in The United States but rarely do billionaires make gifts to schools of public health which are considered to be more professional, more technical and perhaps less glamorous in the eyes of benefactors. Notable exceptions have been billionaires such as Mailman in Columbia (NY), the mayor of NY, Bloomberg, to the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (Baltimore) and Gillings to Chapel Hill (University ofNorth Carolina). But these billionaires were not professors working at the schools to which they made their donations! Nor were they directors of the health services in their city or State!

By giving their personal fortune, the Fielding couple hope to improve public health and leave their mark on the next generation of students. This donation is obviously very welcome, in a difficult economic and financial situation, for UCLA, a public university that depends partly on funding from the State of California. Its Schoolof Public Health, with 700 students a year, and a permanent teaching staff of 85 out of a total staff of 350 is close to the size of the EHESP. UCLA has perhaps not yet achieved the rank (10^th in the classification in US news and world report in 2011) that the classification of its university and the city (2nd) could enable it to achieve in theUSA. With the additional means provided by J&K Fielding which could well attract further donations in the future, the very large Californian university – with 187,000 students, it is larger than Sorbonne Paris Cité and our 120,000 students – can aim to boost the position of public health within the university (the campus at Berkeley has a well classified school of public health – 8th – specialising in the management of health organisations) and its place in the country. With the additional support, the two will now be able to rival the competition on the East Coast, traditionally leaders in international public health.

This evening, on behalf of all those at the EHESP, I should like to express our wishes for a long future for Jonathan and Karin Fielding (and their two children), as they are generous, well informed benefactors of public health in their city, their country and the world!