his deanship a little more than a year later. Indeed, almost eighteen months later, when UMass
president John Lederle was vetting Soutter for the position of dean, the only negative comments he heard came from Boston University’s President Case who declared Soutter to be “difficult” to work with. What happened? Although the details are unknown, it is commonly held, according
to Dr. Chobanian, BU’s President Emeritus, that, BU’s presidents before the 1970s simply didn’t understand the potential of the medical school to enhance the reputation of the university.
Thus, in Soutter’s era, the medical school did not receive the financial or other support it would have needed to grow and thrive. Dr. Soutter’s son was even blunter. He recalled receiving the
impression from his father that President Case thought the school was a lost cause: it ran a deficit
and its reputation was completely overshadowed by its neighbors, Harvard and Tufts. The six-year program so dear to Lamar Soutter could only fulfill its promise if the University followed through with a major investment in new facilities and faculty, something that was not on the President’s long-term agenda. It may also have rankled that the Department of Medicine was more favored
than Surgery or medical education.32 But Soutter may have felt he could get neither the money nor the autonomy that he felt was due to any medical school head. Several years later, in a meeting with the UMass Board of Trustees to plan a Board subcommittee to work with him as Dean,
Soutter ruefully recalled his experience at one (unnamed) school where the dean was “told how
to run [the] school in detail.” The clear implication was that he wouldn’t be willing to repeat that experience.33
After resigning as Dean, Soutter returned to teaching and the practice of surgery at the
BU hospitals as well as at others in the region. By the end of the year he had become Area
Chief of Surgery for the New England and New York region of the Veteran’s Administration. About that time, as we have already seen, the Legislature was finally coming to terms with
the Commonwealth’s need for a state medical school. One can imagine that Dr. Soutter paid
attention to those developments. When, at the beginning 1963 the Board of Trustees formed a
search committee for the medical school’s first dean, Soutter was among the small group shortlisted out of a larger complement of 25 candidates. UMass President Lederle was looking for someone youthful, with administrative experience, a leading scientist who could “deal with
[the] legislature,” and - this was underlined - with a “public attitude.” The Trustees had a more pragmatic goal. As Joseph Healey, chair of the Board’s medical school committee, told the
Boston Globe, “We want a person of such distinguished and established reputation that he will
be immediately accepted by the medical profession, the other medical schools, and the people of Massachusetts as an exceptional choice.”34
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