The university contracted the report in the spring after donors raised concerns that the medical center expansion would conflict with a proposed expansion of the James Cancer Center. The report states the internal rifts could harm the university's ability to recruit top researchers and physicians.
OSU Senior Vice President of Business and Finance Bill Shkurti says he agrees that resolving the internal problems will help retain top physicians. He says disagreements on a project of this size are healthy but in this case, disagreements reached an unhealthy level.
"This is normal in a project of this size in a medical center because you have a lot of people who feel strongly about what they are doing. Those are the kind of people you want to bring in but these disagreements need to be worked out and resolved before we can move on to further design and construction," he said.
The internal rifts center around deciding which programs within the medical center will receive top priority in the expansion.
"Issues that everyone in the university and the medical center is concerned about is that we don't have the money, even as big as this university is, to do everything we want or we think we need to do exactly the when we need to do it. So that's part of this planning process is prioritization deciding what goes first and making sure it gets paid for," he said.
Shkurti says they have slowed the project timeline to address the issues. Detail design work has been delayed.