Stuart Bondurant’s ascension to the top job at Georgetown University Medical Center over two years ago probably could not have come under less auspicious circumstances.

Bondurant, the interim executive vice president for health sciences, became the fourth person to lead the financially troubled edical Center in under three years when Daniel Sedmak resigned in August 2004 after only 14 months on the job. Mired in debt, the edical Center suffered from rock-bottom employee morale after more than five dozen workers were laid off only months earlier.

As he plans to hand the job over to Howard Federoff next week , Bondurant hopes that, even though he did not lead the Medical Center to a full recovery in his two and a half years in charge, he at least stopped the bleeding.

“I think my legacy and that of those of us who’ve [worked] for the last two years is to put a base on which our successors will build this institution to meet its destiny,” Bondurant said in an interview. “I think we did the best we could.”

After inheriting a Medical Center that had been losing tens of millions of dollars each year, Bondurant pledged to balance the budget by the 2007 fiscal year. But even after he implemented numerous large-scale cost-cutting efforts – including the suspension of all new hires in October 2004 and the termination of nine non-tenured faculty members six months later – the edical Center has yet to find its fiscal footing. It lost over $16 million during the last fiscal cycle, which ended in June, and is projected to lose a similar amount this year.

Bondurant said he now hopes that that the Medical Center breaks even by 2010, and that his original goal was too ambitious.

“I think it’s fair to say that we failed to meet that goal. I do think also that the goal was overly optimistic,” he said. But he added that the Medical Center is in a better position to succeed than when he arrived largely because of the structural changes that he has put in place.

“The goal of stabilizing the institution, of putting in place organization and management arrangements that will manage the losses and position [the Medical Center] best for the next phase in its institutional life – I think these things have, to a significant extent, been accomplished,” he said.

Federoff said that Bondurant has helped put the Medical Center on an upward trajectory, but that work remains to be done.

“He has established a level of stability that I expect to build upon,” he said.

Bondurant said that having to fire employees to improve the bottom line may have been the most difficult moment of his career since arriving on the Hilltop in 1999 as a strategic adviser for the university.

“It was terrible. There were people in that group who were dedicated to Georgetown, who had given huge chunks of their lives all out of loyalty in return for salaries less than they could have gotten if they put themselves on the open market,” he said. “The positions had to be eliminated – not them, but the positions.”

Still, Bondurant would not rule out the possibility of future layoffs at the Medical Center. With 70 percent of the Medical Center’s expenditures going toward salaries, he said that more layoffs may ultimately be one of the most efficient ways to reduce the deficit.

“My guess is that in the short term, at least, Georgetown won’t be laying off a lot of people because I think we’re pretty well squeezed down,” he said.

During a ceremony last Tuesday in Gaston Hall, University President John J. DeGioia, who has worked closely with Bondurant since Bondurant became a special adviser to DeGioia in 2001, presented Bondurant with an honorary degree and said that he had presided over the Medical Center during a time when economic fluctuations made it difficult for the medical sciences to be profitable. He said that this shift has motivated many of the structural changes that were made at the Medical Center before and during Bondurant’s tenure, including the sale of Georgetown University Hospital to MedStar Health in 2000.

“The changes that were required at Georgetown – to some degree causal consequences of our context, history and location – placed our Medical Center at the vanguard of the most significant shifts that are occurring in the context of American academic medicine today,” DeGioia said. “[Bondurant’s] wisdom, experience, collegiality, generosity and grace have been crucial to our ability to respond to the challenges I have outlined.”

Speaking to the crowd after receiving his degree, Bondurant left it to his successor to solve many of the problems that have plagued the Medical Center for over a decade.

“I am very proud of what we have done over the last three years,” he said. “Much has been accomplished, but the real heavy lifting is yet to be done.”

– Hoya Staff Writer Robert Heberle contributed to this report.