Dr. Andrew Maccabe spent the past 12 years as CEO of the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges. In July, he will start a new job: vice president of veterinary education at Mars Veterinary Health. Dr. Maccabe earned his DVM from Ohio State University, a master of public health from Harvard and a law degree from the University of Arizona. He also served as a public health officer in the U.S. Air Force and the Air Force Reserve, retiring as a colonel.
1. When did you know you wanted to be a veterinarian?
Many who choose veterinary medicine as a career would say they developed an interest very early in life. I was not like that at all. It wasn’t until I was halfway through my undergraduate work that I decided veterinary medicine would be a good way to combine my interests in agriculture and farming, as well as medicine and science. So, veterinary medicine was a great way to bring those things together.
2. Why didn’t you choose veterinary medicine earlier?
In the late 1970s, the only way you could go to veterinary school in the United States was if you were a resident of a state with a school or a resident of a state with a formal agreement with a state that had one. At the time, I was living in Arizona, which didn’t have a veterinary school, and the only school within the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education was Colorado State. Colorado State was taking two Arizona residents per year, and I thought that didn’t sound very appealing. So, midway through my undergraduate work, I left the University of Arizona, moved back to Ohio, where my family was from, established residency, completed my undergraduate work at Ohio State and then went to veterinary school there.
3. How do you blend your veterinary, public health and law degrees into your work?
I bring bits and pieces of that formal education to my work every day, as well as my experiences in the military, private practice and government service. It requires different ways of thinking, different ways of approaching things, different ways of framing an issue, and different ways of thinking about an argument or an idea. Veterinary medicine relies on deductive reasoning. You start with a constellation of signs or symptoms and reduce them to a diagnosis. Law is a lot of inductive reasoning. You take the specific facts of a situation and try to broadly apply those to a principle of law. The public health piece is the big-picture stuff — the epidemiology, the herd health, the population medicine. It’s the ability to move beyond the specific and think about large groups of people, large groups of animals and large thinking.
4. What came first in your professional journey?
I started as a mixed animal practitioner in Northeast Ohio, doing mostly dairy herd health in the late 1980s. There was a major shift in the economics of milk production to the point where many of the small family farms we worked on were offered incentives to sell their cows and get out of the dairy business. Therefore, our practice shifted to increased companion animal work, which was of less interest to me. I saw an opportunity to do public health work in the Air Force. I did that for several years, and while I was on active duty, I was selected to get my master of public health degree, where I focused primarily on occupational health and epidemiology. I had taken a class in environmental law, and it stimulated my interest in how the law and big statutes worked. Several years later, the opportunity came up when I took advantage of an early but temporary separation from the Air Force to indulge my midlife crisis. So, I rode my bicycle around the country for about a year and decided to go to law school. I did that for three years. At the end, I moved to Washington, D.C., and joined the AAVMC.
5. Did you have memorable mentors?
One of the most significant mentors in my professional career was Larry Heider, who was on the faculty at Ohio State and worked in dairy production medicine. He became a mentor to me because of my interest in dairy work. Over time, we stayed in touch. He subsequently became dean of one of the Canadian veterinary medicine schools and was hired as the executive director of the AAVMC.
6. How did you stay connected?
I was getting ready to graduate from law school and dropped him an email, which was kind of a big deal in the early 2000s. I said, “Hey, I’m getting ready to graduate from law school. Here’s my resume in case you know anybody in the D.C. area who might be interested in somebody with my skill set.” He wrote back right away and said, “I’d like to hire you at AAVMC.” And I remember saying, “Well, great, but what the hell is that? I’m not an educator, and I’ve never been employed by a university.” But he invited me out for an interview and hired me.
7. Do you have any special animals?
Oscar is the wonder cat. He’s on Zoom so much that I think he needs an agent. His compadre is Felix, who’s a little shy. These guys have bonded, and most often, they’re sleeping together. It’s hard to have just one cat. I think you have to have two.
8. What’s the first thing you do in the morning?
Get up, get the coffee and download the newspaper. And feed the damn cats. I know lots of people whose cats wake them up at night or at 5 a.m. Oscar and Felix are good about not waking me. I usually squeeze in about a 30- to 40-minute cardio workout in the mornings.
9. How about your workday?
We lease space from the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is in the same building as the American Dental Education Association, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the Physician Assistant Education Association. When I’m in the office, it typically starts with one-on-one meetings with staff or with group meetings with the senior executive team or program managers. Once a week, I do an all-staff meeting. We have 25-ish people, and about a third of them are remote workers. For those of us who come into the office, we aim for three days a week on-site and two days of work from home.
10. How do you stay organized?
Like a lot of people, I live and die by the calendar. It has to be on the calendar, or it doesn’t get done. I travel about 40% to 50% of the time. I live on top of a Metro station, which is on the line that goes directly to the airport.
11. How did you manage during the early days of the pandemic?
We were already evolving at AAVMC, so we were well-prepared. We had shifted all our systems to the cloud prior to then. All the deans at schools across the United States knew what was going on within their campuses, but they were most interested in knowing what other veterinary medical programs were doing during the pandemic. AAVMC started weekly Zoom calls to all the deans. They immediately shared, “What are you doing with students? What are you doing with clinics? What are you doing with staff? Are you still open? How are you seeing cases?”
12. How do you define leadership?
There are so many trite, great definitions of leadership, but I think the one I come down to is it’s helping people on a team do their best work together. I am not too fond of the ones about getting people to do what they wouldn’t ordinarily do and like it, as that sounds coercive.
13. What is your professional passion?
Continuous quality improvement. This goes back to my Air Force days, as it was instilled in us as one of our core principles. Integrity first, service before self, excellence in everything we do. And I’m a process-oriented person. If you get a process right, then good outcomes will follow. That passion is also a continual evaluation of what we’re doing and “How can we make it better?”
14. What are some of your personal interests?
I enjoy cooking, especially for other people. Small dinner parties are my favorite — three or four people and a nice conversation. I enjoy the process of cooking, so most weekends, I’ll put together something that will last most of the week, like a big pot of chili. I also love to travel, which is good given how much I travel with this job. One of the great things about this job is the opportunity to travel internationally. I enjoy reading, too. I’m a little embarrassed to say I love the Kindle. I used to love the feel of a new book, but now I can’t bear to hold a book. It’s like, “Oh, my God, it’s so heavy.” But with the Kindle, click, click, on you go.
15. Favorite books?
On the Kindle, I prefer fiction. For nonfiction, I still prefer hard copies because when I’m doing it for learning, I like to highlight and write margin notes. After law school, the first thing I did was not read a thing for about six months. I was so tired of reading. When I started back, I read trashy murder mysteries — just breezy, quick stuff. It took me a while to get back into literature, but now I’m enjoying that again.
16. Favorite work-related books?
I was influenced several years ago by Culture by Design. The premise is that every organization has a culture. It may not be the culture you want, but it has a culture. Most organizations spend a lot of time working on a strategic plan, and they can point to a mission statement, a vision statement, corporate values, and a strategic plan with goals and objectives. Then you ask them, “How much time do you spend developing your culture?” And it’s like, “Well, we just hope for the best.” It’s the adage “Culture eats strategy for breakfast every day.”
17. What do you do for self-care?
My great pandemic purchase was a water rowing machine. I also have an elliptical and a bicycle that I can put on rollers. All this fits in about 1,200 square feet. In addition, although we have great mass transit in Washington, D.C., I’m just a little over two miles from the office. So it’s a nice walk.
18. Relationships are?
Essential and foundational to everything we do. It starts at the interpersonal level, moves up to the organizational level and then to the broad international global level.
19. What are your goals for the remainder of 2024?
To successfully transition from AAVMC to my new role at Mars Veterinary Health. Maybe the corollary to that is to make sure I’ve got things in good order at AAVMC so the transition is easy for my successor.
20. Is there anything else you’d like to share?
It’s easy to get discouraged by world events — major conflicts, political situations in our country and elsewhere, climate change, all these things. I’m an optimist at heart. It’s just a matter of what you choose to focus on to make things better. Then, the world is a pretty good place.
AMONG EQUALS
QS World University Rankings identified the University of London and UC Davis as the top two veterinary colleges in 2024. However, the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges doesn’t like third-party ranking systems, stating, “We believe all member institutions provide a high-quality education that prepares students for success in the many different dimensions of modern professional practice.”