Ongoing Involvement: Former Healthcare CEO Mark Taylor Remains Engaged with Alma Mater
Written by Doug Goodnough, ’90
When Mark Taylor, ’74, arrived at Hillsdale College during the Vietnam War period, he knew why he was there.
“It’s not that I wasn’t in tune politically, I was just there to get a good education,” said Taylor, who was attracted to Hillsdale in part because it did not have the campus unrest and anti-war protests that many other colleges and universities were experiencing at the time. “I did not want to be distracted by extraneous things you really couldn’t influence.”
More than 50 years later, Taylor has had a long and distinguished career as a healthcare administrator, including the role of CEO at several large healthcare organizations. However, he said he originally thought law school was his next stop after Hillsdale.
Taylor said what changed his thinking was that he had some college friends working at Hillsdale Hospital. He also got a chance to meet the hospital’s new director of human resources. Those connections and conversations eventually affected his future career path.
“Healthcare seemed like it was really starting to develop, starting to become more businesslike,” he said. “It just piqued my interest, and by the time I graduated from Hillsdale, I wanted to go into healthcare administration.”
Starting his career in human resources and labor relations at a small hospital, Taylor said he tried to absorb as much as he could on the job.
“Early in my career, I was thinking that if opportunities present themselves to do something extra, I’m going to do it,” he said. “So it wasn’t just doing the job I was doing. If some other opportunity came up where I could get some new experience, I was going to do that.”
That healthcare experience also included finance and physician practice management and recruitment. He eventually completed his master’s degree in health services administration at the University of Michigan and his doctor of healthcare administration from Central Michigan University. For more than 30 years, he served as the CEO of several large healthcare systems in Michigan, Missouri, and Wisconsin.
“What I brought into that CEO role is, I had been on the institutional side working in the hospital and healthcare organizations themselves,” Taylor said. “And I also had been on the physician practice side and understood what it looked like, what a health system or what a hospital system looked like from the physician side. And that was unique to have both of those perspectives.”
Taylor said the healthcare industry is different from most, something he recognized early in his career.
“The nature of a healthcare organization is that it’s a social system. It’s about people who are there with a special calling and role in the communities they serve,” said Taylor, who retired as a CEO in 2014 but still does some consulting work. “And they’re there to interact with other people who share that same calling. So there’s a different organizational psychology to it. It’s a social construct, not a transactional construct. And so that’s where you have to understand the business psychology and recognize that healthcare organizations are just going to respond differently than a bank or an insurance company or construction company might.”
His wife, Beth, is a registered nurse who recently retired as the chief nursing officer for the Veterans Healthcare Administration. Together they raised three children: Ben, Chris, and Bethany. Ben, the oldest, graduated from Hillsdale College in 2000.
“My hope is one or more of our three young grandsons might attend Hillsdale, too,” Taylor said.
Taylor said some of his finest Hillsdale memories were participating in the choir as well as the Tower Players. He said an English and history seminar with the honors program was also memorable.
“It was my first class at Hillsdale, and it remains one of my favorites,” he said.
Taylor said his WHIP experience taught him more than a classroom could, including sitting in on the Watergate hearings happening at the time in Washington, D.C.
“I just went in and listened for an hour to the testimony,” he said. “And as I look back now, what a moment.”
Taylor, who now lives in Oro Valley, Arizona, is scheduled to attend the College’s 50/60-Year Reunion event in April and said his involvement with Hillsdale has been ongoing. In fact, he occasionally comes to campus to teach a class.
“I have such respect for the students and the faculty and the institution,” he said. “I definitely want to be engaged with them. They’re just good people.”
Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.
Published in April 2024