All Cooper Medical School needs is students.

Gov. Chris Christie and a bevy of politicians, higher education officials and community leaders will gather Tuesday in Camden to cut the ribbon on New Jerseys first new medical school in nearly 35 years.

The school, part of Rowan University, will be housed in a new $139 million state-of-the-art building diagonal from Cooper University Hospital in the citys Lanning Square neighborhood. Its first class of 50 future doctors arrives next month.

As workmen buzzed around the lobby completing the building last week, founding dean Paul Katz said the incoming students are poised to make history.

“There is only one charter class ever in this school,” Katz said. “And you have a certain responsibility and obligation to create the traditions and legacies that everyone will build upon.”

Cooper Medical School has been decades in the making. Since the 1970s, South Jersey leaders have been pushing to bring a four-year allopathic medical school to Camden to help spur the revitalization of the troubled city.

In the end, it was South Jersey political power broker George Norcross, head of Cooper University Hospitals board, who helped lead behind-the-scenes efforts in Trenton to make the medical school a reality.

In 2009, Gov. Jon Corzine, who had been treated at Cooper after his near-fatal car accident two years earlier, signed an order giving the school the state money and approvals it needed to get started.

Cooper Medical School is opening amid great upheaval in New Jerseys higher education system. The states other three medical schools, which are all part of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, are scheduled to be transferred to other universities under a higher education reorganization approved by the Legislature last month.

Under the plan, UMDNJs New Jersey Medical School in Newark and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway-New Brunswick will become part of Rutgers University in July 2013. UMDNJs School of Osteopathic Medicine in Stratford will be taken over by Rowan.

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