I practiced orthodontics for 27 years and have always wanted to teach. Beginning in 1979, I landed a part-time job at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a lab instructor and became a course director in 1989.
After selling my practice in 1995, I’ve also taught courses in hygiene, dental anthropology and other anthropology courses for Indiana University, Northwest.
The blunt economic fact is this: I couldn’t support a family on teaching. I anticipate doing seven courses this year. The pay will be about $37,000 to cover driving 25,000 miles a year and paying over $9,000 for junk health insurance. Job benefits are unavailable to me. My success in orthodontics has been financed by teaching activities.
At UIC, new full-time faculty are judged on their ability to pull in grant money and publish regularly. The pressures are enormous: administration, overseeing graduate students and, almost as an afterthought, teaching classes.
Entry into academia is formidable: college, dental school, doctoral study, a long post-doctoral program (at a low salary) and then, if a position is landed, it is "produce or be denied promotion and tenure."
I teach because I enjoy it. It is a full-time job: updating course content, preparing Web sites, writing much of my own teaching materials, introducing computer images to my classes. Nothing I do is recognized by the current annual faculty evaluation process because it isn’t published and doesn’t bring in grant money. My pay increase this year was 1.85 percent. The school is strapped for money, so nothing is personal—the funds are not there.
Dental education probably will soon have another faculty category common in the academic world at large, "visiting lecturers." According to a Chicago Tribune article, the University of Illinois hires them as full-time teachers for nine-month contracts. Pay? About $22,000 per year. Who can provide for a family on that?
