This letter is in response to your April editorial about the growing problem with attracting faculty at many colleges of dentistry.
First, as you point out, the average age of dental faculty is growing all the time. With the cutbacks that most dental schools have faced in the last 10 years, a higher percentage of the faculty who remain are tenured faculty who tend to be paid higher salaries. This means that there is less money available to pay junior faculty competitive salaries.
Second, most junior faculty coming in are generally expected to carry a substantial teaching load and organize and direct courses. Third, junior faculty also are "encouraged" to pursue research and publish abstracts and articles. [Faculty have] lower-than-average wages and a higher-than-average workload and expectations. Sounds inviting.
Although the above is, by itself, enough to deter many who wish to pursue academic interests, the true roadblock that limits the number of persons applying and teaching is the departmental organization and mentality of most dental colleges.
Very few specialty departments in dental schools these days would seriously consider hiring a nonspecialist to become a faculty member. For instance, a general dentist who had substantial endodontic experience would never be seriously considered by most departments of endodontics to teach undergraduate dental students. Considering that specialists are the only persons qualified to teach, I find this to be the logical equivalent of considering Mario Andretti the only person qualified to teach a person to drive.
Does it really take an oral surgeon to teach a student how to remove a periodontally involved tooth? Does it really take a prosthodontist to evaluate the preparations on a three-unit bridge? The same can be said for the vast majority of dental procedures done by undergraduate dental students.
The few general dentists who are "allowed" to teach in the dental school environment are usually not considered for tenure-track positions. If a person knows from the beginning that there is little or no hope of advancing within a department, then what is the point of applying? The dental school accreditation process, of course, supports this mentality, as it looks most favorably on those schools who have the most board-certified specialists.
There are scores of general dentists with vast quantities of knowledge and experience who have the interest and motivation to teach undergraduate dental students. Undergraduate dental education should truly be a generalist-centered and -driven educational process with the appropriate and balanced input from specialists.
Dental education should be a reflection of real-world patient care. Specialists seek to serve and assist the general dentist in managing patient care needs when deemed appropriate. In the same way, specialists should serve and assist a generalist-based educational system in educating dental students and providing input when appropriate. In most dental college environments, however, students, patients and administrators tend to be the ones serving the needs of the specialty departments.
Present-day economics will no longer allow a specialty department–based educational system to function. For this reason, organized dental education should possibly look back to the roots of dental education, which was generalist-centered, for answers, or seek alternative strategies in educating students that will encourage greater numbers of well-experienced general dentists to enter the educational community.
