MORE ABOUT TEACHING

LETTERS solutions proposed to alleviate the problem of dental educators—specifically, debt forgiveness. Solutions like that distort the marketplace and have unintended consequences. Someone who is attracted to education but who graduated without any debt (perhaps a spouse paid for the education) gets no compensation under that plan because he or she has no debt. Going into debt for an education is an individual decision based on expected return (a business decision). Going into debt should not be done in expectation of loan forgiveness. The best way to attract people into dental education is simply to pay them more. The pay doesn’t have to approximate private practice, but it does have to reward people for the extra time in school, as well as compensate them to some extent for the “opportunity cost” of foregoing private practice. Ralph Bozell, D.D.S. Canton, Mich. MORE ABOUT TEACHING

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 suc716

cess 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 ninemonth contracts. Pay? About $22,000 per year. Who can provide for a family on that? Clarke Johnson, D.D.S., Ph.D. Kankakee, Ill. ORAL AND MAXILLOFACIAL PATHOLOGY

I read with interest your editorial in April JADA. I am sure that I am not the only practitioner

taken aback by the flippant statement regarding the “sharing” of oral pathologists—it appears rather obvious that there is an essential lack of appreciation of the specialty. Pathologists teach, teach, teach, teach, teach and then see patients, gross specimens, signout specimens and do research. They talk with outside practitioners all the time about specimens and oral disease questions. They go to the health fairs and promote their universities. On the other hand, I could go on ad nauseam regarding other areas that could be cut. Other faculty in the schools may teach one class a year (shared with 10 other lecturers), do research and never see a single patient or perform ancillary procedures such as signing biopsies. On another very practical note, if dentists interested in academia were not made to participate so heavily in research, they might sign up to teach—a very simple but very profound statement. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to respond. S. Bryan Whitaker, D.D.S. Springdale, Ark. MORE ABOUT O AND M PATHOLOGY

I would like to respond to Dr. Meskin’s editorial in April JADA. I can excuse Dr. Meskin’s ignorance in not knowing what an oral pathologist does. But I cannot excuse his arrogance in suggesting that the value of oral pathologists to an institution is so insignificant that a school doesn’t need to “ ‘own’ and ‘pay’ for a full complement of, for example, oral pathologists” (whatever that means). At our institution, we teach

JADA, Vol. 131, June 2000 Copyright ©1998-2001 American Dental Association. All rights reserved.