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President-Elect’s Address

Wow! What an honor, what a responsibility. On Wednesday I will become President of this exceptional organization. It is a humbling, yet proud time. It is a time, in fact, you would really like to share with your mother. Well, I can; she is here. My mom, Kathy Hovland. And next to her is my inspiration and love of my life: my wife, Carol.

During the past year, as President-Elect, I’ve gotten to know ADEA. The agenda of this organization is immense. It represents dental and allied dental education, it represents dental and allied dental institutions, and it provides for all our individual members.

ADEA addresses the concerns and interests of dental school faculty, allied health faculty, advanced education faculty, students, deans, corporate members, researchers, and the many disciplines of dental education. ADEA is in the halls of Congress, in the offices of government agencies, and across the table from the American Dental Association, the examiners, the research community, and so many other organizations. ADEA also hosts and organizes over fifty meetings per year. These are meetings that provide countless faculty development opportunities and result in major national policy initiatives and programs.

Through its activities, ADEA provides moral leadership for dental education and the profession, and it develops and significantly influences national dental education and health policy. It is the voice and the heart of dental education.

So how does an organization with such an enormous agenda and breadth of activities pull it off? How do you put it all together? I feel there are three critical pillars for success in an organization like ADEA.

First, you need a superb staff. With Rick Valachovic’s leadership, ADEA has gathered an extraordinary group of individuals who are hard-working, visionary, committed, and energetic. Working with them reminds me of a story about when Michael Jordan was at his prime in the NBA and his team had recruited another ACC player, Joe Smith. Joe worked hard, made the team, and finally was given a start. Well, Jordan was great in the game that night, scoring sixty points. Smith also played well—and scored one point. After the game, the press in the locker room asked Smith what they should say about him after his first game. He thought a while, then turned to them and said, "I would like to see the headline ‘Jordan and Smith score sixty-one points.’" That’s how I feel working with Rick and his staff: they are Jordan and I am Smith, but we are all on the team.

Second, you need strong volunteer leadership. From our Councils and committee members, to our Council administrative boards, to the Board of Directors, to the officers, we have extraordinary people. I have not had the privilege of working closely with most of the former Presidents of ADEA. But I have worked with Paula Friedman and Frank Catalanotto and can state that their exceptional energy, vision, commitment, and talent have moved this organization to a better place. Paula—with her emphasis on mentoring, on increasing leadership opportunities for all our members, and her initiatives resulting in greater recognition for our educators and teachers. Frank—with his emphasis on the challenges of access and diversity, the ethics of access, and his thoughtful and dedicated activities in the national licensure debate and issues. I will continue to support and move the activities they have so passionately initiated.

Speaking of leadership, soon after I was appointed Dean at LSU, one of our faculty sent me a list of four principles of leadership. I do not know the author, but over the years, I have kept and sometimes referred to that list. These are principles I’ve seen in leaders I admire:

1. Care more than others think is wise.
   
2. Risk more than others think is safe.
   
3. Dream more than others think is practical.
   
4. Expect more than others think is possible.
   

The third and final pillar of a successful organization is the development of and a commitment to strategic directions. An organization as broad as ADEA must define its priorities. It must develop strategic directions in order to provide continuity for an organization that changes presidents and officers every year. It must establish priorities as it cannot do everything for everyone. Well, we have done that.

Through our Councils, our advisory committees, our administrative boards, and our Board of Directors, ADEA has developed and approved a set of strategic directions. My activities and priorities for the year will be the priorities of the Association through those developed strategic directions. Your board is also committed to these priorities and directions and will use them in its decision making.

There are four strategic directions. First is "recruitment, development, retention, and renewal of dental and allied dental faculty." This direction focuses on the support and the development of activities that will help academic dental institutions recruit the very best faculty and interest more of our students and practitioners in an academic career. It focuses on the development of our existing faculty; it focuses on retention of our present faculty; and it focuses on renewing the energy and excitement of many of our faculty members. Supporting faculty through ADEA activities such as the Annual Session and Council programs, the leadership development initiatives, the evolving Academy of Dental Educators, new legislative activities, new faculty support programs, and recruitment strategies will be a major priority.

ADEA’s second strategic direction is "financing dental and allied dental education." Our institutions and programs are experiencing significant financial difficulties with decreasing state and federal support, old and worn infrastructures, escalating costs of new technology and other advancements, increasing costs to students, and the need to better compensate our faculty and staff. Addressing the finances of our schools and programs through activities such as partnerships with the ADA in the National Campaign for Dental Education, growing our Gies Foundation, identifying best practices, seeking legislative support, and exploring and developing opportunities where institutions can share resources and thus decrease costs will also be a major priority.

The third strategic direction is "meeting the oral health care needs of a diverse population." This direction was a major priority for our president this past year, and this meeting focuses on his theme, "Access and Diversity: Educating for Change." ADEA’s focus on this subject through its programs, publications, and legislative activities has significantly raised awareness of the need for diversity and access to care in our schools and in our profession. It has created a national sense of urgency. It has produced funds for diversity and access initiatives and programs. This effort will continue to be a major priority.

ADEA’s fourth and final direction is "curriculum development and design to meet the changing needs of the field and the profession of dental education." This is curriculum development for the future. As you know, our new students come to us with such energy and passion for dentistry. They are so positive and so proud to be part of the profession. They are so eager to learn. And then we, in many of our schools, start to pile on content and more content, sometimes trivial information, sometimes peripheral information, but always more information and most of it discipline only-based. Our students memorize and they recognize and then they forget. We need to decompress our curricula, eliminate peripheral information, define what a practitioner really needs to know, and prepare our students for the future practice of dentistry. Charles Bertolomi said it well at the recent Council of Deans meeting in Tucson: we need to concentrate less on content and more on discerning what is good or not good.

We now have a wonderful and unique opportunity to address curriculum development. Our programs, our faculty, our schools, and ADEA and its Councils cannot address curriculum development in isolation. There are the outside influences on our curriculum of National Board Exams, Accreditation Standards, and the practicing community. The National Boards and Accreditation Standards need to reflect what we want in our curriculum, and our curriculum must meet the needs of the present and future practice of dentistry.

Last October, ADEA, following the initiative of the Council of Sections, convened a meeting of all these constituencies. Representatives from ADEA, ADEA Councils, the American Dental Association, the Commission on Dental Accreditation, the Joint Commission on National Dental Examinations, and the ADA Council on Dental Education and Licensure met to develop a consensus and hopefully begin a process to develop updated clinical competencies for the present and future general dentist, develop foundation knowledge that supports those competencies, develop a new curriculum, and then develop National Board Exams and accreditation standards that reflect the competencies, foundation knowledge, and new curriculum. In simple terms, the goal is to define what a general dentist needs to know, have a curriculum that reflects this, eliminate the peripheral information and trivia, and have our National Board Exams and CODA standards reflect the new curriculum.

All groups agreed we need to and can do this. We have begun the process of developing a timetable and a plan that will include our Councils and the national constituencies. The process and plan will be a major focus of my presidential year. The door for important and necessary curriculum reform supported by all the involved constituencies is now open, and we must move quickly and forcefully. We will.

My activities for next year will center around the continuation of the initiatives of Paula and Frank and around the four strategic directions. Of course we know there will be some of those "out of nowhere" issues to address, like the GME crisis and this year’s fast-moving national licensure initiatives that are continuing.

And I will continue to reside in New Orleans, Louisiana, where you don’t learn until high school that Mardi Gras is not a national holiday. Where when it starts to rain, you cover your beer, not your head, and where your burial plot is six-feet over, not six-feet under.

I have so much respect for this organization, for what it represents, and for the people it embraces. This is why serving as next year’s President is so special to me.

I have lived a blessed life.

I married the girl I love.

I have children of whom I am so very proud.

I have been able to teach what I always wanted—endodontics.

I have had the opportunity to lead an exceptional dental school at LSU.

And now I will serve as President of your American Dental Education Association. Thank you for this opportunity to serve.

	Footnotes

 
This address by the President-Elect of the American Dental Education Association was presented to the membership on March 5, 2005, in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Hovland is Dean of the School of Dentistry at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center.

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