| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
Proceedings |
|
I bring you greetings from Washington, D.C., a city that occasionally rises above red tape and partisan politics to pay tribute to enduring creativity. This happens to be the year of "Shakespeare in Washington," a six-month celebration of the great Bard, who had something meaningful to say about pretty much any situation. He had everyday common sense, too. This is from Much Ado About Nothing: "There was never yet philosopher," Shakespeare wrote, "that could endure the toothache patiently."
You get the picture. It’s hard to turn a street corner right now in Washington without running into something Shakespearean. We have Hamlet performed by tiny Ninja puppets. We have Shakespeare in Tlingit. We have Shakespeare in Hebrew. It is a very globalized Shakespeare that we’re seeing! And that resonates with me because our dental education community is going global as well.
So when we think about the theme of this Annual Session, "Creating Opportunities," we should be thinking in part in global terms. When Shakespeare paid homage to "the great globe itself," he may have been talking about the Globe Theater, which was his world. Our "great globe" truly is the whole wide world, the flat world, the world that is being linked in amazing new ways by technology. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon boasts that "We the globe can compass soon/Swifter than the wandering moon." But thanks to technology, we are lots swifter than that.
By using computers, email, fiber optic networks, teleconferencing, and new software, writes Thomas L. Friedman, "It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world." Friedman, of course, is the author of a best-seller, The World Is Flat, and he and others have written extensively about the way that this ability to collaborate and compete has brought relative prosperity to distant parts of the globe. And prosperity has released pent-up consumer demand, including demand for oral health services.
You can get some idea of unmet need and potential demand by looking at the ratio of dentists to population. In the United States, it is one to about 2,000. In India, it is one to more than 30,000. No wonder that India, which had fifty dental schools five years ago, now has 220 dental schools. No wonder that dental education knowledge has become a highly valued international commodity.
If you need proof that knowledge can be golden, consider the University of Adelaide in South Australia. About a year and a half ago, it sold its dental curriculum for the equivalent of five million U.S. dollars. This kind of licensing of intellectual property will only increase as time goes on. Now think how much intellectual property is represented by our membership. All of you are stewards of knowledge that the globalized world needs and wants. In that truth, there is tremendous opportunity for the dental education community.
There is opportunity for ADEA, as well, to lead the way—not only helping our members share their knowledge with the world, but helping them benefit from international collaboration. Disease, after all, knows no boundaries, and neither does learning.
Think about a second kind of opportunity, if you will. Think about the oral health care service to the American public that may never come to be unless we keep working at it and make it happen.
ADEA’s long-held position is that, without minority practitioners, access to oral health care will be limited or absent in minority communities throughout the nation. Moreover, at the end of September 2006 the ADEA Board of Directors endorsed a statement of policy on diversity and inclusion. It says, in part, that "Diversity and inclusion are critical components of success in a global context and in an ever-changing world." Furthermore, "ADEA believes that the number of graduates of dental and allied dental programs should reflect their representation in the population and the communities in which they will serve. Recruitment, retention, and graduation of practitioners from disadvantaged groups are goals that are important for the public’s health."
Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are the underrepresented minorities in the ranks of dental students. The percentage of blacks and Hispanics in the general population is more than twice the percentage of blacks and Hispanics enrolled in dental schools. For Native Americans, the disparity is just slightly less.
For some time we’ve known what we wanted to do about these disparities, guided by the recommendations of three recent landmark reports. All three are familiar to this audience: the "Missing Persons" report of the Sullivan Commission on Diversity in the Healthcare Workforce, the report of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Increasing the Diversity of the U.S. Health Care Workforce, and "Oral Health in America: A Report of the Surgeon General." All three are major national efforts to alert the country to unmet health care needs and inequitable access to care.
We’ve known what we wanted to do, but we didn’t have the resources to do it. Now we have managed to put those resources together to position ADEA as a leader in response to the recommendations of these major reports, and we are encouraged by what’s happening. Here are some highlights of what we’re doing:
There is some encouraging news about Hispanic applicants to dental schools. The number of Hispanic applicants to ADEA’s Associated American Dental School Application Service (AADSAS) increased 11 percent this application cycle. The numbers of black and Native American applicants are relatively stable. And for the sixth year in a row, AADSAS applicants increased—this year by 8 percent —to a total of 11,225.
Since 2001, the AADSAS applicant pool has increased 76 percent. While finding this abundance of academically qualified applicants is welcome news, admissions committees are challenged to look beyond grades and Dental Admission Test (DAT) scores to identify traits that will contribute to a rich and diverse student population.
For its part, AADSAS has met the challenge of keeping up with the burgeoning applicant pool by going fully electronic as of the new cycle that launches May 15. Using online real-time technology, AADSAS will collect letters of recommendation, whether hard copies or electronic documents, and make them available electronically to the schools. In addition, all applicant data will be available through the admissions officers portal.
Meanwhile, PASS—ADEA’s application service for advanced dental education—implemented real-time technology in the cycle that has just concluded. A record 509 advanced dental education programs now participate in PASS, and more than 3,000 individuals submitted applications in the 2007 cycle.
Last year when I reported to you at this time, ADEA had just initiated its groundbreaking open membership initiative, offering free membership to every faculty and staff member and every student of a member institution. As I told you then, the technology behind this Open . . . Wider . . . campaign dictated that our standing membership be zeroed out, so technically we started 2006 with no members at all. We would have been happy to reach 5,000. In fact, at the end of December 2006, ADEA membership was approaching 15,000 individual members, and we still want to bring all 60,000 potential members and every postdoctoral and allied dental program into the fold. Which brings me to our third great arena of opportunity: serving our greatly expanded membership and the institutional members.
I don’t see a great divide here. What helps individuals helps institutions, and the opposite is true as well. Furthermore, the work that our advocacy team does on Capitol Hill benefits the entire universe of dental education, members and nonmembers alike. We just want to turn every potential member into an actual member. That’s what will produce the greatest political clout.
That said, there is reason to be upbeat about our advocacy efforts. The fact that the Democrats have returned to power means that Congress will have more interest in and a more intense focus on health care, particularly on lack of access and on the uninsured. How Democratic legislators approach these issues remains to be seen.
No one expected much from the lame duck session that ended in December because Congressional leadership was about to change. Many advocates just threw in the towel, but our people decided to work as though the 109th Congress, before it became history, was really going to take important action. On the reauthorization of the National Institutes of Health, for instance, including the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, we were told that we—we being ADEA, the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), and the American Dental Association (ADA)—were the only groups raising concerns about the bill. It seems as though other advocacy groups had either bought into the proposed bill or didn’t see the bill as having a chance of moving. The dental community, in contrast, worked diligently to raise concerns about some of the bill’s provisions within key Senate offices. We activated our dental schools and grassroots advocates in key districts. We also reached out to a number of other groups within the broader biomedical community. In the end, the groundswell of advocacy forced Congress to consider our specific concerns and revise the legislation. The NIH reauthorization bill passed, after thirteen years in limbo, in the middle of the night. Most, if not all, of the ADEA-AADR-ADA legislative goals were achieved.
Likewise, the dental coalition was hard at work to influence the Ryan White CARE Act, which Congress also approved in the dead of the night. ADEA, the AADR, and the ADA persuaded Congress to include a provision in the bill that designates oral health care as a "core medical service." This is an important development that guarantees that more Ryan White funds will be targeted to oral health care services. The designation also establishes parity between medical and dental services. ADEA, AADR, and ADA successfully beat back an effort to eliminate the Community-Based Dental Partnership Program and shored up support for the Dental Reimbursement Program that has returned more than $111 million to academic dental institutions for HIV/AIDS care. In spite of our best efforts, however, both programs remain significantly underfunded.
Congress also passed a stopgap measure that averted a federal funding crisis in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that would have posed a serious threat to children’s dental coverage in the program. So—urged on by dogged advocacy—a do-little Congress, in the wee small hours of the morning, passed three bills of great importance to academic dental institutions.
Success is sweet, but there is not much time to savor it before we move on with other priorities for the 110th Congress:
ADEA doesn’t take its members for granted, either. I don’t know if you realized this, but ADEA doesn’t offer multiyear memberships. We ask you to renew your membership every year because we want you to reconfirm your commitment to ADEA. ADEA’s commitment is to make it possible for you to experience the Association as a real community.
I believe you can see a hunger for affinity when you look at what happened to the membership of ADEA Sections and Special Interest Groups after open membership was launched. One section, Oral Biology, grew by 2,500 percent. The Section on Dental Hygiene Education grew from 321 members to 1,043. That makes it the second-largest section; Comprehensive Care and General Dentistry leads with 1,283 members, more than fourteen times its pre-Open Membership size.
I mentioned that ADEA had nearly 15,000 individual members. It must not go without mention that some 7,800 of these—more than half—are students in dental, allied dental, and advanced dental education programs. Here too we have a great opportunity to build affinity for academic dentistry and to join with our mostly younger colleagues in tackling the issues that face us today. I’ll tell you in a minute about our Fall Meetings, which were attended by a record number of eighty students—and that was in December, right before Finals Week. Now, if that isn’t a sign of an interest in ADEA and in the work of dental education, I don’t know what is!
Affinity extends beyond individuals to institutions. Since we started our Open . . . Wider . . . campaign, twenty-four new allied programs, four advanced programs, six hospital programs, and eight new corporations have joined ADEA as institutional members. We are working hard to bring more institutions into our fold, and our member services staff are taking great delight in providing the kinds of services and programs that will suit this ever-expanding network of institutional members.
When we created the ADEA Division of Knowledge Management a little over a year ago, we envisioned members connecting and sharing and learning around issues of mutual interest via the Internet, and now that concept has become a reality. ADEA’s Communities of Interest (COIs), which debuted this past June, are crafted to connect you with knowledge you need and with other ADEA members who share your concerns. Each community has facilitators, discussions, news, resources, opportunities for collaboration, links, frequently asked questions, a photo album, an events calendar, and a poll. They are kind of like an online interactive academic swap meet.
The first ADEA Community of Interest, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), launched just this past summer, now has more than 280 members. At this Annual Session, SoTL facilitators are hosting lunches centered on their topics. Those attending have been asked to bring content related to the topic to share with the others at the lunch. Then, after the meeting, they’ve been asked to continue the dialogue online in the SoTL Community of Interest. And that’s one effective way to build affinity.
Since the initial launch, four new communities have debuted: ADEA Admissions, Financial Aid, and Student Affairs (AFASA); ADEA Gay-Straight Alliance; ADEA Allied Dental Education Summit; and ADEA Commission on Change and Innovation School (ADEA CCI) Liaisons. This year we will launch the ADEA Student Community and the ADEA Annual Session Attendee Collaboration Site.
Other important projects are coming out of the ADEA Division of Knowledge Management. ADEA is dedicated to expanding the information it gathers, analyzes, and reports, so that members have quick and accurate access to trends in dental education and other information about our profession. We’re very proud that ADEA’s 2006 "Trends in Dental Education," an online resource, won Association Trends Magazine’s bronze award in the All Media contest. This is a prestigious award for the "best of the best in association media."
ADEA also is developing a new interactive site with the working title of "ADEA Resources Benchmarking Tool," as well as an "ADEA Data Warehouse." The benchmarking tool will enable each dental school to make direct benchmarking comparisons of a wide variety of data, from applicant and enrollee information to salaries and compensation. The ADEA Data Warehouse, which will be under construction most of this year, will consolidate the rich data that ADEA has mined about dental education, creating a new information systems infrastructure that will allow us to react quickly to business needs. Through specific interfaces, users will be able to slice, dice, benchmark, and compare data. If we want to track trends in underrepresented minority applicants and matriculants over several years, we can go to the ADEA Data Warehouse. If we want to improve curriculum or manage teaching resources, we can try combining data from ADEA’s Applicant Analysis, ADEA’s Survey of Dental Seniors, and ADEA’s Survey of Dental Educators. The warehouse will put all of our data to work for all of us, and that’s something to look forward to.
In addition to compiling data over the next year, the ADEA Division of Knowledge Management also is compiling compendiums of resources. The first one published and available is "Challenges, Obligations, and Imperatives: The Recruitment and Retention of Underrepresented Minority Students in Dentistry." It includes nearly sixty resources related to this topic. Next out is a compendium of resources about dental faculty recruitment, retention, and quality of life.
Among this year’s opportunities for professional development, I want to mention the AADR/ADEA Academic Dental Careers Fellowship Program. New last year, it gives eleven dental and allied dental students the chance to experience the benefits and rewards of teaching. This year-long program to mentor students interested in academic careers was launched with a $100,000 grant from the American Dental Association Foundation. It is presented by ADEA and the American Association for Dental Research.
Last year, two ADEA meetings stood out. One was the first-ever ADEA Allied Dental Education Summit, which took as its subject nothing less than the future of the allied professions and their role in solving the dilemma of access to care. That was in June. Then, in December, another "first-ever": the first convening of five different meetings in one location, which we called the ADEA Fall 2006 Meetings. These meetings, attended by more than 450 registrants, were linked by the theme of "Connecting, Converging, Creating." They also were linked by the chance to come together in plenary sessions to hear presentations on such challenging topics as using the noncognitive variable system to seek diversity and the "coloring of America" by demographic change.
And so we come to this meeting in this place on our great globe—this storied, magical, unique, greatly injured but greatly resilient city. This is a city renewing itself, which makes it a very appropriate setting for revitalizing ourselves professionally.
It’s been sixteen years since ADEA’s Annual Session last met in New Orleans. Some of us attended that 1991 session and the earlier sessions in 1982 and 1979. They were productive and memorable meetings, all of them, but I guarantee that none of them had happier news: this summer, the Louisiana State University School of Dentistry is coming home to New Orleans.
I dug down in my bag of Shakespeare quotations to try to find one that did justice to the dental school’s heroic effort in leaving New Orleans in 2005 and setting up full operation in Baton Rouge. This is what I found, from King John: "Courage mounteth with occasion." The occasion, of course, was the destruction that Hurricane Katrina wreaked on the school’s physical site. And the courage was manifested by Dean Eric Hovland and by everyone who helped him make the move and restore classes and services—faculty, staff, and students. All parts of the dental education community and the dental industry supported the reopening in Baton Rouge, with coordination from ADEAassist, our award-winning disaster relief fund. But the kudos belong to you and your people, Dean Hovland. We salute you and wish you much joy in your homecoming.
| ADEAGies FOUNDATION In 2007 we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the creation of the ADEAGies Foundation, a public foundation. At the foundation’s inception, ADEA agreed to match the original $1.5 million in funding. We reached this goal during 2006.
|
I extend my thanks to our Board of Directors, including Ken Kalkwarf, Eric Hovland, Jim Swift, Sandra Andrieu, Chris Arena, Ron Hunt, John Killip, Sheila Koh, Candy Ross, and Cheryl Westphal, for their service to the Association during this year. I also thank all of the volunteers who serve in leadership positions on our councils, committees, and commissions and as our representatives to other associations and organizations.
So we return to the theme of this Annual Session, "Creating Opportunities." There are global opportunities based on unmet need for oral health care in the far corners of the world. There are opportunities to provide for the future oral health of our own country by ensuring that underrepresented minorities are engaged by and prepared for careers in the dental and allied dental professions. And there is a great arena of opportunity in serving our expanded—and, we hope, still expanding—ranks of members and their home institutions. We have our work cut out for us.
 |
Footnotes |
|---|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
