Faculty Appointment Policies and Tracks in U.S. Dental Schools with Clinical or Research Emphases

Abstract

The 1995 Institute of Medicine study of the future of dental education, Dental Education at the Crossroads: Challenges and Change, recommended that dental schools increase the use of nontenure-track positions in their employment of faculty. As part of a larger investigation of faculty appointment processes in U.S. dental schools, dental deans were queried about institutional policies governing faculty appointments and the use of tenure and nontenure faculty tracks. Response from the fifty-four U.S. schools exceeded 90 percent for each of two mailed questionnaires. Dental schools were classified according to one of two emphases: clinical or research. Deans classified faculty into one of seven appointment tracks. Nontenure-track appointments were less common in clinical-emphasis schools. Research-emphasis schools had a greater mean proportion of their faculties in both the nontenure research track (7.0 percent vs. 2.7 percent) and the nontenure clinical track (20.8 percent vs. 17.4 percent). Compared to faculty appointment data reported in 1990, there were more nontenure-track faculty in 81 percent of research-oriented schools and 55 percent of clinical-oriented schools. The most frequently cited reasons for more nontenure faculty in these thirty-three schools were greater administrative flexibility, better fulfillment of mission, and increased difficulty achieving tenure. This study showed the number of faculty holding nontenure-track appointments had increased since 1990, especially among research-emphasis dental schools.