Promoting the recruitment and retention of minority faculty

The need for proactive recruitment programs, I believe, will be even more essential as faculty-ALL faculty-become more difficult to identify, as private practice and other professional options continue to be more available and attractive and as student debt levels continue to rise. Active retention programs for new faculty will also be critical activities for departments and colleges of dentistry. Several factors threaten the longevity of junior faculty: As dentistry schools are required to become more financially self-reliant with less support from the parent university (and/or the state), faculty will be asked to "produce" more (and the trend toward clinic track appointments is not likely to mitigate this problem). The standards and rigor of the promotion process at many universities are continually increasing. The increased teaching loads required by our seemingly inexorably increasing curricula are not supported by a commensurate increase in the number of faculty. Lastly, the need for a more diverse faculty intensifies these pressures on many new appointees. Therefore, in my view, we can no longer afford to rely on our largely informal recruitment and retention networks of the past. We must develop programs to support and monitor the transition of new faculty into our university culture.