Stand and Deliver: New Med School Endowment Founded To Attract Teachers

Harvard Medical School (HMS) is creating a major new endowment to help attract and retain gifted teachers in an institution often dominated by research.

HMS, along with the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), recently announced that it would create an endowment to enable medical school professors to spend more time teaching. The endowments--$10 million at HMS, $5 million at UCSF--will fund academies of medical educators within the two schools.

The Academy initiative is the brainchild of Dr. Daniel H. Lowenstein, dean of medical education at HMS. Formerly stationed at UCSF, Lowenstein convinced both schools to pursue the project.

At HMS, the new Academy will be comprised of 200 to 300 of the most gifted teachers on staff. Whereas most medical school professors are not paid for their teaching, the endowment will allow HMS to partially compensate its best teachers.

The Academy's director will also advocate for members' promotions and will encourage new teaching methods and programs.

The initiative seeks not only to address the problem of attracting great professors but, more fundamentally, to renovate the structure of medical schools.

Unlike research, clinical and administrative work, teaching has traditionally not been a paid activity. In the past, teaching doctors have earned their living elsewhere--doubling teaching with clinical work and research.

In recent years, the rigorous demand for research in academia and the advent of managed care has put the medical school structure to the test. Accountability for actual clinical and research work as well as the expected level of productivity has increased in the profession.

As a result, medical professors' energies are diverted away from teaching: doctors, hard-pressed to be more efficient and to see more patients, have less time for their students.

"You can't hide teaching in research and clinical work the way faculty did years ago," said Dr. Molly Cooke, director of the initiative at UCSF.

The Academy initiative essentially creates a funding mechanism for teaching.

"The whole point is to address a structural limitation which prevents disbursement of resources from optimally supporting the teaching mission of medical school, because of the competing research and clinical components," Lowenstein said.

Currently, associate professors at medical schools are supposed to put in 50 hours of teaching per year, while full professors are expected to teach 100 hours per year. But Lowenstein said medical professors often cannot meet those expectations.

Hopefully, the initiative will fill the huge demand for teaching time for lectures, but especially for clinical teaching, which often occurs on a one-on-one basis.

While the Academy will only pay for a fraction of full professors, it will assist members on two fronts. Stipends will be given to professors to develop teaching programs or simply to teach. In addition, some members of the Academy will serve as endowment chairs for a period of three to five years, during which their teaching activities will be funded by interest from the endowment.

Besides channeling funding for professors to pursue educational work, the Academy will also function as a community of faculty members committed to teaching.

Specific criteria for choosing Academy members have not yet been determined, but the overriding factor will be commitment to teaching--those professors who have "a passion for teaching, a willingness to commit time to teaching and a reputation as being an innovator or role model educator," Lowenstein said.

Administrators at both HMS and UCSF are raising funds for the endowment, seeking both private donations as well as institutional grants.

Dr. Kenneth M. Ludmerer, a professor of medicine and history at

Washington University and an expert on the history of medical schools, said this new initiative is a turning point.

"It has great possibilities," Ludmerer said. "Medical professors have been rewarded much more for research than for teaching. The Academy of medical educators has merit to it, as it seeks to create an endowment to support educational activities rather than research or patient care."

Lowenstein said he hopes the program will help shift HMS's overall priorities.

"The biggest effect of the Academy will be to provide resources to allow our best teachers to teach," Lowenstein said. "The Academy will embody a new entity with a single focus: the support of the teaching mission."

--Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan contributed to the reporting of this story.