Search for tag: "tenure"

My personal passion is: How do we figure out a way to value and measure the variety of indispensable contributions that our faculty make to schools of medicine? I'm working on how do we revise our retention, promotion, and tenure guidelines to reflect the diversity of things that faculty do that make medical schools fantastic.

My problem is: How do you capture excellence? How do you measure that your faculty member is excellent?

I think part of the barrier is we have a model, that everyone is comfortable in, that doesn't really work, which says there's only one way to demonstrate excellence and that is having NIH grants and publishing and discovery science.

I think the big challenge is to change the culture so that not that we say, "Educational scholarship isn't as good," rather that we say, "Wow, there are faculty doing amazing things that aren't related to NIH and discovery science." They're doing other kinds of scholarships, and we've known for 20 years that we should be counting those other kind of scholarship, and now we're going to change our culture so people say, "That's a really valuable activity."

What I see is that we now encourage people to follow their passion, which then transforms how patients get their care, which then transforms how healthy our population is. I think it's an opportunity to really take us back home and change fundamentally how we deliver health care, because I think everyone would agree it's not yet perfect.

For our leadership to be looking for members of our faculty who may not have leadership positions but who have innovative ideas and will be people who can change how we view our institution is really important.

The thought that keeps me up at night is probably that we're not using people's time effectively. Not just individual people, but thinking about the synergy that gets created when we bring the right people together.

Our universities without the people, the faculty, the staff, the students are really just a collection of buildings and equipment and material supplies. The people who are there are the ones who make all of this work. The faculty are incredibly dedicated people. They've made a commitment beyond just being practitioners within their own field. They've decided to come back and share that knowledge with learners.

I think we've got extraordinary potential, and the thought that we might be wasting any of that really does break my heart.

When you work in an environment like academic medicine, we have so many capable individuals, and you think about what they could do if you could get the right folks at the table at the right time to look at the kinds of problems we're facing. I think the solutions are out there. But we have to talk to each other. We have to build that shared knowledge based. We have to have that ability to catalyze one another's thinking to actually get these problems solved.

There's a saying in the medical school community that when you look at one medical school, you're looking at one school because they're all very unique. I believe that we are all very unique. But I also think that among us we have such common purpose that we really should be thinking about the things where we are catalysts for something together.

It's up to us to think about how to push the frontier about healthcare for people in the United States. So that's not about us just being unique. That's about us using our uniqueness to forge something better and stronger, and I think we've certainly got the capacity to do that.

One of the problems that we have in our university, and I think that this is the case in a lot of research institutions, is people get very focused on the projects they're working on. They're in their lab, or they're in their particular school or department, and those are the people they see and those are the people that they spend time with. Particularly in an institution like UAB, which is very research driven and very grant driven, you've got really, really bright people who are spending all of their time working on that next grant, working on that next project, and they don't have time to really get out of that space.

If you think about the role of a librarian in a large university, we know more people across the campus than anybody else because our job is to be out there. So we know when there's a sociologist who is working on a problem that somebody in neurology might be working on, and we can help make those connections.

My algorithm for innovation is that you need to figure out ways to bring people from different disciplines together and then see what happens.

I've only been dean for 22 years. I'm the longest standing dean. Whenever I sit down, I'm the longest sitting dean. I've lived through two health care reforms, in the '90s, and again now. What's really important now is that we all work together. What I've learned is that you have to bring people together toward a common mission.

It's now explicit in the letters of offer for our chairs that they have to work with each other, with me and with the hospital directors to make all of us as good as we can be. It's not good enough anymore to have the top five department of surgery or medicine or pediatrics in the country if everybody else isn't part of the team. And it's not intuitive for all of us to do that, but we have to be working together if we're going to survive.