"Increasingly, Americans are being taught skills, not content; they are being trained, not educated." At least that is the opinion of Theodore K. Rabb, a professor of history at Princeton (Rabb, T. K. Chronicle of Higher Education June 4, 2004). The same point about the difference between education and training has been made by leaders in dental education. Among them is R. Bruce Donoff, dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, who has almost made a fetish of this distinction: true education is what is required of a learned profession, whereas simple training is more acceptable for purely vocational or technical fields.

These thoughts came to mind when I received a press release from the office of the UCSF chancellor announcing that UCSF as a whole was the fourth largest recipient of total National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funds in 2003 among all institutions. Better still, the press release specified that UCSF's School of Dentistry, School of Nursing and School of Pharmacy each ranked first nationally last year in their respective disciplines. The School of Dentistry received 51 awards totaling $28 million; the School of Nursing received a total of 42 awards for $13.4 million; and the School of Pharmacy received 44 awards for a total of $19.8 million.

Why is this important? Why should it matter to you that your school has this ranking? Why should they care one way or another? One reason might be that it serves as an objective metric of excellence. The chancellor has said, "There is no better indication of excellence than these rankings, which reflect rigorous peer review of research. The public can be confident that UCSF is pursuing its mission of discovery in finest form." A further reason lies in the "belief that research and teaching are complementary activities; that university-level teaching is difficult without the new ideas and inspiration provided by research."

Probably the most eloquent expression of the concept I've ever come across is from Henry Rosovsky, who said "[r]esearch is an expression of faith in the possibility of progress. The drive that leads scholars to study a topic . . . [is] the belief that new things can be discovered, that newer can be better, and that greater depth of understanding is achievable. Research, especially academic research, is a form of optimism about the human condition." (Rosovsky, H. The University: An Owner's Manual. New York: WW Norton, 1990.) Persons with faith in progress are more likely to possess an intellectually optimistic disposition. "[T]eacher-scholars are probably more interesting and better professors [and] less likely to present their subjects in excessively cynical or reactionary terms."

The hope is that students with lively, innovative, inquiring minds will have acquired through their education the intellectual traction to judge for themselves the merits of the inevitable changes in practice that the future will bring. Doctors should not need to rely on others to do their thinking for them.

Only by becoming a man or woman of science is there any hope that the practitioner will be able to acquire and assimilate new knowledge and to adapt to the changes in practice and in the profession that the future always requires. The faculty, students, staff and graduates of the UCSF School of Dentistry clearly have much of which to be proud.

Charles N. Bertolami, DDS, DMedSc

Dean