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03.24.08

Colleagues:

Welcome and thank you for coming to this afternoon’s Town Hall Meeting.

Today is a major milestone in the Strategic Assessment Process that began in 2005 with the creation of the Strategic Assessment Facilitating Committee.

This process involved numerous discussions, surveys and focus groups that engaged a broad representation of faculty, staff , students and alumni.

We considered all opinions, ideas, and assembled the data, which were then distilled into a report that we submitted to the Provost and in turn to both internal and external review groups.

The findings of this process have served as the basis of my work with the leadership of the School and provost to formulate my vision for the future of the School of Dentistry, which I will present today.

Before I get to that, however, I wish to thank the members of SAFCO and all those who participated in the assessment process for their hard work that has led to today’s town hall meeting.

I would like to review briefly the recommendations of both the internal and external review committees, comment on progress we have made in addressing these recommendation and talk about what needs to get done.

Today, I want to share with you how I see the next 5 years at the School of Dentistry and what we need reach for in these next 5 years. I am going to share my vision for our School and outline Strategic Imperatives to guide us in getting there.

What we do in the next five years will define our future. We will either continue as a leader among dental schools nationally and internationally or we will lose our relevance and run the risk of becoming pedestrian.

I am determined that this School of Dentistry remains a leader among dental schools and continues to provide much needed leadership for our profession.

The results of the Strategic Assessment demonstrated very clearly that the vast majority of us who serve this School share this desire and know that major changes must take place without further delay. It is imperative that we act now.

The School of Dentistry is an indispensable part of this world-class University. As a consequence, we have both an opportunity and obligation to further the reputation of the University of Michigan by being on the forefront of everything we do. To be on the vanguard means we must be in a continuous state of improvement and experimentation. And we must share the successes we achieve with our colleagues around the world.

If we are willing to take bold steps to secure our future, we will be more fully integrated into the future of the University of Michigan community and will play a central role in the Universities decisions, its discoveries, and its contributions to the academe and society. Our University colleagues will seek our counsel to help shape academic priorities and ask for our guidance in helping fix a broken health care system. What we do will be bold and risky; but this is precisely what visionary organizations do - they lead.

Through our leadership our University colleagues will acknowledge the contributions of the School of Dentistry as being central to the Universitys mission. We will lead with innovation and creativity in everything we do. Our actions will be grounded in evidence from our own disciplines as well as those from the social sciences and the humanities.

We will be confident knowing that our decisions are sound and support the highest quality education, research, patient care and service.

Our goal is simple: to stretch, to experiment and to discover, to serve and to disseminate.

Our decisions will enable us to break new ground and ensure that the well being of the public is enhanced. Our scientific contributions, in the laboratory and clinic and through service to our patients we will make a difference in oral health care and in the broader scientific community.

We are and will continue to be proud of what we have accomplished because we will be a community of teachers and researchers, clinicians and administrators, staff and students and alumni, doing the business of what we do in better, more productive ways. We will sustain what is excellent at our school while restructuring how we do what we do in a more efficient, fiscally sound way that is more relevant to the times and with a vision to the future.

The vision I want to share with you is brief and to the point. It recognizes where we are and where we are going. The vision describes the destination while the Strategic Imperatives will guide the process of getting there.

Our vision is clear. The School of Dentistry will transform itself in a way that ensures that it is recognized as a leader in interdisciplinary health care, is acknowledged as a center of excellence in interdisciplinary learning and teaching, leads as an innovator in research and academic leadership and is exemplary in providing access to the highest quality oral health care for the local, regional and global communities.

I would now like to outline the strategic imperatives and give you some tangible examples of what this could look like.

The time has come for us to reassert our position as a renowned institution that provides outstanding care, education, and research. If we take these bold steps, we will transform dental education and dental practice.

We will carry out innovative research in new way that will advance science, dentistry and overall health.

We will educate students and dentists whose practice in oral health care is based on science and who aspire to leadership in academic dentistry.

We will educate students to be dentists who make a difference in local, regional and the global communities.

We will work to eliminate economic barriers to access to quality heath care and to eliminate health disparities in our population.

We will position our graduates and the dental profession to lead in the creation of an efficient, optimally integrated, patient-centered health care system.

From your thoughtful analysis of our strengths and weaknesses and the recommendations of the internal and external reviewers, I have distilled this vision. We ask you to bring your best thinking now to the Strategic Imperatives and to work with us to bring your creativity to specific and concrete action steps for each of the Strategic Imperatives. I have asked our Deans and Chairs to recruit your effort to bring back to me a well-thought out set of ideas. I have asked them to complete this with you and deliver it to me by June 1.

The next step after this will be to develop a Tactical Plan, with timelines and responsibilities for realizing the vision I have outlined for you today.

When we are finished here please join me in the gathering space adjacent to the Sindecuse museum to thank the members of SAFCO. Thank you for listening this afternoon and join me in reshaping our future.

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Dean Polverini

 

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