Council of Deans Chairman’s Section Searching for a Dean

For the past several years, at any given time, more than twelve of the seventy-five Schools of Pharmacy have been searching for a dean(1). As positions are filled, other positions become vacant. The pharmacy academy is not making much progress in having a full complement of leadership in schools of pharmacy. Pharmacy education has accepted tough challenges as we modify our accredi-tation standards to adopt the outcomes and competencies of Position Paper II of the AACP Commission to Implement Change in Pharmaceutical Education and as we prepare for the PharmD degree as the single entry level degree. We urgently need for each school to have dynamic stable leadership in the dean’s position. Why have so many schools had difficulty recruiting and hiring deans? A simplistic answer is that it is difficult to attract someone to be a dean in a time of declining resources. That is only part of the answer, and even the difficulty can be overcome with good plan