“They’re good faculty, but they’re making up a gap that oughtn’t to be,” he said.

Finally, several courses have been “scrambling” as little as a week before they are scheduled to start, searching for teachers.

“We always find a way to put the course on, so you don’t see the effects,” he said, “but this year, a third to half of the first- and second- year courses had fewer than the budgeted-for number of faculty.”

Some students say they have been noticing problems with clinical faculty—but not because of understaffing.

“The problem is more accountability because the med school is separate from its teaching hospitals,” said HMS student Kevin King, who served as the school’s student council president from 2001-2002, “There’s nothing definite to coerce [the clinical faculty] to teach, and nothing bad the school can do to them if they’re really atrocious to students.”

While the problem King sees is different from that of Cardozo and Thibault, his solution is the same: more incentives for faculty to teach.

A significant incentive is to tie teaching more closely to promotion through the HMS ranks, according to Cardozo.

“The primary faculty loyalty is at the level of the department. You have people who want to teach, but...in the current system it’s very rarely seen as bringing benefit to the department [and] the heads of the department really do control promotions,” he said.

Another possible incentive to persuade faculty to teach may lie in providing more funds to departments to increase pay for clinical faculty.

According to HMS Dean for Faculty Affairs Eleanor G. Shore, health plans will reimburse clinicians for time spent seeing patients but not for time spent teaching.

“Teaching is the fiscal orphan that no one wants to pay for,” she said. “[and] when you teach someone, that physician moves more slowly because he has to stop and explain and demonstrate.”

Another issue is the focus of many faculty on research, rather than teaching.

“Part of the dean’s initiative has been to restore education at a higher plane of value,” Thibault said. “A number of initiatives have been started to restore that balance, but it’s not going to be a quick fix.”

—Staff writer Michael A. Mohammed can be reached at mohammed@fas.harvard.edu.