Faculty practice in an age of entrepreneurship: can occupational therapy educators add yet another role?

O ccupational therapy faculty members who seek tenure at research universities rarely focus on one role at a time. It is the nature of the faculty appointment to produce in a minimum of three areas-teaching, research, and service, which includes practice. Outstanding performance in these areas has served as the cri terion for the awarding of tenure, an important career goal for most academicians. To successfully achieve tenure, a faculty member must obtain multiple benefits from each endeavor of teaching, research, and service. Decreased financial support for public universities has profoundly affected faculty roles and responsibilities, especially in research-oriented academic health centers. One response to these economic changes is the formalization of faculty practice plans. In these plans, teaching faculty members provide clinical services as a means of generating institutional hmds. When the primary goal of faculty clinical practice is shifted from academic purposes to revenue production, the interests of the faculty members are at risk of becoming subservient to the needs of the university and the service contract. Our issue is, how can occupational therapy educators in academic health centers meet the expectations of their academic appointments while simultaneously generating revenue for their university? In this article, we discuss our experiences as educator-clinicians and make suggestions regarding the essential components of successful faculty practice. Though we support the idea of clinical practice for faculty members because of the numerCarolyn Hanson, Robert W. Gibson, Angela E. Scoggin