Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out about a new dental school, the first in Manhattan in 110 years. We’ll also get details on a report that found that the culture at Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital discouraged the reporting of allegations of abuse against a former physician.
There are cavities to drill and fill, teeth to extract and implants to — well, implant. And there are fewer dentists to say “Open wide” and treat what needs to be treated.
To narrow the supply-and-demand gap, Yeshiva University hopes to train dentists in a new dental school, the first in Manhattan since 1916, it says. It won’t be on its campus in Upper Manhattan but in Midtown, across from Macy’s flagship store on West 34th Street.
The school will enroll 150 students for an accelerated three-year program, one year faster than conventional dental training programs. Yeshiva says the idea is to let aspiring dentists enter the profession faster and reduce the financial burden of an additional year of tuition and living expenses.
Edward Farkas, the dean of Yeshiva’s dental school, said that only about half the students who apply for dental school nationwide get a place. “We think there’s room for another couple of dental schools,” he said. “There was a time in the ’60s when they were closing dental schools. We think of ourselves as replacing some of those schools” — and training more dentists to replace those who have stopped practicing.
That echoes findings from the Health Policy Institute of the American Dental Association, which said in 2024 that there was a “retirement cliff” created by dentists over age 60 who had left the work force since 2017. By the late 2020s, the institute said, most dentists from the Baby Boom generation will have aged out of the work force.
For now, though, New York has a large number of dentists who have been in practice for decades: Some 43 percent of the dentists in New York in 2024 were older than 55, according to the institute. The ranks of dentists are older in only two states — Hawaii, with 46 percent, and Pennsylvania, with 45 percent. The comparable figure for New Jersey is 42 percent, the same as for California, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia. Connecticut, with 40 percent, was tied with Maryland.
Still, the institute said that the dental work force is becoming younger. But it also said that younger dentists were less likely to practice in rural areas and that it would take 11,000 dentists to make up for “dental deserts.”
Yeshiva says that its new facility will serve as a center for teaching and as a hub for affordable dental care, with a clinic that can serve hundreds of patients every day. Farkas said there would be a clinic for pediatric dentistry and one for orthodontics. He said the facility would accept Medicaid.
“We looked very carefully at the market,” Rabbi Ari Berman, the president of Yeshiva, said. “We’re very interested in helping, especially New York City. We saw that there was a place to pioneer a new direction for dental schools.”
Berman said that dentistry had undergone a “paradigm shift” as new technology has made possible new procedures. There are digital scanners and 3-D printers to offer same-day crown replacements, as well as cone beam technology, which makes high-resolution, three-dimensional X-ray images through a device that rotates around a patient’s head.
The school’s catalog and student handbook says that tuition and fees will total $126,000 in the 2026-27 academic year, including a $6,500 charge for insurance that students can waive if they have their own coverage. It also budgets just over $52,000 for expenses like housing, food, books and transportation that are not paid to Yeshiva but bring the total to $178,520. That is $58,220 more than Harvard University lists as expenses for students in the first year of its dental program. (Harvard students receive a D.M.D. degree. Yeshiva, which has already been accredited, will award D.D.S. degrees.)
The dental school is not the first one Farkas has helped set up. He played a similar role at Touro University, which opened a dental school in 2016. Touro sued him in 2024, saying that he had downloaded confidential files in December 2023, around the time he told Touro’s president that he was resigning as vice dean to join Yeshiva and set up a dental school. Court records show the lawsuit was dismissed.
Weather
Today, expect rain and temperatures near 67. Rainy conditions will continue tonight, followed by a possible thunderstorm. The low will be 54.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 20 (Eid al-Fitr).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It’s not surprising that working people have abandoned the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party has abandoned working people.” — Allison Ziogas, a populist Democrat who hopes to flip the city’s only House seat held by a Republican, Nicole Malliotakis. The district, which includes Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, has some of the highest concentrations of union households in the nation.
The latest Metro news
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Hochul faces pressure to raise taxes: The State Assembly and Senate are each calling for the state to raise a variety of taxes, including the personal income tax and the state’s top corporate tax rate, piggybacking on a push by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
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A dinner invitation: On Sunday, the first anniversary of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest at Columbia University, he and his wife shared an iftar dinner with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, breaking the daily fast of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.
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The school screen-time battle: Mounting evidence shows that excessive computer use can harm children, so parents are cutting back on device use at home. But some families are encountering an unexpected challenge: their children’s schools.
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A mosque argues that a town’s rules unfairly target Muslims: The Hillside Islamic Center, a mosque in New Hyde Park, N.Y., is suing town officials in North Hempstead, accusing them of bowing to anti-Muslim sentiment.
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Man accused of killing a police detective is on trial: Guy Rivera was charged with attempted murder and first-degree murder in the shooting of Detective Jonathan Diller.
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Sherrill’s first budget as governor: Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey released a proposed $60.7 billion spending plan, which includes reducing tax cuts and allowing businesses to claim fewer deductions.
How the culture at Columbia shielded sexual assault by a physician
Two doctors affiliated with Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital stepped down on Tuesday after a report by an outside law firm report concluded that the administration had mishandled allegations of sexual abuse against Robert Hadden, a former physician who sexually assaulted hundreds of patients.
The report said that several complaints about Hadden had reached officials despite “obstacles to reporting.”
“Yet decision makers resolved the complaints ad hoc, in an environment in which deference to physicians like Hadden was the cultural norm, and without systems of records that would effectively identify patterns of physician misconduct,” the report said.
Claire Shipman, the acting president of Columbia University, and Dr. Katrina Armstrong, the chief executive of Columbia’s medical center, said in a statement that the university was committed to seeing that nothing like Hadden’s abuse of hospital patients happened again. A plea deal in 2016 cost him his medical license but spared him from going to jail, which infuriated women who said he had preyed on them. He was later convicted in a federal case and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
One of the officials who stepped down from a leadership position on Tuesday was Dr. Mary D’Alton, who had been the chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and obstetrician and gynecologist in chief at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia. She vouched for Hadden after he was detained by the police in 2012.
Columbia also announced that Dr. Lee Goldman, a former dean of the medical school and chief executive of the medical center, was retiring. The report found that he had signed off on the decision that allowed Hadden to continue seeing patients, with a chaperone present, after he had been detained by the police. Several women later alleged that they had been abused before he stopped seeing patients.
METROPOLITAN diary
On the aisle
Dear Diary:
In August 2012, I bought a ticket to a Horton Foote play that was being performed at a small theater on East 59th Street.
My seat was the second one in on the first row. Eventually, a gentleman with a round face, white hair and dark rimmed glasses took the aisle seat.
We acknowledged each other and the play began. It ran without an intermission. As I stood to leave, the gentleman with the round face, white hair and dark rimmed glasses asked if I would like to have a bite with him.
“Oh, no thank you,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”
But then that voice in my head made me speak up.
“But I could have a glass of wine!” I said.
He perked up.
We left the theater and were together for 12 years.
— Sarah Bareau
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post A New School Hopes to Train a Younger Generation of Dentists appeared first on New York Times.
