While paying his own way through dental school, a first-year student was intrigued when he learned about the Health Professions Scholarship Program offered by the U.S. Armed Forces.
“The recruiter came to the dental school and asked, ‘have any of you thought about applying for the Health Professions Scholarship Program?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what that is. Tell me more about it.’ He said, ‘if you apply and you get the scholarship, we will pay your tuition and fees for the rest of your dental school and for every year we pay, you spend a year in the Air Force as a dentist,’” he recalled.
The young student liked what he heard and successfully applied for the scholarship, which paid for his next three years of dental school. After completing his residency, he spent three years as an Air Force dentist, fulfilling his service commitment. The experience brought an unexpected and lasting reward: he met his wife, a fellow U.S. Air Force service member.
“She was very clear when I met her,” he recalled. “She said, ‘I’m staying in the Air Force for 20 years, so if you want to stay with me, you should probably stay for 20 years.’”
Twenty-one years later, with multiple deployments around the world and thousands of patients served, Benjamin J. Gantt, DMD, MS, FAGD, ABGD, Col.-Ret., United States Air Force, said he is looking forward to the newest chapter of his life: serving as vice chair of the Department of Predoctoral Dental Education at The University of Texas at San Antonio’s School of Dentistry.
Most recently serving as commander of the 559th Medical Group at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Gantt brings extensive experience in budgeting, finance, resource management, faculty recruitment, daily administration and leadership to his role. He also teaches in the Advanced Operative Dentistry Lab once a week. There, he draws on the core values instilled during his military service to guide his work with students and patients. Chief among those values are treating patients with integrity and approaching every interaction with a commitment to excellence.
“It’s doing your very best every time and understanding that, while our profession is financially lucrative, it’s a profession of service,” Gantt said. “We are giving our patients a service that they need and that service should override our sense of self. I think those things easily shape how I approach patient care and how I approach teaching students.”
Service before self
During his deployments to Iraq in 2009, and Qatar in 2016, Gantt said it was fulfilling to provide emergency dental treatment to service members and help them return to duty.
“I felt very rewarded that I could impact service members who came to see me because something was wrong and they weren’t able to do their job in that moment and I was able to fix that and get them back to doing their job so that their team could count on them,” he said.
Now, Gantt said his first Veterans Day as a veteran will be especially meaningful, adding that he is grateful to all the men and women who chose to serve in the armed forces.
“They chose to take their time and their talents and their expertise and serve rather than do other things,” he said, noting that there are additional sacrifices made every day to keep the nation safe, like “spouses not being able to hold down a regular job somewhere and kids not being able to have that regular group of friends because they move so often.”
Gantt is one of 396 military-affiliated employees at the university’s Health Science Center, representing 4.7% of its 8,491 faculty and staff members. That group includes 164 active-duty service members, or 1.9% of all employees, and 232 veterans, or 2.7%.
Among the Health Science Center’s 2,348 faculty members, 162, or 6.9%, are military affiliated. This includes 77 active-duty service members, representing 3.3% of faculty, and 85 veterans, representing 3.6%.
Military affiliation also extends across the Health Science Center’s staff. Of its 6,143 staff members, 234, or 3.8%, are military affiliated: 87, or 1.4%, are active-duty service members, and 147, or 2.4%, are veterans.
Inspiring the next generation of care
As he thought about his future impact on students and patients, Gantt said he hopes to approach his role at the School of Dentistry with humility and convey to students that having empathy is paramount to the profession.
“Dentistry is a very technical, demanding, difficult job,” he said. “It’s not about dollars and cents. It should be from a place of trying to help this person and improve this person’s health. [My hope is] for students to come out of dental school and be very empathetic, caring providers and focus on delivering the best, the safest, the most effective healthcare they can to their patients. Everything else follows from that.”