Oral history interview with Eloise R. Lewis, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Eloise R. Lewis
INTERVIEWER: Anne Phillips
DATE: January 24, 1990
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
AP: I want to ask you about your background where you were born and about your
educational background, how you got here—but, first of all, about your childhood and
where you were born.
EL: I was born in Pageland, South Carolina. My father was a country physician. My mother
was a college speech teacher. And they emphasized throughout our childhood that an
education was an important part of our heritage. When I announced that I wanted to be a
nurse, there was very grave concern about this, and in those times we did often what
father said. So he simply said, "No, you will go to college as your mother and your
sisters. When you have completed your college education, basically, we will talk about
it."
My mother was a graduate of Winthrop [University] and my sisters [also], so
that's where I went. But I had the good fortune to have as my advisor—because I chose to
be a double major, biology and history—my advisor was a Vanderbilt [University]
graduate. She knew of my interest in nursing and what I wanted to do, but also
appreciated the direction I was getting from my father.
And one summer she went back to Vanderbilt to summer school, And the next fall
when I went back to Winthrop, she said, "I have a way. I learned this summer that
Vanderbilt is to begin a new baccalaureate program in nursing. And I think this will
satisfy your father." So we began to work on the kinds of things that might intrigue him
about this change or at least a new direction.
I did go to Vanderbilt. I went in the fall of ’38 and was in their first class that had
only college persons in it. And all of us were working for a baccalaureate degree in
nursing. When I finished my baccalaureate degree in nursing, we in this country were
already in the throes of the beginning and involved in World War II, and there were
concerns about the shortage of prepared people in nursing.
And nursing in this country decided to have a training program where we
prepared nurses quickly for overseas duty, and it was in connection with Bryn
Mawr College in Pennsylvania. And I was called to the dean's office one day, and
she said, "What are you going to do when you finish?" And I said I hadn't made
up my mind.
She said, "Well, I've made it up for you. Graduates of Yale [University], Cornell
[University], Massachusetts General [Hospital], Vanderbilt, are being chosen to work on
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the faculty of this new program to quickly prepare nurses for overseas duty or for World
War II duty. And we would like you to be the person from Vanderbilt." You don't—in
those days you didn't disagree very much with the dean, besides I wasn't finished yet.
And I did agree and my first job was teaching at the Woman's Medical College of
Pennsylvania. And you say how can that be? [laughs] Well, we were weird creatures,
those of us who had baccalaureate degrees at that time and were nurses also. So my first
job—and the day after I finished Vanderbilt, I got on the train and went to Philadelphia to
teach and to work.
And I never—I was involved in teaching at the Woman's Medical College. And
then a very interesting thing in my career—the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of
Nursing was looking for degreed people and stole away three of us that had gone on that
project to come to Hopkins.
At that point, all teachers in schools of nursing in this country were frozen in their
jobs. Although two of us very much wanted to go in the army. And we continued to have
that wish, but we were not allowed. Then when we began to have serious trouble in the
East, in the European Theater—the Battle of the Bulge and all that kind of problem.
One day I was called to the director's office, and she just said, "Well, you can go
now." [laughs] So I—when I went into the army, into basic training, I knew where I was
going to be assigned, although I was pledged to secrecy. I was going to be assigned to be
responsible for the Cadet Nurse Corps in the 3rd Service Command [Ft. Meade,
Maryland].
AP: And you went there from Hopkins?
EL: Yes. I went to basic training. And then I—the headquarters of that operation was Valley
Forge General Hospital. And I was responsible for six hundred senior students for their—
for all of their activities. When I finished basic training, that's where I went. The colonel
just said to me, "Go over there in the dorm and live with the kids and do what you have
to do, and I'll give you the support you need." So that—you see, I had a brother in the
ETO [European Theater of Operations], brother-in-laws, husband, in the service. But I
served with George Washington at Valley Forge [laughs]and six hundred students.
Again the idea of an educated nurse was—at the college level was not, you
know—a universally-accepted notion. I was asked one day by the dean of the School of
Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania to come and talk to the seniors because I had
some of their seniors who were in the Cadet Nurse Corps. Come and talk with them. And
during my presentation, she sent a note, “Please come by her office to see her on the way
back to Valley Forge.” This I did.
And she just said, "When you get out of the [United States] Army, how about
coming and teaching at the University of Pennsylvania with me?" She was one of the
early nurses in this country to have a doctorate. She was a Southerner, came from
Winchester, Virginia, Dr. [Teresa] Resa I. Lynch. So when I got out of the army, I did go
and work with Dr. Lynch. And at that—during my years with her, I helped her and was
one of the faculty members that helped her develop the baccalaureate program at the
University of Pennsylvania.
And she said to me one day, "Get your master's [degree]," though there were no
master's in nursing at that time, I got my master's in education. Then one day she said to
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me, "The time has come for you to leave here. They are beginning a baccalaureate
program in the School of Nursing at the—in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the
University of North Carolina. And Dr. Elizabeth Kimball, who is a former student of
mine and a friend, is going down there to be dean. Those of you who are from the South
who are educated and have experience need to go help."
And I said to her, "But I haven't been asked yet." And she said, "You will be." But
I got the opportunity to spend a year in New Orleans between the time I left the
University of Pennsylvania and the time I came to Chapel Hill on a special project that
added immensely to my understanding and to my educational background. And then I did
get the call from Dr. Kimball, and she asked me to come to work on the original faculty
over there.
And I came to the University of North Carolina [at] Chapel Hill on June the first,
in ’53. And it was an interesting experience because we were the first group of just
women faculty on that campus. It took us two years to be allowed to go to the faculty
club for lunch.
AP: How did you feel about that?
EL: Well, those were interesting days. Dean Kimball didn't let it last. She wanted to be sure
that we got there. We had the only women freshmen on campus so that—we never had
one of our students register for class like you would expect a student to register and stand
in the lines. We did it for them because otherwise there would not have been a place for
the girls; the boys, would have had all the prize places. We graduated our first class of
sixteen in ’55 I believe, ’55.
And that was a new era was [sic] born in this state when the vision of health
affairs was created at Chapel Hill. There was a great concern about the placement of the
School of Nursing. Many thought the School of Nursing should be here, at the Woman's
College [of the University of North Carolina]. That's logical; that makes sense.
And there are beautiful documents here from our own faculty council that show
the progress of the discussions relative to whether or not the School of Nursing should be
on this campus or at Chapel Hill. They're wonderful letters of exchange between
Chancellor [Robert B.] House and Chancellor [W.W.] Pierson, that was here.
And the argument was—this was the most appropriate place for an educational
program primarily for women. But then there were many who disagreed—how can you
educate a physician, a dentist, a public health person, a pharmacist, without the nurse in
the team? And I think it was wise that the school was placed there.
But it was always the notion of this faculty that someday they would have a
baccalaureate program in nursing. And we ran a lot of interference in this state. There
were many people who felt that their children, regardless of their academic credentials or
anything, should be allowed to go to Chapel Hill if they were taxpayers. So we had some
interesting experiences.
And I learned I was not educated in North Carolina history. I began studying my
North Carolina history when I went on that faculty and also the geography, so I would
know where they came from and this kind of thing.
One day Dean Kimball said to me, "The time has come for you to get your
doctorate." And we talked about whether or not I should go back to the University of
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Pennsylvania, which would have been very simple, or whether or not I would go to Duke
[University]. I chose to go to Duke and did my work over there and was the first nurse to
ever be awarded a doctorate.
When I came back from finishing my doctorate in ’63, Dean Kimball said to me,
"You're not to go back to your teaching," because I was department chairman in the—for
the department of medical and surgical nursing at Chapel Hill. She said, "You're not to do
that anymore. You are to develop a state-wide program in continuing education. There is
not one in this country. And I want us to have the first one." I said to her, "But I don't
want to do that. I'm not prepared to do that." She said, "You can learn." And so that I
developed, with her guidance and all the things, the program in continuing education that
was the first state wide in the nation. And when I left Chapel Hill to come over here, I
left over two million dollars in federal grants in that program.
Well, then one day Dean Kimball said to me, "You've spent enough time in
continuing education. You need now to learn to be the assistant dean." [laughs] So that I
was the assistant dean. And what had happened though—which is kind of just fun to
think about—the day I defended my dissertation at Duke University, I outranked all of
my committee members except my chairman because I had been promoted to full
professor at Chapel Hill in July—had developed my, you know, defended my dissertation
in September, so that, [laughs] you know, the rivalry between Chapel Hill and Duke. It
was an interesting experience.
Then we had been working with this campus—we being the folks at Chapel
Hill—because when nursing in this country said to itself, “We need a different level of
preparation.” Hospital preparation had been the way and then the few baccalaureate
programs that were coming along. But based on some research that had been done, it
seemed to—that we might educate the technical nurse at a two-year college level.
Nationwide when the states were chosen for that activity, North Carolina was not
chosen because we did not have a community college system at that time. We in nursing
in this state—and I was very involved as president of the association and all kinds of
things about that time—we said, “Let's go talk to the folks at the Woman's College.” This
was just before we changed our name, it was in the fifties. “Let's go talk to the folks at
the Woman's College and ask them if the will think about this on an experimental basis.”
We came and talked to Mereb Mossman [dean of the college]. Miss Mossman, we
said, “Would this institution be willing to think about an experimental associate degree
program?” We know that's not the mission of this institution, but we still had enough two
year programs operational on this campus that she might consider that without, you
know, doing something that was totally different.
So this institution agreed to have the first and only experimental associate degree
program in the state, carefully acknowledging that it was not going to be here
permanently. This faculty—and there are records again of this—never said it was
replacing their dream of a baccalaureate program with that associate degree program.
That associate degree program ran on this campus from ’56 to ’66. We took the first
students in ’56, I believe, over here and finished—you know, they graduated in ’57. So
for one decade, this institution ran an associate degree program.
The state was not geared up to pay for that. Miss Mossman, and justifiably so, did
not believe that they could divert funds from the ongoing educational programs here to
start an experimental program that would not live on this campus. So that the Moses H.
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Cone Memorial Hospital gave the money for that program and supported it all those ten
years.
But the clever thing that Miss Mossman—did, all the years, every time we made
budget requests from this campus—she put in extra requests for, you know, faculty. And
so gradually she began to put the nursing faculty on the university schedule. And then in
1965, one of my faculty colleagues at Chapel Hill came over here to graduation, and she
was a Woman's College graduate and she came back from the graduation very excited
and said, "Guess what happened today?"
Governor [Dan] Moore, who was then governor of the state, but at that time he
was also chairman of the board of trustees because that's when the governor was
chairman of that hundred board of trustees, when we only had the Woman's College, you
know, [in] Greensboro, [North Carolina] State [University] and [The University of North
Carolina at] Chapel Hill.
“Guess what? He said today the money has been allocated to start the
baccalaureate program on our campus.” And she was so excited, being a graduate from
here. "You ought to think about going over there." I said, "No, no way. No way." I had
reached the point in my career when it seemed appropriate, and I remember now—as the
assistant dean—that it was time for me to leave. I had been at Chapel Hill thirteen years.
Dr. Kimball was up for her last five-year reappointment. We begged her to accept it,
because we were in the process of building a building, and we were moving to a different
curriculum and on and on. And we asked her—well, I reasoned that if stayed five more
years as the assistant dean, those would be five good years that I couldn't retrieve in any
way, and that perhaps it was the appropriate time for me to leave.
Well you see, it was very easy to get a job as dean of a school of nursing
anywhere in this country because of the background and educational preparation I had. I
was one of a handful of nurses with an earned doctorate. I had had experience in a
nationally- recognized institution as Chapel Hill and had been the assistant dean. And so
I—every week or so I got invitations to come for interviews. And I was primarily
interested in the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware—Delaware
because I'd be going to begin a new program; Penn [University of Pennsylvania] because
my roots were there.
And I went to the University of Delaware for an interview, completely forgetting
that the president of the University of Delaware was former director of our board of
higher education. We used to have a board of higher education in North Carolina before
we got our current of board of governors. I knew him and we—I had a fine time and was
very impressed with the notions they had of where they might go.
The very next week Dr. Parks saw [University of North Carolina] President
[William] Friday at a meeting and said to President Friday, "Oh we're very pleased that
Eloise Lewis is thinking about coming here to be the dean," you know. [laughs]
Very shortly after that there were—few words that passed that around—it was
suggested to me that this campus was about to move into planning and opening a
baccalaureate program, and that there were those folks who hoped that I would be
considered—that I would consider coming over here. One hardly moves back from a
request from President Friday to look at something.
And they started the negotiations, and we did have a search committee, but I think
it was pretty well settled that I would come if I were interested in—Miss Mossman came
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to Chapel Hill several times to talk with me, and I came over here several times to talk
with her. And one day she said to me, "Dear one, if you will come and help us develop
that school of nursing, I will be sure that you get what is necessary to run a program of
excellence."
And that's exactly what happened. She was true to everything that she said. But
she was so visionary that, you see, she had the basis—she did have seven faculty
positions already allocated for nursing so that no faculty member here could say that
other programs were being deprived. Those positions were already allocated.
It seems to me that it was critical certain things be set forth before I would even
consider coming. One, that the associate degree program would be phased out. I was not
prepared in any way to handle an associate degree program. I didn't know about that. And
besides, it was no longer appropriate for this institution to be involved in a two-year
program because they were phasing out all the others on this campus. And that no faculty
member currently employed in that associate degree program would be just automatically
moved to a four-year program.
Those were two of my main concern and that we sieve out the reaction of this
community and whatnot. When I finally made up my mind to come over here, I think the
basis—and there were several things that were important, and they've proven to be right.
Number one, a professional education of excellence is based on a very sound liberal arts
education. This institution was known for that. I knew from my thirteen years at Chapel
Hill that if we had a student whose first two years, for example, were on this campus and
she or he applied for that school of nursing, there was no question but what they were
taken because we knew the sound scientific basis upon which that student's education had
evolved, and the liberal arts component was there.
So that made a lot of difference to me—the kind of educational base that I would
find here. The attitude of this faculty—that they still wanted baccalaureate program in
nursing—and that was critical. And as I came for my interviews, these questions I could
ferret out and then I read those documents that I mentioned to you. [unclear] this
community is a beautiful place to have a baccalaureate program in nursing because we
have fine, plentiful resources.
And I had so little bit of concern because I was educated in medical center; I had
never worked outside of a medical center. So I looked careful at the advantages versus
the disadvantages of having a school outside a medical center, recognizing, first of all,
that one thing our students would miss would be the exchange of other health
professional students, like the medical students, whatnot.
But there were other things that far outweighed that. We would not, for example,
in this community be down at the bottom of the pile of learners, but we would be first.
We would not have to stand back while the medical student, the assistant resident, the
resident and so on, interns, had a learning opportunity—and then the nurse. We would be
first. Then the reception of the medical community, and that was very important to me
and, I think, to the school and their interest in having us here. Those, plus I liked the
campus, and I liked the people that I met.
And I want to tell you a charming story about how I happened or where I
happened to have my office. One day when I was here working with Miss Mossman, and
I said to her, "Where will my office be?" And she looked at me and smiled, and she said,
"Well, now, let's think. You can go in McIver Building—arts, science. You can go in
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Petty Science [Building], that's chemistry. You could go to the Jackson House, you can
have the Jackson House." And then she waited for a good little bit, and then she said,
"You could go in to the basement of the infirmary." That's what we called it at that time,
and she was hesitant to say to me, and I said, "May I have a little time to think about
that?"
So I went away, and I thought about it. I don't want to go to McIver because I
need the liberal arts folks, but I don't need to be totally associated with them. I don't want
to go to Petty for the same reason, because I need biological issues. If I go into
president's house, I'll never get us out. I believe I can make a greater case for getting into
the infirmary in the basement and get us out of there faster than anything. So when I told
Miss Mossman, she kept saying, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” And I said, "Yes ma'am.
I am sure."
So with great glee, I came on this campus September 1st of ’66. On September
19th of ’69 we moved into our new building, and, you know I couldn't have gotten us out
of the president's house and whatnot. It was easy to make a case for how bad it was for us
to be in the basement of the infirmary. So we got out.
Another thing that was very important and that I had to make sure would be on
this campus—that we would not be a department. There was the School of Home
Ec[onomics] that was nationally recognized and important, the School of Education, and
it just seemed to me that—it's a School of Music—and that we would be the School of
Nursing. So it was a school from the very beginning; that's the way it was organized, and
that's the way it was set up.
Another thing that the faculty on this campus helped me with—it was clearly
understood from the very beginning that everything we did would move us toward being
nationally accredited. State accredited, yes, that was, you know, necessary, but nationally
accredited by the National League for Nursing. There are many, many wonderful tales
about things that happened to us. Two I would like to share with you.
One, remember now that at this time we still had the governor as chairman of the
board of trustees. When we moved to get this new school approved by the N.C. Board of
Nursing, because we had to be approved by the Board of Nursing in order for our
graduates to take the board exams to become a registered nurse—so this was part of what
we had to do.
So, and it was an interesting experience because I was chairman of the Board of
Nursing at this time. So anyway, we all along had said that we would go for that as
quickly as we could, and we did all the things that were necessary. And the day that I got
the application blank to look at—and I knew it because I was chairman of that board and
was chairman of the education committee when we developed those papers, but I didn't
know it was going to be so bad to fill them out.
Anyway, on the front page it said signature of the chairman of the board. All
right. In fact, that's the governor. Well, I said to myself, “So what do we do?” Would it be
like President Friday because we were still with President Friday; we hadn't moved as we
are now. But anyway, our chancellor—I asked Miss Mossman, she asked the chancellor
and the chancellor asked President Friday. And he said, “No, let's have chairman of the
board sign the papers.”
So remember now, I am chairman of the Board of Nursing. And the executive
director of the Board of Nursing at that time was a former student of mine at Chapel Hill.
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But we had a deadline, and if your application blank came in, you know, application
came in one minute beyond the date and time, then it was not at all accepted. And she
kept calling me and saying, “Your application has not come. Your application has not
come.” [I’d respond,] “Never mind, it will be there.”
And so that, she loves to tell the story, she was wringing her hands because she
went to see the mailman on the morning it was due at the time, and it wasn't in there. But
just at that time car number one from the governor's office drove up, and the little—our
application—was delivered to the Board of Nursing with the governor's signature on it.
Well, when we came up for approval at the board, and you think now I'm sitting
on the other side of the table with Miss Mossman, with our chancellor, when our records
were, and approved, and we went through the process. When it was all over, the vice
chairman of the board said, ”Well, it would be hardly likely that [an] application with the
governor's signature would've been turned down.” But, you know, it was in order and it
was just funny. But one of the—
AP: The year for that again?
EL: [Nineteen] sixty-seven.
AP: Okay.
EL: I came in ’66, and we went to the board in ’67. Now, one of the wonderful things that
happened to us in all this time, Chancellor [Otis] Singletary was the chancellor that I had
my appointments with, and throughout the years I kept telling my colleagues on this
campus, “I'm the only one of you who has a job description.” Because Chancellor
Singletary said to me: “two things you're to do—set up a damn good school with
everything you're supposed to and clean up the public relations with persons in this city.”
And I used to tell my colleagues, “See, I have a job description.”
He was not in that spot very long after I came here before he chose to move and
to go to Washington [D.C.]. And so Chancellor Ferguson was our interim chancellor, and
then he was named our chancellor. The day that the faculty decided that we—they
wanted Chancellor Ferguson to be our chancellor—he was acting. Then a petition came
around, and the faculty member who came to talk to me was Kendon Smith [psychology
faculty].
And he said, “We are writing a petition to get Chancellor Ferguson—to be sure he's our
next chancellor, and we want you to sign it.” Well, I read right up here, and it said if you
had been on the faculty for a year, you could sign this petition. I hadn't been on but a few
months. And I said, “I don't believe I can sign this.” And he—we laughed about it, and he
went away.
But it worried me very much, politically, I did not think it was smart for the new
School of Nursing not to be endorsing the proposed chancellor, and nowhere would my
signature be on that. So I decided that I would write a special letter to the chairman of the
search committee explaining why my name was not on there. But, anyway, I did that.
We moved. We had thirty funny little students who were interested in nursing that
first year, and remember, they didn't know where we were going and we hadn't decided
where we were going. But the wonderful thing the, I—we never recruited as long as I
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was there, from ’66 to ’85, we never recruited students. The first couple or three years the
alumni helped me because there were aunts, there were mothers and there were
grandmothers who had been to this school who had nieces and granddaughters and
daughters who wanted to be a nurse. And they would encourage them to come here. So
the alumni were simply fabulous.
And you say, people say, how can you say you never recruited? Remember now, I
was president [of the] Board of Nursing. I was president of the State Nurses Association,
so had many contacts with people all over this state. Everywhere I went, everybody knew
what I was doing and that I was on this campus—but you know, that's how it is—so that
we had marvelous help.
In that first year I was here all by myself, my primary assignment in my own head
was to lay out the plan—basically search for the first faculty and do what was necessary
to go through the ropes in terms of this faculty—I'm not talking about nursing—to get
our program really set up and started.
And I had, two—permission from Miss Mossman, remember, now, she had
money for faculty—and I had two very fine consultants who spent a lot of time with me.
Julia Miller, who started the School of Nursing at University of Arkansas and the
university, Emory University, had retired here to North Carolina. So Julia would come
and stay with me at the house, and we would work on, she was—administratively they
didn't come better prepared than Julia—at time or more interested in what I was doing.
And then I had a curriculum expert, Miss Ruth Boyles, and she helped to lay out the
plans.
Now to go through all the red tape on this campus—and I don't think it got any
better during the years when, well, it was complicated then. I had to lay out the basic
parts of that curriculum. Well, you know it’s—with the consultant's help it’s easy to lay
out the academic part of that. The professional part of that, it seemed to me most
inappropriate to put down anything ‘til we got faculty. And so we just laid out the other,
and then I had my, I don't remember, forty-eight to fifty credits of nursing.
The day—and it was on the thirteenth of December, I think, of ’66—that I went to
the faculty council to present what I—what we had laid out. And Ethel Martus—she was,
when she retired she was Ethel Lawther—Ethel Martus was chairman of the department
of HPERD (Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance). And Dr. Naomi
Albanese was dean of the School of Home Ec. And they were waiting for me when I
came into the faculty council that night. And one sat on one side, and one sat on the
other.
And they said, “Don't let anybody in this room scare you when you present your
curriculum and everything tonight. Remember you know more about it than anybody in
here. Just stand up there and say what you have to say.” Well, I made my presentation
and when I had finished, Dr. Bruce Eberhart who was chairman of the department of
biology, rose and said it sounded all right, but he didn't want to approve a curriculum that
just had forty-eight or fifty credits or whatever it was.
In nursing, he didn't know what was going to be in there, and he didn't think they
ought to do that. Two, what am I going to do? And then, you know, someone just helped
me with that, had his hand on my shoulder I am sure. And I collected my wits and said,
"Sir, I would not in any way put forth what goes into a nursing curriculum without the
benefit of the faculty, and I would not ask them to accept what I put forth. And I don't
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believe the faculty, my contact with faculty on this campus to date would suggest that
they would not be willing to accept such. Therefore, I request that it be approved in faith
’til the faculty are on this campus." And so it was approved.
Now the most exciting, well, you know, exciting time came in ’68 when we
decided—and we were the first School of Nursing in this state to go to an upper division.
But that was because on this campus, majors were at the upper division. We were ahead
of Chapel Hill because in order to have any students in nursing, women at Chapel Hill—
we had to have nursing all four years. Here, that was not the case—we could build on
that liberal arts base.
So we took our first students into the major in September of ’68. Remember I told
you there were thirty funny little fellows that started with it, and I think twenty-two
survived to go into that—into the major. We had almost more faculty than we had
students that day. And we were—oh, we were so anxious—our first class of nursing.
Now remember we were down in the basement of the infirmary, and we were all
there. And all of us went—all seven of us were going to participate that day in teaching
the nursing bit. And the phone rang, and I said to the faculty, "I will run and answer it." I
went to answer it, and this voice said, "Eloise, this is Bill Friday. Today I know that you
all are starting the major in that School of Nursing. I wish you to convey to the students
and faculty my excitement and my support and my expectation that that will be an
outstanding program. Bless you all."
Now I ran back. I want to ask you how better way to start a program than to have
the president of the university remember that that was the day, and call you. Dr.
Ferguson, our chancellor, called us sometime during that day to acknowledge that he
remembered. And, of course, Miss Mossman remembered.
And we started in the basement. [laughs] Now all during this time when I told you
were working toward our accreditation and we were also working toward the building—
we petitioned the building, you know, through the university procedures to get the money
for our building. And Mr. Charlie Phillips [director of public relations]—and that's a
name very much associated with our university—carried the request through the General
Assembly.
And we had a little plan. We had just gotten federal money for the building at
Chapel Hill. Well, it really was out of ignorance on my part that I told Mr. Charlie that
we could never get money—being in the same institution—from the feds because Chapel
Hill had had theirs. Well, that's in truth not so because we were independent institutions.
But we didn't know it. So Mr. Charlie went to the General Assembly and we worked at it,
and we got the money for our building.
And we had the good fortune to have Margaret Moore on our faculty. Margaret
was a Woman's College [of The University of North Carolina] graduate, and she was the
only faculty member we stole from any place in North Carolina for the— that original
faculty. And Chapel Hill let us have her because she was a Woman's College graduate.
All the rest of the faculty came from out of state.
Then Margaret had as almost an avocation—she designed the building at Chapel
Hill, she designed the State Nurses' Headquarters Building, she did the nursing one at
Atlantic Christian [College], the nursing one at [University of North Carolina at]
Charlotte, a hospital in Virginia—she did the nursing one at the Medical College of
Virginia. So Margaret was—this was her campus and her school, and she was very
11
excited. She came—I was here by myself that first year, but I ran up and down the road
between here and Chapel Hill. And Margaret would help me lay out the plans for that
building and to move it along.
And the first real trouble that I got into on this campus had to do with the
building. The chancellor said there were several spots the building could be placed, and
we would look at the most appropriate one. But unfortunately Miss Elliott's house was
standing on the most appropriate spot. And—but the chancellor and whoever else made
the decision—that's where the new School of Nursing building would go. Well, the day
the bulldozers pushed down Miss Elliott's house, then I was in trouble on this campus and
got the real cold shoulder from several of the old timers.
But some fun things happened. Virginia Lathrop, who was a distinguished alumni
[Class of 1922] from this school and on our board of trustees, and you know, did the walk
through the campus, that little book and everything, she called Henry Ferguson [later vice
chancellor for business affairs] one day and said, "Henry, I collect doorknobs. And I want
all the china doorknobs out of Miss Elliott's house." So Henry went over, got the china
doorknobs, sent them up to Virginia Lathrop, so that helped me a little bit.
Now the day that we were supposed to move into our new building, we had—we
decided we weren't going to take any furniture with us. We weren't going to take
anything except the records, the things that we had to. So the faculty— and we moved in
those funny little laundry carts. Those were funny little laundry things. We don't have
them around here anymore. But they used to be used for everything ,when I came to this
campus. Anyhow, we moved in it and it rained that day. Well, by the—
[End Tape 1, Side A—Begin Tape 1, Side B]
EL: —were all the juniors, and by then we had seniors. They had mops, buckets,
screwdrivers, hammers. And one of the students named Robin Fowler was—could
organize anything—well, she was in charge of all of them. And they said, “You were
talking to us about the history of this institution. And in the—when the first class came,
the dorm wasn't finished or the buildings weren't finished, and they had to sweep out
everything. We've come to repeat the performance,” because they knew I had an interest
in history, and, you know, was history double major in college.
But anyway, there they were. We are not going to school tomorrow over there in
that infirmary, we're going here. The chairs weren't put together, the boar[ds]—the floors
weren't swept and the bulletin boards weren't—“Robin, we're so tired.” “Never mind,
we'll do it.” But, you know, you couldn't go off and leave thirty students, and that's how
many we had at that time. They said, “We want to have our first class of this year in the
building.” So that’s how we got in the building. And we didn't have to run and get
permission from anybody; we just did it.
So the next morning we started classes in that building. We graduated the first
eighteen students in June of 1970. See, I came in ’66, and we were ready to graduate the
first students. Now there were eighteen in that first class, and we can say with great glee
that was the largest baccalaureate graduating class up to that time in the state. ’Course,
we only had two more than Chapel Hill, but we still had two more.
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What a wonderful thing had happened to us in April before that graduation. We
said we were moving toward National League for Nursing accreditation, and we felt we
were ready for that accreditation. We felt that it was important for us to go when we felt
we were ready, and it never occurred to me that we shouldn't go then. We handed in our
materials, and our visit was scheduled in April.
Well, I was very conversant with the people on the board and whatnot, and in
those days you could ask for the persons that you wanted to be on your visiting team. We
asked for the chairman of our committee to be Miss Ruth Neil Murray, who's dean of the
School of Nursing at the University of Tennessee [Health Science Center] in Memphis.
She was a regal and a highly-respected Southern lady. She was on the board of review,
we knew that.
Then we asked for somebody else, and she called me on the phone and said,
"Eloise Lewis, you can't have the chairman of the Board of Collegiate—Board of
Review"—and I didn't even remember she was chairman and it—“some of the others
you're asking for. Now make up your mind, if you want me to come, I'll come.”
Anyway, she came, and we were granted our accreditation, and we were the first
school in the country that had ever been granted national accreditation before we
graduated the first class. So the day that we got the letter, the chancellor gets a letter and
the head of the school gets a letter from the Collegiate Board of Review. And I promised
the students, because we were in the clinical by then, I promised the students that when
we got that letter—we knew when it was coming—that I wouldn't open ’til they got
home from the clinical, and everybody would come to my office and we'd open it
together.
And some people said, “How can you do that, what if you didn't get accredited? I
said it will affect them just like it affects us. And so that the letter came, and I put it
across the office from me that morning where I could look at it all day. And the
chancellor called, and he said my letter came and I said, “Yes sir, but don't tell me. And I
haven't looked at mine.” And I explained it to him, and I said, “Can you come this
afternoon at two o'clock? The students wanted to have the opening, they said, in
upstairs— in one of the classrooms where they liked to go.” It was the classroom that had
the most trees when you looked out, and it's their favorite classroom, and they want to go.
And he said sure he'd come, Miss Mossman would come. The—we called, and
[the] executive director of the board of nursing was coming and the executive director of
the State Nurses' Association was coming, who, by the way, is a Woman's College [of the
University of North Carolina] graduate, and not a nurse. But anyway, all these people
from the outside we invited, you know, to come.
And at that point in time I ran up the stairs with the letter, and here we were and
here they all were and the students. They had the people from the news bureau; they had
the people from the newspaper. Now greater faith—great faith. And we opened it, and,
oh, we had the best time. Of course we got accredited without recommendations for eight
years. And then as we—the chancellor, I think, he knew about this, ’cause he had to get
permission.
So when we finished shouting and hugging everybody, the door to the classroom
opened, and some of the students came pushing in this big cart with a tub—champagne
bottles and whatnot. And those were in the days before we were allowed to do that, but
the chancellor had given his permission, and so we could celebrate.
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We were—got a lot of interesting reaction about that because some of my
colleagues across the nation weren't at all pleased that we had been able to do something
that they hadn't been. But it was the caliber of the academic base for that program. It was
the fact that our first faculty were all prepared at the baccalaureate and master's level in
nursing, that they had experience, they knew what they were doing. We had great clinical
resources; we had students who were motivated to achieve something very special—
AP: And your own training and background, your leadership and all of that.
EL: So we had a wonderful time with that. Now the school had—we weren't unlike anybody
else, but our classes did not grow very large in size until ’74. We had our first large class
of seventy-six in ’74. And we had our first man. The reason that we chose—we didn't
make any effort to recruit men up ’til that time. We said that our School of Music and our
School of Education and our department of business had men. Let's just get our feet
firmly on this campus before we take men.
Donald Moore was our first man, and we had—he was the only one in that class.
And one day I said to him, "Don, how you think you'll make out with all these girls?" He
was a fine young man, and just so handsome, the way he said, “Well, I believe I'll make
out fine.” And he most certainly did.
From then on, we grew rapidly, and, we had at one time in the late seventies six-hundred
students. We were nationally recognized as a very fine baccalaureate program,
and we were offering a sound undergraduate education. And the people in this
community knew that we were.
Two things happened to us. In ’76, or ’75, we got a letter from General
Administration saying, “You've done a fine job at the baccalaureate level; now it's time
for you to get a master's program.” We didn't petition General Administration and the
board to let us have that program. We were told that it is time that you do that. So that we
planned and worked with our master's program and took in our first students, I believe
the first ten, in 1976.
But 1976 was a major year for us because we were ten years old. Now when we
started the program in ’66, that was the seventy-fifth anniversary year of the founding of
this institution. So we were born in the seventh-fifth year, and that's why the centennial
will be important to us—because we have a historical attachment.
But in ’75 we made a petition to have a chapter of the honor society in nursing on
this campus. Now one of the things back then that seemed to me unnecessary—you had
to work and plan for small honor society of some kind to say that you worthy of having
this National Honor Society. And I had been instrumental in helping it become a reality
on the Chapel Hill campus and always had that background. But I thought, “No, we're not
going to spend our time developing a little honor society on this campus. That's not what
we're about.”
Why is it not what we're about? From the very beginning, our faculty and students
were involved in the honors program on this campus. And if this league and the Sigma
Theta Tau—and that's the honor society—wanted us to be so much a part of an
institution, then why develop our own little honor society out here? Why not petition to
have our participation in the honors program on this campus take the place of that.
I went to talk to Herb Wells [psychology professor] at the time. He was working
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in the vice chancellor's office. And Herb said, "Oh Pattie, I'm not sure you can make this
one." I said, “Let's try.” So that we laid it all out, and we invited the president of Sigma
Theta Tau to come down and spend the day and talk with us along with the
membership—national membership chairman. They did. And we went before the board,
and it was granted.
And they came—and see, then we were a year ahead of ourselves. In 1975,
Margaret Moore, who helped plan the building that I mentioned, and Margaret Klemer—
now they were two of the original faculty—flew to Texas with our petition for a chapter
of Sigma Theta Tau and were present when the vote was taken and flew home with our
okay and our petition signed and ready to go. We had planned to start the Sigma Theta
Tau chapter in 1975, and they had been and it was in October.
In November, Miss Moore died suddenly without being ill or anything. And we,
in our grief and in recognition of her part in all of this, said, “Let's petition the national
chapter to defer us by a year. Then we'll be able to handle it better, and then it could be
part of our tenth anniversary celebration.”
We were granted that—it made a difference in our name because by the seventh-sixth
year, 1976, when we were ten years old, Gamma Zeta was the name assigned to us.
That's not what we would have been had we been in ’75. But it was very wonderful what
happened to the school in 1976.
We talked early on to Chancellor Ferguson about our tenth anniversary
celebration. And since we were part of the seventy-fifth and since we had some historical
base, he allowed us to be the center of attention and the focus of Founders Day in ’76.
And at that celebration, the Founders Day speaker and all that centered around the School
of Nursing.
On that day Jessie Scott, assistant surgeon general of the United States and a
nurse [and rear admiral in the Public Health Service commissioned corps], was our guest
speaker, and we gave her that day an honorary doctorate and that was the first nurse that
the university system anywhere had so honored. After Jessie made her speech, and all the
dignitaries were here, you know—President Friday, everybody was here—we named the
building for Margaret Moore, and her family was here and her portrait was unveiled that
day and it was a beautiful day.
It was made even more significant by what had happened the evening before. The
evening before we had initiated the Gamma Zeta chapter of Sigma Theta Tau, and we
chose to have a good friend and a person that was one of us here in North Carolina. Dr.
Ruby Wilson [dean, Duke University School of Nursing] spoke at the Gamma Zeta
induction of our society. And we just have gorgeous pictures of that evening with
Chancellor and Mrs. Ferguson, with Mereb Mossman, with all—and you know, Dr. and
Mrs. [Stanley] Jones who was—Dr. Jones was our vice chancellor [for academic affairs].
But it was significant in the history of this institution. And we felt compelled to
run the kind of program that would be creditable for this institution, that would be
recognized as, you know, part of this heritage, and that would be—have the excellence
that the rest of the academic offerings had. We were lucky to get Miss Scott and, of
course, Dr. Wilson.
And I neglected to remind you that the day we moved into our new building—
when our building was dedicated and that was in ’67—Dr. Kimball from Chapel Hill did
the address. But that was the day that I just called up my friend—dean of the School of
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Music—and I said, “Larry,” Dr. Larry Hart, “Larry, how about music like we never have
had on this campus?” And Larry plays the harpsichord. It was moved over to the School
of Nursing. We had the trumpets and all of this. So some of the same music that was used
at the time we dedicated our building was used at the time we celebrated our tenth
anniversary.
And another significant thing that happened that day, Miss Moore was in World
War II; she was an army nurse and a highly decorated one. And when she died, we had
the flag cover her casket, and the flag was taken off and given to me. And then I gave it
to Henry Ferguson who was the vice chancellor for finances. And it was flown over this
campus on—from our main flagpole on the tenth celebration of the tenth anniversary and
the naming of the building for her.
Now we continued to grow and to be recognized. As I've indicated to you, our
master's program grew. We were—had some national recognition through the fact that
we had the first occupational health nursing practitioner grant in the state. And what
we—and then we began—we were working all this time very closely with our AHECs
[Area Health Education Centers]. Now one of the things that we—we had a job to do that
shifted during the years, and we were in a different time of philosophy.
But like Mr. Jones said to us, Dr. Jones our vice chancellor, many times, “Our job
as a university is to finance the educational programs that we offer. The job you all have
is to do it well and with the standard of excellence that will attract the students and
whatnot. “
So that emphasis through the years was not to get money like we have the
emphasis now. Our emphasis was to lay the foundations that would attract donors and
that would provide the kind of education that would make our graduates well known,
interested in giving back to the university.
So our focus was different. We had one big job to do in this community and that
was to educate people that a baccalaureate degree in nursing was important. And I
remember with great glee the night that I was serving as a member of the education
committee at the Moses Cone [Memorial] Hospital, and there was still some thought that
Cone someday would have a three-year diploma program. That would have been
devastating for our school, and it was still being talked about in the mid-seventies.
And one night we had a meeting, and Dr. Phillips who was chairman of that
education committee, said to the committee that night, “Look, the time has come when
we ought to, in my opinion, set aside any idea of a diploma program here in this hospital
and put all our time, effort and energy behind that program at UNCG.” And that's exactly
what happened. It's never been mentioned since, and they have been a very supportive
part of what we do.
AP: Did most of the students work at Moses Cone for their clinical work? Or how did that
work out?
EL: By the time that—I told you how many students we had. We had them in, I think, at one
time, at eighty-seven clinical agencies. We had them at Cone, at Wesley Long [Hospital];
we agreed with [North Carolina] A&T [State University] that we would not bother L.
Richardson [Hospital], and they would not bother Wesley Long at that time. We'd share
Cone, right? We had them at [North Carolina] Baptist [Hospital]; we had them at Forsyth
16
[Hospital], we had them at Memorial [Hospital] in Alamance. We had them at the Health
Department; we had them in all the industries around here.
We had them at Presbyterian [Retirement] Home in High Point. And we were, in
the very beginning, small enough we could do that. And one day somebody asked me if
everybody on the original faculty in the School of Nursing was Presbyterian. [laughs] We
had them at Starmount Presbyterian Church for their daycare work, at the Presbyterian
Home in High Point.
But what we were trying to do—and what we did was to place them into all the
agencies so that one of the things—we decided to have a gold and white uniform. The
students decided this because our colors were gold and white—that everybody in this
community knew that gold uniform. The faculty all wore the gold lab coats. We could go
anywhere—I could go anywhere in that outfit in this city, and everybody knew what it
meant.
It was significant—it meant UNCG, and it meant the School of Nursing and it
meant [a] program of, well, training and preparation and education. And so that we did a
lot of that kind of work. It was absolutely necessary because people didn't know. “Well,
what can the graduates of that program do that nobody else can do?” And there were
things, and they were taught that.
And we used to work with them and say, “Look, because we're good,” and I think
we have to acknowledge that we were good. We worked at it. And the university helped
us to be that way. “You carry a burden to be a graduate of this program. These are the
reasons. But stand straight and tall, and be proud of what you're doing.”
And it's true—one of the things that began to frighten me toward the end of the
seventies and into the eighties,—our graduates were employed without reference if they
were a UNCG graduate. You know, I've gotten after a lot of my colleagues in this state,
“Look, we can't always make a hundred.” No, if you do that and if you're a graduate from
over there, we know what kind of an institution that is, then you have a job.
But now we did have times when we stubbed our toes, and let me tell—share one
with you. The first time we had a student who was not successful on the state boards—
and our records all the time ran, you know, in the 90 percentiles. But we did stump our
toe one time, and a student didn't make it. When the, you know, papers came to me that
morning, I was very distressed about this.
And I called Dr. Jones's office and spoke to Paula [Andris], his good girl Friday,
and said, “Paula, will you tell vice chancellor that we've had failure on state boards.” And
she said, “Don't you want to tell him?” And I said, “Heavens, no! Please tell him for me.”
That evening, you know, that afternoon when I got ready to go home, I flew out of my
office, it was a little after five [o’clock]. And he was sitting there with his arms crossed.
And he says, “Pattie, I did not come over here to, you know, comfort you or anything of
that nature. I came to protect that poor student”
And he was always—and we had—he said, “Look, the more students we take in
as your program grows bigger and bigger, the more risk we run.” So we did have—the
grief that we always had was—it was worse for that graduate because they could not
function as a registered nurse ‘til they passed.
And we did—our record was sound, but we did have, you know, some problems.
What I had said to my secretary, Avahleen [Cain]—then I had the same secretary for
seventeen of those nineteen years, she lived and put up with us. But anyway, I had said
17
with her—to her when we sent forth our first class, said, “Avahleen, if everybody passes,
I will do a dance on my desktop” When we got the letter that day, [I] took off my shoes
and danced on the top of the desk and over the credenza and all around on the furniture.
And she, she, you know, bless her, her face got red, and then she was dying laughing, and
she said, “Keep going,” while she got the rest of the staff. And they'd always laughed and
they said yes, they'd seen me do that. I didn't have that privilege every year, but our
record was sound and, you know, it was pretty good.
AP: I'd like to have seen that myself.
EL: I think one of the things that made us very happy when we grew old enough to begin to
see our graduates start back to get their master's, and now we have a nice cadre of those
who have completed their PhDs in nursing. We’re moving in that direction, but our old
master's program helped with that. And a lot of our graduates have come through that.
We talk to them pretty seriously though,—if a life situation, if you live here, you're
always going to live here, your business is here, your husband's business is here and you
want a master's degree, then you'll have both from the same institution. And we talk it
out. But we did not say, “No you can't come.”
AP: Were most of the women in nursing single, say, in the sixties and seventies, or were
many of them married?
EL: You began to see the difference early in the seventies. Now in our first three, four
classes, I think they were all single. Not after that. And we began to get older students
coming back and second career and the men. And now, you know, the thick—but there
was one student that was different, and she was in our second class.
Honey, she had five little children younger than seven. And I used to look at her
when she got to an eight o'clock class and think, “How'd you do that? Those are ten little
hands and ten little feet, and to feed those little ones and everything.” She wanted to do
this, and her parents said, “We can help you while they're little. We cannot help you if
you wait because the teenagers and the older ones need more. The little ones we can
bathe and play with and feed and entertain.” So they helped her.
But now, one significant thing about our program: we—you hear about the
registered nurse going back to school, and there were a lot of questions that were posed
to us, “Are you going to have us come to school right away?” We said, “No, give us time
to go through this program one time so that we know how we can best meet your
educational needs, how we can tailor that program so that it is meaningful to you,” which
made very good sense to my faculty and to me.
Well, that's what we did, or at least that's what we thought we did. But then we
had a registered nurse who came and she was college transfer. And she said, “Please take
me in the first class.” We said, “No, Carol. We don't have it set up to give you any credit
for what you've done or anything.” “Take me anyway.” They had just moved here; her
children were at the age she thought she wanted to start and so she said, “But we agreed,”
we being the faculty, and Carol—that we would not tell her classmates, and we would not
tell anybody.
So we started away, and she finished the academic work she had and came to that
18
first class. We were doing just fine, and Wednesday before Thanksgiving that year—that
would be `68 now, I got a call from the Cone Hospital, and the person said, “Dr. Lewis,
do you have a registered nurse in your first class?” And I said, “Would you help me to
understand why you're asking the question.”
And she just said, “Well, the students were here this morning,” and I said, “Yes, I
know that.” And that when the student signed her nursing progress notes, she signed it
Carol Singer, RN. So she let the cat out of the bag. So I thought, “Oh Lordy.” So I called
her after that night. I think, I said, “Carol”—maybe it was the Tuesday before
Thanksgiving—I said, “Carol, we got a problem.” “What?” I said, “You signed the
nurse's notes today Carol Singer RN. The cat's out of the bag, and I think we ought to tell
your classmates in the morning. I think they deserve to know.” And so the next
morning— we agreed, and it was class and we agreed to tell them. And they said, "So
what? She's our classmate, she's our friend. We knew she was better at the technical
aspects than we were, but there's no difference in what we're doing, so what's the big
deal? She's part of us."
So from that very first the registered nurse was a part of what we were doing. And
as we grew and as we understood better what we were doing—laid out our plans—we
could provide challenge exams that would give them credit and all that kind of thing. But
there was never two classes of citizens in that school. It was one—we were, they were
students.
And we tried to help the students from the very beginning to understand the
concept that they were, first of all, [The] University of North Carolina at Greensboro
students who had chosen to major in nursing. And we tried, although the major is very
demanding—we tried to help them become involved in the campus activities and things
like that.
Now I decided from the very beginning that I wanted to teach, and so that I taught
a course—I used to teach two—then I taught a course until the last two years before I
retired, when the faculty said, “You know, somebody else ought to do that because you
won't be here.” But I wanted opportunity to come to know the students as students, to
work with them not only as the administrator, but as the teacher.
And in the beginning, in the first couple years, I taught some of the nurses, and I
went with them to the clinical agencies, but that was not what I was employed to do. I
was employed to run the interference and provide the things that the faculty needed to do
that. But basically being prepared as a teacher and liking that and doing it all along, I still
wanted to have that kind of contact with the students.
AP: And that teaching gave you a whole new dimension on your administration. It always
does.
EL: Yes. And no student, until that last two years, could ever leave this school without
saying—with saying she never saw the dean or the dean never saw her. I never taught a
course in the graduate program, but I taught units in several as it was appropriate to teach
in the graduate program. I chaired some of the thesis committees. But in order to make
sure that the students got the kind of support and help that they needed, it was impossible
for me to carry too great a load and to separate it out.
Now, some fun things happened to me. Know that when we became The
19
University of North Carolina with sixteen campuses, and President became—Friday
became our president and we've got a board of governors—one of the early things that
we did was to get a faculty assembly, a faculty assembly, okay? Now what does that say?
That says that each campus elects faculty, and they go to that.
Well, for the first go round, I was selected from this campus. And when I went to
the first faculty assembly meeting in Chapel Hill, some of my buddies from the Chapel
Hill campus whom I knew and with whom I had worked, “What are you doing here? This
is faculty, and you're one of those administrators; you're one of those deans, you're not
supposed to be here.”
I said, “That's all right; my campus sees me as a faculty member,” which I always
thought that I was first of all a faculty member here, and then an administrator. So that I
served a funny time on the faculty assembly. I don't know if or whether there's ever been
another dean that's served there or not. But this campus said, “ No, that I was elected to
go there,” and you know.
Then when I first came here, we—the deans met with the department chairmen all
the time—we did not have the College of Arts and sciences when I came to this campus.
The year after I came we got Bobby—[Dean] Bob Miller came and the College of Arts
and Sciences grew under his direction to an independent unit. And—but we had—see the
promotion, tenure, all the committees and everything—but it was pretty clear that the one
place that the deans don't serve and that's on the university tenure and promotion
committee.
But a long time ago different things happened, and so that I served two terms as
chairman of the promotion and tenure committee on this campus. It was, you know—that
was before we had our current instrument of government, these kinds of things. But it's
kind—just interesting to reflect back upon this, the things that have happened on our
campus.
When I came here, we had just about three thousand students. We knew
everybody, and that was one of the things that made it easier for the School of Nursing to
get started. It was easy for me to run around, sit down and talk to all of my colleagues on
this campus for a—to keep everybody informed about what we were doing. Like, it was
so simple a thing to do. But I asked permission from the deans and department heads
meeting,, all along, to tell them about what we were doing. Not—I wasn't reporting, I was
simply sharing.
And then the day that we got the new uniforms and the day we got the caps, then I
just asked to share because here was a new creature on this campus. And we needed to
make sure that we remained a part of what was going on. Then, as we went through the
eighties, our program continued to grow, and we—of course, one of the things, and it
doesn’t help us much with, you know, my other colleagues in the state-supported
schools—but when Mr. [William] Johnson [Lillington, North Carolina, attorney] was
chairman of the board of governors, he was on TV one night.
And we'd had a lot of failures on the board in this state, and there were problems
about nursing. And [Johnson] said in that TV interview, that The University of North
Carolina at Greensboro ran their best school. And so on. You know, that was lovely for
us to hear, but not so good.
And we got a new vice president for nursing at Duke one time, and we used to
have meetings of all the deans of the schools of nursing in the state, along with the
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counterpart in the big clinical facility, like Cone. Mr. [Russell Eugene] Tranbarger would
go with me. Anyhow, the new vice chancellor was there, and it was her first trip there.
And we were talking to her about how she was getting adjusted at Duke and what she
was doing. We asked her to tell us you know, some of the things she was doing.
And she just said—well, she had spent time on every unit at Duke seeing what the
needs were, talking to her staff and everything. And she said, “I always end up with one
question. If you had your choice of where you would get your staff members from, which
school would you choose to have all of your staff members come from?” And she said,
“In every instance, it has been The University of North Carolina Greensboro.” Well, you
know, that didn't set well at all with my colleagues, and they—anyway, those are just
charming bits. That said, it made us work at it harder.
Now we were—to be as large, and we grew from seven faculty members to—one
time we think we had fifty-six. And—but handling that many students, and then we said,
“All right we can't handle them all on this campus.” And we were working very closely
with Northwest AHEC. And so together, Northwest AHEC and this university started its
baccalaureate outreach program for the registered nurses, and that's headquartered in
Hickory.
AP: And the northwest, just general, the geographical area would've included how much area?
EL: Twenty-two counties north of I-40. And come to the edge of Forsyth [County], but all the
way to Avery [County], just north of I-40, and—
AP: All the Blue Ridge area?
EL: All the way, all the way.
AP: Up to the Virginia line?
EL: Twenty-two counties. And we are still running that baccalaureate program. And we—our
faculty goes from here, and then we use the clinical resources out there. I think—and I'm
not up to date on the numbers—but I think I'm right that there're about thirty-some
students there now. And it's made a lot of difference.
We saw this as a continuing service and a continuing effort to educate more
people at the baccalaureate level And after all, that means feed into your master's
program. Anyhow, that's very viable, and it goes well and we're pleased with that.
And then we worked with the one appropriate for Greensboro AHEC to have an
outreach because we're right here, and A&T is right here. So what Greensboro AHEC did
with us—we offered a residency program in administration to our master's graduates
whose major was administration. And Mr. Tranbarger over at Cone helped us do that.
And then another thing that we got going in the eighties—we do things
intuitively, or we did for so long in nursing—we need to base our performances and our
care on good research findings. And so that Mr. Tranbarger and I worked hard at this. He
said, "I can get the money, and I have the money. You have the expertise on your
faculty."
So together we joined together. And the faculty person from our school ran the
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interference and gave the guidance to the staff over there in developing the research
projects that related to improvement in patient care. And that's what they're about. Ours is
education that would lead to that.
So that we tried those ways of working on this community. We said, “All right, so
we've gotten a good baccalaureate program; we have a fine master's program; our
graduates are going on to advanced education. We're making a major difference in this
community, we're learning about research,” but, like, we had to lay the foundation.
And we—my vision for this school was that we look very carefully, first of all to
continue a strong educational program because you can't have strong master's and
doctoral graduates if you have a uneasy undergraduate program. To get it—and we've
continued that—we'd get as many of our faculty members as we could prepared at the
doctoral level. But it was unrealistic to think everybody could be because there are not
that many in this country yet. We're working very hard on it.
And then that we would beef up our research efforts; we would continue to work
in this community in a variety of ways to improve the level of health care. And that,
while it was unrealistic at this point to talk about our doctoral program in nursing, and
there are many of us that don't think we need but one in this state. And it took us thirty
years to get the one at Chapel Hill, and we've just gotten it. That we could make our
program so strong at both levels, make our faculty so strong that there—and plan, could
we plan for the future when there would be cooperative efforts with Chapel Hill at the
doctoral level, and this is their first year at that.
Then we needed to continue to be sure that our faculty had national visibility, that
they took their place not only in their own special areas but in nursing itself. And you
know you hope and you dream that the faculty and students will go so far beyond where
you were. I'm getting ready, and I haven't been able to do it yet, but I think any day now
I'm going to be able to do it; all the data I collected for my dissertation that I did not
use—I still have it.
Well, of course it's terribly out of date and the cards are yellow and all that. But I
said to myself, “ I had a limited time to get that degree. I put on my blinders, speak to the
purpose of my study and get it finished,” which I did. But I don't want the faculty to—
and the young people coming along today—to let that happen to them because they need
to share, and they need to have the satisfaction of doing that.
I think that one of the things that always seemed important to me—and the
heritage, for that notion rests in this campus—one of the things that touched me when I
came here were the many ways in which there was evidence of caring about the human
being on this campus that intrigued me. That's part of what it's all about in nursing.
And I think that it's critical in the medical world, and in nursing particularly, not
to forget that because, you know, all right, when we set forth the philosophy in the
School of Nursing, we said we believe in the dignity of every human being. All right?
Now unless I learn to treat that faculty with the dignity that was due them, they could not
deal with the students in that same way. Unless we taught the students, and unless they
saw it, they could not deal with their patients and their families in the way that we had
dreamed.
So that I hope that always that will be underlying. I can't say; I've been gone five
years. I tried very hard and worked at it up until my time was finished. But then you do
what you do at the time you're there. You cannot criticize what the people are doing now
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because you're not a part. We left a good shop.
[End of Interview]