Mahon: Okay. So, we’re live again. Today is Friday, February 1, 2019. My name is Leeah Mahon, Graduate Intern on this oral history project and masters’ student in Public History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).
Also, in the room and participating in the interview is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History and Co-Primary Investigator with Steven Towne for the IUPUI Oral History project funded by the campus administration. Dr. Scarpino also serves as Director of Oral History for the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis.
Today, we have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Angela McBride at her home in Lafayette, Indiana.
This is the second recording session with Dr. McBride. There is a biographical sketch of Dr. McBride at the start of the first recording session.
Before we begin the interview, I’m going to ask your permission to do the following: record this interview, prepare a verbatim transcript of this interview, deposit the interview and the verbatim transcript with the IUPUI Special
Collections and Archives and with the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence.
Directors of IUPUI Special Collections and Archives and the Tobias Center may make the interview and verbatim transcript available for their patrons, which may include posting all or part of the audio recording and the transcription to their respective websites. Can I have your permission to do these things?
McBride: Yes, you have my permission.
Mahon: Okay. We’re going to start with just a few basic demographic questions and then move on to your education, just to have that on the record. . .
McBride: Yes. . .
Mahon:When and where were you born?
McBride: I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, or, if you’re really from there, you can say Bawlmer, Maryland.
Mahon: And who were your parents?
McBride: Mary Schpanska (SPELLING???) and John Barron.
Mahon: Okay. Did you have any brothers and sisters?
McBride: I have a younger sister, three and a half years younger. Her name is Cecelia, and she’s also a doctorally-prepared nurse in Psychiatric Nursing and Mental Health.
Mahon: Okay. What did your father do for a living?
McBride: He was a policeman. He retired as a police lieutenant and was on the force for a number of decades. He was a policeman during a very colorful part of
Baltimore’s history. It has all gotten gentrified, but the area that he worked, at one point, was called The Block and it was rather famous for, let’s just say I actually met Blaze Starr, and she had a night club. (LAUGHING)
Scarpino: We should probably say that she made a living taking her clothes off. Is that what we’re talking about here?
McBride: Yes. (LAUGHTER) Scarpino: How do I know that?
Mahon: I’m not familiar with who that is.
McBride: She was rather famous.
Mahon: Okay.
Scarpino: I didn’t want you to think it was an opera singer.
Mahon: Yeah, I kind of got the connotation there. So, how about your mother?
McBride: My mother was a seamstress and she worked until she had children and then, of course, she worked enormously in the house. I mean, we lived in my
grandmother’s house all my growing up. It was a three-story rowhouse. And really, up until when I was six, we had two rooms and a bathroom on the third floor. I had another aunt and uncle and cousin on the second floor, and then my grandmother and an uncle and an aunt on the first floor. This was shotgun housing. So, it was just one room after another. It’s interesting because I would say in hindsight, it became very close to tenement living. High demographic, lots of people on the block; lots of stories. If you would want to do a TV serial, lots of material there. My mother worked for a seamstress who, who did work for two maidenly ladies and they wound up knowing Gertrude Stein.
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: And I believe they had a brother who knew her brother. One of the things that – oh, I can’t remember their names, very famous – but their collection is now in the University of, the Maryland Art Museum and a lot of the impressionists, and this was a period when nobody really cared for the impressionists. So, they bought art from -- and I remember Monet particularly because I remember then going to the exhibit many years later after hearing my mother’s stories and seeing a lot of Monet -- but there was a sprinkling of the others. But my mother tells a story that these two maidenly ladies in this what would be like a brownstone house in New York, I believe one was a dentist and the other one was a schoolteacher, and it was just chock full of art. I mean, my mother really, at the time, was very taken with the whole idea that they would collect all of this. And because it was an immigrant community, they were people who made her -- contributed I should say -- to my mother really believing that education was important. Becoming a lady was important to her, and so she was a woman who took a tea-serving
course. And I don’t ever recall her serving tea, but she saw that as a mark of, if it would ever come up, she would be capable. And so, it was an interesting – I’ve always wanted to write a novel about the different generations of people, starting with her mother’s generation, emigrating and, you know, I now have children who have lived in Hong Kong for twenty-one, twenty-two years.
Mahon: Oh, wow.
McBride: They’re Amerasian. They are – in many ways, the middle-class Hong Kong apartment is about the same size as the apartment I grew up in. So, I see that the arch of who you are and what happens to you is sort of interesting, but I was somebody who absorbed a lot of stories. I’m telling you some of the stories that my mother had and that my father had.
Mahon: Okay. So, as you look back on your youth, what did you learn from your parents that shaped the adult that you later became?
McBride: Education was the key to everything. For a girl at that time, I was angry about the limited opportunities. I always wanted during the summer to work for the park system and mow grass because I thought you – and they paid more than nurse’s aide work did and I would get a tan – so, at the end of the summer, I would have more money and I would have a tan. And to me, this was what you should strive for, and girls could not apply. I just remember a world – and my parents were very good about educating, but my father, I don’t know how many times he would say, “Even though I only had girls, I educated them,” and I wanted to hit him in the face because it was obnoxious. I will tell you, the grownup me is just very grateful because I do understand that he was unique. I didn’t know another woman who had a college education other than some of the nuns, and not all of them had college education, until I went to college. There was this -- I would say both of them fueled my ambition to become an educated person who was
comfortable in the world.
Mahon: Aside from your parents, were there any other individuals who had a significant developmental impact on you and helped you shape the adult you later became?
McBride: I had a very good relationship, and this sounds funny in this day and age to talk about it – my great uncle was the pastor of the Polish community, the Holy Rosary Church in Baltimore and he had become pastor as a young man. He was pastor for, I don’t know, forty, forty-five years, and my grandmother, I think, secretly loved him. She would hold his hand and she kissed his consecrated fingers a little longer than I – I would tell her that too – than perhaps was
necessary. My mother did his laundry. My mother saw him as the person – we never had a car growing up, but he had a car and he never drove. My father drove it. He had the car that enabled the family to have a car to actually drive a car somewhere. So my mother had a relationship with him that was, you know, caring and appreciative. My great uncle had been a handsome man. I saw pictures of him and when he was a young priest, just associating with women was seen as something that you should not do. You had to be proper. Well, here comes this great niece on the scene, and when I went to college, like every time I was home from college, I would go over and visit with him. And I was flip in a way that he could tolerate, he really enjoyed because he’d enjoy the
camaraderie. The fact that I went to Georgetown and so I wasn’t that far away, but I was doing something different. The only other people in the family who had really, at that time, gotten college educations were going into the priesthood. . . Mahon: Okay.
McBride: . . .Or they were going into the priesthood and then they left it to become something else. And then he had another prelate. It was a very large parish, Father Tony, and Anthony Javulski (SPELLING???), and they would take turns being on -- call where they would, you know, no cellphones or anything – all the priests would have like an evening when they had to stay there in case
somebody was dying and they would have to go and, or there was an accident or something happened. And when Father Tony was on duty, I frequently, during my high school years, would go over and have just long, rambling conversations with him. He was trying to convert me to become a nun.
Mahon: Oh, really.
McBride: And I told him I’d become a priest because they went to Europe. I knew he had gone to Europe. I wanted to go to Europe and so, “Okay, “I’ll become a priest, but I’m not becoming a nun. I don’t know any nun who’s ever gone to Europe.” It was pretty cut and dry for me. I actually, he was the head of the Catholic Youth Organization and I became the first girl to become a president of that and so I was very involved. You know, at the time, if somebody had said, “Are you a leader?” I would have thought that was sort of not something you should ever own up to. It was like God’s going to hurl thunderbolts at you because you had the nerve to say you’re a leader.
Mahon: You mean when you were…
McBride: When I was in high school.
Mahon: … a teenager?
McBride: When I was a teenager. But when I look at it, there was a drive, there was – and I have to tell you, for me, it was a drive to prove that girls could be as good as boys and, again, I didn’t have a name to it. I had not read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex yet. I had not, well, Betty Friedan had not written The Feminine Mystique at this point, but I just had that drive and I wanted to – I mean, when I think about it now, I went to a grammar school and then I went to high school that nobody I knew went to. From high school, I went to a university that nobody I knew went to, and then, of course, when I got into graduate school, I had two different episodes of graduate school. They were all at places that I had, you know, not thought about or they’re – it wasn’t the -- because a lot of -- if you look at a lot of teenagers even now, they’ll wind up going to a university with their best friend or something or they knew somebody who went there. And I never
thought about it at the time, but again, I’m more at the stage of life where you’re reminiscing and I think, “Oh, well that was sort of brave to do.” That was sort of – at the time, it was just what seemed to make the most sense.
Mahon: So, where did you attend high school?
McBride: I went to the Institute of Notre Dame, which was in the inner city of Baltimore.
You have to understand, it’s now Notre Dame of Maryland Prep, much more famous. But the one I went to, Nancy Pelosi was in my class. It was a class of 120, and two years ahead of me was Barbara Mikulski. There was one time when, you know, I’ve read the book How to Lie With Statistics. There was a point where I could say that half of all the women in the United States Congress and Senate had gone to my high school. (LAUGHING) I mean, there weren’t that many, if you think about it. You know, I think Barbara Mikulski was one of two at the time and, you know, there’s so many more now, but Nancy’s been in for a while. When she went in, it was still not that many. She herself had a very interesting trajectory going in because she did not really get in – her dad was the Mayor of Baltimore.
Mahon: Oh okay.
McBride: . . .She comes from a family where she is the seventh child, but the only girl, and so I have thought a lot about when enabled her to do what she has done. I would love to work with her on a real autobiography. She wrote one when she was Speaker the first time and it is pablum, but she, you know, I still remember her. Her real name is Annunciata because Nancy is a corruption of Annunciata, and her mother was Annunciata, and so the father ruled the city and he was beloved, he really was. She got along with all her brothers and kept them in line, but her mother would speak from time to time, and we would hear that
“Annunciata has declared,” and when she declared, she declared. She ruled the domestic scene. You know, she had wonderful role models and, and anyway, it was a terrific, it was a very good academic high school. When I went to
Georgetown, the freshman year, I thought, if this is college, eh…
Mahon: Really?
McBride: … oh, yeah. It was easy. Sophomore year was a shock to me, but freshman year was, you know, “I had this in high school kind,” of thing.
Mahon: Okay. So, you earned your undergraduate degree in 1962.
McBride: Right.
Mahon: So, I’m assuming you graduated from high school in about 1958?
McBride: Correct.
Mahon: So, when you graduated from high school, what did you hope that the future would hold for you?
McBride: Well, I had already been in a nurse’s aide…
Mahon: In the summers?
McBride: … summers and weekends, so I had really worked a lot and, and what I did – now, if you look at nurse’s aide work, they deliver magazines. When I think of some of the things that I actually did in a hospital, that they allowed me to do, I
think the administrators had absolutely no sense of legal liability. I mean, I just think that they’re guilty. I mean, I took dead babies down to the – you don’t let a thirteen year old go with a dead baby down to the morgue part of the hospital.
My great uncle had been good friends with the woman who was the head of the hospital, the nun who was the head of the hospital. In many ways, he sort of talked up nursing and then he facilitated me becoming – you know, I’ve worked since I was thirteen and when I say worked, I mean fortyhour work weeks kind of thing. There was a period when I thought adulthood sucks, I’m exhausted, I cannot do forty hours, but I had done all of that. (LAUGHING) And then in the – I can’t remember if it was the end of my junior year of high school or the beginning of my senior year of high school, our high school decided that they would, you either went to a hospital-based nursing school or you went to Notre Dame of Maryland, which did not have nursing at the time. They had only, it was much more K through twelve teaching that they were preparing and Mount Saint Agnes – those were the two places. The school decided that they would have a bus trip for anybody who was interested in college to go to D.C. to see the schools there.
So, we went to Catholic University, we went to Georgetown, we went Trinity, and we went to Marymount, and there’re only two people who were on that bus who actually then went to D.C. to go to college. Nancy went to Trinity and I went to Georgetown. Her husband was in my class. I mean he was not in nursing. He was in the School of Foreign Service, but he was a freshman. He is also of the same class of Georgetown and so, and he was interested in theater and I was very interested in theater. Through high school, I had an enormous amount of energy – Lord, I wish it would come back; I don’t understand it, it’s like lost.
(LAUGHING) But I, during the day worked hard to be a nurse, and at night there were people who thought I was a theater major because in the four years there I did a lot of acting, I did stage managing, I did props, I did costumes, and I got to know, the guy who was the director there influenced me. My freshman year, I had to take a speech class. I don’t know any nursing school now that requires you to do a speech class. In many ways, it seemed as far away from nursing as possible, but he was the head of the theater program. I wound up becoming friends with him. I mean, just a few years ago, I went to his eightieth birthday party. I had no idea that we were all that close in age. I thought he was an old man at the time, but he also was interested in psychodrama and worked at Chestnut Lodge, which was a psychiatric facility. I already knew that I was more interested in psychiatric and mental health stuff, so that when I – his interest coincided with mine. I went to Georgetown; I can even tell you an Abraham Lincoln story sort of. I applied to four places for college, three required what was the, you know, college boards. Georgetown, at the time, required the ACT.
Nobody else was taking the ACT. I had gone on that trip and I had fallen in love.
I took one look at Georgetown, and that’s where I was going. One of the nuns in my high school scheduled that privately she would monitor me doing the test on a Saturday. That day there was a blizzard and my father and I – you could not drive. My father and I walked from our house to the school, which is probably two miles, but it’s a blizzard. I mean, it’s bad snow, and then I took the test and then we walked back. To this day, I attribute the fact that I got a four-year scholarship to the fact that I secretly think that woman said, “Let me tell you how she took the test, there’s a blizzard and she walked here.” (LAUGHING)
Mahon: Dedicated. You earned, like we said, your bachelor’s in 1962 from Georgetown as the valedictorian of your class. Do you remember what exactly attracted you
to the study of nursing in the 1950s, aside from the fact that you were a nurse’s aide in the summers?
McBride: Well, you have to understand, there was a part in me that actually wanted to be a history major and go to Bryn Mawr. That was where I thought I should go. I knew my parents would not buy that, it would never happen, and if you’re torn between traditional and feminist, you don’t want to really do something that, I mean, it would be beyond what they would comprehend.
Mahon: Right.
McBride: They wouldn’t see history major as earning a living. I mean, when I said I wanted to be a nurse, my father -- my mother said, “Good, you can always use your psychology on your kids.” So, the implication was you would get a skillset in nursing that would be good for what would be your real goal, which is to get married and produce children. My father said more pithily that was good
because if I married a drunkard, I could always earn a living for the family. And I have to tell you, alcoholism was the endemic problem. I mean, this is pre the drugs we have now. It was alcoholism. There were little saloons every two blocks in our neighborhood. My parents were supportive of nursing and Georgetown struck me, I liked the Jesuit mentality. I knew that they were academic, that within Catholic thinking, they were academic, and I wanted to become an educated woman. For me, that really meant the humanities and the social sciences. It wasn’t so much that I was the great science buff or
something, but nursing used all of that. And I had been so raised to service – I mean, you know, now there’re all these books on service learning, but
Catholicism, as I grew up, was service and it was what you do for others I thought nursing was interesting because it was never the same. It was not, there – people always have problems, there’s always – and medicine, I was clear that I didn’t want to be a physician because I saw them as saying, “Here’s the
treatment.” What fascinated me was when you give people the treatment or you say, “Okay, you have this chronic illness,” helping people cope. And I saw a lot of that as like service to individuals and families. You know, I did find my valedictorian speech because when I got an honorary doctorate from them. I actually referred to my valedictory, and what I said, decades later, was so much of that at my graduation emphasized service and caring, and I had found out that nursing used all parts of me. For example, I am still interested in history and I am still interested – I’m a great believer, if you want to be futuristic, you need to couch even what you say we need to do in the future, being very mindful of the history that’s gone before. For example, I mean, I’ll give you a very concrete example of this. I got a lot of pushback; I was the first Dean of Research in the School of Nursing. In fact, I convinced Betty Grossman that what we needed was somebody who served that function to develop grants and awards. They had them already. I mean, I had run training grants and all, but we had had someone who did both administration and like signoff for grants, the managing;
you know, if you have to sign papers to get permission, how do you do that? We did not have, as the school became – the field required, if you were going to be in university, that you needed a doctorate. I mean, it was pushing to be academic, a body of knowledge. And I knew that as we had more doctorally-prepared people – see, when I first started there in 1978, I don’t know how many
doctorally-prepared people we had, but we had maybe no more than seven max?
-- out of a lot of faculty, but most of them had EdDs because the task had been to develop graduate programs. The first round of doctoral education in nursing really was EdD to develop graduate programs. And then there was, eventually, a second round of research push and that was for nurses to get PhDs and
research training. And they typically did it in another field and then imported those models to nursing problems. For example, I eventually was part of that movement because my doctorate is in developmental psychology, and I have actually used the models of developmental psychology to look at some of the mental health issues that have interested me as a nurse. Then after that came PhDs in nursing, as there was a body of knowledge. I mean, when I first started out, there was only one magazine that had the word research in it associated with nursing. Now you can’t count them, and you know there’s a huge body of literature. So, I can’t even remember how I got off this; this is bad because I was talking about research and knowledge and my valedictory -- my honorary degree speech. I had come to find out, when I went back and talked to the graduates decades later that there was no aspect of nursing. The stereotype view of nursing is this is the kind of person who goes into nursing is terribly dated. I used to always say, especially when I was Dean and talked to larger groups, that you can be a curmudgeon and still be a good nurse. Now, we will have to put you through the clinical program and you’d better understand your weaknesses because you’re going to have to deal with people and get through classes. But if you are a geek and what you really want is an informatics background because you want to design programs in healthcare, having the nursing background and then going in that direction, the field is big enough now that we’re not cookie cutter anymore. When I started nursing, it was cookie cutter; by the time of my honorary degree speech, it was not cookie cutter. It’s a field that now has four million people with all different kinds of preparation, but, but united in some notion of – there used to be a definition of nursing, which sounds so simplistic, that nursing is helping people do for themselves what they would do if they had the physical ability, the knowledge, the understanding, it’s what they would do.
It’s to help them with their problem-solving and management. I’ve often said that that definition sounds like common sense, but what we forget is that sense is not common.
Mahon: Right, right. Well, we’re going to come back to your work in nursing, specifically later especially when we talk about IUPUI, but for now, we’re going to continue on with your education and talk a little bit about Yale. You earned your
Scarpino: Can I ask her?
Mahon . . .yeah, yeah you can.
Scarpino: You mentioned Betty Grossman. Can you say who she is for the record?
McBride: Oh, Betty Grossman was actually the second Dean of the school. Emily
Holmquist was the – the history of the School goes back to 1914. At that point it was a training program, it was a hospital-based program, but it evolved to then become college-based. By 1922, Indiana University School of Nursing had the moxie, I would say, that there were six student nurses who wanted to start what became the Honor Society for Nursing because they knew that Phi Beta Kappa existed for the liberal arts and Sigma Xi existed for the sciences, and they
thought that doing something like that in nursing. You know, what I have always reflected on, the director of the program at that point, facilitated that. How many directors with six people coming up with this – for 1922, this was pretty like strange and wonderful – but she helped them even start an organization, get a lawyer so they could become incorporated.
Scarpino: Just to connect the dots, Betty Grossman was involved in this?
McBride: No, that’s 1922, but the school then only became a – that was, the school – I am rambling. When you do conversation, you ramble. When you do a speech, you’re organized ahead of time. The school -- we became an official school of IU in, I think, 1965 and Betty Grossman had already been the Director and she became the first Dean. Then Betty Grossman succeeded her, and she had been Dean, I think she was Dean for up to sixteen and a half years. She was Dean when I was hired and a person who was enormously supportive of the school moving positively in directions. I would say that she was particularly the person who worked with the then President for what because an eight-campus School of Nursing.
Scarpino: I want to ask one more question and then I’ll hand back. As you were talking about your high school years and being involved in theater and all the things that you did, acting…
McBride: In college.
Scarpino: … in college, I’m sorry. What occurred to me is that when you became an administrator, did you ever draw on those acting skills?
McBride: Oh, all the time. (LAUGHTER)
Scarpino: We’re pulling the curtain back here now, so…
McBride: I would say, no, a lot of what I learned I really do – well, I’ve written a lot about leadership. I mean, my first thing on leadership was in 1972. So, that’s a long trajectory of being interested in the subject. My definition of leadership is
inspiring and catalyzing others to work together to achieve organizational mission and goals in a world that keeps changing. Thus, for every generation, you have to think through how the values, which do not change, will be manifest. If you follow that, it’s a definition that says you’ve got to have the qualities to inspire and catalyze people. That’s the personal stuff. But then you’d better achieve
organizational mission and goals. I’m a great believer in, not necessarily what is written about it, but the whole concept of transformational leadership. And that is the notion that a good leader doesn’t just help achieve today’s mission and goals, but gets people ready for the future, as best you can. And the context keeps changing so that, for example – if you’re interested in my book on leadership, I will give you a copy. It’s the one I’ve now revised. I have expanded it and all – but my view of leadership does require -- it has a whole first section on the personal. You know, it has chapters like, the whole chapter is on knowing yourself. The second chapter is knowing what you do and what you tell other people to do, meaning you really need to know what your worth in the
organization is. I taught – I ran the Institutional Research Training Grant for a
number of years and there was a seminar that everybody took and I did a lot of socialization for research. I mean, you had to do a lot of getting ready for pilot work and you did all of the stuff that everybody would think would be in it to help you get ready for your dissertation because a lot of the course was, “Here’s where you are and at the end there will be a dissertation, and you need to use every class on the way to meaningfully get there, and I want you to do this deliberately.” I used to do a whole class on failure. I would get the best
researcher in the building, and I knew her history, to come down and talk about all the things that went wrong. By this time, this person was nationally acclaimed by any criteria because I think it’s very important that beginners know about failure, but the – again, I have gone down another little alley in terms of –
leadership was important to me – you’re right, Phil, that the CYO skills and that I did it at the diocesan level…
Scarpino: Catholic Youth Organization.
McBride: … yes, and I also was Vice President of the diocesan at one point, the theater – all of it, I learned all sorts of things and that is you better stay on message if people are going to hear the message. That sounds simple.
Scarpino: Okay. Well, that’s a good statement for me to hand back to you.
Mahon: Okay. So, we’re going to go back to your education, just to get that on the record. You earned your Masters’ in Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing in 1964 from Yale.
McBride: Right.
Mahon: I know you’ve talked a little bit about you had an interest in mental health nursing for a long time, but what drew you to the study of psychiatric mental health nursing specifically for your Masters’?
McBride: Well, my flip answer is our family was so poor, we couldn’t afford therapy, so we had to become therapists. Of eight first cousins, we have two psych mental health doctorally-prepared nurses and one psychiatrist. I will say no more about that. Between my junior and senior year of college, there was an opportunity, at that time – I don’t know if the name St. Elizabeths means anything – but St.
Elizabeths was a very big federal hospital in D.C. Ezra Pound was incarcerated there. You know, he’s the poet who – I thought it was chic to go to the psych facility that had Ezra Pound, which again tells you, I wanted to keep the literary up as I did my mental health. But they had a program where if you already had your psych mental health rotation, you could work during the summer. I did all my psych mental heath at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: I will tell you that I was influenced in a way that it took me years to figure out. It was only later on – I was already interested in mental health and psych issues, but when I was at Walter Reed Army Hospital – remember, all nurses are officers…
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: … and if you’re a captain and a physician is a lieutenant, the fact that that person is a physician and you’re a nurse don’t really matter as much, you are a captain.
And that was true, even in 1961, and so I saw nurses there as having an authority in running things and being taken seriously and, in some ways, I attributed it to psych mental health also, but I realize now in hindsight, it was the whole military structure that I was absorbing. But I had already been through that and then when I was at St. Elizabeths, it was a work-study program – I will tell you, it had very little study and a lot of work. It had like, I worked about sixty hours a week and I was the charge nurse…
Mahon: While you were in grad school?
McBride: … no, I’m still an undergraduate.
Mahon: Okay, at this point. Okay.
McBride: But, again, by the time I went to Yale, by the time I finished, I had already had all this nurse’s aide work, I had had Walter Reed Army Hospital mental health, I had worked at this big federal hospital, I had run, you know, an adult service and – I had dated in college a guy who went to Yale School of Medicine and I had visited him at Yale, probably my junior year of college. He pointed out the School of Nursing building to me and said, “Maybe you’ll think of coming here.” Well, by the time I was graduating, I was not in correspondence with him anymore, but I remembered that building. I fall in love with buildings. (LAUGHS)
Scarpino: They’re more permanent than boyfriends.
Mahon: They are.
McBride: And Catholic university – and by the way, he became, you know, he stayed in the Connecticut area and I was in the Connecticut area, and years later, decades later, I said to him, “You know, I would have had the career I had if it hadn’t been for you.” He sort of chuckled. He was, he was pleased that I was admitting that he had been a force. But by the time I ended Georgetown, everybody was pushing me – I had several teachers who said, “You’ve got to become a teacher,”
you know, pushing me in that direction and that was a direction that I was interested in. Everybody went to Catholic University and got Masters’ degrees and I thought that would be a fifth year of Georgetown. A lot of the people I knew at Georgetown had been working on graduate degrees…
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: … and I, I did know Monty Python then, but I wanted my Monty Python and now for something completely different. So, I applied to Yale and I got a traineeship to Yale. Yale was, there were probably two events in my life that have wound up shaping sort of the later leadership of me. One of them is Yale. Yale still had a, let’s just say, I believe that program was founded in 1922, something like that. If you interview people at Yale, I would say that almost none of the people would have known that there was a School of Nursing. It was the smallest school of
nursing in the United States at that time. I’m Goldilocks; I have worked at the smallest and the largest and I have always yearned for medium-size bed.
Anyway, it didn’t have nuns; it had women who took themselves seriously. It was not so much religious service to others, though in some ways the values were the same, it was, “What are you going to do with your talents?” And Yale, even at that time, had the, you know, there’s something about the Ivy League where it’s like, “Okay, I’m not sure we even want you to be one of us, but you’re here and if you’re one of us, what are you going to do with your talents?” And all my
experience before that, as a female, had been much more geared to are you good enough?
Mahon: Right.
McBride: Are you good enough to have a career? Are you good enough to do this? Are you good enough to do that? But for me, this was a different philosophy, and it was not so much are you good enough looking inward, bellybutton gazing, but looking out, sort of what are you going to do? There’s a world of problems, so which ones are going to be yours? And I was enormously shaped, at the time, it was one of the few places that was the beginnings of clinical research. My Masters’ study was an intervention, clinical intervention study that involved taping people in pain management and I worked with somebody else in my class who eventually became Dean of Yale. She developed the scheme for my clinical intervention which was three different kinds, and there was a tape recorder in my lab coat – of course, I got permission – but as I talked with people, the
intervention was to talk differently in the same amount of time and to see if talking differently about pain gets you different relief in an acute pain service.
Oh, there were so many flaws to that study, but if you think about it, it was – intervention studies are really only now seriously take a clinical trials. And, you know, I’m the person who took the blood pressure and the pulse so you could say, well, it was not accurate, maybe she geared it in a certain direction. But at least objectively, that Masters’ study had a second person listening to see if the talk varied and then it made a difference to what happened to people. And I didn’t know whether the talk – she didn’t know which category people were in. It was really the beginnings of get NIH grants. Well, the, it was get grants. Even getting training grants within – there was a division of nursing within HRSA, the Health Resources Services Administration, but I’m trying to think if any nurses had NIH grants as such, but it was the beginnings of that movement, and that was enormously exciting. I did, you know, it was a two-year Masters’ program.
During that summer, I worked at Connecticut Valley State Hospital with a group of college students who were interested in mental health psych work, and then I wound up having students at Yale Psychiatric Institute, which was very much like Chestnut Lodge. It was really – you know, that was the heyday of Freudian therapy. It was full of teenagers who were getting long-term therapy for, sort of in the Freudian model. I mean, all of that is dated now, but that was what was happening then. When I came to graduate, or close, Yale asked me if I would stay on and teach. I stayed on and taught. I don’t know that I ever thought I was going to stay on and teach at Yale. I was pleased that they asked that I stay on and I liked what they were doing. And then meanwhile, they were using two philosophers, Dickoff and James, who were in the process of – now we’re talking about the history of nursing – putting together the conceptualization of what nursing knowledge would be, and they were doing it as logicians and
philosophers. I wound up meeting my husband – I met him early on at Yale – but the whole idea that I then wound up marrying a philosopher and these two philosophers were there, I linked nursing to the department of philosophy. I was a philosophy groupie.
Mahon: So, you mentioned the research and the leadership aspects of Yale, was that common in U.S. Masters’ level nursing programs…
McBride: Not at all.
Mahon: … in the 1960s?
McBride: Not at all, not at all. I would say people were doing research studies, but it was survey. It would be like I have these ten items, would you take the survey and then I would write up and say of the twenty-five people I did, fifteen said this and ten said this. That may be informative, but I would say that even my pathetic little clinical intervention was getting much more toward scientific management. In nursing, nursing research can be encapsulated as studying what is effective.
Effective implies it is controlled, managed. I don’t know that I’ve got the words right. Nursing encompasses both a scholarship of discovery, which would be much more NIH research, what works under controlled conditions. You know, I do something and it’s, I have no idea who gets what, what behavioral
intervention, I modify things with, you know, in one group we do person-to- person, somebody else we call them up – you know, I’m making all of this up – but these are, these are the stuff of clinical interventions. But once you have the research, we’re also interested in if those findings, if we then apply them and they seem to work, what can we apply in real life conditions? (stop)It’s the scholarship of application, sort of the Boyer model in terms of Carnegie Foundation…
Scarpino: That’s Paul Boyer.
McBride: Ernie Boyer.
Scarpino: Ernie Boyer, okay, alright.
McBride: Ernie Boyer, Ernie Boyer.
Scarpino: Get that in the record.
McBride: Oh, what I was struggling with before was efficacy and effectiveness…
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: … and I knew effective was, I was saying it wrong, but efficacy is controlled;
effectiveness is more does IU Health, if they adopt that practice, is that
something that we can, that really works? And maybe what you studied has four parts to it, but you know, we have a budget, maybe could we do only three of those parts. And we do three parts and we see if three parts work because a lot of studies wind up being that kind of a thing. But I was schooled in that direction.
I really loved working there, but I still was tormented by the traditional. And I
always kid that Bill and I – Yale Philosophy Department asked Bill to stay on and teach and I always kid that it was the first year of teaching that we commiserated so much that we wound up getting married, but again, this is not the best
description of my marriage. But I still wanted to be, I loved my mother so much, I wanted to be like her. And so when I was pregnant, I remember sending off the summary of a grant that I had managed, a training grant, having a baby – the baby was born in June – and by the beginning of August, the nurse who had been my boss asked me if I’d come back and do part-time teaching.
Mahon: At which school?
McBride: At Yale.
Mahon: At Yale, okay.
McBride: I was ready to kiss her feet at this point. I had been home from mid-June to the beginning of August and I realized that I could not be my mother, that I had to work at another version of I will stay with those values, but how I will work them out are going to be different. I was fortunate because the woman who was the head of the department that I had been in, she wound up really very much shaping me. You know, every leadership thing that I did, she was the one who always sort of said here’s the next one. She was twelve years older than I was and it was sort of like, I always felt like – she had a daughter twelve years younger than me, so that it was always like, well – and then my children, she babysat my children who were twelve, one of them was twelve years younger.
So, we had different generations. Rhetaugh eventually became the Dean at University of Michigan and she was the Deputy Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, the first woman, the first woman of color and the first non- physician to be in that position.
Scarpino: What was her full name?
McBride: Rhetaugh Dumas – it’s R-H-E-T-A-U-G-H Dumas, D-U-M-A-S.
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: She’s originally from Mississippi and New Orleans, had been very active in civil rights and became just a dear friend. She’s the godmother to our second
daughter. But Rhetaugh asked me to come back to supervise Masters’ students.
You know, and again, in some ways it was hutzpah because here I am twenty-six years old with a Masters’ degree. I’ve had a lot of clinical experience of, of, I’ve gotten a Masters’, I’ve done some teaching, but then it was working with students and, for me, research has always been, I’ve always been a logical person, so specific scientific knowledge is about twenty percent, in my mind. Getting clear about what your problem is and what your question is and then trying to actually systematically study it and then look at your data and answer the question that you thought you were; it’s all logic to me. I would say the people I supervised, the specific scientific clinical knowledge that they had, I relied that they would know what they were doing, but for me it was, “Can I help you get clear about what you’re doing and the Masters’ studies?” By the time I was pregnant with my second child, Rhetaugh had gotten a grant from the National Institute of Mental
Health to run a series of psychiatric nursing institutes for the Northeast. She was a chair of a department, but she was also the chief – no, she wasn’t yet – Rachel Robinson was, Jackie Robinson’s wife was the first Chief Nurse Officer for the Connecticut Mental Health Center. Then Rhetaugh eventually took that position.
And Rachel, her husband was in declining health and one of her children succumbed to drugs and then when Jackie Robinson died, she took over the business. There was a lot of business component to it. She’s still alive.
Extraordinary. It’s his 100th birthday, so I look forward – and if you’ve seen the film on, that came out several years ago, Rachel Robinson is more beautiful than the actress. I mean, I thought the actor sort of got him, but the actress, it was like, “Nah, she is really much more beautiful and authoritative,” an interesting combination -- a woman that you would take very seriously and I thought in the movie it was sort of like, “You didn’t get her right; I want to tell you, you didn’t get her right.” But Rhetaugh asked me to then come back and run the grant for these institutes and what we did was to capture fifteen graduate programs in psych mental health nursing in the Northeast. We went as far down as Catholic University and the University of Maryland and then we went up to, oh, I guess Massachusetts would be the most. I don’t remember New Hampshire having much or Vermont or Maine at the time. I mean, that was a period, when I was there, that was a period when public universities in the Northeast corridor were not as developed as they are now. What we forget, I mean, what people don’t remember is that in the period that I was at Yale and even starting there, it was private education. It was the Ivies, but it was a Catholic education, Fairfield.
Those were the colleges and universities that actually had more academic reputation than did like the University of Connecticut or the University of Vermont. I mean, all of that has changed, but it was, I was so fortunate, you know. I feel like Herman Wells, he you know, always said he was lucky. I really was lucky to have worked with someone who knew my skillset, had a project that was perfect for my skillset, but it allowed me to combine work and family, but it also immersed me in the profession. Because I put together working with all of the graduate programs in the Northeast and they would come to Yale. We did four of those and it ended because I then – Bill got recruited to Purdue and I moved here to Indiana, but we would’ve probably gotten another grant, but at that time, it was not something –she had – there were things in her life that were happening. But I was so fortunate to stay really connected. And when I was at Yale, I was working on the grant at the beginning half-time, then three-quarters of the time, and by the time I left there, I was working full-time. But when you were managing a grant, it was just perfect because I had a secretary. She was one of the best people I’ve ever had because she was able to tell me how to use a secretary. And it was a project that I knew about, but I could manage and also not have to be in the office all the – the way you do with committee work and, you know, I was connected to the school, but I didn’t have the burden of a full-time tenure track position. Yet I know everybody that was going on – I knew what was going on. I even got a summer grant for what wound up being the manuscript that lead to The Growth and Development of Mothers, my first book. You know, if you look at the Forward in it, I thank Yale for the grant. And I thank Yale, I mean, in many ways, I thank Yale for saying it’s okay to have irreverent thoughts.
By the time we then moved to Indiana, I also could see where the world was going, that a Masters’ was not enough. There was one grant that I could not be the principal investigator for because I didn’t have a PhD.
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: That bothered me. It was sort of like, “It’s my idea; why can’t I be PI?” I don’t understand this. And then when we moved here, you know, in philosophy you have many fewer choices than you do if you’re an academic in nursing. Purdue had recruited Bill for over several years and he said – we agreed that we’d only go somewhere where I could see what I was going to do next. And I had already made contact with some of the people in the Department of Psychology and I had seen a couple of people who I had felt that they – and again, for, you know, when I think about it, I was a weird one to come because I didn’t have that much psychology at the undergraduate. I had psych mental health, but they took it and, you know, if I think about, I’ve been in a lot of constipated bureaucratic structures. They let me do it; they accepted me. The house needed so much work, the children needed to get established in school, but my first book did well, so I got a book contract for another book right away. So, the first year I was here, I actually was writing what then became Living with Contradictions: A Married Feminist, and Harper and Row was eager for that one. It’s probably, of all the things, it’s my orphan child because it came out in 1976 and I do think that it was ahead of its time. It didn’t do – it good reviews, you know, I could name you reviews in the Washington Post and stuff, but people didn’t know how to take this book. Anyway, the second year that I was here in Indiana, I started at Purdue in developmental psychology. I even got a training grant because I had been running a training grant and you had to – I knew the people who were running the training grants. I actually got a training grant for one nurse to study developmental psychology at Purdue for my junior and senior year and it came with tuition, stipend, even had a site visit…
Mahon: Oh, wow.
McBride: … because it’s a training grant…
Mahon: Yeah.
McBride: … and again, under the heading of what would never happen right now. When I finished, Purdue asked if I would stay on – well, the nursing program really wanted me, but they only had an Associate Degree program. They were moving to a baccalaureate program and I had only taught graduate education. I thought it was a poor fit; I didn’t think I’d been good for them and they would be good for me. Actually the Department of Psychology entertained hiring me and they thought they shouldn’t hire their own. I found out years later that there were two different factions about whether I was good enough for their department, and I did have a few of them tell me they should’ve hired me. Anyway, Indiana University was matriculating its first doctoral students, so they hired me. They already a doctoral training grant; they needed to develop the program. So, I was hired to really develop the doctoral program in psych mental health nursing, which I did with Jerri Laube who also had gotten a doctorate in psychology and had a psych background. Tragically, in the second semester I was at IUPUI, her husband died suddenly and then she decided that she wanted to go somewhere else after that. In some ways, she wanted a different environment and she moved and I wound up, because she moved – by the second year I was an Assistant Chair of the Department and then I became Chair of the Department.
Scarpino: And you moved to IUPUI in 1978, right?
McBride: Yes.
Mahon: Which is the same year that you got your PhD.
McBride: Yes.
Mahon: Yeah, okay, and you got your PhD in Developmental Psychology/Social Psychology.
McBride: Exactly, yeah.
Mahon: Okay. So, now I guess we’ll just jump to…
McBride: I did IUPUI.
Mahon: Yes, we’ll move to IUPUI. Like you mentioned, in 1978, you were hired by IUPUI to develop a psychiatric nursing program for the IU School of Nursing. You mentioned, in the pre-interview, that you developed coursework in the fall and taught that coursework in the spring.
McBride: We did the doctoral program – first of all, there are a lot of analytic things that you have to do in a doctoral program – higher-level statistics, methods, that kind of thing. For the Ph, for the, well, it was DNS program at the time, for the
doctoral program, but it was – it was a DNS program because the school didn’t think that the graduate school of Indiana University – there were very few
graduate schools of major universities that were willing to do a PhD in nursing in the late 1970s. They weren’t sure that nursing had a body of knowledge and so you can, strictly speaking, offer a professional doctorate within the school…
Scarpino: So, a doctor, a doctorate of nursing studies is a professional…
McBride: Is a doctorate of nursing science…
Scarpino: Science, sorry, it was professional ...
McBride: … is what we offered. It was a professional degree, but we who put it together, put it together to be a PhD program. There was a certain literature at the time about how you had to immerse in practice. That was the difference between a DNS and a PhD, but a lot of that was nursing trying to make the best of a
situation, that graduate schools around the country were not likely to approve the PhD. I mean, now it’s the PhD. And by the time we developed the PhD in nursing when I was Dean and it was, it was an opportunity to look at our doctoral program that already had a history and to upgrade it, but the graduate school actually was enthusiastic. They wanted us to be PhD because they wanted IUPUI to have more PhD programs, but it was a different political climate in the late 1970s. But I developed fifteen credits that wound up building into it pilot work for your dissertation, immersion in clinical experience, and the research project that would give you some hint about whether it would work for your dissertation and also some evaluation skills. It was both trying to incorporate
research methods for studies, but also building in evaluation that you do with practice models. Yeah, when I got there, the first semester it was planning the course for the second semester. In the second semester, not only did you teach that, but you developed the one for the next fall, but then you had somebody else coming in for the first one. Anyway, we had different cohorts, but it was, for a while there, we were only one semester ahead in planning before we actually wound up teaching it.
Mahon: What did IUPUI and the School of Nursing look like in 1978 when you arrived there?
McBride: Well, it was a school that was very committed to developing the graduate, the doctoral, the research, the body of knowledge. You have to understand, the whole literature is trying to address the issue of, you know, people sneered at any field that would be even applied knowledge. And I would argue sometimes doing applied studies are more complicated and difficult methodologically than, you know, rat studies that you can actually control for things. There was a great literature out there that sort of said essentially we need to move in this direction, but we didn’t have the models. I mean, we were trying really to get doctoral students to do research that some of the faculty had never done and some of the faculty had gotten tenured with Masters’ degrees. So, we only had, I don’t know, the amount of people with a PhD were small. Actually there were two or three of them that constituted the research department and they taught all of the statistics and research methods. I mean, it was pretty clear – well, it wasn’t pretty clear, it began to be clear that as you pushed for at least your tenure track faculty in nursing to be PhD prepared, scientifically prepared – it could be DNS, but they had to be scientifically prepared because scholarship in the same mold as what other people are doing, I mean, it’d be different. You look through the lens of your profession at the phenomenon of study, but you look at it with models that you’ve gotten from social sciences and sciences so that you might be doing manipulations that in part are say behavioral talk – I’m making that up. But some of it is also using measurements like pulse and blood pressure rate and glucose, whatever to sort of, so that you need to know about the glucose values in diabetes, but you also need to understand the social science, psychology, sociology. You know, in one way it was a period of great experimentation, I mean, you know, sort of ferment, but it also was a period, I would say, in the school where there faculty who were thinking, “My God, we’re changing one more time. I got tenure, now they’re telling me I need to get a doctorate; they’re telling me I can’t get a doctorate from the school that I’m teaching in.” There was a whole phenomenon, I would say, at that time we had an Associate Degree program and there was a lot of feeling in the field that you should not have it, but the community college system in Indiana was not developed until the 1990s with the Ivy Tech development. At that time, I believe, like when I came in 1978 – see, I wasn’t paying that much attention to the regional campuses then because I was a department chair and then I eventually got into research and I was on the IUPUI campus, but I did know that South Bend came in later so that whatever they had there. And I would hear about the regional campuses, and I know that Betty Grossman took great pride in being the biggest School of Nursing in the country. And one can be honest – nobody’s going to listen to this tape – I always was dubious about large as one of your great statements because I always thought that was sort of code for bureaucracy; and the world was changing,
selling people on large was not going to attract doctoral students. It was having faculty that were producing a scholarship that was valid and reliable by any standards and then, frankly, a faculty who would have external recognition of their authority so that they became fellows of the American Academy of Nursing.
They became membership in the National Academy of Medicine. They were on the NIH Cancer Institute’s Advisory Board. For me, and by the way, all of that is true of faculty in the School of Nursing. For me, and it’s very hard to, I can say, you know, I wasn’t this smart in 1978 or 1980 or 1982. I can say hindsight, that this was a period of movement in that direction, and how do you get – and I will say what we were urging the doctoral students to do, it did have the effect of faculty thinking they ought to do more and so that was in the air.
Mahon: Talking specifically about the psychiatric nursing program again, can you just describe the program that you helped to develop and what degrees were offered and…?
McBride: Well, it was the DNS.
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: And so it was the DNS for everybody…
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: … the Doctor of Nursing Science, but you could have a focus that would be more community oriented, and Beverly Flynn really helped develop that program particularly. You could have one that more on adult chronic illness. In psych mental health, the, it was not – my feeling was you get a baccalaureate degree to know a little bit about everything in the field. So, it’s like a smorgasbord. I think the task at the baccalaureate level because, not only are you going to school but you have a lot of clinical experiences, you have different mentors, you’re in different settings, that should help you get clear about what piece of nursing has your name on it. And then at that time, you would go to get a Masters’ degree, and that was an intense two-year program, forty-two credit hours I believe, intense, lots of clinical. But the focus of a Masters’ degree was in your specialty area, and we had different specialty areas, to learn a little bit about everything.
Now, I shouldn’t say a little bit about everything, but to get up to date in the specialty because you already had general knowledge at the baccalaureate level, now it was specialty knowledge. And the coursework then in psych was family therapy, group therapy, immersion in psychopharmacology. It was a lot of material. Now, when we started the DNS, the idea that I had certainly in developing it was that at the doctoral level, you now focus on some problem within your specialty. “ What don’t we know?” Research is always, “what do we know” and “what don’t we know.” And the, “what don’t we know?” should be relevant. I always say to people when they’re putting together things, “Did you answer the ‘so what?’ question?” because to me, it’s, “so what?” I mean, you know, we’ve all read dinky studies where we’ve said to ourselves, I hope they didn’t put a lot of money into that, and sometimes we don’t understand the study, but there are some dinky studies. The fifteen hours really were more less
emphasis on, “I’m going to tell you about the specialty, I’m going to work with you as you intensely.” For example, in the first course you had to take, I combined
history of psych nursing because I really do believe you ought to know where we’ve been, and the big thing that you had to do for that paper, your big
outcome, it was like eighty percent, was you had to do a review of the literature that would – it could be the review of the literature for the beginning of your dissertation. And it would be saying essentially, “This is what we know, and this is what we don’t know.” You need to understand that meanwhile in the field, the first edition of the Annual Review of Nursing Research is coming out – it’s now about thirty-five of them – but you’re beginning to get this background of literature in the field that should also help you see what a good review article looks like, and I had the guidelines for what is a good review article. I used the guidelines that I had learned in developmental psychology for what a good review article would be like. That was the first credits. Then basically, I had them for two semesters where they had to develop the problem and the research methods for the research pilot work they wanted to do, but they also had to do a clinical intervention to see if something worked that would be an evaluation so that, to my way of thinking, you were at least trying to think through for a research study what pilot work you would do. But this was embedded in a clinical experience where you were going to come in and try to understand the problem better and recommend an intervention that you would then even talk to the people in the clinic for. I’ll give you a concrete example of one of the early ones. We had a doctoral student -- I think in some ways she was maybe the first one I even – she was one of the two first people I worked with. She was interested in talking to people who commit -- teenagers who made a serious suicide attempt and did not die, and then going to talk to them about. There was no literature on, “How long did people think about this? Do we know any?” Because teenagers, it is a very vulnerable population. I don’t remember, of course, the specifics – but I thought it was just so interesting that she tackled something that there was no literature on and trying to find out and -- I deliberately didn’t use that they were not successful because I find that poor language, but it was, I think you should take any harm that you do to your body seriously. At the very least, you are in
distress and something needs to be done and understanding your mindset before this and what you did, especially if you do something that is – you know, there are a lot of teenagers that will cut themselves…
Mahon: Yeah.
McBride: … or hand or to pick. They do things – that wear long sleeves and then you don’t see it – but this would be something more dramatic. Joan Austin was one of my first doctoral students and she, I mean, she is like the (pause) she was in my first cohort of doctoral students. I worked with her closely. I remember convincing, saying to the woman who was our Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at the time, “I don’t really believe in hiring your own, but this is a live one,” and I don’t have that feeling about everybody, like “this is a live one.” “We will regret that we didn’t hire this person.” From my point of view, she had all of the things that go together. The other person who was in that first cohort is Vickie Champion.
Now, I did not work with her in her doctoral studies, she worked with somebody else. I then began to work with her when I was Dean of Research and the two of them were good friends and they had worked together and commiserated around doctoral education and all of that. But those were two people who wound up having by any measure; getting grants. Vickie was the first one who then got an NIH grant of bringing it into the school and well, I think both of them have
something like three decades of NIH success. And they’ve been successful interprofessionally because really, one of my beliefs about leadership, and this is different from own socialization so much, is that all the big issues get decided in interprofessional forums. Youou need to know how to focus and be involved in interprofessional forums and both of them worked with models that came from other – both of them, well, a lot of what we, I’ve always thought that doctoral program that Jerri Laube and I put together was amazingly like the current health psychology in the American Psychological Association. It came, it developed a little bit later, but if you look at, there are some similarities. I wouldn’t want to take that too far because I think nursing research, in some ways, is richer because the things that you study are much more varied. There are many more settings and all. You know, you can have a lot of theories about something working with Psych 120 freshman students, but it doesn’t work with forty-five- year old people suffering from something. The model seemed good, but when you apply it to then something that is a real-life issue that’s more complicated, it may, often it does work. I mean, that’s the exciting part, but sometimes you say to yourself, you know, “It just doesn’t apply, it just doesn’t work out.” Anyway, it was, you asked about what the place was like, I would say Associate Degree was separate, Baccalaureate was separate, Masters’ and Doctoral were
separate. And then the school, as a whole, also had seven other campuses. If you were at IUPUI – well, at that point, we only had, you know, I was somewhat oblivious to about every campus because we didn’t have every campus having an accredited Baccalaureate program until the fall of 1992, January of 1992.
(stopped here)
Scarpino: Can I ask you – because that was a situation where some of these students were taking at least beginning courses on the branch campuses and then finishing up at IUPUI?
McBride: . . .Well, what happened is we had a curriculum and they essentially borrowed the curriculum. Those faculty were part of IU School of Nursing and we had a pharmacology course that was taught by mail. You could do that one by mail, but we didn’t really have – it was only, it wasn’t, you know, the 1978 or 1980, it would not be until later on that we began to get one-way video, two-way audio, and then we had what we have. And then eventually, certainly as Dean with me, we then became very much web based. We were the first school to then go digital and actually we changed a great deal, with my own belief that that’s where the world was going. But I would say that IUPUI, at that time, was often people were, would go to other campuses to help them put together stuff and it was the first accreditation for South Bend was like under the Baccalaureate accreditation that we already had. You could only do that one, I think, within nursing and then you have to actually get accredited in your own right, or you have to get
accredited so that they go in and inspect you and talk to you and ask you
questions. But we had, I believe, at that time, Associate Degree education on six campuses. We did not have it in Southeast (PAUSE) and we didn’t have it in Bloomington – that was the other one, I couldn’t think of it.
Scarpino: The biggest and the smallest. (LAUGHS)
McBride: Southeast, Albany, New Albany and Bloomington did not have it, but the other six had Associate Degree. We had Baccalaureate education on seven and a half
because that was a period where you could do all of the pre-reqs on the Bloomington campus, but then for the junior and senior, you had to come up to IUPUI. In fact, that was one of the major issues that I had to deal with as Dean because in the beginning 1990s, we had so many people wanting to go into nursing, and they had two years of pre-reqs, but they only got accepted in their sophomore year and they were angry because we didn’t have that many spots.
We were big because we took one cohort in the fall, one in the spring – I think it was 100 each or something like that. I mean, if you get clinical placements for all them, it becomes an enormously complicated spreadsheet to get everybody all the different experiences. And eventually we then did a junior year in
Bloomington and then by the time I stopped being Dean, we had already admitted, and it was only after I left that we actually had a graduation there, but we had all four years. Now, that program is growing.
Scarpino: At Bloomington?
McBride: At Bloomington.
Scarpino: Okay. Why don’t you hit pause real quick?
Mahon: Okay.
Scarpino: Okay.
(PAUSE)
Mahon: Hit the pause again to play it, correct?
Scarpino: No, hit record.
Mahon: That’s right.
Scarpino: Flip it over and then make sure that the numbers are going…
Mahon: Okay.
Scarpino: … and the needles are bouncing. You’re good?
Mahon: Yep.
Scarpino: You’re good.
Mahon: Okay. So, we’re going to move on to the other positions that you held at IUPUI in the School of Nursing, and I want to set up my next series of questions by
reminding users of this interview of your administrative appointments:
Executive Associate, Dean for Research, School of Nursing, 1990 to 1991 Interim Dean, School of Nursing, 1991-1992
Associate Director for Academic Affairs, Department of Nursing Services, Indiana University Medical Center, 1992- 1996
