Angela McBride Oral History Interview

Mahon: Today is Friday, December 7, 2018. My name is Leeah Mahon. I’m the 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 Barron McBride in a conference room in the School of Nursing on the IUPUI campus. 

This interview is sponsored and funded by the Administration of IUPUI and is co-sponsored by the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence. 

We will place a more complete biography of Dr. Barron McBride with the transcript of this interview. For now, I will briefly offer the following biographical summary: 

Dr. Barron McBride earned her BSN from Georgetown University in 1962 as the valedictorian of her class. She then earned her MSN from Yale University in Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing in 1964, followed by her PhD in Developmental Psychology/Social Psychology from Purdue University in 1978. Finally, Dr. Barron McBride earned her Certificate from the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard University in 1992. 

In 1978, she accepted a position as Associate Professor of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing at the Indiana University School of Nursing in Indianapolis. Dr. Barron McBride moved through the ranks of the Nursing School, becoming a full professor of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing in 1981. Between then and her becoming Dean of the Nursing School in 1992, Dr. Barron McBride was Associate… 

McBride: My name is not hyphenated. So, it’s really McBride. 

Mahon and Scarpino: Okay. 

McBride: And I say that for alphabetical order when you’re doing things. I’m part of that old guard. People then later – I married too early to be hyphenated and so I just kept it as my middle name. 

Mahon: Okay. 

McBride: . . .And I’ve gone to hotels where they don’t have Angela McBride and then we look and I’m just sensitive to that. 

Mahon: That’s okay, it’s just, in the documents I looked at, it appeared that way on some of them, so I just… 

McBride: But it’s never hyphenated. 

Mahon: Okay. 

McBride: So, it’s just the middle – it would be like Angela Marie McBride… 

Mahon: Okay. 

McBride: … only I use my maiden name as my middle name. 

Mahon: Okay. Do you want me to re-start? 

Scarpino: No, we can fix that. It’s alright. 

Mahon: Okay. Dr. McBride moved through the ranks of the Nursing School, becoming a full professor of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing in 1981. Between then and her becoming Dean of the Nursing School in 1992, Dr. McBride was Associate and then Executive Associate Dean for Research in the IU School of Nursing and Interim Dean of the Nursing School. In 1992, along with her appointment as Dean, Dr. McBride was named Distinguished Professor of Nursing. She stepped down as Dean in 2003. Dr. McBride’s specializations include Women’s Health, Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing, Leadership and Career Development, and Quality Patient Safety. Outside of nursing, she also taught classes in Philanthropic Studies, Women’s Studies, Psychiatry and Psychology at IUPUI. 

Dr. McBride has an impressive record of publication, including several books and monographs beginning with Psychiatric Nursing and the Demand for Comprehensive Health Care, an edited volume published in 1972, and The Growth and Development of Mothers, a single-authored monograph published in 1973 by Harper & Row. 

McBride: Book, not monograph. 

Mahon: I’m sorry. The Growth and Development of Mothers was translated into several languages including Spanish and Hebrew and reissued three times. Her last two book-length publications were The Growth and Development of Nurse Leaders and a multi-edited volume Nursing Leadership: A Concise Encyclopedia in which she also authored several entries. In addition to her book-length publications, Dr. Barron McBride published more than seventy book chapters and several dozen refereed journal articles between 1967 and 2017. 

Dr. McBride’s vita lists numerous honors, including a designation as a “Living Legend” by the American Academy of Nursing. She was also elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association’s Division 35, which is the Psychology of Women, in August 1991. The Growth and Development of Mothers was named as one of the “Noteworthy Books” of 1973 by the New York Times Book Review. The Growth and Development of Mothers was also picked by the American Journal of Nursing as one of the best books of 1973. The Growth and Development of Nursing Leaders won the 2011 PROSE Award in the Academy of Nursing and Allied Health. 

Dr. McBride supervised 30 dissertations between 1981 and 2010. She has an impressive leadership record, serving not only as Dean of the Nursing School for 

11 years, but also as the President of the Honor Society for Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International, from 1987 to 1989; on the National Advisory of Mental Health Council and Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration from 1987 to 1991; on the Advisory Committee of NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health from 1997 to 2001; and as President of the American Academy for Nursing from 1993 to 1995. 

Dr. McBride retired from the Indiana University School of Nursing in 2005, becoming Distinguished Professor and University Dean Emeritus. 

Before we begin the interview, I’m going to ask your permission to do the same things you just agreed to do in writing, just in case the paperwork you signed gets misplaced. I’m asking 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 and that the Directors of IUPUI Special Collections and Archives and the Tobias Center may make the interview and verbatim transcript available to their patrons which may include posting all or part of the audio recording and the transcript to their respective websites. Can we have your permission to do these things? 

McBride: You have my permission. 

Scarpino: Shall we hand it off here? 

Mahon: Yep. 

Scarpino: Okay. As we said when the recorder was off, we’re going to talk to you about leadership, and that’s my part. Because this interview is co-sponsored by both the IUPUI Administration and the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, I’d like to start by asking you how you define leadership. 

McBride: Leadership, for me, is inspiring and catalyzing others to work together for a common purpose, to achieve organizational mission in a world that keeps changing. Values don’t change, but how those values will get expressed are going to be affected by the times that you live in. So, you can never stay the same. Being creative has to be part of your view of achieving organizational mission. 

Scarpino: As a leader, how did you go about inspiring and catalyzing those who followed you? 

McBride: I was Interim Dean for a year and a half before I was officially named Dean, so altogether, I was Dean for twelve and a half years. And I would say during that time, it was a period of lots of distress within all eight campuses because when I was Dean of the School, in fact, the title was University Dean eventually because it was a University-wide school. The President at that time subscribed to the view of one university with eight front doors… 

Scarpino: I remember that. 

McBride: … and so I was Dean of a school on eight campuses. We had Associate Degree Education on six, Baccalaureate on eight, we had a Masters’ program, we had a doctoral program, and we had a postdoc program. That interim period was a time of great unhappiness, I would say, throughout the system. We were headed towards a common accreditation, there were people who did not want that. And part of being a leader at that time was to try to be as inclusive as I could. I’m a great believer that you don’t argue about what you – I don’t think we have to be the same on eight campuses. Why argue about what we don’t have to be the same on? And actually one of the things that I did as part of leadership, I think, was to wind up engaging the faculty on all eight campuses with their notion of where we were one and where we were many. It was, we did, we got -- you know, just like in good research, you get all the items of what people think might be one and many, and then do several cycles of asking people to winnow it down so that you wind up beginning to have agreement. And I would say that one of the things that I did to at least bring enough working together that we achieved all of our goals was, as Dean, to also think through the difference between the University-wide administrative structure and the Indianapolis-Bloomington corridor because those were the two research campuses. Those were the two campuses where you wanted to be one of the top NIH research schools. I wound up changing the structure so that we had -- part of the idea of, “let’s work together for common purpose,” was to make sure that meetings were geared to- we did not just talk about Indianapolis and Bloomington when we were talking system-wide. And there what we had in common was a tremendous commitment to undergraduate education. That was what bound us together. I wound up every year doing both a State of the University School address and a State of the Corridor address for the Indianapolis-Bloomington campus because as we got some greater clarity, the idea was to -- we had different goals. We had different outcome measures. And one of the things I believe about leadership, especially if it’s a big complicated matrix organization, is that the leader has to stay on message. That doesn’t mean you say the same thing all the time or people will make fun of you and you become a joke. But I think you need to know if you’re with a twenty-five-cent crowd, how to use twenty-five-cent words; if you’re with a $1.98 crowd, you use $1.98 words; and when you’re with a $10.98 crowd, metaphorically speaking, you use $10.98 words. I’m being a little bit funny, but I think it’s staying… (LAUGHING) 

Scarpino: Well, you’re talking about tailoring your message to your audience. 

McBride: … it’s staying on message for what are the goals for what piece of the organization you’re leading at that time. And actually, at one point, because I chaired, before we divided this up, if I, there was no one to really support Indianapolis because I was both the head for Indianapolis and for the University-wide. And at that time, the School has gone on and changed. We created an Executive Associate Dean structure, and my goal for her was you have to argue with me in these University-wide meetings for the goals of Indianapolis and Bloomington. Particularly when they were coming from a different lens. I would say I think we were able in those -- every year our outcomes moved in the direction. System-wide we handled -- when Ivy Tech really became a full community college in the 1990s, we knew that associate degree education for us was something that was dated. And at that point, working with all the campuses, I wanted all the campuses to then have three versions of the Baccalaureate 

Degree. One is the generic program – you finish high school and you go on to college and you want to be a nurse and you go on in much more lockstep. But we also had, for people who had gotten their RN, which is not an academic degree; that’s just licensure – if they had gotten it as a result of going to an Associate Degree program or a hospital program, we had a BSN completion program which we did a lot. Most of it was web-based, and it was very creative. My colleagues were enormously creative in coming up with web-based education to help people with a completion. And then we started, during my tenure as Dean, an accelerated second -- degree program. This would be for people who went to college and got a degree in Art or Sociology or History and decided that actually this wasn’t quite what they wanted. Particularly, if you have more life experience, I think, and I hate to say this because I wish it were not true, but I still think in 2018, if you’re a young man of 18 saying you want to become a nurse, you take an awful lot of razzing from your friends. At the age of 28, you may look at nursing and the range of career options that are there and say, “You know, I’ve always been interested in helping people, there is such a variety to the profession, I think I want to go into another program to add…” And I would say that accelerated second degree program, we had wonderful students. We did have more men in it; we did have actually, I don’t know if we kept it up, but we had much more diversity of all kinds. We had people who had been stockbrokers, we had people who had been in theater, we had people in sociology. And I would say, all of those fields – nursing is such a big, and in fact, I think part of my leadership was to tackle in not only at IU School of Nursing, but everything that I did at the national or even international level, changing the stereotype of what nursing is because it’s not a cookie-cutter profession. In fact, when I used to do the welcoming of new students, it took me several years to get my schtick right because if you only have two or three minutes, what can you say that would actually be useful to people? I wound up developing three messages. One was: Even if you came to IU School of Nursing because it was the public university and your parents reminded you that it was cheaper than the private, I want you to know it’s a nationally ranked school. You may not have been as aware of it as you applied because it was your state school and you just didn’t know that much about it. My second message was: Treat your basic nursing program as a smorgasbord because licensure really, when you become an RN, it’s a statement of you know a little bit about everything in nursing. And I don’t again want to be glib, but in some ways the RN is you know a little bit about all the basics. In fact, we go on in Masters’ and doctoral programs – we call it certification because that is a statement that you have knowledge in a specialty area – and those are different. Those are both laudatory that, you know, there are many, many, many jobs where you don’t need specialization, you actually need basics. But I wanted people to understand that if they didn’t like a piece of nursing that did not mean that they would not like nursing because, again, part of the stereotype is, and I used to get very tired of it, when people would just begin by telling me they don’t like blood or they don’t like taking people to the bathroom. And it would be like, “you know, you certainly have reduced my field to the basic denominator.” I mean, it seems to me, and you know, I would then say to people you know, “I’m not fond of blood and smelly work just does not appeal to me all that much either.” I actually appreciate how important it is, but I wanted people to understand that you have to find your spot and that’s really true of all leadership. And I wanted people to really think through what piece had their name on it. By the way, the third thing that I would say in the orientation was I 

wanted people to understand that the learning had changed because we were upper division and people had done the first two years, which is a series of humanity, social sciences and sciences. And I would always begin by saying, “I suspect you were like me and you stored it in your short-term memory so that you could pass the exam. Now the reality is application to complex human experience of all the things that you learned and you’re going to sort of regret, as I actually wound up doing, that you were not as awake when some subject matter came up because this patient has a lab value that you know is not good.But you’re really not sure what it means to not be good and it’s putting it together.” And my hope was, I really do think because it’s a different kind of learning when it’s a -- when you are an applied field; and sometimes that gets a bad rap, like you’re second best. But the reality is there’s enormous artistry in applying all the different pieces of knowledge. And I will tell you, I have never worked with a patient and that person’s family without some piece of psychology or some piece of thinking about spirituality, or some piece of basic physiology, nutrition, functional ability. What do I remember about muscles working that applies in this situation? That in fact, is I think the wonder and the magnificence of nursing. 

Scarpino: I’m going to circle back here. I started by asking you how you define leadership, and you have articulated a pretty highly developed sense of what it means to be a leader. 

McBride: Yes. 

Scarpino: Do you have any notion of when you first began to see yourself as a leader? 

McBride: Oh, I was raised not to have a big head. (LAUGHTER) You know, I am part of -- I went to Catholic education from first grade through college and I was raised to be a servant leader. The model of servant leadership, when I wound up reading about it, was not unfamiliar to me, but girls did not go to college when I was in high school. I mean, I went to a very good academic high school. But I will tell you, it was a period where you either commercial track and you were going to become a secretary, or you were academic and you were going to become a K through 12 teacher, a nurse or a nun, in which case you were going to become a K through 12 teacher or a nurse. The world of larger opportunity was not there. And I worked as a nurses’ aide all through high school. From the age of thirteen, I worked every summer and weekends, because I knew, I really knew I wanted to go to college. I wanted to be college-educated. I’m not even sure -- well, partly that came from an immigrant background. My parents both mourned the education they were not able to have for financial reasons. My mother did not get to be a teacher. She finished high school nighttime. My father courted her by walking to the bus and picking her up and meeting her after night school after she worked during the day. And my father, who always wanted to be a surgeon, never finished high school and he got a GED at the age of 60. I thought that was courage in action. I came from a family where the message was always that education was your future. It was going change you. And I will also tell you I learned early on, as I became more my own person, that education was the way for me to strike out. I could do many things if I convinced my parents it was in the name of education. You could move away from home in the name of education. I think becoming educated to me was always tied up with some view of leadership. And then, I don’t know when I first noticed it, probably was I think 

really even in high school, that everybody got the same 24 hours. And some people never got things done, they never had fun - you know, it was sort of like every time I saw somebody who seemed to like what they were doing and they liked their lives. I tried to figure out what made them work, what made them that way. And I will tell you probably that, that is the theme of my life. I have constant -- now we talk of it mentoring, and I’ve done my own share because I’m a great believer that if you get mentored and people are invested in you and coach you, you can get further faster. I had to decode it myself. So I have had this lifelong interest in what makes for effective people and I’ve sort of pieced together elements. I think I’ve already said what they are, you know, that some how you’re effective. You actually know a job and know how to get it done. 

Scarpino: Did it ever occur to you that most people don’t think that way? 

McBride: No, I thought most people thought that way. (LAUGHING) 

Scarpino: I’m listening to you talk and describing your Polish-Catholic upbringing… 

McBride: Polish-Catholic upbringing. Nancy Pelosi and I went to high school together. We’re the only two people who went to college in Washington. 

Scarpino: Did you know her? 

McBride: Oh, yes. (LAUGHTER) I mean, it was a small all-girl Catholic high school. I knew her husband before she knew him because he was in my year at Georgetown at the School of Foreign Service. 

Scarpino: Are you still in touch? 

McBride: Let’s just say, if we were in the same room, she would know who I was. At this point, her world is so much larger than mine, but yes. I mean, if Paul were here, he would say, “Angela, what are you doing?” (LAUGHING) And I did keep up with her after high school and then, you know, her own life is just so full that -- but I have an autographed copy of her autobiography that she wrote that came out right at the time sort of that she became Speaker, the first time. 

Scarpino: Here’s what occurred to me when you were talking. You grew up in a Polish immigrant Catholic culture that imagined limited opportunities for women, and I actually went to a high school where you were either on the, you know, the work track or the college track. So, one of the options, whether you were a nun or a civilian, was nursing. As your life went forward and changed and your world view changed and you became a leader and a professional, you were still building on one of those options that was really a narrow range of options that was available to you when you were a young woman. . . 

McBride: At the time, you know, I gave the speech at my high school… 

Scarpino: In other words, you picked up the ball and ran with it. 

McBride: Well, I was very affected by the women’s movement of the 1960s. I graduated from college before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique. 

Scarpino: 1963. . . 

McBride: It was only in the 1960s that I not only read her book, but I, more importantly, read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, especially that second half of the book. The first half is very dated, but the second half is this erudite consideration of the roles of women. I married a philosopher of social/political philosophy. We actually do have dinner conversations where we might talk about some of these things. In fact, I will tell you that one of the recurrent themes in our life is every now and then I struggle with something and I come up with this idea that I think is just brilliant, it’s like I have a new insight because I actually taught what I believe to be was the first women’s health graduate course at IUPUI and probably at IU. 

Scarpino: Do you remember when you did that? 

McBride: It would have been probably 1980-ish? 

Scarpino: You were born into a culture and a society that imagined pretty limited roles for women… 

McBride: Right. 

Scarpino: … and you… 

McBride: I never liked it. I never liked that part. I didn’t like the constraints. 

Scarpino: … but the women’s activists that you were reading, and the ones that you just mentioned, really kind of run counter to Catholic doctrine. Did you ever struggle with that? 

McBride: I did. I just think religion is more complicated. I think Catholicism is very patriarchal to this day. I think it’s the tradition that I love. I value very much my Catholic background. But for me, religion and spirituality had to become more complicated too. It is, you know, I think that human beings, to the extent that we think the larger thoughts, the larger spiritual thoughts, I think we put too much of human beings into it. So, God the Father being a man with a long beard, you know, it’s like I gave that one up. We have no -- I think I believe in the meaning behind some things, I believe in the notion of prime cause, I believe that Jesus Christ was a person who transformed the ethic of the world in a very good way. But I actually think that if you take Jesus Christ very seriously, you can be as radical as you want. I think that there are a few nuns on buses who stayed in Catholicism who are like my heroines, and I think Pope Francis is still a little stuck, but he’s got sort of the right idea that love is the answer and not getting too hung up on any one of the things. But many of the things that are now Scripture, they came up with them in the 19th Century and if you look at the historical reality at the time -- We also had a very dear friend who was on the committee put together in the late 1950s, early 1960s, for looking at the pill for contraception for the Catholic Church. And I can tell you that the committee recommended that it be approved and then the Catholic hierarchy decided that it would not be tolerated. If you know those things and if you think larger thoughts, I like to think that I am not a black and white person. I have a big tent; I can hold many different beliefs. That doesn’t mean that I’m wishy-washy. It just means that 

when I put together my world view, it is complicated. And that really gets back to leadership because I think leadership is not being a knee-jerk. It is, I mean, you know, leadership becomes really interesting of how do you maintain morale for a community and build the community while pushing it and titrating the amount of change that people will be comfortable with because people are not comfortable with change. How do you change, what are the expectations? That was one of the biggest ones for my field because we had people who had become tenured professors who did not have doctorates, and yet the profession had changed and said you needed a doctorate. And how are you nurturing and mentoring to people who are in a different piece of time, and you’re trying as a leader to be in the avant-garde, at least for your period of time to push it? I think it’s a complicated position and the more you can understand different points of view -- and I don’t mean just being politically correct, I mean do you understand the teaching mission? You actually understand how important research is to a university, you understand how important service is, and so that -- in fact, I’m giving you part of my answer for how I rallied everybody because Ernest Boyer wrote Scholarship Reconsidered just about the time that I became Interim Dean and then Dean. And I decided that that Carnegie Foundation for Teaching manuscript was my key to moving the school. Because if I looked at everybody, they were either the scholarship of teaching, the scholarship of service or the scholarship of research. Now, everybody was supposed to do a little bit of everything, but there were people who were truly excellent in each one of those. And then if you recall, the year after Boyer’s book came out, his monograph, the next book that came out from them was – I can’t remember the exact title – but scholarship evaluated. It basically said no matter what kind of scholarship you do, you should be doing the same thing that is keeping up with your field, articulating, doing work that is subject to public refereeing, which gets you into refereed presentations and refereed publications. It gets you into looking for grant money. I tried to make it that no matter -- and in fact, we completely revamped, during my early years, all of the tenure promotion exemplars of excellence to be mindful that you still had to have outcomes, but each kind of scholarship was going to be valued, treasured -- and the leadership that was required was, I think, to come up with some scheme that would somehow cover everybody in valuing them, but also helping them move to the next level of where they needed to go. 

Scarpino: We’re going to actually ask you a lot of questions about your time as Dean, but I want to follow up in the leadership context. . . 

McBride: Yes. . . 

Scarpino: You’re inspired by Boyer’s work and you just laid out his message, so to speak, and you then… 

McBride: And it gave me power. There’s nothing like an external, highly regarded organization that says this is it, to when then you say to faculty, “Well, this has come out, what do you think of it? Can we use these ideas?” 

Scarpino: And that’s where I was going with this. Once you were thinking that it was important to recast the tenured promotion guidelines for teaching, research and 

service, as the leader then, you kind of had to sell that to your faculty, and to the administration. . . 

McBride: Yes, and they were dubious because I had been the Dean of Research. I had been the Associate Dean of Research. . . 

Scarpino: Well, that’s where I’m going with this. . . 

McBride: You know, at least nursing was a good preparation and let me tell you that because being in academia, I’ve always known that people in clinical and hospital facilities are always suspicious of those who teach, that they probably didn’t really -- they don’t really know nursing or they wouldn’t have left it and become faculty and scientists. I think that understanding that, you know, you’re always, people are always a bit dubious about whether you are understanding real life, and I think faculty are like that. I was that way myself as a faculty member. Do you understand the range of what is going on? And, I mean, I -- what I also did was to really – when I say I valued, it wasn’t just something in my mind; it was cheering on, showcasing. One of the brilliant people I had on the faculty was Diane Billings who was a master of IT. Our whole move toward web-based, she had vision, and somebody like Marge Applegate, who was brilliant at evaluation. I think a lot of it has to do with looking at what people have and saying you know, “You are so terrific in this area,” and then helping them, well, making the connection to other people that how this is important to all of us because somebody being good at evaluation is good no matter what aspect of our school you’re concerned with, somebody being very good at IT. And we were the first school to go digital. I don’t know if you know that, on the IUPUI campus, and we did that in part, and I say this with great humility, I am lousy at IT. I am always afraid I am going to touch the wrong button, but I do get it. I got that it was transformational, that this was – I’m a great believer, as a Dean, that if you’re working in a larger environment like a university or a campus and you see big trends, and you should be reading so that you have some idea what those trends are, and there are big trends that you think really have legs. They’re larger ideas, they’re going to be transformational that sometimes to become the beta site gets you extra money at the beginning from the administration, and so I had understood that principle. I think that there were times when Jerry Bepko and Bill Plater thought I understood that principle perhaps even a little bit more than they wanted me to. But I actually thought that while I was not good in this area, that actually if you took that whole movement, informatics, that it was -- I could see where it was going. It was sort of like I can’t go there, but I can see where you’re going. And I think, I don’t know if faculty would say this about me, but I think I tried if I saw where you were going to do as much as I could to help you get where you were going. But then also to connect it to some larger message that would be like the State of the Corridor Campus address, or the State of the School address because I think also – I ran a T32 grant – it’s an NIH training grant – before I, well, while I was Dean and then before. And one of the things that I learned -- and we were one of the earlier doctoral programs. We got a T32 institutional research training grant early on. I saw the power of – I didn’t do it at the beginning; I was smart enough at the beginning of that grant to get an advisory board that was interdisciplinary because the School of Nursing didn’t have that much research strength, but we were collegial, and we were connected to pieces of the campus where people had really good CVs and grant records. It 

was a good strategy so that it would have Chris Callahan with the Aging Center, Gary Bond with Rehab Psychology when he was starting. I mean, we really had a good advisory group. I’ll tell you the most transformative thing that we did though with our pre-docs and when we post-docs was the advisory group would meet with the – everybody who was in training at the beginning of the semester, at the end of the semester, in the fall and at the end in the spring and it was an update. You had to put together a statement of where you were – what grants, what monies, what publications, whatever you were doing, and the interaction upped everybody’s game. People would get a training grant thinking, “If I can publish one article ever in my life, it will be a miracle.” By the end of it, they are telling you that they are coauthoring or they’re on this grant or they’re doing something, and it’s sort of the principle of getting people engaged, showcasing it. A lot of it is cheerleading, but I don’t mean this in a mindless way. I just think people need to believe that you have confidence in the excitement of what you’re doing. 

Scarpino: What had become a really transformative emphasis on research in the Nursing School, you were the leader of that movement. I just wanted to get that in one place. So, I want to ask you two more questions about leadership and then I’m going to hand off to Leeah. So, you talked earlier about some of the stereotypes that exist about nursing as a profession. The question that I have is, and you wrote the book which we’re going to talk about later, The Growth and Development of Nursing Leaders published in 2011, when did you begin to link nursing and leadership? When did those two things begin to connect in your mind? 

McBride: The earliest thing that I have written on my CV is something about leadership in about 1971, but it started before that. It was, well, I was the first officer of Georgetown University’s Mask and Bauble, which is the theater group. So, you asked if I had leadership, I guess the fact that I became an officer in a Jesuit university of the long – actually, it’s one of the older theater groups in the country… 

Scarpino: Would you tell us again the name of that group? 

McBride: Mask and Bauble. 

Scarpino: Okay, got it. 

McBride: But it’s Georgetown’s drama group. . . 

Scarpino: Yeah, yeah. 

McBride: And I was -- I did things in college but it was always, I didn’t think any of it was like a big deal. But I honestly - Simone de Beauvoir’s book where she talks about the masculine -- what has been the feminine and the masculine principle. Immanence is how she describes the feminine principle, which is much more static, it is much more doing. And the masculine is transcendence, it goes beyond boundaries, it is future seeking. Immanence exists in the here and now; transcendence exists in the future. And I would say that the stereotype of nursing had always been that nursing exists in the here and now and the caring 

for in the here and now, the following of orders, which it’s true, physicians prescribe medical treatments and typically nurses implement them, but what nurses do above and beyond that piece of their responsibilities is large. It’s a constant assessment. It’s constantly facilitated functional ability. It is helping people understand how to put together changes in their life situation because they now have this problem that isn’t going to go away, but they’re going to have to be living with. There is a leadership in that. And then I always believed that what nurses did, because people tended to think it was following orders, that it was anti-intellectual when I thought it was actually enormously complicated and actually that actually prescribing a drug was easier than actually working with people to get them and their families to accept maybe a lifestyle change or whatever. When de Beauvoir talked about transcendence, I realized, because I had actually bought a lot of the literature – you know, I finished high school in the 1950s, so this is when people were talking about the man as the head of the family and the woman as the heart. And I will tell you that I fully understood by the 1960s that all human beings needed a head and a heart and that one being the head and other one being the heart was not going to work because human beings, just the very act – I mean, my book, The Growth and Development of Mothers, which was the first book that was well-regarded to look at motherhood in light of the women’s movement, it actually takes issue with static roles of motherhood. And for me, the static roles of motherhood, because often nursing was seen as she was the mommy and the physician was the daddy, that those roles needed to be completely rethought, and once, in the 1960s, my mind opened up to, “Lord I’ve been swallowing an awful lot of stereotype.” I never liked it because I sort of, I mean, I can tell you, all through high school I resented that I could not get a job in the park system that paid more money per hour and got you a tan by the end of the summer because only boys could get those jobs. I came into high school with that belief and, you know, I grew up in a period where ads were jobs for women and jobs for men and all the interesting ones, you know, the Mary and Martha story. I knew which one I identified with. I wanted to be in there talking with Jesus and not in the kitchen making the dinner, and so that was my, that was who I was, and the women’s movement opened it up. There was a whole literature that then came into being and there is something about a fresh -- a paradigm shift. It’s like the glacier moves and all of the things that didn’t seem quite right, or you didn’t have the right thought, you begin to realize that you can have your own thoughts. And for me, that also then has a lot to do with the whole issue of leadership, and what do you do in a situation and how do you think about it? And I probably, I would say, that I am, I give more thought to these things than most other human beings. I do not work on automatic pilot. I may look casual… 

Scarpino: Hahaha, I’m not taking that one. 

McBride: … but I rarely am. (LAUGHTER) 

Scarpino: This is a sound recording, so I’ll say you don’t look casual. So I’m going to hand off. 

Mahon: Okay. So, that was a good segue. You mentioned before that the women’s rights movement and feminism have constituted a common thread or an influence throughout your life. In several places, you’ve described yourself as a 

feminist. Now we would like to talk to you about women’s rights and feminism and see how your views on those subjects may have influenced the way that you approach leadership and your career and your life more generally. My first question is: Do you remember when you first began to think of yourself as a feminist? 

McBride: Oh, you know, the word feminist has always been loaded because it was loaded in the 1960s when Friedan wrote her book. I always used to reframe arguments. If somebody said to me what you just did, I would say, “I actually believe all human beings should be fully actualized and we should care about other human beings being fully actualized.” And from my point of view, that construction covers both the traditional and the feminist. The traditional meaning that you have more communal, you have more family oriented, you care about not just yourself, you’re not just guided by your individual desires. But I also believe greatly that self-actualization, that’s going to vary. I mean, what people want -- not everybody wants a career. Not everyone has a lot of energy to be ambitious to take -- I mean, we vary so much, but I actually think that’s the beauty of people, but I do think that whatever constitutes what’s important to you to realize has got to be part of the mix. It’s got to be part of the mix of a marriage. I mean, I don’t think you can have a partnership with another man or woman without it somehow being good for both. Now, when you say it’s got to be good for both, there are many times when you say okay, we’ll do it, we’ll do what’s important to you right now, but I’m keeping track. And you hope you don’t have a tit-for-tat relationship. But nevertheless, you’re keeping track so that the next time something comes up, you are --and I also do think, I mean, I went through every anguish that a mother who works outside the home can feel. I can also tell you that with the gift now of hindsight, I anguished more than I had to because, for one thing, combining worlds has made me more interesting to my children. I mean, they call me for career advice as much as they call me because something bad happened to them. I mean, and I did work part-time when the children were very young, but I was fortunate, I mean, I say this again with the gift of hindsight. I was teaching at Yale when my first child was born and I had been on the faculty for three years. And I actually had quit and written a final grant report on something I was working on just around my due date because I was going to be to my child what my mother had been to me. That was my belief. This is 1967. And two months after I quit – she was born in June – my chair of the department called in August and said, “Would you do some part-time work for us?” And I just about kissed her feet because at the time, I had a skill already that they needed somebody to do – I actually did some Masters’ supervision during that time – and then when my second child was, well, the woman who was the department chair had then eventually gotten a grant. And for the next few years, including the time that I had my second child, I was working on a grant which I was the manager for, but that meant that I had a defined role. I didn’t have to do all the juggling that a tenure track faculty member does. And it also was a grant that came with secretarial support. I actually had, and the great fortune for me is even when I worked part-time, I worked part-time in an area that built my CV, that actually – I wasn’t smart enough at the time to say, “Oh, isn’t this cleaver?” I mean, now, in hindsight I say. I’m so glad they knew me and said, “Would you manage this grant and it’s only half-time and you can, you know, you can do things.” But in fact that was the period that was one of the, that was a great period of my own life negotiating 

whether I was going to be like my mother and not once I had children (pause) because I realized that she lived in a different world than I did. She had a different background and I was going to have to work out something else and how I was going to combine things. But because I was really at a university at the time where the people knew me, it wasn’t – I am actually like a footnote in some nursing history. I probably have taught in the smallest nursing program at that time and then I’ve taught in the largest school at that time. I’ve always kidded that I’m Goldilocks who wants a medium-size bed. But because it was small when I was at Yale and people knew me, they were enormously supportive to what I was thinking I was capable of doing at that time. In fact, I got a grant from Yale one summer to write what was the first draft of The Growth and Development of Mothers because it was a project that I was interested in doing. And I wound up -- you know, I’ve never had a book go so well actually. When you know nothing, sometimes God is good. That book got published because my husband had lunch with a very distinguished professor of philosophy who didn’t want to be by himself when a publisher was coming to town for lunch. And this – I believe it was Harcourt Brace at the time – at the end of the lunch, the man said to both this professor and my husband, “Well, do you have any books that you can give me?” And my husband said, “No, but I have this wife who has this book.” And he said, “Well, it’s not up my line, it’s not a philosophy book, but let me take a look, I’ll get it to the right person.” And actually, that person got it to somebody, it got a review by someone very distinguished at Harvard who said, “This is an irreverent treatment of a subject that usually doesn’t have this kind of analysis, but it’s an interesting book, but it’s not a Harcourt Brace book.” So, with that particular commentary, it wended its way to Harper & Row and I found what was then the best editor I will have ever had, and that’s when people still did editing. She gave me comments on the first draft that unbelievably made the second draft better. And, you know, I have now lived many more decades and I have done a lot of editing, I now can appreciate how good she was. She was not heavy-handed because you’re a tender soul when it’s your first book and… 

Scarpino: It’s like your first baby, isn’t it? 

McBride: … it’s like your first baby. And actually it came out within three weeks of its debut. It was on page three of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, which I think at the time I thought, “Oh, this is my lot in life.” I tell you it’s been downhill since. And I will even tell you that the Review said that I had a doctor in psychology, which I did not, which I eventually then got so I would not make the reviewer a liar. It was one of the co-founders of Ms. Magazine who did the review. Anyway, I digress. But we were talking about women’s… 

Scarpino: I’m going to insert myself and ask you who the co-founder was in that handbag? Who was the co-founder of Ms. Magazine that reviewed your book? 

McBride: I knew you were going to ask and I’m having a (INAUDIBLE PHRASE), but was, it’ll come to me. 

Scarpino: Okay. . . 

McBride: . . .I lose names that I don’t think about too often. Oh, this is awful because she was so – I need to Google it. 

Mahon: It’s okay. If you remember at any point, you can just back in and tell us. I’m just going to go back… 

McBride: And I wound up, by the way, I wound up then writing a couple pieces for Ms. Magazine along the way. If you look at that CV, you see that they’re a couple of pieces in it and that was sort of the connection. 

Mahon: Ye. You did talk a little bit about the way that you define feminism that you would have been considered a feminist for a large part of your life. What about -- was there any inner struggle with part of you that was shaped by growing up in a Polish-Catholic culture in Baltimore? 

McBride: . . .Oh, of course! Tortured, tortured, I still am. You know, I always kid to my husband that I’m merely a crapshoot. You never know when this radical piece of me is going to emerge and when somebody who insists, as I have this year on putting more Christmas stuff up because mothers put that up when their children come to visit, is something that we are to do hell or highwater. That’s not a very good example of being traditional, but that tug between – I just don’t, I think it’s called the human experience. See, I think you’re always going to be torn between what would be your own ambition and desires, what is good for your partner, what is good for your children, and you juggle. I have, in recent years, conducted sessions on juggling work and family that have been sell-out crowds, but I’ve done it with people much younger than me. In fact, I did this about three years ago with a woman who is a second accelerated degree coming into nursing. She’s at Hopkins. She is in a lesbian relationship and I don’t know which one of them has the children, but we did a session because we talked about it as multigenerational and people would ask, the people who were now pre-docs and post-docs, would ask things like: “So how do you handle when you’re trying to get a grant and it’s Christmastime coming up and your family isn’t going to see you and you’re not doing what they expect you to do?” And my colleague answered by she then goes to the family and says, “I don’t know if you can get behind this, but the grant comes in,” explains why it is important, explains her absence, explains the help that she expects from the family. And says, you know, “I will emerge on December 24th and this is how it’s going to look.” And it was a very family-engaged process. And somebody asked me, “So how would you have handled the same thing?” I said, “I would have plowed through,” because at the time it didn’t occur to me that I could even say to people, “Now, this is the help I’m expecting,” because I was part of that generation where if you said you needed help, they would tell you you didn’t belong in the first place. And since I didn’t want to hear that – you remember, it was that old ad of I can get the paycheck, I can do the cooking, I can, you know, flip the bacon, I can do all of those kind of things. And, you know, I agree with Michelle Obama, it was in her Becoming, she takes issue with you, “Can have everything.” I think you can have many things of the course of your life, but you also have to figure out who you are; and for all of us, that’s a different configuration. I think who we are is always going to be shaped by the piece of history we live in because there are different opportunities, there are different challenges for each generation, and you’re going to have to figure out something. You know, there are people who I have met who their work is more important than anything else and I know – well, in fact, I’ve conducted because when I was President of Sigma Theta Tau around the country, I was one of the first people to do a talk on orchestrate a career and 

I always, in every region that we went to, I would insist that we’d get people with different lifestyles; a person who never married and said I could have never fitted in children and a husband, people who were dealing with an ailing parent, people who had eight kids. And, you know, I mean there were these proverbia, you know, every region has different people, but the point was – and men and women -- because I wanted men and women in nursing to talk about juggling work and family. And I will tell you, everybody had a different story. For some, ambition was more important. For some, putting things on hold for a while, not knowing what was going to be there, but because they were bright people, they sort of were able to then seize opportunities even though they had not had a continuous career. So, for me, I don’t like when anybody has glib definitions of feminism or traditional or anything because, for me, it’s not even traditional. It’s the difference between valuing the individual and self-actualization and valuing and knowing that you share a role in whatever community you’re in, whether that’s the family, whether that’s your neighborhood, whether that’s the city or country or whatever; what is your piece in it? And people will play different roles. 

Mahon: So, you did talk about how, when you were younger, that you felt like you swallowed a lot of stereotypes about women. When you were in college and graduate school during the women’s movement, what ways did the women’s movement impact your world view as you were earning your undergraduate and graduate degree that made you the woman that you then became? 

McBride: Well, this would really be much more, after I even had a Masters’ degree, I was very big into -- I wound up being quite popular in graduate school. There weren’t that many women around at Yale and let’s just say I had an opportunity to date a range of kinds of men. One of the things – remember, I was getting a Masters’ in psych mental health nursing, one of the things that was true was Rogerian technique. And part of Rogerian technique in psychology/psychiatry is I’m working with you to get you to talk about things that are troubling in your background. And you say something and I don’t in a stupid way repeat your words, but you say – you make a sentence and you say, “I was uncomfortable, but I nevertheless did this.” Well, part of Rogerian technique might be to say, “Well, tell me how uncomfortable you were? You said you were uncomfortable before you said you did this, tell me about it.” But Rogerian technique really is a repeating back to people what are elements of what they have said. And if you had read the dating books of that period, it was just the way girls were supposed to talk to guys -- repeating back to them fascinating things that they had said to get them to talk more about themselves. And let’s just say I could be very good at this. I actually met my husband then, my donnybrook. (LAUGHTER) I was destined to marry a professor of philosophy because, of all the men I’ve known, he really didn’t buy that. He would say, “So what do you think?” And he would – and I actually was very attracted by the fact that he actually asked me what I thought and what I was doing. And I would say that that is an enduring theme for our marriage. He’s always asked me what I wanted to do next and that sounds like such a simple question, but I will tell you, I didn’t think it was an appropriate question at various times, when he first started asking me. When I was a new mother, saying “what do you want to do next?” I thought isn’t that silly. I have to stay home and take care of the child, but it opened up, there was something about someone giving you, opening that up – and then reading. My husband had the same background that I did, is, you know, one of the most -- philosophers are 

professional critics. They’re critical of everything. He doesn’t hesitate to be critical of everything, and there’s something about the things being open that was, that wound up, part of that became very good for me. 

Mahon: So, was there anything, did the larger social ferment of the 1960s and early 1970s influence your thinking about women’s lives and women’s careers at all? 

McBride: It did, particularly women’s mental health and women’s issues. I would say concretely, the big professional thing that came out of it because, with the women’s movement came women’s studies broadly conceived, but women’s health is really a real subset of women’s studies. And at the beginning, most of the thinking was a critique of what was. For example, it was a critique that the longitudinal study of aging that had gone on for twenty years never included women. Now, if you think about who is aging, the study that was originally done on, is an aspirin good for your heart, was originally done on men. And biologically, what people always said was, you know those women have those cycles and so you want a control scientifically for those cycles, so you do research on men. But what did we conclude from those studies? We concluded that whatever we found was true, was true for all human beings, and women got prescribed the same treatments. And so, I don’t know if you can see, but this is a whole new paradigm shift opening up. It is a major critique of what was. There used to be a time in the 1980s, so this is – I don’t happen to think that the 1980s are like, you know, so far away, when if they thought you might have breast cancer, you signed an informed consent that they would then remove the tumor and you would have surgery. So, you had anesthesia, number one, not even knowing if you really had cancer, so your mind had not come to terms with the fact that you had cancer. But you had cancer, they did a mastectomy, you woke up without a breast. And, at that time, if you were over forty and you ever wanted breast reconstruction, they saw it as narcissistic; they used the word narcissistic. With the implication being that if you’re over forty, you’re over the hill. Why would you care whether your breasts were affirmed? Now, that’s a completely masculine view of breasts. I mean, from my point of view, my breast is not a sexual object; it’s like a part of me that hurts like my hand does or my foot does or something else does. I mean, just imagine any other body part that if you got rid of it, and to be – and I’ve heard women talk about they feel lopsided.. You know, we do a lot less total mastectomies now, but that is an example of a critique of a procedure, and there were many of them. And there were many things that concerned women that men did not, that were not studied, I mean, nobody took seriously. When I was getting a Masters’ degree at Yale University and went to the student health, if anything was reproductive, genitourinary – you know what I mean; urology. Anything to do with your lower parts, student health did not do it; they told you to go to a community doctor for those things. Basically, I’m paying a student fee for health services and part of me is being farmed out as not belonging to your health system. And that was the world, I mean, that’s not Yale, that was the world view at the time. I can come up with zillions, in fact, that was the basis of the graduate course because the graduate course that I taught was, I always described it, “It is not gynecology in the sense of plumbing; it is GYN-ecology, looking at woman in her environment around health and disease issues.” And the course was people who were in different aspects because you could be a nursing administration and write – and everybody wrote a paper on what was of interest to them. For example, 

somebody might be interested in lupus, which is it’s much more prevalent in women. And you might, because that is the patient population you work with and as a Masters’ student want to write a paper on the experience of women with lupus and the treatment, etcetera. But if you were in administration, there were --the insurance company did not -- had different insurance policies for women and men for different things and things didn’t get covered. If you were in health systems research, there were issues to be critiqued as much as there were issues if you were in lupus or if you were in parent-child nursing. So, whatever aspect of nursing you were in, women’s health, taking a critical look, and I would say that was part of what I did. And, in fact, I was unhappy with a course,when I was a doctoral student at Purdue, because my husband was on the faculty. We introduced the first philosophy of women course and we co-taught it. I was an associate instructor in philosophy for a semester. 

Mahon: Was this while you were taking classes? 

McBride: While I was a PhD student. But we co-taught the course and developed the course, which by the way, continues to this day. My husband has always been interested in these issues because he’s open-minded, so he is actually the father of women’s studies at Purdue on the West Lafayette campus. But we actually had a course on what was, you know, it was like who were the all-time great male chauvinists of philosophical tradition. And we even had a little game with, you know, the saying and match it up to did Saint Thomas Aquinas say this? Did Aristotle say this? Who said this? But it was a course and then really looking to working towards then beginning to introduce somebody like de Beauvoir into a conversation. And, you know, there’s a whole tradition. I mean, I got my doctorate in 1978, so since then there’s a huge number of philosophers who have tackled this. But I was unhappy when I was first teaching the course because, in my mind, I knew that this was different. But how do you name it? And there was no literature. And in fact, I wound up -- and I have to admit that, as I explained what I was trying to talk about, my husband said, “Well, that’s the lived experience, what phenomenology talks about.” And it was like, yes, what I am glomming onto is the difference in women’s health as a subset to study is the lived experience and taking more seriously the lived experience. You take so seriously the lived experience of women that you include them as subjects in studies and, by the way, the NIH was transformed around this time. I wound up actually being on the Office of Women’s Health for NIH at one – my CV tells you exactly what that title is – but it was – and one of the things that we actually did at the level of NIH is we came up with something like five volumes that were an overview of what we know about all sorts of issues that are of concern to women and setting a research agenda for what we don’t know. Sort of like what do we know/what don’t we know? But, so much – Bill and I actually wound up writing in 1981 a book that is called Theoretical Underpinnings for Women’s Health, because as I would tell him what I was struggling with, he was able, having my home-based philosopher, to talk about the ideas that I was talking about that were part of larger traditions. And we wound up then writing an article on women’s health as lived experience and we wound up then – it was an article that was important. I don’t, you know, it wasn’t like important like in some, everybody publicly knows, but like the first Center for Women’s Health that the National Institute for Health supported for nursing was at the University of Washington. I can tell you that they used that article as they set it up as 

theoretical underpinnings for what they were going to study. Bill and I then wrote another article that came out about ten years later and, at this point, it wasn’t how do you name what we’re doing? Which is a critique; I was then chewing on the fact that how do you move from critique to assertion? That is, if you’re just merely critique – this is true of anything, the political system – if you’re only critique and you are not offering something that would be alright, this is a critique of the old order. What is going to be the positive statement? What is the assertion? And we, we did something then about what had happened in the literature. And, for me, it was much more taking some of the NIH things that were happening out there and talking about you’re beginning to get people to study things that they had not studied before. One of the most profound changes at the national level was the requirement that unless there is a good reason, like you’re studying prostate cancer, you’ve got to document that there are women in your study. I mean, you can’t just have a study of men and, you know, that’s even more larger because now people would say, “Well, you just can’t have Caucasian women, you can’t just have middle class.” I mean, you have to have diversity and go on to larger studies and that’s how things have evolved over time. But the part that I would say I can lay claim to is that part that is trying to define some of those things. Then I wrote a lot about what the women’s movement means for nursing and looking at decades in terms of changing views and social currents kind of thing. 

Mahon: Now I’m wondering about -- you talked about women’s health in a wide sense, but what about women’s mental health specifically, especially around the stigma around women’s mental health in the 1950s about not asking for help if they needed help or…? 

McBride: I think that, I mean, I think one of the best examples of changes in mental health, because of the women’s movement, there was a time when we talked – Bateman had written stuff, Margaret Meade’s husband, about the schizophrenogenic mother. We would talk about schizophrenic children having schizophrenogenic mothers. It was a view that it was the mothering that went astride. And the decade of the 1990s at NIH was the decade of the brain and that’s when they discovered so much more about the biological. I mean, schizophrenia and the genetic, there’s no one gene, there are multiple genes. And like anything that’s genetic, because you have the gene, doesn’t mean it will be manifest. You stress people enough and then, if they have that gene, it may be expressed. But there was a wholescale notion of how that was such a bum rap for the mother because the child has a problem and then you’re saying that the problem is the mother when many mothers of children with mental illness are heroic in what they do for the sake of the child. I also think we got into a much more complicated view of depression during that time because women were prescribed many more antidepressants, which, by the way, they did not work as well in the early stages on women as they did in men because they had never been tested in women. But then you look at the broader world of alcoholism, which stereotype – from a stereotype point of view, that was depression for men. And people began to understand that depression and different kinds of biological and trying to understand the situation, trying to understand the (pause) to better understand women’s experience, I’d say we have only gone so far. I have a daughter who’s fifty-one and she’s a very distinguished professor of developmental psychology. We have had a running debate for the last twenty-

five years where we each take turns taking a different opinion. It’s not because we do this as a debate. As the world turns, sometimes I’m more depressed and sometimes she’s more depressed – but it’s like are things really better? (LAUGHING) You know, and there’s a part of me that says, “Oh, Cami, you have absolutely no idea; things are so much better,” and then we talk about situations. You know, I think if I were writing The Growth and Development of Mothers again, the big thing that I missed in that book is how much you need social supports to handle individual and community stress. And, in our society, we’re so pull them up by the bootstrap that there is this kind of rugged individualism that inhabits everybody, not just West Coast, East Coast; everybody. And what happens is, it isn’t anything simple; it’s a different world view because we need more than paid leave when you have a child for both parents, which we do not have -- I mean, we have companies that do that, but we don’t have that as something that you can count on. We still have child--care as let’s make a deal. There just, you know, depending upon the community – when my children were young, there was nothing in the community, there wasn’t anything. It was all individual. You had to get a babysitter and often that person – it was not good. I mean, you know, we know so much more now about what good childcare includes, what are the advantages even of childcare especially when it is complemented by, you know, engaged parents. I mean, it broadens your world view. Anyway, theworld has changed a great deal, but we still do not have what I consider to be social supports for particularly the first three years of life, and the adults that are connected to those children, not just the children kind of thing. 

Mahon: Support for the adults as well? 

McBride: There was a study by Olds (SPELLING???) that has been replicated many different times and he was not a nurse, but he used RNs and they got money for vulnerable first-time mothers to have home visiting for – I can’t remember if it was two or three years – and the consequences, and they’ve now done the longitudinal. It had consequences for high school graduation, it had consequences for things that in no way would I ever think you would have those consequences kind of thing. Anyway, that sounds more like a sermon, but I just get very upset that we still have not confronted some of those issues. We still see them as the problem of the individuals. We have this fantasy that everybody lives near a family that could be supportive, and we don’t have those families anymore. You know, everybody is working. One of the dirtiest secrets of American society is we make women going out to work sound as if we actualized women and we did it for that reason; and I’m telling you, the economy would have never been what it is. We only have the lifestyle and the economy we have right now because we have now gotten to two-wage earners in a family as normative. 

Mahon: Yes. 

McBride: That does sound like a sermon. (LAUGHING) 

Mahon: Well, now I’m going to shift away from the women’s movement and it’s affect on you specifically and ask you a little bit about how you feel the women’s movement -- because you mentioned this a little bit earlier -- how the women’s 

movement may have had adverse effects on the nursing field in the 1960s. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? 

McBride: Yeah, you know, the first wave of the women’s movement, which was suffragettes, if you read the literature of the time, there is a lot of admiration, particularly for teachers, nurses and social workers. In fact, there was a literature that said you need to get – because, you know, you did have women social workers, nurses and teachers -- not nearly in the numbers that you do now, but you had them and there was the notion that somehow women’s values would make the American system better because it would feminize, it would soften; the values that the women have, their heart would now come into politics. I would say that nursing lived through that period where, you know, you had Ladies’ Home Journal articles about the nurse who delivers babies in Kentucky and, you know, real life people who were heroines and, and doing heroic things. The second wave of the women’s movement, which Friedan got going, was much more characterized by well, we got the vote, but there are all sorts of places where we are not now. And I am in no way critiquing that. I mean, that was true, there are places where women are not now. But it became completely a valuing of where women were not and in a funny way, evaluating men’s worlds in some sense. You know, we now have women engineers, we now have women physicians, we now have women lawyers. And it got to be – I cannot tell you how many times along the way I’ve been told that I’m so smart I could have been a doctor, and it’s like, “Can I punch you in the face now?” And, in fact, I always kid that I went through three periods – the first period that when somebody said you’re smart, you could have been a doctor, I sort of preened because I was the exception to the rule. You know, everybody likes to be the exception to the rule. You know, “I thank you for the compliment.” Then I was into my more feminist militaristic period and it was like I would tell you off and I would go on and on and on and on. (LAUGHS) My third period, and I found this to be -- it took me many years to actually get to the point, was when people would really say that, I would just laugh and simply say, “Why would you say that?” Which puts the person on guard and it’s like you are ridiculous to have this world view. I mean, it’s sort of like such a crazy view. And it was, “I can give you the name of a hundred other colleagues, you can go talk to them. They’re much more interesting than I am; let me give you their names,” kind of thing. But there was a period – well, we’re still in it – where people still think if the child is smart that then going into nursing is limiting options. I’ve been fighting that one for decades because, for one thing, people have no idea of what modern professional nursing is like. The range of possibilities and, in fact, I would argue because I know an awful lot of PhDs in many subjects where getting a good job is not going to be easy to come by where you could combine whatever interests you have – I mean, I know nurse philosophers, I know nurse lawyers – and have options that where the nursing sensibility then joins perhaps with another field to in fact lead to something very creative in your life. I mean, I know nurses who manage multimillion-dollar budgets kinds of things. Well, nursing and patient services is a big budget item in a hospital and there is a chief nurse executive. So, that person – now, I’m not saying everybody’s going to become a chief nurse executive. The nurse practitioner role is terribly exciting in terms of the possibilities of what you can do, but, you know, I do feel – I was on the Indianapolis, well, the Central Indiana Community Foundation when Women’s Fund was formed. I’ve been on their Board and at one point, there was a booklet that they were going to distribute for 

their grant money for things about, you know, girls can be anything they want to be and it said girls don’t have to be nurses, they can be engineers, they can be, and I just said to the person who put that copy together, “I will rip this page out. . .” 

Mahon and 

Scarpino (LAUGHING) 

McBride: . . .If you every wonder why we have a nursing shortage, it’s because you are talking dumb talk and this has got to be rewritten so that you don’t” – because the truth of the matter is, I know people who are working with engineers to design eldercare for the future that has sensors that, that it’s, it’s the nurse’s research. But the engineer, the information technology person is a colleague who is a co-investigator. But not necessarily, because they don’t understand the fullness of what the, you know, engineering is solving problems depending upon what it is; processes and materials and all of that. But saying what has to happen, it’s the people who understand what the environment has to be able to do for the person and robotics. You can now get a nursing in engineering degree at Drexel, I just would like to – no, Duquesne; Drexel has robotics. They’re doing a lot with a nurse bot. You know, all of this is in the early stages, but in fact, by the way, I actually do think that nursing, when I dream about what my field’s going to look like, I actually think that nurses are going to have to get much more involved into – we have a lot of, I don’t know if you know, but the head of the, the Director of the National Library of Medicine, it’s part of the NIH, is a nurse informaticist, Patricia Brennan. The head of CMS at one point, which is Medicare and Medicaid, for a brief period of time was – the Deputy Director was a nurse who then just became – we’re all over, we’re all over and I would argue, and again, part of the stereotype is to say if you do things other than the stereotype that you’re no longer a nurse. Because people would say to me all the time as a Dean, “When did you used to do nursing?” And my answer always was, “I’m in psych mental health nursing and I practice it every day,” and that was true. All of those principles, all of those things about how to work with people, how to work with difficult people, how to work with passive people, you know, it’s part of every day, but I think it’s a sensibility and from my point of view, nursing is just a very – why is there always a shortage, for one thing? I mean, some of these things have influenced who goes into nursing. By the way, we’re getting a lot more younger – people are more interested in nursing than ever before. I don’t know, I’m revising my book on leadership, but the Boy Scouts does a survey every year of what is the occupation that most are interested in because they have a whole arm that helps people with occupational choice. The top choice for this last year was Registered Nurse. 

Scarpino: For the Boy Scouts? 

McBride: For the Boy Scouts. I can die peacefully now. (LAUGHTER) No, you know, I mean, we’re full of stereotypes still. People are still happier when your daughter wants to be a nuclear scientist than to be a nurse, but I would just say that winding up showcasing what is possible and helping people then achieve the range of goals so it has been, well, for one thing, it’s been one of the great pleasures of my life, to change things. 

Mahon: Now I’m just going to ask you one more question that is specifically directed at the women’s movement and feminism, which a lot of these views that you just talked about appear in A Married Feminist, which was first published in 1976 and then reissued as Living with Contradictions: A Married Feminist in 1977. Now I just would like you to explain what you saw as the contradictions associated with being a married feminist. 

McBride: Well, first of all, A Married Feminist was a bomb. It got some good reviews, but I think in 1976, everybody who was married saw the book and said, “Why would I buy it?” And everybody who was a feminist saw that title and, “Why I buy it?” And they had an atrocious cover; I cannot tell you how bad it was. I told them it was an atrocious cover… 

Mahon: That’s it, I got it from the IUPUI library… 

McBride: … yeah, but you don’t have the cover. 

Mahon: No, there’s no cover on it. 

McBride: There was this hand with this feminine thing and it looked like militant and it did not conjure up, and it had sold just enough copies and got enough reviews that when it was reissued, we negotiated with, first of all, the cover looked different and they were willing to change it. It was not strident because the other cover was like red, white and black, which is strident in the way they did it, and the whole book, for me, is a dialectical tension. It’s what I talked about earlier. It’s that tension between self-actualization and the good of others. So “a married feminist,” for me, was a phrase that I used to indicate someone who valued both traditions. I don’t know if you looked through the book, but it goes through all the elements of a woman’s life and how, in those different areas, you’re torn, you’re constantly torn. 

Mahon: I did look through it. I read the Introduction specifically, and a lot of it I agreed with because I feel the same way about a lot of that stuff, especially… 

McBride: I’m so glad. I’m glad that it holds up actually. 

Mahon: I believe it does and I read – there was a specific part in there that was: I want to be married to a man and have a man for a life partner, but not be considered – not for him to be considered my owner. That’s paraphrasing what you said… 

McBride: Yes. 

Mahon: … but, yeah, a lot of that I really enjoyed and would like to read it when I am not reading a book a week in graduate school, but it was, I did enjoy it. So, why did you believe it was important to write about living with contradictions of being a married feminist? 

McBride: Because I was living contradictions. What the first book did, because it was so well received and it actually sold quite well – I even had illusions at that time that 

I could just become an author and that would be lovely; I would just become a writer because I’ve always liked writing. It’s not easy, but I like it. I’m a tortured writer, but I like it. But because it had done well, they actually even asked, Harper & Row asked if I had an idea for another book and I gave them this, that is the tensions because in some ways, The Growth and Development of Mothers was talking about tensions, but I thought you could do it in a larger way and talk in a larger way. The good editor that I had for the first one got married to a man who had children and moved to New England – well, further up in New England – and I got somebody else. That’s sort of why I got a book jacket that I was not fond of and, but when the, the revision, the reissue rather of Living with Contradictions, I think that phrase people understood better in the title than A Married Feminist. And, in fact, you know how you get letters from people who read your book, I actually got a letter from someone, a couple who were both going into a second marriage, it was interesting, who were using it for their own marital counseling. They had decided that they would use the book as their discussion for and I… 

Scarpino: Did you charge them? (LAUGHTER) 

McBride: I actually wrote them back saying what an excellent idea because I thought actually the book tried to come up with like all the different things that are elements of what I struggle with. You know, when you read the chapters, you don’t come to any big conclusion; well, the conclusion is that struggle is human experience and that you’re going to constantly, and that the best that you can do is to actually think through some sort of an accommodation. How do you accommodate? And again, I don’t like to use these words because they always sound mealy-mouthed; they sound like you don’t have – but the trouble is, in our society, we’re so big on principles, we don’t understand that the blending – well it’s a little bit like even the political system, the negotiation is how you actually govern. You work with people. I’ve always thought that the willow tree was the strongest tree because it bends. And this notion of, you know, what are your principles kind of thing, and sort of, “How can you meld it together for the good of all,” has been an overarching concern for me. 

Mahon: And I think that’s what I enjoyed about it the most was because I feel like when somebody says that they’re a feminist, it’s often considered all or nothing. If you’re a feminist, you believe fully in women’s rights, equality for all, or you don’t. And I liked the fact that it was like, “Well, I can be a feminist and I can also agree with some more traditional things.’ That doesn’t negate, like one doesn’t negate the other. 

McBride: And sometimes it’s a matter of thinking what is a new tradition? What was the principle? 

Mahon: Yeah. 

McBride: . . .You know, all those home-baked cookies, but you know. The principle of that was the parent being there. In fact, you know, I went on to write a book about parenting teenagers. One of the interesting things about the literature – because I had not kept up as much, after I did that work, that’s when I had really gotten into deaning and I got into larger national psych mental health stuff kind of thing – 

but that book, which was a product of a Kellogg Foundation opportunity, I did something at NYU on something that they had about parenting teenagers, facilitating teenagers, and I wound up talking to my daughter because I tell you, she’s a developmental psychologist. I said, “You know, I’m afraid that some of my ideas are dated of what I talked about in that book because that was 1987, and what are the big things that people are now talking about because you’re teaching this now on a regular basis?” She said, “Mom, you’d be surprised. One of the biggest markers of families doing well is that they have one meal a day together.” We’ve become such a fragmented society that maybe the cookies, when you come home from school, but it’s some notion of dinnertime. In fact, my daughter made a crack about the fact that we all had to sit in the dining room every night for dinner and we had to have conversation. And they would make fun of it, like it was a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, but the truth of the matter is they remember those discussions and they still talk about, “Well, that’s my chair,” and they haven’t sat in that chair for decades. 

Mahon: I do that at my parents’ house. One last question about the book. Who did you hope would constitute the audience for this book? 

McBride: For A Married Feminist: Living with Contradictions? 

Mahon: Yes, yes. 

McBride: I actually thought that it had a broad audience. I thought that – you also have to understand, it comes out in 1976. If you think about all of the developmental psychology literature that was at the time, we did not have much of a professional literature on adult development. It actually took place in the 1970s. Erik Erikson’s stages of ego development, which goes back to the late 1950s, 1960s, is sketchy; it doesn’t say that much, but we were only beginning to get – a book called Seasons in a Man’s Life that came out in the 1970s was very much talked about and then… 

Mahon: Do you know who wrote that? 

McBride: God, he was a friend, you know, you’re asking – I need to go back and, oh, I can see him… 

Mahon: That’s okay. 

Scarpino: You can look it up. 

Mahon: I can, I can look it up later. 

McBride: … a psychologist at Yale – Seasons in a Man’s Life – and then the woman’s version… 

Mahon: Daniel J. Levinson? 

McBride: Yeah, Dan Levinson. And I would tease him because it was all on seasons in a man’s life and, in fact, like one of the things that it talks about is the period he calls “BOOM” – B-O-O-M;Becoming One’s Own Man. You need a mentor before 

that, but then you become the mentor and that’s how it goes. Well, one of the things that I have critiqued is Dan’s own work in my own thinking and that is – see, I don’t think mentoring ends with like your 1940s when you become your own person. I just think every stage that you aspire to, we tend, as it gets later, to talk more as coaching than mentoring because it’s a not like your dissertation mentoring which is much more instrumental; but the coaching that you continue to need is talking to somebody you trust about your misgivings about where you are, where you’re headed, what you want to do, and have someone – we now have executive coaches. I mean, you take a top CEO job, a lot of them, well, they have been through it already in terms of different experiences like that, but a lot of it right now is mentoring. And I would argue that it really even comes from the women’s movement because I think women don’t think they become their own woman. I don’t know any woman who says I became my own woman. I think women have always thought that they were in the process of becoming, and what you could become has enlarged, but therefore, you need help to imagine it. And, to me, that then gets back to leadership and mentoring and how do you structure environments for people to achieve their maximum. 

Scarpino: We switching back? 

Mahon: Yeah. 

Scarpino: Okay, so… 

McBride: Well, you know, we said it would be two hours… 

Scarpino: Yes. 

McBride: … and it is… 

Scarpino: Okay, then… 

McBride: … and I have something that I have to get to at 12:30. 

Mahon: Okay. 

Scarpino: What time is it now? 

Mahon: It is 11:43. 

McBride: It’s quarter of 12. 

Scarpino: We can stop now or I can ask you two more questions. 

McBride: You know, I am slow moving. 

Scarpino: Okay. 

McBride: By the time I walk with my walker to the garage and I’m going to the Meridian Street restaurant, I am not fast, and at this stage, I’d rather have the extra time. 

Scarpino: efore you turn the recorder off, I want to thank you very much for doing this and sitting with us and sharing your memories. We’re going to schedule … 

McBride: Will you edit it? I mean, will it be edited so that little… 

(END OF RECORDING) 

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 

Dean, School of Nursing, 1992 to 2003 

In roughly that same time period, between 1990 and 2005, you received just over $2.2 million in a three-part intuitional training grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research in the National Institutes of Health. For the years 1990 to 1995, $386,590; 1996-2001, $661,985; and 2001-2005, $1,180,679. You are listed as the Program Director. What was the purpose of those Institutional Training Grants? 

McBride: In many ways, getting an NIH Institutional Research Training Grant says, “This place is good enough for NIH to invest in preparing doctoral students there.” That was the first five years – and then we had doctoral and postdoc. From my point of view, it was a major developmental event for the school. When we first went to get one – now, I’m Dean of Research -- I remember getting everybody who was doing any scholarship together in a room with flipcharts. It’s sort of like, “Well, what do we do? What can we say we do?” In many ways, it was all over the place. I mean, it was all nursing, but different patient populations, different questions. But to get one of those grants, you have to work to make a claim that you are essentially a center of excellence in something. It lead to actually more than one conversation with me trying to come up with – I always thought this was one of the great cognitive gymnastics of my life – of how do you go from lots of generalizations to getting something concrete and specific enough that you could make a case for it? You could argue a case and that the faculty would actually believe that that was what they were doing. Because you get into – you know, people come in all different abilities, but every faculty has a lot of concrete thinkers where they look at something and if what they’re doing specifically isn’t in it, they don’t feel that you connected with them. On the other hand, you don’t want to be so mealy mouthed and I remember – I think that was writing a play and the theater comes through – it was how do you put together logically all the pieces that you have? And the strong things that we had were, by this time, people were doing refereed presentations and publications in good places. They were not just doing internal things. They were not just getting internal awards. I mean, people were – somebody was saying, “Will you come and be a consultant?” So you have stuff to play, with meaning you have lots of pieces. But for me, it was how to put together a good case that would – and if you’ve ever seen a training grant -- well, actually, that itself is something because Doris Merritt had been the first Acting Director of the National Institute of Nursing Research. She did that for two years and then she came – she left NIH. Her husband had died during that time and you’ll be interviewing her, but she came back as an Associate Dean in the School of Medicine and I worked closely with her. When we were even applying for the Institutional Training Grant, I remember going to her office saying, “I’ve read the form.” You know how you read all the directions and they all are sort of overwhelming if you’ve never seen a grant like that – and I said to her, “What does it look like?” Well, it just so happened that on her desk, she had the head of one of the medical departments that was doing research was reapplying for their Institutional Training Grant, and she said to me, “Here, take a look at it.” I sat in her office and looked at all the table that they had and all the data that they had. What I can say is, for me, it’s always been helpful to see a concrete, “This one’s a winner; this is what a winner looks like.” Okay, I can put that together. Years later, after that person, after Doris was not an administrator, after I was not an administrator, and after the 

chair of that department – who I then became friendly with, but I had not known him – I said to him, “I want to thank you. You don’t have any idea that your Institutional Training Grant, actually seeing it as a model, made all of the difference in the School of Nursing getting one, and I would like to personally thank you right now for what you did for me.” (LAUGHING) 

Scarpino: Now, that was an important moment for you. 

Mahon: Yeah. 

McBride: It was very important… 

Scarpino: An important several hours, I’d say. 

McBride: It was a very important moment and what it did was it really gave me an idea of how to play every one of our strengths. I put together the grant. You know, you have to say in those grants what your program is. I put together a research socialization course that I required for all of the people in the program. It had what I thought was missing in the DNS program, and I didn’t want to go to battle with all the DNS faculty in all the different areas and to say this is what we need. So, I put – it became sort of, if you think about, later on a lot of doctoral and post-doc people will have journal clubs, it’s not specific, but it’s socialization; it’s do you understand the field, do you get people coming in to talk? I mean, that was the course where people had to actually put together a pilot study. I mean, they had to do concrete research work, but a lot of what we did was how do you even interview for a job? How do you put together your CV? And I thought there were no places where we had: how do you come to terms with the piece of nursing scholarship that will have your name on it? Because if you don’t do that, you’re then wishy-washy and sort of what will my dissertation be? And anybody who goes in not knowing what they’re going to do and they’re going to whip one together and don’t have some passion about what it is. You know, and some of the people then wound up studying things that maybe there’s a problem their mother had, and they wanted to find out better how you handle this kind of thing. But anyway, and we were very big on, you know, if this is a personal problem. If you look at all scholarships, a lot of people have studied things that came to them through personal experience. You know, my line has always been that gives you the passion, but then you have to remember you have an N of one in whatever you did. Now, you’re going to actually do something objective. We put the seminar in. I’m pleased to say that seminar became a regular part of the PhD program years later. But we got the first five-year grant and then, by the second five-year grant, I knew that they would give me high points. A lot has to do with the leadership of your program. Well, let me say about the first five-year grant, I knew enough that we would have a better training program. The School of Nursing was connected to what I will say were better researchers, and I’m not saying this in a pejorative way, I’m saying this in a developmental way. There were people in other schools who, for what they were doing, really were doing good research. I mean, it was the kind that our students needed to go to, and they often were people who represented one of the centers at IUPUI. I would ask them if they would be on our Advisory Board. I will say that one of the smartest things – I didn’t know how smart it was – I did learn through some of the development work I was doing nationally that when things are uneven, the more 

people can look at each other, they up each other’s game. If people finishing the dissertation come in – and I used to have this matrix of what you have to accomplish in your doctoral program. The first time I met with the people we gave stipends to, I said, “Your obligation is to get the next five-year grant. So, you’re going to have to do these things.” I mean, I did it in a humorous way, but it was like, “We picked you because you’re good, we’re going to give you these experiences, you’re going to take advantage of them, and at the end of it, you will have refereed presentations, you will be on your way to refereed publications or have one.” It depends – not everybody gets a refereed publication out – but there’s certain marker events. In fact, I developed, I found it in my papers, I finished a book yesterday and sent it off, and so I’m now cleaning out papers. I don’t really think I’m ever going to do another book, and I found, I created for that course something called the research game. It was 100 items that you had to fill out of things to do in research and if you did like twenty-five – like do you know how to turn on a computer, was the first one; so everybody got that one. Remember, this is… 

Scarpino: I remember when there were people who couldn’t do that. 

McBride: …the late 1980s. What was my favorite one? (pause) Oh, I can’t remember. I had the name of a review thing that sounded like a rock group, but one of the questions was: Is this, you know, a place to search for information or is this a rock group? (LAUGHNG) And it was sort of like you had to know the answer. I mean, it’s interesting because I looked at it and it, it has been used. I mean, it’s been used in Japan; somebody found it. I mean, it’s amazing how these things work. But it was showing that a research career, you should, as a doctoral student, begin to get up to the first twenty-five and do some things. And like by seventy-five to one-hundred questions, you know, if you got like ninety-nine, it said you have ninety-nine points, distinguished professors will be yours; professorships will be yours. But it was to – actually, and I treated it as a game, but it was how to get people in that mode. By the second five-year, and by this time, I’m already Dean and I now am Dean of an eight-campus school and I’m immersed in all sorts of issues. While the training grant was my beloved child and I never gave it up and I stayed with it, I knew that my own productivity in that five-year period would not get us post-doc and I thought we needed post-doc education. But we were now producing researchers who could be the mentors to the post-docs, and so people like Joan Austin and Vickie Champion and I, at that point – Vickie at this point, we had already developed some of the Walther work in cancer. But Joan, I asked her if she would be the director for our post-doc studies. I thought that together, with me as director and I argued that my strength was leadership and research socialization. But her strength was the very specifics of research, and we had many other good people at this point, and so we got post-doc education. That was from an institutional point of view. I’ve actually given a paper on developmental stages of organizational development and I would say that when I started, we were still in stage one, and stage one is infrastructure development. This is a time when you don’t have doctorally-prepared people, so you’ve got to get some doctorally-prepared faculty. You need to develop a research office so that if you’re going for a grant, you’ve got people who can help you with the budget who know and can get a model of a grant out and say this is what a good one looks like. The research office would have mock reviews because you need to get some good people to look at your 

grant. Since the time cycle before you hear from the grant people, the federal people, is long, you’d better do a mock review in-house with people saying, you know, “This is not convincing. Fix it before it goes out.” There’s a lot of infrastructure development. The second stage of organizational development is the stage of stars. I called it that because we had individuals who by any criteria were stars. I mentioned Joan, I mentioned Vickie, I would mention Bev Flynn, I would mention Diane Billings – I always hesitate to get further, but all of them are about the same generational. So, I don’t want to get – we had many other people, but what that means at that stage of organizational development is that you’re really getting good mentoring. You’re getting people who have done what they say you should do because in the early stage, we’re telling you to do this and we don’t know all that many people who have done that. And then we move to the stage of – the third stage is programmatic development. That was one of the big things that I did at the school that was my own view of development, leadership. I believe that you can, excellence, if you choose excellence as a change strategy, and essentially I thought that’s what I was doing, you need to have specific things that the school are known for because I believed at least IUPUI, if all of those people went to a professional meeting and somebody asked them, say at the beginning of my Deanship, “So what’s going on at your school?” There would be no coherent message. I don’t think, I don’t think there was, you know, people might give you gossip, they might tell you about somebody, but there was no coherent message. And remember, IUPUI has Trudy Banta coming in at this point with mission development and all of that stuff… 

Scarpino: Vice Chancellor? 

McBride: Vice Chancellor, yes. We have Jerry Bepko trying to develop, I mean, I would say Jerry and Bill Plater, certainly we went from what was outreach in Indianapolis, and by 1978 it was still sort of, in some ways, certainly considered by others to be outreach, and like Psychology Department was on 38th Street. I co-taught, I taught a course that was cross listed in Psychology and went out to 38th Street. Meanwhile, the campus was developing and one of the things that I did on the larger level at IUPUI, and I did this with people. I mean, it wasn’t like I – well, when I first started out as Dean, you have to understand everybody thought they reported to me, everyone of those campuses, everyone of the department chair, whatever the organization was, they all reported to me. I’m going to sound very glib, but it was much more a mother-may-I kind of governance. Now, I will tell you, I don’t believe you can exert leadership if you respond to people. You have to have a vision of going to something. I also believe with this third stage of development; you need to sort of say what you’re good at. We did a lot of work around mission and goals, but we then wound up coming up with that, and Boyer’s work was out there then. We came up with there are three kinds of scholarship. He talks about four, but the meta-analysis kind; you could do that anywhere. But we said we are a school committed to the scholarship of teaching, particularly interactive learning, simulation – we had several words there – but that encompassed what Diane Billings was doing, that encompassed what Pam Jeffries was doing, all of the digital stuff that we were doing. We said that we were committed to the – going to be a center of excellence in chronic care, particularly cancer. If you look at chronicity, it covers everything. I mean it’s just almost everything that nurses have to deal with – kidney failure, diabetes – and we had people doing all of that. But you need a 

big word to encapsulate that, and it was sort of health behavior research in that area – self, patient self-management. And then the third one at the time was Healthy Families, Healthy Communities, and Joanne Martin, all that work that she did with Healthy Families, and then what Bev – So, what I did and I don’t remember – the archives have every one of my State of the School addresses… 

Mahon: I looked at them all. 

McBride: … okay, well, you can tell me exactly what year I did this, but I remember at the beginning – well, we had committees. A lot of it was me trying to put together something in one page that I could then go to donors with and say, “This is the school.” By the end of my tenure, if you were being recruited and saw me, you saw me at the first interview, you saw me at the last interview. At the first one, I particularly talked to you about where the school was going so that we would talk about a fit between person and place because I believe excellence only comes if there’s a good fit. There are people who are good at stuff that actually I don’t think the School of Nursing is ever going to be good at. In fact, there was one woman who interviewed who was doing so much basic work and I said, “I can get you access to labs, but that’s never going to be where the IU School of Nursing here is going. We have too much strength and we’re going to build on strength.” And I said, “Actually, University of Wisconsin-Madison is your place,” and she said, “I’m interviewing there next week.” I helped them get somebody. But I was a great believer that you need a leader who can articulate the strengths of the place in language big enough that most people feel that they’re captured, and specific enough that people would want to come to your place for doing a post-doc. Or because they would choose you because they could see, and so the third stage of organizational development is programmatic so that you really develop cancer care and cancer control. You’re really developing – we got a center, we got a center grant from NIH during that period – and in Community, Healthy Families. We got Kellogg money during that period. The teaching, one of the things – meanwhile, IUPUI’s going digital. There was one year, literally, that converting existing graduate courses to web-based courses, we got all the grants. Diane Billings and I put together a statement of where the school was going. I told her that we will put it as an attachment to every course because if I were a reviewer and you told me this course belonged to a plan, I’m going to give you more money than if you just give me the course. And, Bill Plater asked for a re-review because one school should not get all the grants, but we got all the grants. It was one of my happier moments. It was like, there are very few times that administrators can say, “Yah,” but I was very happy with that. But Diane and Pam wound up also getting a major Department of Labor grant. It was over a million dollars for working with critical care nurses. We really began to have centers of excellence. The fourth stage of development, and we got there, not all of it stuck, it’s interesting because now it’s years later, some sticks and some doesn’t, was I believe once you have excellence, you then do more across institution, collaboration in certain areas. Vickie developed the – you know, I don’t prepare for this, so I don’t remember things that I haven’t had to use – but she put together the Mary Margaret Behavioral Group that involved multiple universities. They eventually got an interprofessional training grant that was IU. To me, that is an example of that. Anna Daniel, yeah, she was the key person, because I supported her after she was tenured to even get a post-doc, a National Library of Medicine post-doc, to connect with Regenstrief because I thought that 

was important. Anyway, Anna put together, we put together a consortium of University of Iowa, Michigan, Madison, and us – I don’t know if I said all four of them – to do nursing informatics online because all of us didn’t have –had either one or two people who were good. And you don’t start a doctoral program with just one or two people. But together, the consortium through CIC – we were the first one in nursing to do that. 

Scarpino: CIC stands for? 

McBride: The Big Ten consortium, the – Herman Wells started it. 

Scarpino: That’s okay; we can look it up. 

Mahon: We can look it up. 

McBride: It’s the Big Ten. 

Scarpino: Okay. 

McBride: Committee for Interinstitutional Cooperation. 

Scarpino: Okay. 

McBride: But right now, not only in all athletics, like all Big Ten games they work together, but all the nursing Deans work together, all the library. I mean, whatever level of organization you’re at within that CIC, which is now more than Ten – it’s Maryland, it’s Pennsylvania State – anyway, there’s a collaboration there, but four of the schools, four of us in schools started this nursing informatics. For me, that is, those were two examples of excellence building further excellence. You parlay the excellence that you have working with other people to get something bigger than you could do yourself. I have given you my whole plan for the School of Nursing. 

Mahon: That’s okay. 

Scarpino: Can I step in? 

Mahon: Yeah. 

Scarpino: Okay. We’re going to be respectful of your time so, but I want to ask you… 

McBride: Well, you do – you know, I’m reminiscing, so it’s pleasant. 

Scarpino: No, this is, this is fine. If you had to write an executive summary and in that executive summary state your accomplishments as Dean, what would you list? 

McBride: I would say research development was a major one, scholarly development, because we also redid all the promotion tenure in light of the Boyer and had examples of the different kinds of scholarship because developmentally, I had faculty who were angry at the research faculty. I had a very good master teacher say to me after I gave a State of the School address, “Those research people have an advantage; they do presentations and publications,” and I had an ah-ha 

moment. I didn’t say anything to her, I wanted to be respectful because she was a really good teacher, but I realized that all the people who were master teachers were not doing anything about the scholarship of their teaching. They were not analyzing their work, but there were journals that existed to talk about innovative pedagogy and what have you, and that resonated, of course, with Diane Billings. Diane Billings, she’s the Energizer Bunny. Every time I work with her, she was somebody – she was like the ultimate person you want to work with because every time I came, she had thought through the next ten-point plan. Well, if you are Dean of a Big Eight campus thing – you know, you can only give attention to so many things at a time. Having somebody who is thinking all the time, and they were good thoughts, and my job is to listen to her thoughts and if you say to yourself, “Oh, that’s a live one, we’re going to run with that,” and in fact, after a while with working with Diane, I once said to her, “You’re not going to get anything more, you’re just so organized, you can always get resources out of me for something, I have other areas that need to be developed.” But with the Boyer, it was none of this, “You’re not good,” but it was the scholarship of teaching is going to – and Diane ran brown-bag lunches for faculty to help them with scholarship. She is a prolific scholar. She did work where people then did chapters. I would say that she did an enormous amount in the most understated way to take people who were good, told them they were good, helped them then convert what they were doing to what were scholarly products. When I say we increased in research and scholarship, I mean it together so that the overall refereed presentations, publications and what have you, grants money went up. I would say that everything that we did in – we were moving to become, the scholarship of teaching took off because we were pioneers both around the country, the world and certainly the campus with simulation. The simulation lab and what we did because Pam Jeffries worked with – oh, I can’t think of his name, but he was a surgeon – when the new administrative building for IU Health was created, and I’m sort of leaving them, but I got them to commit to something. Nursing and Medicine were working together to make an unbelievably good simulation lab, but we also had simulation that was remodeled within our own school. And if you look at where nursing has gone, how to help people get basic skills where they can take very complicated mannequins, program them to show symptoms and let the patient die while you’re still a student and it’s not a real person. A lot of the simulation that was done was unbelievably creative. So, I would say we had the blossoming of the scholarship of teaching, and actually that wound up influencing the National League for Nursing and they wound up developing a category of centers of excellence. And I think ever since they started it, we’ve gotten it, but we were also, I think, the inspiration for those centers of excellence. I would say that the notion of all the cancer work, the Champion Center for Cancer Control, I mean, we became the best place if you were interested in behavioral oncology. If you were working with people with cancer, both to try to think of behavioral strategies to prevent, or early recognition, or to prevent something that we think we can prevent, or to manage symptoms. We have people who are very good with, there are certain symptoms that flow from chemotherapy that people have to deal with and they came up with new strategies for how to handle that. I did say the Healthy Families, Healthy Communities, we started, we had clinics in schools, we had nurse-run clinics downtown. One of them turned into, while I was Dean – it’s hard for a school that isn’t really linked with some kind of bigger purse to take on a legal liability for some of the clinics. So, we started a nurse-run clinic in inner city that did well, 

and I always worried that something would come up. I tried to get connections, but there is a federal community center where the community takes over. The school helped set it up, but we also helped them, they then became an official community center. Then, in many ways, I think my biggest accomplishment is the link between service and education. There was no connection when I started. There was one meeting of the Dean of Medicine, Dr. Daly, that about fifty people went to and it was like more announcements. In my mind was, “How can you be in a practice profession and not be connected to the practice?” You know, it would be like IU School of Nursing students are ours when they wanted those students so they could recruit them clinically, but there was no sense of ownership if the clinical facility was moving in a new direction. We didn’t know what was going on. I always said we had, you know, guest status, we’d drop students in. And then meanwhile, nursing changed. In 1999, the National Institute of Medicine came out with Too Err is Human. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about that book, but it talked about all of the, we don’t have standardized procedures. This is the beginning of the electronic health record. We need standardized procedures to avoid unnecessary mistakes, and they estimated unnecessary mistakes at, you know, millions, I mean, medication errors and everything else. And you began to have, by this time, that if students were going to even work. You know, it used to be in my day, like okay, you’re a nursing student, I’m going to give you an experience with, believe it or not, cataract surgery. You used to be sandbagged in a bed for two weeks. I’ve had both my eyes done and was off and running the next day. (LAUGHING) But it used to be, that was the case. You then worked with reading up about it or, but meanwhile people are in hospital short periods of time, it’s more and more complicated, and then there is this big national push to more standardization, best practices, get the best practices out. But if you don’t know how to use the electronic health record, you don’t even know how to put your observations in. You have to understand something about the system if you’re a student or you can’t work in the system. That was sort of a revolutionary thing of what you had to be. Anyway, I was one of the few people who probably was really happy when with the push towards – we need to make sure we have enough money base – IU Medical Center needed to partner with somebody for a bigger patient base and they looked at Community and they looked at Methodist and they partnered with Methodist. Actually that was in the air even when I interviewed – after I was Interim Dean for a year when I had to go through formal interviews, I asked to see Stuart Kleit, the Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs, because I knew that Walt Daly, because I had worked with him and I had been with him in meetings. But Walt was, you know, interested in the whole. The clinical he left to Stuart Kleit. I asked to meet with Stuart Kleit as part of my process. He even asked why. He said, “You know, I’m not the Dean; why are you in my office?” I said, “Because I’m a practice profession and it doesn’t make sense to me and you’re moving in this direction, and I believe that the School of Nursing should be connected.” Meanwhile, Sonna Ehrlich Merk had, as they put together what was Clarian Health, Sonna, who was the Chief Nurse Officer for the IU Medical Center became the Chief Nurse Executive for what was now Clarian, but she was only in that position for I’d say no more than six months before I became Interim Dean. And then I knew her and we both wanted a better relationship. And one of my most accomplished leadership strategies, bar none, is – I shouldn’t say I; we, Sonna and I – we decided that we would have all of our meetings in public. We would have breakfast at different hospitals because, if you know anything about 

hospitals, it’s 6:00, 6:30 in the morning, 7:00 – it wasn’t so much, it was more like 7:00 – the surgeons are getting some breakfast in the cafeteria before, and Sonna is a gorgeous person. She’s a lovely blonde and her husband, who died in there very suddenly, had been the head of OB/GYN. So, he had been very respected. SSonna was well-regarded clinically and I would say that metaphorically, I said to her, “I want you to drape your metaphorical, say I’m a good person so that if they see me with you having breakfast, they see that we’re working together.” And then I took her over to what was the Convention Center at that point so that academia – but we actually did a whole series of hospital – because I like to say that when I first became Dean, the physicians asked her what she thought of me and she metaphorically conferred authority on me. Then when they chose the next Director for what was then Clarian, the physicians asked me, “Was this an okay person?” But I wound up then – Stuart said, and I never forgot this because from a leadership point of view of a gendered profession, this was a good thing, he said, “Any time you and Sonna come together holding hands,” of course, he meant that metaphorically, “I will take it seriously.” Well, you know, service and education in nursing are interesting because the Chief Nurse Executive knows everything that’s going on. She controls millions of dollars. I mean, if you think about what those positions are, but she works for the organization, so she does not have an independent voice. I always like to say, I, as Dean, didn’t know what was going on, but I had voice. I had – deans have an independent voice. We actually, at that time, worked – we had a research agenda that we put together, we had an exchange of titles, so she became Associate Dean for Clinical Practice and that’s embedded now. Whoever is the Chief Nurse Executive, like at IU Health, is a faculty member in the School of Nursing and there is a title. Now, it was title that had nothing to it. I have learned how to use titles that have nothing – I mean, I had no desk, I had no, you know, as they say, without remuneration or tenure. Well, I had no space, it had nothing, but every time I communicated with them, and one of the most interesting things that ever happened is we worked together and we worked on what we were doing to make it better, and we didn’t have, we were glad to bring service and education together. The physicians were having a hard time because Community physicians looked at the IU physicians and thought, “What do they know about practice? They’re just in education and research.” And the IU physicians looked at the Community people and said, “What do they know about education and research?” The truth of the matter is, both of them were accomplished, but they did not have a common culture. Because they had such a strong culture in the old version, it was a hard move because we didn’t have anything in the old structure. I was glad to have a new structure where I could lobby, and what I lobbied for was that board committees should have the Dean of the School of Nursing, the board committee for Clarian. So, I eventually was on the Education and Research Committee of the Board for Clarian. I was on the Quality and Patient Safety Committee. Rose Mays, I believe, was on the Community. My goal was to infiltrate and for them to see us because, and in fact, at one point, I lobbied, after I was Dean it went away, I think, to get on the executive, the medical group where they do credentials and all of that. They always had dinner meetings in Methodist Hospital basement, awful, once a month, but I religiously went from table to table. In fact, they had a big argument before I was invited to join – Sonna pushed it –of whether I’d have a vote or not for the medical Sonna said, “Well, she doesn’t want to vote, she just wants to find out what’s going on.” Well, they thought that was okay. But I went 

systematically every month to those meetings and took some of my propaganda. You know how we always have propaganda of like, of the mission statement, what are you proud of, or something and, you know, sort of like I’ll put it on the table, so you have the information. You sit next to a person at the meetings – the meetings were never as important as saying to somebody, “I have been meaning to call you up, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” and that’s how leadership works. It’s threads of connection because, at one point, when I was lobbying to infiltrate the structure – so this is Bill Loveday and then eventually it goes, well it’s Bill Loveday, and then Dan Evans really happened more while I was at IOM after I stopped being Dean, but with Bill Loveday, I don’t remember who said this to me because I was lobbying for, you know, the Dean of Medicine was on the Board… 

Scarpino: And Bill Loveday’s position was what? 

McBride: He was the CEO for Clarian Health. 

Scarpino: Okay, alright. 

Mahon: Okay. 

McBride: And then Dan Evans became, but the – I was lobbying for the School of Nursing to be there and what I really wanted was for the Dean of Nursing to be on the Clarian Health Board, the Board Board, just like the Dean of Medicine was mandated. It took me a year and a half for the School of Nursing to become Exhibit S in the negotiated agreement for Clarian Health. And I will tell you, it doesn’t say much. But basically, from my point of view, it says the School of Nursing is ours; we have some privilege status. It says it in very general language, but when Marion Broome was appointed Dean, the first thing I did when I went to visit her was to give her Exhibit S because nobody would know Exhibit S. And when Robin took her current position, I gave her Exhibit S, and it was you need to know that the negotiated agreement, because every now and then, historically, pointing out that the negotiated agreement was this, can at least get people talking about your issue. I mean, I’m talking a lot about this because making service and education connected was important. They told me early on that the Dean of Nursing, Angela, we’ll never, we won’t put the Dean of Nursing on the Board. Just to complete the story, the year I went to IOM as a Scholar-in-Residence, so I’m not Dean anymore, Dan Evans wrote me and asked if I’d be on the Board and if I would Chair the Board Committee on Patient and Quality, which I did for the next twelve years. For a leadership archive, I think some of these examples are just really good examples of within gendered professions, or gendered issues, trying to expand the space so that – because I’m a great believer if you are there and talking, after a while, people – I have gone to meetings where people didn’t want me in the first place and then they don’t remember that they didn’t invite you; after a while. Now, it requires you to understand that they might not talk to you for a year or two and you have to have staying power. I’ve always said that my leadership style was erosion, water on rock. (LAUGHING) But it led to a lot of things. It led to when IU Health was formed. Sonna and I wrote one letter about – they were doing a big analysis of physicians and Clarian and they never asked us how things were going for us. But we decided to write the letter that would – it began with, “We know you care 

deeply about nursing, so we thought we would tell you how we’re doing. You haven’t asked us, but here’s the letter.” We listed all of the accomplishments that we had and it ended with what we thought needed to be done next. What was interesting is that letter was on the agenda – I only know this from Sonna – like three times and it fell off of the agenda, but everything that we asked for basically came to pass. 

Mahon: Now I’m just going to give a little recap of your time as Dean, and I don’t expect for this to encompass everything that you did, then I’m going to ask you a question. You gave your last State of the School address in September of 2002. Between your very first State of the School address in 1991 as Interim Dean and your last, all of the nursing programs on all eight campuses became accredited, the School of Nursing was the first to go digital on campus, nursing received more research funding than ever, and an official clinical relationship with Clarian Health (which later became IU Health) developed, and the School of Nursing rose even higher in national recognition, particularly as the only one to offer all four degrees… 

McBride: And also, in U.S. News and World Report and NIH rankings because we were like, yeah, way up there. 

Mahon: Okay. So, what did your time as Dean teach you about being a leader? 

McBride: (pause) I learned a lot about the current health scene. Once I was in the role, there were all sorts of things that I never had thought much about. I had bigger thoughts, and this is not encompassed in what I’ve said before, but we had an Associate Degree program and I did work with, I couldn’t work with all the students, but I could work with the leaders of the different programs. The notion of people starting Associate Degree and being embedded in the school where you could see all the rest of what nursing could be. I had a better sense of opportunity and what we needed to do for opportunity. We eventually then started, you know, a Baccalaureate, a Second Degree, Accelerated Second Degree program for people who have college degrees and want to go into nursing and that has become popular, and that’s also captured a larger population. I did a fair amount around diversity and inclusion in terms of, Lillian Stokes ran a series of programs. In fact, she started with the Office of Diversity and then basically people who were not minorities wanted the same programming. We talked about it as diversity and inclusion. She was unbelievably good about understanding both how to help students who need confidence to be successful in college, but also to put programming together that gives the whole school a better sense. We actually went on the wall and listed our diversity goals and we decided we would make them public, we had to make them public. I learned that what had been a flaw in me earlier, wound up being an asset in that position, and that is I have always had broad interests. I once had somebody said to me in a sneering way, “Oh, she’s like Margaret Mead, she talks and writes about everything.” Well, I was part of a field that, at that point, was just coming into its own. I didn’t have anybody who said to me, “Angela, okay, let’s get you now moving towards excellence.” But I’ve had broad interests, and I realized that even though, oh, way back when I hadn’t wanted to be Dean of the largest school of nursing in the United States, I learned about higher education. I learned about how systems work, and I learned that my interest in a 

variety of things, and I would hope that anybody who worked with me would say it, made me respectful of a range of strengths. Because I don’t think in a pubic university you can just have one thing you’re pushing. You’ve got to build strength in all areas. Everybody has to feel that it’s good for them. I think I elevated the camaraderie of the faculty so that there was a sense of, you know, we went to responsibility centered management. One of my happiest moments was when a faculty member who was very much a person, a New York-born person who speaks her mind, I put her on my Budget Committee because one of the things with responsibility centered management that I took seriously is that everybody needs to understand financially how we run and that there are different pots because I grew philanthropy. We didn’t have any – I went in with the goal – this was just Angela’s goal; this wasn’t anybody else’s goal – but the only way you build research excellence is to even start getting endowed professorships and chairs because people don’t work just for money, they also work for distinction. And, at the time, I think we had sixty tenure track faculty, so I decided ten percent should be endowed, named or something. And by the time I left, they had not all come to fruition, but we had developed a number of them, and we were alive philanthropically. I think the fact that I had so many interests and could listen and I always knew I had pretty good logic, but I also learned that when it comes to strategy, I was pretty good. 

Mahon: Do you have any further questions? 

Scarpino: I don’t. 

Mahon: Okay. 

Scarpino: Do you think you should wrap it up? 

Mahon: Alright, sounds good. So, we… 

Scarpino: I mean, there are things I could ask, but I mean, your, you… 

Mahon: Yeah, I know. 

Scarpino: … a lot of what she said answers the questions that we had here. So, there’s no point in asking them over again. 

Mahon: Now that we’re at the end of the interview, I just have two final questions for you, and the first is, is there anything you wanted to say that we didn’t give you a chance to talk about? 

McBride: Well, you know, I was shaped very much – you asked about my education and all that – I have to talk about my marriage… 

Mahon: Yeah. 

McBride: … because I wound up marrying somebody in philosophy. One of the reasons, Bill was – Bill was an independent thinker and a fresh thinker and in the Dedication to my first book, The Growth and Development of Mothers, I say that he always asked me the stretch question of: What do you want to do next? For, 

for someone who grew up not liking the constraints of being a girl growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, then marrying somebody who asked you what do you want to do next when you didn’t even think it was a good question because you had a new baby – what do you mean, what am I going to do next? There was an openness always to him in what I was doing that also then, you know, goes with – he and I wrote together two papers that are important for theoretical underpinnings for women’s health, and so I’ve, I have to be – I was shaped very much by marrying somebody – now I have to tell you, I would struggle with something and I would say something like, something that I thought was brilliant, you know, I finally have arrived at this. I’ve been married to somebody who would say, “Well, that’s what Aristotle said and blah, blah, blah,” and I would say, “No, he didn’t; show me the book, bring back from your office that book, I want to look it up.” (LAUGHING) But I tease about it, but it was, that was very helpful to me to have sort of a broader interprofessional, interdisciplinary state of mind in looking at things because I think you are at least looking at different issues of leadership from different lenses. You know, I realize now how privileged I was to be at a place that was going through so much enormous change because the ability then to shape and I say this about being in the Midwest, I used to kid at the beginning that Midwesterners are so nice. You ask them something, they think you’re crazy, but they’re polite about their answer and they always try to answer even if it was like, “Where in the hell is she coming from?” And being in a place, because I’ve only taught at two places, and I then was on the Advisory Board for Yale – I was the Chair of their Advisory Board. I mean, I even was a candidate for, on the board of Yale for the corporation. It was rigged – they took two women and one man and, if you know anything about Yale, the man is going to get the vote for the trustee, but the whole idea that at least I ran for Yale. So, and I kept up with Yale. I was on the President’s University Council for six years. I would say that where I was, was not as developed, but I was just so privileged to be there and to be there at a time, you know, I think that Jerry Bepko was just an extraordinary Chancellor. He managed to develop IUPUI and to be supportive while understanding politically – I’ve seen him at meetings; I learned from him to – you’ve got your own agenda, they have their agenda. How can you be nice to their agenda? But nevertheless, never loose track of the thing that you’re pushing, and you keep pushing and you keep pushing and you wear people down, in the nicest way and you don’t use the same strategy all the time. Sometimes data wins the argument; sometimes humor wins the argument; sometimes whining and saying you’re not getting any younger and you need nurses, you know, be nice to the School of Nursing. I mean, I had used all of these strategies to get my way, but I was in a place where people were very supportive and very open and I am just very grateful for that. I had a better career by being planted there. I had a better career nationally because I knew, I used to always say I don’t know all the answers in nursing, but boy, do I know every question because we have every program. You can just lay it on me here. I’m your woman for that kind of a program. And there weren’t that many people nationally who had that breadth of experience. Period. 

Mahon: Okay. Well, on behalf of the Administration of IUPUI and the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence we thank you for sitting with us for this interview. 

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