Editor’s Note: This is the third part of a three part series.
Judith Lewis, an associate professor in VCU’s School of Nursing began serving her second term as Faculty Senate president this fall. Because of her position and the changing face of VCU’s faculty, the Commonwealth Times interviewed Lewis to discuss the major issues she and other Senate members will work on during the 2004-2005 academic year.
CT: How much of a role does the Faculty Senate have in hiring the provost?
The Board of Visitors hires everybody. I would be sure that not only the Faculty Senate, but the faculty is involved. But the other thing that happens is that as candidates come to campus there are open sessions with faculty and students, and you get an opportunity to go to the sessions to ask questions and fill out evaluation forms. And I think students and faculty both need to meet people and find out where they’re coming from.
CT: What other goals have you set forth for the Faculty Senate?
One of the things that is important to me since this is my second and last year as president is to make sure that we’ve got good leadership in place so that this will work again. One of the things I like to do is mentor people and to work to make sure that we have folks waiting in the wings.
You always need to find three people to replace yourself, because something happens to one or two of them. So one of the things I’m working on is continuing to develop faculty and also continuing to develop our relationship with the administration.
Faculty members are always working on developing new curricula and new programs. We’re working on getting our research funded. So to make sure we have the infrastructure in place to work with administration on things like that is very important.
Personally I’m excited because we’re in the final phases of design and will be breaking ground in the spring for a new School of Nursing building. And that’s been an issue because this building is just old. It used to be a dormitory. It wasn’t designed architecturally for classrooms.
So we’re looking forward to having a facility in which we can have human-patient simulators and some other state-of-the-art technologies-because there is a tremendous nursing shortage. The building is going to be on Lee Street at the corner of Lee and 11th streets. So we’re very excited about that.
CT: What’s being done to combat the nursing shortage?
We have more than doubled our undergraduate program since I came 12 years ago.
When I came, the course I’m teaching right now had 40 students. I now have 80 students in that class. So we’ve really increased the number of new nurses we’re putting out.
We have a large program of folks who are already registered nurses but don’t have college degrees-they went to a junior college or diploma school. We have lots and lots of those.
We have a big program now for folks who have bachelor’s degrees in something other than nursing. So we’re looking to get the best and the brightest. Someone told me the other day that they went to a movie theater, and during the ads and previews there was an ad for VCU School of Nursing. So we’re really working hard to get the word out.
There is a huge projected shortage in nursing. In my many years in the field there have been shortages and surpluses and shortages and surpluses. And this is a shortage that’s not going to go away.
There’s also the fact that as those of us of my age that are moving toward retirement, we’re going to have a huge shortage of faculty as well. You can only grow as fast as you have qualified faculty to teach.
But we’ve got a really nice partnership with the hospital. On this campus the academic medical center and the hospital are just wonderful partners in terms of working with us to increase training facilities for students.
So we’ve been working really hard to keep the curriculum innovative. We compete really well. We have no shortage of qualified applicants. We’ve been really pleased. The nursing students are great.