Interview with Elizabeth Keenen

This interview is being conducted in the Hearing and Balance Centers Conference Room in the Administration Building on the Towson University campus. It is part of a series of interviews comprising the TURFA

Oral History Project, conceived and supported by the Towson University Retired Faculty Association, with a generous support from the Dean of the College of Health Professions. This interview, as well as others in this series, is

available in the Towson University Archives. Our guest interviewee today is Elizabeth Keenen, who's a professor emerita from the Department of Nursing. Welcome, Liz.

Glad to have you here. We'll start with this question. Just tell us where you were born. Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Up in Lancaster, OK.

My aunt and uncle lived across from the hospital and I'd sit on their steps and see these nurses, the students going to class. And in fact, I used to go in, the classroom was partly underground

and I'd go over and see what they were learning and I'd sit outside the window and see what was going on. But yeah, I came from... My father particularly was from a very large family.

And of course all the illnesses that goes with that, grandparents and everything. And I think I always got attracted to helping people. Are there others in your family who went into the medical

profession? You're it. I was the first. You're the one. First and only,

I will add, now, I don't know some of the younger ones. My family's so large and they're so removed. Most of my family's gone, obviously. Oh, and we lived, when I was growing up,

my father worked for a doctor as a kind of handyman, and I knew the family. I mean, I'd go to their house and everything. And the doctor strongly encouraged me.

And in fact, he gave a lot of advice. Take Latin. A lot of medical terms are in Latin. Yeah, that kind of thing.

And so they backed me up a lot, too. What colleges and universities did you attend? Up there, I went part time to Franklin and Marshall College. I had to go in the evening because they didn't allow women

to go to day school. And I also... Yeah. I also went to University of Pennsylvania and I used to commute from Lancaster to Philadelphia to take courses, after I finished nursing school, and I probably had about

the equivalent of two semesters. Then I came down here to a workshop at University of Maryland and found out that even as an out of state student, I could get through cheaper and faster.

And so I came down here and never left. I went home part of the time, but... And what did you major in? In my bachelor's, nursing. You majored in nursing then too.

OK. Now, of course, you've had a long and good career in higher education, but what made you ever decide to go into the field of higher education?

It was always a desire, but I worked at Good Samaritan Hospital and I was in charge of educational programs over there. And I always wanted to teach in a baccalaureate program because

I was a diploma graduate, which you may or may not know about. And Ruth Schwalm, the founding chair of our department, came over to make arrangements for clinical experiences for their students.

And the more I showed her around and the more she talked, I said to her, do you have any openings? And she said, oh, yes, we're just forming. We don't even have any...

Well, they had one med surg faculty member. And so I applied. And here I am, 27 years later. What made you decide that this was the place you wanted to

come to, Towson University? Through Ruth. I had attended University of Maryland, and I wasn't wedded to it, let's put it that way. And then after I'd talked to Ruth, it sounded like a program

I wanted to be part of and a university I wanted to be a part of. What was the institution called then? What was Towson called? State.

We were the Towson State College, I think, when I came in 1972. It was a similar college to one we have in Lancaster, which you may or may not have heard of.

Millersville. Had the same history, normal school, state teachers' college and on through, but they... I talked to them at one point about a nursing program and they weren't interested.

Now they do help the nurses up there with their prerequisite courses. So when you first came to Towson State College, what were your first impressions about the place?

People laughed at me, but we were in Linthicum and I had to park in the parking lot way down and I'm climbing up to Linthicum. And I said, well, I'll never retire from here, but I did.

And I found people very friendly. Now, in our early days, we were just one course ahead of the students, you know, preparing the course. So we didn't get terribly involved at the university level

for many years. But I liked it and I liked the campus. I liked the people. Dean Sheets was our Dean.

I thought he was great. What year did you retire? 99 was my last semester, but I had that, what was it called?

It was an early retirement. They were giving some of us. So I actually didn't retire till the spring, but I stopped working in the fall of 99.

And what courses did you teach while you were here? OK. I taught medical surgical nursing, which is really many times called care of the adult in a hospital setting.

And that's all I did. I never, well, I taught some of our conceptual courses. I taught leadership one time, but mostly med surg. You were involved with the Department of Nursing right from

its very onset. I was the fourth person in the department. Ruth Schwalm was the chair. And then there was there was a lady by the name of Elizabeth

Hughes, who kind of, or did, I guess, develop our conceptual framework. Then Charlotte Davies came and then I was next. So they had already taught the first course by the time I got

here. So like I said, we were just one step ahead of the students going into the courses developing it. You must not have had many students then enrolled in the

program with such a small faculty. We had 15 students the first time and they graduated 1974. And of course, our program had to be accredited by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

And so we only got that in 75, but it was retroactive to our 74 graduates. And then of course, our graduates have to take state boards, Maryland State Board of Nursing.

Did you have any administrative responsibilities here? I was chair for one year, between chairs, I was an interim chair. And then in 1978, we opened the program to people who

already were registered nurses but didn't have their baccalaureate degree. So then I was coordinator of that until I retired. I also did teaching.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, during all that period of time with a small faculty that obviously grew, did the faculty responsibilities

change over that period of time? Did you see any changes taking place? With us it was constant changing actually, because we had to keep up with what was going on in healthcare.

So we were greatly encouraged to attend workshops and seminars and those kinds of things so we could keep updated. You know, healthcare changes, as you all know now, all the time. And so we had to keep up with it. As far as our association with

the college and seeing a lot of changes. I knew the change to the university and that kind of thing, but I really wasn't that much... Well, I was reading some of my own information and realized I

was on a task force for middle states. I didn't remember that. We had to do self-study reports for the Department for Nursing as well as middle states and I was always a big part of that.

The curriculum had to make many changes to keep up with the changes in healthcare itself. Do you remember any of those curricular changes that had to be made? We started with something that came from the Lysaught report,

which I forget what. It's a branch of something and they described nursing as episodic and distributive, episodic meaning nursing that took place in a hospital setting, episodic out in the

community. So our students got experience, like, in health fairs, clinics, they made home visits. One of our faculty started, I'm trying to think of the name of

the organization. It's an organization for homeless men and started a dental program, which may sound funny that you'd start with dentistry, but a lot of diseases come from bad teeth, bad gums,

and they got that going. Helping Up Mission, it was called. What kind of changes did you see take place at the university from the time you came in till the time you departed?

The student body changed for us anyway. I don't know whether it did totally, but our initial students, our first sixteen, and this applies to me also. We were first generation, having advanced education of any kind,

and of course later students were coming from professional families. So we had to adapt in terms of the kinds, the ways we were teaching.

We had to emphasize their thinking skills in addition to, as you know, nurses do physical skills also. There was a lot of talk about our student faculty ratio because in the clinical area it was eight to one. and of course, people

who had 50 and 60 in a classroom didn't understand. I did too. We went up as high as 64 students from our initial 15. And so our classroom teaching was pretty similar probably to

other disciplines, but then our clinical was one to eight. And it had to be. Those eight students were all with patients who were sick. And if I was in a room with one student, I really didn't know

what the other seven were doing. And I came out many a time and said, thank goodness we have the caliber students we have because they knew what they knew and they knew what they didn't know.

And so they would wait for me. Were you able to keep that eight to one ratio? Pretty much. Every now and then it went up because we maybe had an extra student or so.

We were financed initially by, we had a grant from the NIH, I think that was a three-year grant. And then after that we got it from the nursing association associated with NIH and that went on for years.

I can't tell you when that stopped and the university had to pick up all of the cost, but they would increase the amount of the grant so we could take an extra eight students. In other words, have another section in the clinical area.

And so we ended up with 60-some students in a class. So you said you retired in 1999. Yes. Did you ever teach after that?

No, I go to classes. You went to cold turkey and stayed away from... I take courses at the community colleges. I have wonderful courses for seniors and it's cheap and in

fact I'm enrolled in one to start in a week or two. What kind of courses you taking? I've taken a lot of political ones. In nursing, we didn't... When I went on for my degree, I didn't have a lot of

liberal arts. The focus was still a lot on nursing and I missed that. And so I'm kind of making up for lost time. And then I volunteer also.

Yeah. Oh, was that true in the curriculum while you were here too, that there wasn't much in the way of liberal arts in the nursing curriculum?

No. We had to meet the same standards every other student did. Plus then we had psychology, sociology as requirements for

our major in addition to the sciences. What about the students in nursing, from that small group to the larger groups that occurred later on? Did you see any changes in the kinds of students that you were

getting? I think initially we probably got students like I was, first generation, but I think later on, yes. Well, first of all, we got men.

You know, there aren't too many men in nursing. We got African American students. We got international students. We had some international students who could barely speak

English that came into the major, and I remember asking one, you know, about not having a better command of English before starting something like nursing. But she said in her home, she wasn't allowed to speak English.

She had to still speak their native language. So everything she was getting, she was getting here in all of her classes. And I presume that all of your majors were preparing to

go out into the nursing field. Exactly. Yeah. OK.

Do you know if the international students you got, were they planning to go to their home countries to become nurses? The ones I know about did not. They stayed here.

Now, maybe some of them went back, I don't know. But we had students, a lot of Asian students. We had a couple from Nepal. The initial group was all female.

Yes, all female and all Caucasian. About how long did it take for any of those changes to take place, when you began to get men? You know, I can't remember.

I remember our first student, but I can't remember when he came. But we got men. One man's wife came home and would talk about her nursing

practice all the time. And it sounded so good that he decided to come into the major also. And then we had an engineer.

We used to smile because he's the only one that walked around with a briefcase. So we got men from other fields, and reputable fields, but they decided on nursing.

I remember over the years driving by Burdick Hall during graduation time and seeing all those nursing outfits hanging from a line outside the building, but I never knew what that was exactly about.

I kind of guessed it had something to do with graduation, but it was... What's the story behind all the nursing outfits out there? I don't know that there's any. I just know they decided that they had finished the program

and they were pleased and happy and they decided to hang their uniforms up. And like I said, maintenance, a strung a line of some kind for them to put them on and they stayed there quite a while.

Yes, yes, they did. They did. But I can't tell you when that stopped. I don't remember anymore.

Let's focus a little bit now on pedagogy. I assume, since there were so many changes you already said in the Health Sciences that affected nursing. How did that affect the pedagogy of the

people who are of your faculty who are teaching nursing courses? Of course, when we first started, none of our faculty had their doctorate.

Then Charlotte Davies got hers and eventually I got mine, step at a time. And right now they have what they call clinical faculty. And these are people who work in the area, like they might be an

intensive care nurse, and they take our students in the clinical settings and of course, they're the best-versed. Then we have the actually prepared faculty, the doctorates who do teach classroom teaching and clinical.

As far as teaching the students, nursing was always straight lecture and I know when I went through nursing I said it was stimulus-response. We were taught when this happens, this is what you do and

that's about it. And of course we very much encouraged looking at a situation, analyzing the situation that what can you do differently. And the ultimate goal of course is the patient to

go back to taking care of themselves. Did you not need any special facilities of any kind with equipment? Oh, we had a lab, which I am dying to say because what,

again, this is an old tradition, but we had what we called a Mrs. Chase. She was basically a wooden adult sized doll that we could practice on and we practiced on one another.

You know, we learned vital signs on one another. We learned all kinds of things. And I was talking to Lisa Plowfield and she was telling me what what the new lab's going to be.

A lot of simulation, a lot of... And I gathered not just nursing is going to use it, but maybe OT students. I don't know who else is going to use it. And they did have something last week, but I just can't do that

walking. So she invited me to come over and she said we have wheelchairs, we'll just push you around. So I might take advantage of that.

And you should. I'd love to see it, to go from what I knew early on to what it is now. Yeah.

I've heard it's a wonderful new facility. Yes. Technology, of course, has influenced nursing a lot. But was it influencing prior to 1999?

Was technology strongly influencing nursing even then? Somewhat, somewhat, yeah. But I think it's more so now. Well, during COVID they got their classes on Zoom just like

everybody else did. I still haven't figured out exactly the how to stuff, how they managed that, but they graduated, which some, I think, should influence the type of education they get.

If you can do a lot of it online, then why not do it and maybe not have to have as much faculty? And I asked Lisa about enrollment and she said that it's really based on, they're not able to get enough

nurse educators. And I understand that to a point. A lot of our graduates went out and earned a lot more money than we did here at Towson in their first jobs.

And so I can see people not being willing to go into education. Would they have to get a doctorate? Probably. Eventually. They might be hired without one, which I was.

But the writing was on the wall and the day I talked to Ruth Schwalm, she said to me, you know, you're going to have to start your doctorate. Well, I was kind of thinking about it anyway.

But then I was encouraged. Did the nursing program have any affiliations with any of the hospitals or doctor's office or medical facilities? Oh yes, we had to have contracts with all the agencies and we

never really had big problems getting, we went into healthcare centers, we went into hospitals, like I was at Saint Joe's and GBMC and Good Samaritan, all those places with students. And that was just me.

The rest of them did the same thing in only different places. So travel was involved as part of your assignment. I remember one time I had to go to what used to be a TB

hospital in East Baltimore. I can't think of the name of it now. Anyway, it was over in Eastern Avenue. And so one night I drove over because I thought, I don't want

to be late, so I better go and see where this place is I'm going. And I did, and I found it, so. During the time you were here what are the things that stick in

your mind as interesting stories or humorous stories about something that just stays in your mind? Not much, but our social life was pretty good. The faculty really became good friends.

We've been friends since the 70s. This group that was at my house the other day, we've been doing this for years. And so that's our fun part.

And, but during the working days, no, I really can't think of... It was, I don't know what the rest of you do, but we worked seven days a week.

And because you always had to be revising your content. And of course, when they first started the program, they were reaching out. You probably had some of our students because they're all

required to take English and the sciences, of course. This footwork was all done before I got here getting people on campus, talking to them about course requirements and that kind of thing.

And then our original chair also was the person who went out and got the initial clinical facilities. After that, we did it on our own. As far as searching for agencies,

that wasn't hard because I worked in a couple of them. So it was easy to go and say we have these students that we'd like to send to you for clinical practice. And of course, you know, that helped them too.

They were patients that they didn't have to take care of that day. We were. And so it worked.

It worked out fine. You were at Towson in a number of years. What do you think it is that makes Towson a special university?

I like the people. I like the opportunities. I was a faculty member, but I did have the opportunity to be chair for a year.

I was a coordinator of the RN program, so it wasn't like, 27 years I went in and taught this course. And I changed courses. You know, I didn't always teach the same thing.

And those opportunities were all there. And we're the second largest nursing program in the state. There are something like 1,200 nursing schools in the country and we ranked 285 or something like that.

I asked Lisa about pass rate because our first class, we were so excited, everybody passed state boards. And she said they're in the mid 90s in passage, so they're doing a good job without us.

We also did some interdisciplinary things within the department. We had faculty who were community health faculty. We had faculty who were in hospitals like OB, pediatrics,

med surg, and then we had our psych faculty who were in psych institutions. And so we had combined conferences and in fact, a couple of us had some psych faculty come into the med surg

area with us. So we were there for the disease and the treatment and that's what I was there for. But the psych faculty would come in and interview the patient and

would get a kind of different perspective sometimes, which she shared with the students. You ask about men. We had one male faculty member who didn't last very long. But again, you have to look at the male population and nursing.

Yeah. Yeah. But I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about how the department got started.

How it really... Yeah. What gave birth to the whole nursing program? It was determined that, well, there was a nursing shortage and

they determined that they needed another nursing, a baccalaureate nursing program. And the board of trustees here at Towson was contacted and they agreed to have a nursing department on campus, which I'm

sure changed things a lot for the rest of the campus because we were kind of different. Of course, OT came after us. So then they were a little different too, but, and then we

had the grants to get us started. And with the grants from NIH, we had those for a number of years. You always had to do a new report and a new request for

funding and all that kind of thing. Was the nursing department in the College of Health Professions when it got started? No, we didn't have colleges then,

did we? I don't think so. So it was just departments at that time. We were departments, yeah.

There were no Deans. Yeah, we had Dean Sheets, but he was, he had basically what's the Health Science, health field now, he had that group, but he was our Dean.

If you had a crystal ball and can look into it and see, there's Towson University in 20 years, what do you think it would look like both as a university and a nursing program? The nursing program now has a master's degree.

And I don't know how much further they will go because, you know, we have the big University of Maryland downtown and they sort of have the upper level things. Nursing has become, and maybe some of you have them, nurse practitioners.

I have one too. We have what they call traveling nurses. They will go to any area. For example, right now down in Texas, I wouldn't be surprised

if they put out a call that they need nurses and people would go. And then of course we do have the doctorate in nursing now, but that's all University of Maryland.

So I would see, I would see nurses becoming more and more independent as the nurse practitioners are, because they kind of, they work under a physician, but they make a lot of decisions but with the approval of a doctor because we

don't have the background a doctor has. And the university, I think it's fine the way it is. I mean, you have a lot of doctoral programs now, I think. They're coming along.

Yeah. So I wouldn't, I would see that progressing, Nothing else. And all the time you were here, were you in Burdick Hall?

The story is, Ruth Schwalm loved to tell it. She and Pat, the secretary, had two carrels, carrels, how you ever say that, in the library.

In the library. Now, Pat tells me they moved around a lot. Well, that was in the formation days. And then we went to Linthicum, and then we were in the old administration building and of course now they'll be moving

around again. Right, right, right. Anything else you want to add to all of this? You provided some awfully good information.

I don't know whether, you know, the nursing education at one time was pretty much diploma, which is what I had, hospital based. We were the workforce.

They didn't call it that, but we had to take state boards and it had to be an accredited program, but that's all that they really wanted. Then the associate degree, that what they used to call

the junior colleges and now the community colleges started nursing programs and the students come out with an associate degree in nursing. Several years ago, the push became to get the professional

degree baccalaureate in nursing, and many reluctantly did that. They didn't see... I was a coordinator for that and I had to tell them what courses they had to take. And I do remember one student came in and slammed my door and,

I don't see why I have to take English when I've been a nurse X number of years. Well, I hope she found out why she had to. Anyway, they felt like they were repeating, but what we tried to

do isn't, we didn't repeat courses they had before. We tried to give them more advanced courses, like doing a research project, being in the community because they didn't have that as part of their other programs.

That's the kind of thing we tried to do. Then they had an elective in, it was part of the administrative course, but where they actually worked with an RN over on the floors in the in the community services.

So they had the background to keep moving on and did, a lot of them, just as their faculty was, because we, I started out teaching with just an RN and then of course, I went to school and got all the rest.

And you did, you were a nurse too? And, yeah. Did you... Yeah, I was in the, I worked in on the units in the hospital for

years before I actually started teaching. Did any of that overlap your teaching and your nursing or once you stopped, once you started teaching, you stopped nursing? Oh, I had to go in the clinical area with students.

So no, that was the best part because I could teach and I also was still with patients. And so I always say I had the best of both worlds because I could still be a nurse, but I was a teacher also.

You talked about English, the importance of English. And I remember that in the writing center, if you were going to take the colleges and departments and, you know, see who sent the most students, it was always nursing.

And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the importance of English, specifically writing to the field of nursing. Actually, it doesn't apply too much to their day-to-day working because writing nurses' notes as as brief as it can be.

So we're not talking whole sentences and everything that goes together, but I think we had them write a lot of papers and some of them... Well, anyway. And I'm not an English major, but they really, and a lot of

them must not have had much in high school. I don't know, but some of them are really poor writers. And hopefully we helped them along with that, all of us, because they had to do the second writing course also.

And the RNs who felt they were forced into going back to school, and maybe they were and they couldn't see the relevance of it, I have to happily say I did not feel that way when I went back to school because it must be hard to have to sit in

courses you don't want to be in. But I always enjoyed learning and I always enjoyed going to school. So, and you have to think about, I can't imagine going through a

nursing program where you had... You're working full time, you have a family at home, you have a couple children. That must be hard. And then to be told, OK, you've got to go back to school again.

And whether the requirement in nursing will eventually become all at least baccalaureate prepared nurses, I'm not sure whether they can get that far or not. When I went to school, very few people went to a four year

school to get a bachelor's in nursing. Part of that financial, because the diploma schools were so much cheaper and we got an RN at the end just like they did. But then some of us went on after that.

I never, until today, I never heard that term, diploma schools, that's a new term to me. There probably aren't any left anymore. I was trying to think, Union Memorial had one, Saint Agnes.

I worked at Saint Agnes for four years in a diploma program. I worked at my own school for four years. I had a four-year limit in most things and I stayed at Towson 27 years.

Does that tell you anything? I worked everywhere four years. So is it mostly senior nurses who were teaching in the diploma schools?

No, they were... Some of them were master prepared. I had master prepared faculty. I did, yeah.

Some of the clinical faculty probably only had their bachelor's, but they all at least had gone beyond the RN. Yeah, but that's a long time ago. I graduated in 1954. But I'm glad I had the privilege of

catching up and keeping abreast of everything that was going on. Well, thank you for a wonderful interview. We very much appreciate it. You contributed greatly to the TURFA Oral History project.

Best wishes.