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F O R P E O P L E W H O M A K E G R E A T T H I N G S H A P P E N A T U T O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9

WHAT’S INSIDE

dean Hart’s revolutionarytext Analysis Program and book

Photo Tara Haelle

continued page 8

By Katherine Allen

Sherlock Holmes could deduce anything about a person by their shoes – shiny shoes, dull shoes, worn or new – every de-

tail was a clue. Roderick Hart, Ph.D., dean of the College of Communication, is trying out the exact same concept. Only instead of shoes, he is using words.

“Sherlock Holmes was a great detec-tive because he paid attention to people’s shoes,” Hart said. “He could learn a lot about a person even without looking at the rest of them.”

Hart, who earned his bachelor’s de-gree from the University of Massachu-setts and master’s and doctoral degrees from Pennsylvania State University, has dedicated his career to political com-munication. Before becoming the dean of the College of Communication, Hart taught at Purdue University and UT

in the communication and government fi elds.

An expert in politics and the mass me-dia, he created a revolutionary text anal-ysis program called Diction to study the language of politicians in the news. Th is past September, he received an award from the American Political Science As-sociation for his book “Campaign Talk: Why Elections are Good for Us,” which details his research using the program.

“Campaign Talk,” which has been crowned one of the best political com-munication books written in the past 10 years, off ers a more hopeful view of elections than most other research at that time. Hart’s work showed that cam-paigns, although a messy process, pro-tect democracy by bringing politicians out “for some fresh air,” Hart said.

Hart wrote in “Campaign Talk” that social scientists often avoided studying

the meaning of text because of its com-plexity. “Just because it’s hard to under-stand doesn’t mean it should be ignored,” Hart wrote.

His need to understand government propagated Hart’s interest in political communication, which began during his years as an undergraduate in the ‘60s. Hart said any type of miscommunica-tion is toxic to a country that functions as a democracy. No matter the size, pop-ulation or location, it takes a vibrant and healthy communication system to main-tain a democracy.

“Imagine if you’re a small country like Laos, that’s kind of hidden away in the mountains, or a country like the United Kingdom,” he said. “It takes some type of communication vehicle to bring those bodies [people] together.”

Th e same holds true at a local level. For example, there has to be a city coun-

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• our campus • october 2009

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dolores sands’ vision Leads school of nursing to national Prominence

Dolores Sands retired Aug. 31, 2009 after 20 years as dean of UT’s School of Nursing.

By Elena Watts

When Dolores Sands, Ph.D., left Arizona’s desert in 1984 for

the Texas Hill Country, she had no way of knowing it would be the best move she would make in her life. Sands led the School of Nurs-ing from obscurity to national prominence during her 20 years as dean before retiring on Aug. 31, 2009.

Sands, a straight arrow whose path was made winding by the world, was brought up in Detroit, Mich. where her father, a factory worker without an opportunity

for higher education, adamantly believed women should be soci-ety’s highly educated group. True to her upbringing, she attended a hometown university where she discovered women could not pur-sue their passions. Although her world began to open up in Ari-zona, it was her last stop, Austin, where her life’s work began.

Sands said her father “thought women needed to be educated because they were involved in the care of their families and they needed to have all the education they could get to be good parents and to help society.” Sands’ aca-

demic achievement earned her a seat in college at the young age of 15.

However, her father’s mind was open well before doors to women. Sands’ freshman chemistry pro-fessor, in stark contrast to the support she experienced at home, was shocked by her desire to study medicine. He dismissed the idea and plainly spelled out her op-tions: teacher, nurse or secretary, which were the main choices avail-able to women in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.

“That was the sort of advisement that went on in those days,” she la-mented. “He didn’t even know my age, for example, that I had gradu-ated with such high rankings in high school.”

Devastated but not deterred, Sands followed her professor’s ad-vice and entered a hospital school of nursing. She earned her bach-elor’s and master’s degrees from Wayne State University and her doctorate in higher education and administration from Arizona State University, where she stayed and worked for 12 years before joining UT as professor and direc-tor of the Center for Health Care Research and Evaluation. She was promoted to dean just five years later.

Upon her promotion, Sands identified three waning areas: teaching, research and service. Her first step was to eliminate the summer doctoral program that attracted students from across the nation because the school was graduating large numbers of doc-toral students without a concomi-tant number of faculty to super-

vise them adequately.“There were as many as 50 stu-

dents graduating a year from that program and they had had very limited research experience,” she said.

Numerous other challenges such as inadequate clinical labora-tory facilities to train undergradu-ate students, a master’s program that needed to be developed into various nurse practitioner pro-grams and limited organized com-munity service facilities for unin-sured and underinsured presented themselves.

Sands envisioned a setting where the school could provide service to the community and at the same time provide clinical sites where students could learn and researchers could study. Just five years into her deanship, the Children’s Wellness Center, the primary source of care for 3,500 underinsured and uninsured chil-dren in the Del Valle ISD, and the Women’s Wellness Center, which was absorbed by the Fam-ily Wellness Center three years ago, opened. The two clinics, after careful examination for quality, are now part of the Travis County Healthcare District.

The alternate entry master’s program, another of Sands’ initia-tives, allows students with degrees in fields other than nursing to earn master’s degrees in three years. While there are alternate entry baccalaureate programs, Sands saw Texas’ need for nurse leaders with master’s degrees.

“There is a little known shortage in the state of Texas and that is a real shortage of master’s prepared

Continued page 10

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By Laura Kandle

Recently appointed Dean Sharon Mosher and Di-rectors Terry Quinn and

Charles Hale have taken the reigns in some of UT’s most productive institutions. Mosher, Quinn and Hale all have a history of teach-ing at the University of Texas and are honored authorities in their respective fields of expertise. Be-low is an overview of what these members of the UT community is doing in their new positions, and how they plan to improve the quality of research and education at the University.Sharon Mosher

New Dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences Sharon Mosher has begun work to fur-ther improve the research and educational opportunities offered by the department.

Mosher began her career at the University of Texas as an assistant

professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences, where she worked from 1979 to 1990 before she was promoted to full professor.

Mosher earned her master’s in geology from Brown University in 1975 and her doctorate in geology from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1978.

Her credentials include more than 30 years of tectonic plate boundary field research in places around the world including Aus-tralia, Texas and New England; seven appointments as commit-tee chair in department admin-istration and other geosciences committees; and nine awards and honors. She also served as presi-dent of the Geological Society of America in 2001.

Mosher took over the position as dean on July 1 when former Dean Eric Barron was promoted to director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

In her new role, one of Mosh-er’s goals is to bring together re-searchers from different fields within the school. She believes that interaction between differ-ent disciplines is a perfect recipe for major breakthroughs.

“Our goal is to bring [together] young interdisciplinary scientists that will utilize interdisciplinary research,” Mosher said.

She aims to produce a better educational experience for stu-dents by providing tutors in basic courses such as chemistry and calculus, as well as to improve the educational and research oppor-tunities for both undergraduate and graduate students within the department.

By “increasing emphasis on the publication of research and providing stronger mentoring of Ph.D. students,” Mosher intends to strengthen the doctoral pro-gram. Graduate and undergradu-ate students also have research opportunities during a two-day field experience.

“We want to give graduate and undergraduate students the op-

three Promotions: Mosher, Quinn and Hale

Sharon Mosher was named dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences.Photo Tara Haelle

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portunity to become more well rounded and succeed,” Mosher said. “[And] really provide a su-perior undergraduate experience both in education and in increased research experience.”

Mosher takes over at an excit-ing time for the department. In 2005, the Jackson School of Geo-sciences was the recipient of more than $230 million dollars, the largest single endowment given to any school at the University. It was given to the school by John and Catherine Jackson for whom the school is named. Mosher in-tends to use this generous gift to continue to hire excellent faculty, build new research labs and sup-port students and post doctorate alumni.

With climate research becom-ing one of the main focuses both in the global geological field and in the Jackson School of Geosci-ences, Mosher’s promotion has come at a significant juncture for geological research.

“It’s very exciting times,” Mosh-er said. “We just have tremendous potential.” Terry Quinn

On Sept. 1, interim Director Terry Quinn became the new of-ficial director of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas.

Quinn earned his doctorate in geological sciences from Brown University in 1989 and his mas-ter’s from Wichita State Univer-sity in 1994.

A senior research scientist and professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences since ’06, he has worked on many research projects concerning climate change with a recent focus on modern and Ho-locene climate variability. Quinn was also the main authority in the redesigning of the Stable Isotope Laboratory in ‘08.

The Institute for Geophysics was established at UT more than 30 years ago to investigate both Earth’s inhabited areas and the 75 percent not inhabited such as the polar regions and oceans.

It supports a broad range of Earth sciences from ocean bot-tom seismography to airborne geophysics. One of the institute’s largest research fields is that of polar studies of ice sheets in which they have a strong history of research based in Antarctica.

The institute is also deeply in-volved in computational geosci-ences, which provide the technol-ogy to analyze different aspects of climate change for numerous periods in history.

Scientists and students also

Photo Tara HaelleInterim Director Terry Quinn became the official director of the Institute for Geophysics on Sept. 1.

Continued page 9

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By Emily Pennington and Jennifer Schmalz

On Sept.1, 2009, Bene-dicte Callan joined the Lyndon B. John-

son School of Public Affairs’ re-

search team as a Sid Richardson Fellow. The New Jersey native, who has spent the last 12 years of her life traveling around the globe, brings a unique perspec-tive to UT’s classrooms with her

research on health policy and in-novation. Callan joins the Uni-versity as a research affiliate for the Center for Health and Social Policy (CHASP), which focuses on health, social and economic

policy. “Benedicte Callan brings to

CHASP a very unique perspec-tive and extensive knowledge of innovation in health efforts in the OECD countries and will also conduct work on economic and environmental sustainability of bio-based products and pro-cesses,” said interim Dean of the LBJ School, Admiral Bobby R. Inman, U.S. Navy (Ret.), in the LBJ news release in August.

The job that took Callan around the world and made her an “international bureaucrat,” was for the Organization of Eco-nomic Co-operation and Devel-opment (OECD). She served as principal administrator of health for the biotechnology division, and later as head of the biotech-nology unit.

During her time with the orga-nization, Callan worked closely with experts in a variety of fields from 25 other industrial coun-tries spanning Japan, Australia, France and Spain. Their goal was to discuss and reach a consensus on issues concerning biotechnol-ogy policy.

“There’s a lot of smart people everywhere,” Callan said. “Run-ning a modern government is a really expensive and very large endeavor.”

Callan remembers participat-ing in one particular conven-tion that dealt with genetics and intellectual property rights. In

response to countries and com-panies taking out patents on particular genes, experts from each country gathered to dis-cuss options for trying to create an international agreement on whether gene patenting should be legal, and to what extent. To date, 30,000 human genes have been identified as part of a com-mon human gene pool, she said.

“OECD talks a lot about data sharing—there’s no way around getting different players in the room and talking about how you do sharing and access,” Callan said. “It’s comparative to property rights. People aren’t going to al-low free access to data.”

Callan has been an intellectual jet-setter since her college years. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale University in biology and East Asian studies. While at Yale, she focused on neurobiol-ogy, worked in a lab, and spent a year in Japan, where she became interested in the Japanese-Amer-ican trade war. She focused on high technology sectors, such as semiconductors, cars and elec-tronics.

Callan continued to study this topic in her graduate work at Uni-versity of California-Berkeley, where she earned her doctorate in political science in 1995. Her work at Berkeley explored how Japan’s government and industry structure created a high degree of competitiveness in the world’s

Callan Joins LbJ school of Public AffairsResearch affiliate for CHASP brings unique perspective on health policy and innovation to UT’s classrooms

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technology sectors.During the 2009-2010 year,

Callan will try her hand at teach-ing a course on innovation and health for the first time. She is researching why some particular biomedical technology and in-novation, such as sonograms for fetuses, get taken up and used quickly, while other ideas take much longer to come to fruition.

“Medicine is still so much of an art, and based on what a doctor knows in his head,” Callan said.

Her goal is to study a way to compile biomedical data and health records of individuals currently being held by differ-ent groups to create a complete health profile of a person.

“[It’s] important to help share this information so that you can help people,” Callan believes.

She uses a person with cancer as an example: Cancer is not a single disease—even if you look at one type there are multiple ways a cancer can start and prog-ress. People with the same type of breast cancer are naturally locat-ed in varying parts of the U.S.

Callan said doctors need the

ability to access information so they can determine questions based on age, drugs used and re-actions to the drugs. Callan said that if a set of data were created for a particular type of breast cancer using statistics from peo-ple with the same type of breast cancer, the data set could poten-tially help people.

Callan was drawn to UT-Aus-tin for the research and teaching opportunities provided by the LBJ School. In particular, Callan said she looks forward to working with colleagues who can increase her knowledge regarding the or-ganization of the U.S. health care system and the politics behind changing it.

“It would be excellent if we could extend insurance and qual-ity health care to all Americans. But the details of how the health care package and the ways the insurance systems are going to work are way beyond my exper-tise,” Callan said. She hopes to contribute her understanding of the organization of research sys-tems that feed U.S. health care.

Callan said she came to UT for

personal reasons as well. “UT is really exciting. It’s a growing Uni-versity in a place in the U.S. that is growing,” she said.

Now that she has been here for six weeks she loves spending time

outdoors and at the pool with her children. Callan has two daugh-ters, who she said are beginning to enjoy Austin as well. “They were born and raised in France, so they think of themselves as

French girls,” Callan joked. “Good things are happening in

the University and there is a sense of growth and excitement…Aus-tin is a cool town,” Callan said.

Benedicte Callan brings experience as an “international bureaucrat” for the Organization of Economic Co-opera-tion and Development to the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

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cil to make sure there is commu-nication between citizens and politicians, Hart said.

Using Diction, Hart deciphers each particular word in a poli-tician’s message. The program breaks down a speaker’s words into the different parts of speech, almost entirely ignoring the con-text of the sentence. A sentence’s context is important, but at the same time, a person is incapable of paying attention to a specific pattern of words [when they read or listen for context], he said.

“Try to reduce the amount of optimistic words you use in a day” Hart challenged. “I could hand you the list and say ‘here, only use half of these,’ and you couldn’t do it.”

The underlying meaning of a word supplements the human-drawn context of a sentence. Dic-tion targets particular words and analyzes each of them to find the unconscious, psychological im-pact on a person. With the un-derstanding of particular words, Hart can fully understand a poli-tician’s message.

The latest version, Diction 6.0, which is more tech savvy than the original, has been in the works for the past three years, said Craig Carroll, co-developer of the pro-gram and assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hart and Carroll revamped the program to keep up with today’s fast-paced media.

Diction 6.0 aims to understand a multimedia-driven press, as op-posed to the print-dominated press of the past, Carroll said. Carroll hopes that the program can eventually transcend the boundary of political communi-cation and be used to understand the dialogues of other markets like business, sports and enter-tainment.

The newest version of Diction can analyze interactions between people, as well as blogs and TV transcripts. Carroll said the shelf life had expired on the original program, which could only ana-lyze a single, non-interactive text.

“People are much more impa-tient now, technology is faster,” Carroll said. “We want to do on the Web what we used to do with newspapers.”

This version enables researchers to aggregate thousands of texts at a time, while allowing them to make data-supported claims about a politician’s underlying meaning. Diction works off word lists that are divided into five cat-egories: certainty, activity, opti-mism, realism and commonality.

Hart recently finished research on President Obama’s campaign rhetoric. Many people found President Obama overly optimis-tic during his campaign, when that was not the case, Hart said. The key to President Obama’s campaign was his commonality level, or the feeling that “we are in this together.”

Obama’s level of commonality far exceeded any other presiden-tial candidate’s since Truman’s election in 1948. Hart believes this came from Obama’s back-ground as a social organizer.

“It was the quintessential way of saying ‘Hey, we are in this to-gether. All we’ve got is one anoth-er. We’re not rich and if we don’t

ban together then we can’t get change,’” Hart said.

However, the analysis began way before Obama. In “Cam-paign Talk,” written and pub-lished nearly 10 years ago, Hart gives a detailed analysis of politi-cal rhetoric from 1948 to 1996. People resonated toward the book because the research emphasized a positive outlook on campaigns and politics, Hart said.

The book is now considered one of the top political communica-tion books in the past decade, ac-cording to the American Political Science Association. The associa-tion honors few books in this way, said Richard Davis, the political communication chairman of the association. Hart showed that during an election, politicians are not simply full of “hot air,” Davis said.

Robert Boynton, a new me-dia and politics professor at the University of Iowa, said Hart’s research impressively laid out the major political themes from the ‘40s to the’90s. Now, with blog-ging, microblogging and online video, the public has been intro-duced to new mediums of infor-mation, which have become major

Dean HartContinued from page 1

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“Campaign Talk,” a book by Roderick Hart, dean of the College of Communication, has been named one of the best political communication books written in the past 10 years.

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components in a politician’s mes-sage that need to be understood.

Hart did not form his argu-ment until the end of the book. After compiling all of his data, he realized he was saying that elec-tions were vitally important to democracy.

“Even if castor oil doesn’t taste very good going down, grandma used to say it would make us bet-ter. I realized that’s what I think the book did,” Hart said. “It taught me that.”

“‘Campaign Talk’ is important in the sense that it reminds us that campaigns really do matter,” Davis said.

Campaigns force politicians into the public to meet their con-stituents, but more importantly, they hold them responsible for the decisions they make in pri-vate, Hart said. Come campaign time, politicians know they need explanations for the decisions they have made.

In his book, Hart said a core purpose of a campaign is to teach. When Americans “grumble,” they are enforcing the livelihood of a democracy by creating a dia-logue.

“Some of this learning was painful, no doubt, but the cam-paign unquestionably brought important issues to the surface,”

Hart wrote. “Campaigns don’t fail unless they inspire silence.”

People may think campaigns are boring, negative or tacky be-cause a democracy is itself a gi-gantic contentious thing. Every-body wants his or her own way, Hart said.

“Well that’s OK, but unless you can get a whole bunch of other people to agree with you, then it isn’t going to happen,” Hart said.

A resolutely optimistic person, Hart said that as long as there is a dialogue between politicians and citizens, and between citizens themselves, he can remain posi-tive about the future.

“Politics, on its best day, is a rough neighborhood,” Hart said. “Communication is the salvation of democracy.”

Hart is also the director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation, a UT organi-zation that works to instill a sense of political community. Accord-ing to the institute’s Web site, http://communication.utexas.edu/strauss, the organization was founded in 2000 in response to growing political cynicism.

“I guess, to make a long story short, communication is the lifeblood of politics,” Hart said. “Politics is the lifeblood of de-mocracy.”

In his search for new ways to understand the world, Hart posed a question: When dealing with the same issues, why does the media always read more nega-tively than politicians?

He found that the press looks at things analytically and points out the shortcomings, while politicians deal with the same issues in ways that promise a better fu-ture. Nobody wants a negative politician, he said.

As long as our country has a free press and the ability of the American people to make contact with their leaders continues, good things will happen, Hart said.

work closely with an ocean drilling program that supplies core samples to the institute for study, and seismic research which assists in measuring tec-tonic movement and activity in multiple areas around the globe.

Quinn’s main duties as direc-tor include further developing these areas of specialization for the institute, encouraging col-laboration between current and incoming scientists and insuring that the institute has an excel-lent faculty, as well as outside resources and supporters.

Quinn is not only work-ing to improve current fields of research, but also to further develop ways the institute can contribute data and research to modern issues such as climate change research.

“We will be more involved in climate change scenarios… [and] will grow in those areas,” Quinn said.

In light of recent disasters with earthquakes the institute is also increasing their efforts in seismic research, a field that it has been involved in since its establishment. “We have a new group looking at the Sumatra earthquake and the large tsuna-mi it caused,” Quinn said. Their research has shed light on the fact that the area has far more seismic activity than previously assumed.

Quinn believes that much of the success of the institute lies in the excellence of all faculty and

staff as well as the institute’s sup-porters.

“We are really a team opera-tion,” Quinn said. “Our group is really strong because we have a great support staff.”

The support staff Quinn cred-its for the institute’s continuing success includes not only re-searchers but also other faculty members that work to coordi-nate the programs and publicity within the institute. Charles Hale

Charles Hale, new director of the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies is no stranger to the field.

Hale has approximately 10 years of experience working in Latin America, was appointed president of the Latin Ameri-can Studies Association and has served as chair for the Long In-stitute’s publications committee.

Hale earned his bachelor’s from Harvard and his doctor-ate from Stanford before joining UT in 1996 as a professor. He served as an associate director from 1999 to 2003 and later as co-director before taking over as director.

As director of the institute, Hale hopes to propel UT’s Latin American studies program to the national forefront. He will oversee more than 130 affiliated faculty. To continue improving the institute’s productivity and capability, Hale said he will focus on “establishing clear thematic priorities to which the institute will devote special attention.”

Three of these main thematic priorities include a focus on cul-tural agency in which the power

of culture to transform lives is studied. The second priority is “Social Inequalities: Roots and Remedies,” which focuses on the causes of inequality in Latin America and the effects of ef-forts to remedy the problem. The third priority is sustainable democracies around which the first LLILAS-initiated event of the year is centered.

The institute also partners with ArtesAmericas, which brings Latin American perform-ing arts events to UT and pro-motes a greater cultural dialogue on campus. Hale looks forward to strengthening this partner-ship as director.

“The field of Latin American studies is undergoing exciting transformations, and we need to be at the forefront of these ef-forts,” Hale said.

Three PromotionsContinued from page 5

Charels Hale is the new director of the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies.

Photo courtesy of College of Liberal Arts

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nurses,” she said. “We are way be-low the national average and we thought we could help solve that problem also [with the master’s alternate entry program].”

Not one nursing school in Tex-as held national rank in nursing research with the National Insti-tutes of Health when Sands ar-rived.

“So the faculty and I set about doing that,” she said. “It involved my making very concerted deci-sions related to the type of re-sources the faculty would need to gain that status, and I went about getting them those resources.”

Sands allocated budgets and gave faculty lighter teaching loads, which allowed them to develop their research.

“Even though I had been there [director of the research center] for five years, it’s difficult to do that [research] without enough support from upper administra-tion,” she said. “And that’s what I intended to provide and I did and we became one of the top ranked schools in the nation in nursing research.”

“Dean Sands had a very clear vi-sion of excellence for this School of Nursing and the leadership the school should provide for the state of Texas and the nation,” UT School of Nursing interim Dean Alexa Stuifbergen, who worked with Sands for 20 years, said. “She dared to imagine what was possi-ble and provided the resources and leadership for the faculty to enable this to happen.”

Now, UT’s School of Nursing is the top ranked school in the nation in non-health science settings.

“And so now we have a very powerful ongoing honors pro-gram for nurses, one of the few in

the state,” Sands said. “And NIH rankings have placed us in the top one percent of schools with doc-toral programs.”

The school’s undergraduate program is the leader in the state because they retain and gradu-ate 98 percent of their students, which Sands said “is unheard of.” U.S. News and World Report ranks the master’s program, of which there are 450 in the coun-try, in the top four percent, and an endowment system established under Sands’ watch gives notable scholarships to undergraduates, master’s and doctoral students.

“Without a doubt, I believe her most significant accomplishment was the School of Nursing receiv-ing recognition as a top-ranked school of nursing in NIH fund-ing,” Stuifbergen said.

There are at least 13 major grants from National Institutes of Health at all times with a cur-rent total value of $23 million, Sands said. Their research focuses on health promotion and disease prevention, especially for under-served populations. Studies of multiple sclerosis, end-of-life care and family caregivers, among oth-ers, are underway.

“We have at UT-Austin right now some of the top flight nurs-ing researchers in the nation, and I mean that,” Sands said. “At this point, I take no credit for anything anymore. They [faculty] did it all. I was over there just cheering them on.”

During her time as dean, Sands is most proud of the quality of the students in UT’s nursing program. The overwhelming lesson she has learned in her role is that leader-ship counts.

“I must say and it sounds im-modest, but I’ve learned leader-ship does count,” Sands said. “And I don’t mean that just to point to

myself.”She compared the creation of

the tight partnership between fac-ulty, staff and students to leading an orchestra. A leader must in-spire, Sands said.

Shalonda Horton, a second year doctoral nursing student, said her first encounter with Sands was at the master’s orientation in 2004.

“I remember on orientation day, I was feeling a sense of excitement about going back to school and doubt if I could handle the pro-gram and workload,” Horton said. “But after hearing Dean Sands’ welcome address, I was only excit-ed to be part of such a prestigious program led by such an inspiring woman.”

Sands encouraged Horton to pursue her doctorate a few years later.

“She [Sands] has a way of mak-ing you think you can conquer the world,” Horton said. “She believes

in you…in me.” Horton teaches part time and

goes to school full time. “I am a Jamail Scholarship recip-

ient which has eased the financial burden of going back to school,” Horton said. “It is because of her [Sands’] dedication to education and research and her tireless ef-forts in improving scholarships for students that I and many other scholarship recipients are in school today.”

“I never imagined what the right kind of leadership can do. And it really can,” Sands said. “People search for that. They need a guide. Without that they flounder. So that I’ve learned, I didn’t know how important it really was.”

Sands said there is still a great deal more to be done. Her advice to the incoming dean is to articu-late a vision for the next 20 years.

“Among the most important things [that Sands taught me]

would be the importance of vi-sion and perseverance in the face of challenges,” Stuifbergen said. “I think that she was able to identify how individual staff and faculty with different abilities and inter-ests could all contribute to the growth and improvement of the school. She gave selflessly to the School of Nursing and the Uni-versity and we will all benefit by her contributions.”

“And I like to think we were a very closely knit team,” Sands said.

A Texas flag flew over the Capi-tol in honor of Sands’ contribu-tions when she retired.

“I am totally committed to the state of Texas and wanted the state to be proud of our school,” Sands said. “So everything I did, I did for Texas as far as I’m concerned and I do believe Texas deserves a school like ours and it took a while to get it. It took many years.”

Dolores SandsContinued from page 2

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Julie O’Connor’s Journey to UT’sSchool of NursingWhat is your background?

My name is Julie O’Connor and I grew up in Kansas. I earned my bachelor’s in general studies from Wichita State University in 1986. After graduation, I spent one year training to be a cytotechnologist. Recently, I completed the founda-tion year of the nursing school’s alternate entry master’s program. My goal is to work in oncology, and perhaps teach in the clinical setting.

What made you decide to pursue your master’s in nursing?

I spent 14 years in cytology. Al-though examining cancer cells was a challenging career, it wasn’t sat-isfying a deep desire to help cancer patients directly. Always interest-ed in the medical field, I decided to change careers and return to school to obtain a nursing degree. Little did I know how difficult it

would be! Defeat greeted me ev-ery step of the way in the begin-ning of this journey. I was turned away at every admissions office to which I applied: “You have been out of school too long. Your GPA isn’t high enough. You have to start over.” After two discourag-ing years of trying to gain admis-sion to a program, I was ready to concede defeat. But first I wrote a letter explaining my frustration to members of a statewide board who were trying to devise solutions to the nursing shortage. Thankfully, one of those members sent my let-ter to Dr. Sands. Some call it luck, I call it divine intervention. Dr. Sands called and wanted to know more about me. She understood, and agreed with me when I said nursing is a “calling” I could not ignore. She looked over my tran-script and she encouraged me to reapply to her program. Because of her belief and faith in me, I was admitted to the alternate entry master’s program in 2008. Here’s the most beautiful part of this story: Dr. Sands saw something

deep within me, a passion and conviction for nursing that no one else was willing to see. Her torch for me never dimmed! She was willing to look beyond my GPA of 20 years ago and eliminate the obstacles others refused to remove for a non-traditional student like myself. I am now a Registered Nurse, working on my MSN.

What has been most rewarding and most difficult for you in the alternate entry program?

Returning to the academic world after a 20 year absence was a shock, especially entering such a highly regarded and reputable nursing program that Dr. Sands has created. Taking exams and juggling parenthood with the de-mands of nursing school has been the hardest thing I have ever ac-complished. But, walking into the nursing building and having the opportunity to learn from such brilliant nursing professors is a privilege I owe solely to Dr. Sands and one I will never take for granted.

What is the most important thing you learned from Dr. Sands?

I have known Dr. Sands for three years and my relationship with her has been life-changing. It’s impos-sible to think of her without get-ting a lump in my throat, let alone trying to put my feelings for her in a few paragraphs. Her goodness, enormous heart and belief in her students is something that will stay with me forever. Her encourage-ment and passion for the nursing field is a gift I vow to pay forward

throughout my career. Because of Dr. Sands, I have been able to help a patient dying from breast cancer. Because of Dr. Sands, I was able to help a sad young man, terrified af-ter a below-the-knee amputation. Every patient in my future will benefit from my passion for nurs-ing because of the opportunity Dr. Sands extended to me. Her physi-cal body may be leaving the UT-SON, but her incredible spirit and contribution to the field of nursing will endure forever.

Julie O’Connor, an alternate entry master’s student, is standing next to a bronze statue of Florence Nightingale that was purchased and donated to UT’s School of Nursing by former Dean Dolores Sands.

“The world is put back by the death of everyone who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.”—Florence Nightingale [1852]

“I think the biggest issue is tak-ing care of that large group of uninsured, and we [UT School of Nursing] certainly have done our share to do that. I think any future form of health care reform will rely heavily on highly edu-cated nurses. Why do I say that? Because the nurses will be pre-pared to deliver primary care to children and families—what our demonstration projects [Chil-dren’s Wellness Center and the Family Wellness Center] do—as well as give mental health care to those groups. You will never have enough physicians. So nurse prac-titioners can do a good portion of the primary care. We proved it.

Any form of health care reform will have to rely heavily on highly educated nurses who are gradu-ates from master’s programs—if we are going to absorb 20 million more people.

Future reforms are going to rely on another group I haven’t men-tioned, and that is highly educat-ed managers and administrators of nursing in hospitals and public health because every field of en-deavor requires leaders in order to achieve the goals.

Hospitals do not understand that they need highly educated leaders to lead the nurses. They are starting to, but only barely. The managers of the floors and the nursing administrators (Chief Nurse Officers, CNOs) are in critical positions and they have very high turnover rates.

They [CNOs] need a lot of

education to get ready to do those positions and many of them are promoted from lower ranks with-out any formal education in those roles—a very serious problem in hospitals. They do not like to talk about it at all, but I know about it. I know what the stats are and places that want to be called magnet hospitals have been told nationally, not just locally, that by 2010 they better have nurses with baccalaureate degrees in management positions. Well, I’m shocked at that. They should be master’s prepared. But it is so bad that they have community college graduates managing, and they do as well as they can with their lim-ited education.

I do not mean to knock the community college programs, but they were never meant to be managers and leaders, they were

meant to be bedside nurses. And for that they have done a very fine job. But that does not make them leaders. The hospitals kept them, plucked them and moved them up, but they do not know the theory behind what they are doing. They [the hospitals] end up with 14 percent turnovers, 18 per-cent, 20 percent, all very shocking turnover rates. Every once in a while the blame game goes on and they blame it on us, and the edu-cators look at them and say ‘you don’t know what you’re doing.’

We give you excellent gradu-ates, but you have got to be able to keep them. And graduates of the caliber that we produce know the difference and they will leave. Fifty percent go to Houston and Dallas and get paid more where the cost of living is less than Aus-tin’s. The local hospital system

does not like to hear that, but the facts are there.

Our graduates are everywhere–they are in demand—but they [Austin hospitals] want them all to be employed here. They feel we are not providing enough nurses for them, but we are a state insti-tution, not a local one. We care about the whole state of Texas and so we are pleased they [our nurses] are in demand through-out the state.

I’ve said for years they [Austin hospitals] need to increase their salaries but they do not think so. They think all beginning nurses are alike and that is their position. They do not even give a whole lot of credit to those with master’s. It’s very problematic. Now they are instituting ladder concepts where if you get more degrees eventually you will get more salary.”

Sands’ Take on Health Care Reform and the Role of Nurses

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UT Retirement Planning

200910

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