Despite Massachusetts’s need for more nurses, Boston University does not have plans to reestablish its School of Nursing, which was once ranked third in the nation for its graduate program and has not existed for more than a decade.
BU officials shut down the school, which was established in 1946, in 1988 because of decreased enrollment. BU President emeritus John Silber had criticized public universities opening nursing programs for generating “a massive waste in higher education,” according to a July 1985 Boston Globe article.
“It was principally a financial decision,” said former SON dean ad interim Patricia Meservey. “Competition of adding a public nursing school made it difficult to support the school.”
There was a shortage of 7,000 nursing positions in 2003, according to the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education’s Nursing Initiative program website. The program focuses on increasing partnerships in higher education, hospitals, healthcare associations and businesses.
In a June 18, 1987 letter, the Board of Trustees said SON closed because of a “decline in the number of young Americans who wish to be nurses” and because of an increase in nursing programs at state schools.
“Unnecessary and wasteful increase in the number and size of heavily subsidized nursing programs at the state colleges and universities . . . the School of Nursing might have survived either one of these assaults, but it could not survive both,” the letter states.
BU spokesman Colin Riley said there is no discussion of reestablishing the SON.
Eighty-seven percent of hospitals faced nurse shortages in the same year the school closed, according to a March 1987 SON factsheet. After SON closed, faculty, students and alumni campaigned to change the administration’s decision, Meservey said.
“[SON] was a school that had been a prominent nursing school for many, many years,” she said. “I thought [its closing] was a loss to nursing education.”
Meservey, who is now Suffolk University’s provost, said BU’s former graduate nursing programs and resources were transferred to Northeastern University to begin a new graduate nursing program.
Some students continue to inquire BU about the nursing school more than a decade later, simply because they are unaware the university no longer offers such programs, said former Nurse Midwifery Education Program Director Mary Barger.
Assistant Health Services Director Bob Master started the Nurse Midwifery program at BU in 1991 after SON closed, Barger said. The program, available at BU and the University of Puerto Rico, offered a joint Masters of Public Health and Nurse Midwifery Program, she said.
The midwifery program ended in September 2006 after an increase in course requirements were needed for students to obtain a Doctor of Nursing Practice, which decreased the program’s applicants.
“At that point, people will say, ‘Why didn’t I just become a doctor?'” Barger said.
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