1: THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL PATH OF DOCTORAL NURSING EDUCATION ■ 21
faculty must have an in- depth knowledge of nursing education and nursing practice” (p. 1).
This indicates that the proper preparation for the nursing faculty role is to have coursework
and practica in the teaching role to ensure the effectiveness of the graduate. Our continued
concern is whether the move to properly and expertly prepare the DNP graduate for the
academic role will nonetheless result in the burden of extra coursework at an additional cost.
What, then, is the solution? Certainly, the answer is not to create easy or quick
doctorates that MSN- prepared nurse educators can complete. In my own 2014 survey
for external feedback on the development of the DNP, one respondent wrote that the
best program would take less than a year to complete and be totally online. Nor should
work experience be credited to the awarding of the doctorate. The new AACN (2015a)
white paper on the DNP has suggested that DNP students who are nationally certified
should be considered for automatic credit toward their 1,000 total practice hours post
the awarding of the BSN:
One commonly used process adopted by programs is to award credit to stu-
dents who hold national certification in an area of advanced nursing practice,
most commonly for national certification in one of the four APRN roles. Some
programs also currently waive practice hours for other national advanced
nursing practice certifications e.g. ANCC’s [American Nurses Credential-
ing Center] Advanced Public Health Nursing certification and ANCC’s Ad-
vanced Nurse Executive certification. (pp. 8– 9)
This is going to result in a Pandora’s box for DNP programs as one program may
waive a certain percentage of practice hours and the next program will attempt to attract
more students by waiving even more practice hours. This is a new descriptive element
of the DNP, not previously expanded upon, and it has the potential to be detrimental to
the rigor of the DNP degree to many stakeholders.
To enhance the transition of MSN- prepared faculty to achieve the doctorate and
establish common credentials as the majority of members of the academy, Anselmi et al.
(2010) suggest nursing faculty exchange programs (e.g., “you take two of our MSN
faculty for free and we will take two of yours for free”) and mention that internal matric-
ulation of nursing faculty in their own doctoral nursing program could be allowed rep-
utably if the potential conflicts of interest can be minimized. Such a “doctoral nursing
program exchange” is now in operation between Duquesne University School of nursing
and Saint Louis University School of Nursing to assist their own internal MSN- prepared
faculty to complete a nursing doctorate without having to experience internal conflicts
of interest by enrolling in their own PhD programs, which was prohibited. Large num-
bers of the current nursing professoriate are pursuing the DNP and many schools of
nursing have more applicants for vacant teaching positions with the DNP instead of
the PhD or EdD. What is one to do? This is where nursing innovation is needed and
where accreditors too often become the barriers to innovation (Dreher, 2008a; Melnyk &
Davidson, 2009; Neal, 2008; Stewart, 2009).
Finally, large numbers of MSN faculty are not going to return for the doctorate
with the likelihood of only marginal increases in compensation. It is disturbing that
in the aforementioned recent study and white paper from the Texas Higher Education
Coordinating Board reported limited upward mobility of graduates with only 37%
achieving higher levels of compensation after the DNP. Certainly, Texas is just one
market and every individual DNP graduate has the ability to negotiate new employ-
ment terms, including compensation. This author has seen incredible upward career
mobility with his own DrNP graduates and in other DNP graduates as well. But both
nursing accreditor agencies, the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE)
and Accrediting Commission for Education in Nursing (ACEN), and now a new