16: LIFELONG MENTORSHIP AND MENTEESHIP ■ 383access resources she would need to create and teach her courses. Her efforts
to contact her mentor, however, were unsuccessful. They had not established
any regular times to meet, her phone messages went unanswered, and her
e- mails were either answered late or the chair’s responses were so brief as to
be useless. When she approached the chair after faculty meetings, the chair
would complain about her workload, the students, and other faculty. Patricia
reached out to other faculty, and found one who answered her questions and
helped her as she learned her new role. But even this faculty did not seem
to welcome her, or include her in any informal meetings or lunches. After
the first semester, the chair told her that the faculty who taught in the clin-
ical course always met at her house to calculate final grades, so she would
be expected to travel across the city to her chair’s home, and bring her stu-
dent’s graded papers with her, which she did. The meeting took most of the
day, although the actual time spent calculating students’ grades was about
an hour. At the end of the meeting, she picked up what she thought was all
of her student papers, placed them in her briefcase, and traveled across the
town again to her house. Later that evening, she realized that a paper was
missing when she emptied her briefcase. She called the chair, who told her
that the paper was not there. Patricia spent a sleepless night, and then the
next morning she searched her home, car, and office but could not find the
papers. As she prepared to contact the student, another faculty called her to
tell her that the chair had the paper, but had decided to keep it for a few days
to teach Patricia to keep better track of her student’s papers. Patricia finished
her semester at that nursing school, but quit at the end of the year, vowing
to never again take a teaching position in nursing. Years later, however, she
once again accepted a position as an assistant professor at a nursing school,
this time with much better results. She is now a full professor, with teach-
ing and scholarship recognition, enjoying an academic experience, and she
makes a point of welcoming and mentoring new faculty.■ MEETING THE NEEDS OF UNDERREPRESENTED GROUPS
OF DOCTORAL ADVANCED NURSES
Professional nursing is reflective of America and its racialized society. Needless to say,
over the course of time, especially at its origin, underrepresented groups were pre-
vented by Caucasian nurses from gaining access to professional education programs
as well as professional nursing organizations. This clearly contributed to limiting and
preventing access to leadership roles in academic programs, clinical practice, and pro-
fessional organizations for racial and ethnic minority populations for a period of time.
This pattern of discrimination by a European- heritage- dominant mainstream culture
can be traced back Margaret Sanger and Ms. Nightingale, the same Nightingale who
so successfully mentored Linda Richards, a Caucasian American nurse, in 1877. Mary
Seacole, a Jamaican nurse, visited Ms. Nightingale in Scutari during the Crimean War
and offered her services as part of the nursing staff, and was refused. Seemingly un-
daunted, Ms. Seacole established a British hotel near the battlefield, where she tended to
■ CASE STUDY II: Patricia: A PhD and New
Faculty Member (continued)