Hayes: Sherman Hayes, speaking today in our faculty interview series with Professor Allen Gray. But Allen, for the record, indicate your full name.

Gray: All right. My full name is Paul Allen Gray, Jr.

Hayes: Thanks. And we'll get to how it got to Allen Gray. Today's date is October 18th. Is it all right if I call you Allen?

Gray: Sure. Please do.

Hayes: It's Dr. Gray. But although we're concentrating, in this particular series, on UNCW's history and your interaction with and contribution to that history, obviously, people don't come full formed, ready to go. Some don't age [ph?] to UNCW. So I'd really like to start, if we could, on background. Where did you grow up and how did you get started, and work us up to UNCW.

Gray: How I got to UNCW, perhaps.

Hayes: Yeah, it's important.

Gray: All right. I was born in Wadesboro, North Carolina, Anson County, in 1944. My parents had been married, I guess, a couple of years before I was born, and my father got drafted into the Army during the Second World War. It must have been 1942. Mother had followed my father as he was traveling across the country with various assignments, and I was actually conceived down in Colorado, Pike's Peak.

Hayes: You didn't know that. Somebody must have known that.

Gray: After my father got off active duty in the Army, I had been living with my mother in her parents' home in Ellerbee, North Carolina in Richmond County. So after my father came off active duty, the whole kit and caboodle moved back to Wadesboro. And I grew up there and went to high school there. I did an undergraduate degree in comparative literature at UNC Chapel Hill. I was a premed student, and I didn't get into medical school, and that was a very large crisis. My mother, who's a nurse, had suggested that I might look at nursing, and I thought, well, what man would want to do that?

Hayes: What year was this?

Gray: That was in 1966 that I graduated from UNC.

Hayes: So there really was a stigma that would have said no man would ever look at nursing. Was that your sense?

Gray: That was my sense, and that's a reflection of the social situation at the time, it may even be current. But certainly there was a lot more hesitation about men going into nursing, although some men had begun going into nursing, I guess sometime during the sixties. I wound up going to a diploma program in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Mercy School of Nursing, a Catholic school.

Hayes: Is it still going?

Gray: It's still there.

Hayes: What do you mean by diploma program?

Gray: A diploma program is a three year program that's set in a hospital, usually. This one, I don't remember when it was established, but it was one of the old programs in the state. The reason I went was that I applied and they chose to give me a year of advance credit because I had a degree by the time I got there.

Hayes: I was going to say you already had four years in?

Gray: Right. Four. So they gave me a year of credit, and I finished that program in two years instead of three. I knew once I got into nursing that I really didn't want to stop at that level, that I wanted to at least get a graduate degree.

Hayes: Was that unusual at that time, though, even for anybody?

Gray: Graduate degrees?

Hayes: Yeah.

Gray: Somewhat unusual. We're talking about late sixties. I graduated from that program in 1968. And I was the first man to graduate from that school of nursing.

Hayes: No troubles going through the program? No discrimination?

Gray: No real problems. There were some chit-chats about should we really allow this man student to be in obstetrics. And some of the faculty people just were very firm and said, "Well, of course. That's the way it has to be." Actually, an aside, for some reason I won the school's award in obstetrical nursing the year I graduated, so I'm not quite sure how that happened.

Hayes: It seems like they had to be careful, because that could have restricted an awful lot of female nurses access to an awful lot of medicine quickly, with the other thinking.

Gray: So I can't say that I've had any problems in that regard at all. I was trying to get into graduate programs, and graduate programs required a baccalaureate degree in nursing. And I thought, well, I guess I'm up against the wall. But one of the places I had contacted about getting some additional coursework in lieu of getting a baccalaureate degree was North Carolina College in Durham. It's now North Carolina Central University. The director of the nursing program there said, "Why don't you come on up here and we'll give you a full scholarship, and you can finish the degree requirements in a year." That wasn't the case. While I was at Central-- and I was there for a calendar year-- I had gotten a second draft notice. I had been deferred, I guess, in about '65 or '66-- it must have been '66-- because I had braces on my teeth. But the braces came off some time around '68, so I was up for grabs.

Hayes: Let's put some context for our listeners, or our readers. So at the height of the Vietnam War, there was a draft notice.

Gray: Right. But if you were physically qualified, you were good to go. I also knew that there was a need for nurses in the military, and I was an RN at that point, degree or no degree. And I knew that if I passed the physical exam, I was gone, and that's all there was to it. So I went to see recruiters, who encouraged me to apply for scholarship programs, let's call them, and to transfer my draft physical from my home county in Anson County to the county where I was living, which was Orange County at Chapel Hill. So I did that, and I was sworn into the Navy Nurse Corps Candidate Program, two days before my draft physical was due in Orange County. Which started a whole new adventure. So from that point, I was on active duty in the Navy, but in school on a scholarship program.

Hayes: Interesting. This was the Navy? Do they have a whole sub-unit that's called Health, or Nursing? What kind of unit were you in?

Gray: Well, I wasn't in a unit. The scholarship program was set up in such a way that so long as I was enrolled in school and making satisfactory progress toward the degree, all of my duty was going to school.

Hayes: But when you got done--

Gray: I finished coursework for that degree in August of '70, I guess. No, it was August of '69, because I was sworn in in January of '69.

Hayes: Oh, '70.

Gray: No. I started at Central in August or September of '68, and then I finished up the coursework a year later, which was August of '69. But I was sworn into the Navy program on January the 13th, 1969, my pay entry base date.

Hayes: What was that?

Gray: Pay entry base date. That's a Navy term.

Hayes: Tell us what that means.

Gray: It just means the day that I started with the Navy.

Hayes: It's a work day, right?

Gray: It's a critical date, because every year on the 13th I went up another year. So that was a critical piece.

Hayes: You went to school and got the bachelor's?

Gray: I finished the degree requirements in August of '69 and immediately, I mean within days, went to Newport, Rhode Island for Officer Indoctrination Course.

Hayes: Before we go into that, perhaps we can go back and just clear up a couple terms that you're going to use quite frequently. You have a degreed nurse and then you have an RN. Are those not the same thing?

Gray: No. Entry into nursing practice is currently set up so that people can qualify to take the licensure exam on three tracks. A three year diploma program, which is what I come from; a four year baccalaureate degree program, or a two year associate degree program. The associate degree program started, I guess, mid-fifties or so. And I'm not aware that there were that many associate degree programs in North Carolina in the mid-sixties. I know when I was looking at nursing schools, I had looked at Chapel Hill because they had an established baccalaureate degree program. But in order for me to go through that, I would have had to be there for four years. In other words, the nursing courses were strung across four years. And the only way to complete the courses was to take them in sequence.

Hayes: Even though you already would have had a degree [inaudible].

Gray: Even though I already had a degree, yes. And I didn't want to do that. So one of the reasons I went to the diploma program was that I could get through the thing in two years. But once I got out of the diploma program, it was interesting that even though I had a liberal arts degree, it was not a degree in nursing. So I didn't get any credit for the degree. And my goal was to go to graduate school anyway, so getting the baccalaureate degree in nursing was just putting in more time and meeting some degree requirements someplace that granted the degree.

Hayes: As you went through this three year program, did it finally become four years that you finally had to go, or was it two?

Gray: Let's talk about it this way. I spent four years at Chapel Hill doing the comparative literature degree. I spent two years immediately after that at Charlotte doing the nursing requirement to take the licensure exam. I became an RN in August of 1968. And then I spent a year taking required nursing courses at Central. I actually got the degree in '70 because they only give degrees, or did at that time, once a year, I guess.

Hayes: So you have two baccalaureates.

Gray: I have two baccalaureate degrees.

Hayes: While you were in nursing school, was it similar to now, that you had lots of practice in that? Was this a practical, hands-on kind of program?

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: So you were ready, when you got done, to be a practicing nurse.

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: The moniker, the name that everybody else would use is that you were an RN, right?

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: The degree business wasn't as obvious to the public, right?

Gray: Yes. Not necessarily.

Hayes: You were ready to be a practicing RN.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: With practice already. In other words, at Charlotte, what high school did you have to help out?

Gray: I, of course, did clinical practice stuff during the nursing education program. But I graduated, I guess it was in June of '68, and worked in critical care at Mercy Hospital for the summer before I started school at Central. So I'd actually been in practice for a few weeks, months.

Hayes: Did you have to practice while you were at Central?

Gray: Yes. There was clinical there as well.

Hayes: I want to make that clear, because your literature degree, you don't have to practice literature.

Gray: You do, but not in the way you do nursing.

Hayes: Nursing, at this time in the sixties, was similar to now in the sense that you had to practice.

Gray: Right. For example, one of the courses that I had to take at Central was a public health nursing course. And I had no background in public health nursing, but by going through a semester course and actually following people out in the community, I acquired that.

Hayes: Sorry. You and I may know some of the terminology, but 50 years from now maybe that will change, and that's why I wanted to put it on the record. So now the Navy owned you?

Gray: The Navy owned me, absolutely. I had, I think it was a two year obligation, even though they had only paid for one year of my going to school. So I went to Newport, Rhode Island to Officer Indoctrination School, which actually was called Women Officers' School.

Hayes: Called what?

Gray: Women Officers' School. The military has different ways of providing front-end information for officers. There's obviously ROTC on college campuses. There is something that's called OCS, Officer Candidate School, for people who want to be officers but go through a training that's similar to enlisted basic training. And then for people who are already commissioned, Officer Indoctrination School. Well, I had been commissioned in February of 1969 as an ensign.

Hayes: Is that an officer ranking?

Gray: That's an officer ranking in the Navy. It's 01. So I finished my days at North Carolina Central as a Navy Nurse Corps ensign. Didn't know anything about the military, never worn the uniform, nothing. So the deal was to go to Newport, learn how to be a Navy officer in five or six weeks. Very interesting, regimented situation. A couple of anecdotes from that. We were restricted to base.

Hayes: This is Newport--

Gray: Newport, Rhode Island.

Hayes: Not Newport News.

Gray: No. Newport Naval Base.

Hayes: Is there a city there called Newport?

Gray: Yes. Newport's famous because of the mansions there that wealthy people have built, the breakers and whatnot.

Hayes: Probably your accommodations were not at that level.

Gray: No. Not at all. They restricted us to base. I don't remember for how long, but we had full days. Class most of the day, drill, physical activity, this, that, and the other. Eventually they did let us go off base on, the Navy calls it "liberty." And there was one specific criteria, and we had to wear the uniform off base. By then, we've been in the uniform and we knew a fair amount about at least playing Navy. And I'll never forget being out in town, and people would make very negative, disparaging remarks. That just really hit me, because I thought, well, I'm just one of you. I mean, I just happen to have this uniform on. In retrospect, that's probably an important event in that it forced me, and probably other people as well, to recognize that while you're wearing the uniform, you are the uniform.

Hayes: Were the remarks because of the Vietnam War?

Gray: It was because of the Vietnam War.

Hayes: And yet this town was living off of--

Gray: It was a military town, that's right.

Hayes: It was a large base?

Gray: A large base at that point, yes.

Hayes: Were the officer candidates men and women?

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: You called it Women's? Did I hear that correct?

Gray: Nurse Corps officers went to Women Officer School. The Navy had been taking men into the Nurse Corps for about a year, I guess, at the time that I was there. So they had switched over. I can't remember now. My certificate may say Women Officer School. But I think what they did was that they gave the women a certificate that said you completed Women Officer School, and for the men they gave something that said Officer Indoctrination School. But it was Women Officer School.

Hayes: So you were really very early. Well, they had corpsmen ________________that were men, but you were saying there were men nurses as officers were not in existence that you knew of?

Gray: Not until about the mid-sixties.

Hayes: Interesting. So you were a trailblazer.

Gray: Right. A pioneer.

Hayes: It wasn't your intention to be.

Gray: No.

Hayes: Another story, you said there were a couple. I'm just getting back to your time period.

Gray: I think I covered that. I knew when I went to Newport that where I'd be going, where my first duty session was. At some point while I was still at Central, the Navy had sent out what people called a Dream Sheet. Here are the places you can go, which one would you like to go? And I had chosen Pensacola, Florida as one of my places, and that's where I went. So I was at the Naval Hospital of Pensacola, Florida for two years, from late '69 through the end of '71.

Hayes: Vietnam wasn't automatic? I knew the Navy had a huge presence over there, but not everybody went.

Gray: Well, the situation was that we had, I'd say, better than 50% of our patients at Naval Hospital of Pensacola were returnees from Vietnam.

Hayes: So you were serving in the war but at a distance.

Gray: Right. An interesting anecdote-- well, a couple things. I got selected to do in-service education, which meant that I did orientation to 20 nurses. I'd been there about six months, I guess, and that position came open. And somehow or other, I wound up doing that, which was wonderful. I enjoyed it because they kept me in the rotation. Junior nurses-- how can I tell you what that means? Young nurses, lower ranked nurses. And some of the older nurses as well, or more senior folks did shift rotation. I mean, that's just the way it was. Days, evenings, and nights. The standard rotation was a week or two of days, ten consecutive evenings-- no, it was seven consecutive nights. And then seven consecutive evenings and then back to days.

Hayes: No break in that at all?

Gray: Yes, there was a break. One of the payoffs was at the end of nights you got four consecutive days off. So people typically would stumble out of the hospital, get on a plane, and go someplace, so that was nice. And in those days, you'd fly military standby for, I guess about half price. Just show up in the uniform, pay the fee--

Hayes: Did you do some flight business?

Gray: I did a few trips around the country. The administration in the hospital, the higher-up officers, had put me into this continuing education, in-service education position. But kept me in the evening and night rotations. So what I got to do was work with people new to the Navy primarily, and tell them what to do and how to do and whatever during the day when I was working orientation. But then I got the opportunity to show them I knew what I was talking about when I got to be charge nurse on evenings and nights. So that was fun.

Hayes: Were these nurses or more LPNs?

Gray: No. No LPNs in the Navy. They're all officers.

Hayes: Even though you'd been in just six months, you were, in essence--

Gray: In a leadership position, yes.

Hayes: Do you have a sense that this was the first bug of teaching, or are we going backwards and guessing?

Gray: I don't know.

Hayes: Because you really were a teacher then, at that point?

Gray: I was.

Hayes: Were they actually formal classes?

Gray: We did actual formal classes, but the numbers were always small. It was not exactly one-on-one, but one to maybe as many as five or ten.

Hayes: So you were doing your duty, you were still in Pensacola.

Gray: Yes. Toward the end of that, the assistant director of nursing, or the assistant chief nurse, whatever the position title was, came out to see me on the ward one day and said, "I need to talk with you." I'm going, "Uh-oh." And she said, "Here's the deal. There's a need for a male nurse in Vietnam within 48 to 72 hours. And you're about to detach, and we're giving you the opportunity to go. You'll have to extend for six months, a year, or something or other to do that." And I said, "Thank you, but no, I have other plans." And I was very relieved, because that was the first time something like that had happened. I had already been accepted in graduate school for a master's degree at USC Chapel Hill, so I already knew what I was going to do. And I couldn't see trading off the opportunity to go to graduate school to go to Vietnam for a year, so I didn't go.

Hayes: It seems like you handled probably a lot of bullets from Vietnam as it was. Were these severely injured folks that you were really getting by this point?

Gray: We had people with all kinds of injuries. I worked on an orthopedics ward, and we had lots of people who were amputees, that sort of thing. All kinds of stuff.

Hayes: Did you have a sense that this was real nursing, real serious nursing?

Gray: Yeah, it was very real.

Hayes: In other words, some people I've talked to who have been in military nursing say it is the most intense, alive, in really helping people, I mean in that sense. That these are not colds and so forth.

Gray: No. I worked on wards that were around 40 beds, and they were open wards. So that means it was a big room with two-thirds of the patients inside and a third of the patients on a porch outside, a closed in porch. And we would have on the orthopedic ward, for example, people who were having surgery. We would have people who had completed surgery, been through surgery, had casts, braces, traction, the works. And then on the porch, we had people who were convalescents. People who could take care of themselves. On evenings and nights, I would be the nurse for that ward and three or four other wards. And yeah, it's real nursing.

Hayes: And good nursing. You learned a lot, I assume.

Gray: Oh, jeez, yes. It's called trial by fire. You either make it or you don't. What's really interesting is that not only was it an opportunity to learn and polish nursing skills, but I was operating in a military environment and so I had to be, and was, a Navy officer along with it.

Hayes: Were these men predominantly that you had in your wards? Were they from all services or was this only naval?

Gray: Yes. One of the shocks that I had with military nursing, I had assumed that patients would be battle casualties, that sort of thing. Never thought about the retired population. And a large percentage of our patients, particularly on medicine wards, those kinds of things, were retirees.

Hayes: Interesting. I never thought of that either. So it served both.

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: Florida has a lot of retirees, so it makes sense. Pensacola is huge, I think it still is a major--

Gray: It's a big naval base, yes.

Hayes: Okay. So we're headed back to Chapel Hill. Did you get a chance to see the folks ever, or come back, or was this pretty much really a remote assignment?

Gray: Yeah, I traveled back to North Carolina periodically, and I don't remember what the frequency was. But as I had said earlier, it was possible to go hop a plane, so that wasn't really a big deal. I had said after doing undergraduate work at Chapel Hill it didn't make a lot of sense to do other work there. But sometime or other, when I was in North Carolina and was thinking about graduate school, I had arranged an interview at Chapel Hill. And I was so impressed with the nursing faculty that I saw there, I thought, well, why not? Plus, they had a bit of incentive. They had started a full scholarship program, the Johnston program. So I applied for that, and I was awarded a Johnston scholarship, which paid for the whole of the graduate program and paid a stipend for me.

Hayes: How many years does that typically take?

Gray: Two.

Hayes: Full time?

Gray: Full time.

Hayes: And probably a lot of extra work, because you're loaded up with clinicals? Did you all the time [ph?] work there?

Gray: Yes, we had clinical. I didn't work part time. I went to school full time.

Hayes: That's what I meant, because your clinicals are like working.

Gray: Actually, we had the summer off. There were no summer courses, and I worked during the summer between the two years of the master's program at the teaching hospital in Chapel Hill. I'd gone in and asked for a job, and the Director of Nursing Service said, "Oh, we'll fix you up." And they gave me a unit that was Three West, and he said, "The best way I can describe this unit is that it's the armpit of the hospital." I'm going, "What's that mean?" They had multiple services. Surgical services and medical services, and they were the overflow from the ICU, which was sort of down at the other end of the hall. That was another trial by fire, but I learned a lot.

Hayes: Too much work?

Gray: They gave me the opportunity to be there for the summer as the head nurse, and I had never done staffing, nothing. So I learned a lot, quickly.

Hayes: Were you in transition to somebody else that they were thinking was coming?

Gray: The person who was there, I don't know what her issues were. But the story I heard was that she had decompensated to the point that whenever things came up-- and there were lots of crises-- that all she could do was cry. So I thought it was really interesting that they were willing to take the risk with somebody like me and just drop me in there to see what I could do. And one of the stories that I enjoy telling is that when I started, the working people came by and let me know very quickly that they hadn't had time off in months, and they wanted vacation time because it was summer. And I thought, well, what am I supposed to do? So I said, "Look. If you promise me that you'll work your ass off, I'll give you time." They did, and I did. So by the time I left at the end of the summer, everybody, I think, who wanted time off had gotten it. But I was in there working with them shoulder to shoulder.

Hayes: Was the armpit designation a valid one?

Gray: Probably accurate. The place frequently was full and with sick folks.

Hayes: And the patients really were sick.

Gray: That's what I mean. The patients were surgery patients, long-term patients. In those days people stayed in the hospital for maybe months on end. Not the case now.

Hayes: Done with school?

Gray: I finished the master's degree and was sort of uncertain about what I wanted to do. An opportunity came along to be a nursing supervisor in part of the outpatient department at this hospital. So I took that job, and--

Hayes: Which hospital?

Gray: North Carolina Memorial Hospital.

Hayes: Is this connected to the university?

Gray: It's the teaching hospital at Chapel Hill. The name's changed now, it's UNC Hospitals, plural.

Hayes: It's right at the edge of the campus, right?

Gray: Yes. Well, it used to be the edge, but it's pretty close to the center now. That was an interesting adventure. Not long after I went to that position, the administration in the hospital decided to-- they already were using an administrative arrangement that they called triads. A triad would be composed of a physician, an administrator, and a nurse who were responsible for some area of the hospital. They decided to move that from the inpatient area, where it was already established, to the outpatient area. So I got to be the triad nurse for the medicine specialty clinics.

Hayes: Explain to me what a unit like that would do.

Gray: We had medical specialties, things like hematology, gastroenterology, rheumatology-- I'm trying to remember, it's been a while. But those kinds of things.

Hayes: Outpatient means that people came in and got service, but were not expected to stay for very long or not at all?

Gray: Typically, the clientele were people who had chronic illnesses, who came in periodically to see whatever faculty physician was following them. It was the faculty practice that we were providing office space, that kind of thing. That was very interesting because it gave me an opportunity to deal with management at a level that I'd never worked with before. We did everything from budgeting through, well, the whole works.

Hayes: Your team, again, was yourself.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: And then a doctor administrator?

Gray: A physician.

Hayes: But he or she was really mainly an administrator?

Gray: The physician was a clinician and an administrator. A faculty member from the medical school.

Hayes: And then the administrator was--

Gray: --was an administrator in the hospital who had several triads, probably.

Hayes: And they had probably gone through a hospital administration type program?

Gray: Yes. The administrator I worked with was a retired Navy hospital corpsman. Very interesting. The Navy term is "salty," and he certainly was salty. But I learned a lot from him, a lot. People talk about mentors, and he definitely was one.

Hayes: Should we say his name?

Gray: Yeah, his name was Joe Peters.

Hayes: How many years, then, were you in this practice? Lived in Chapel Hill?

Gray: Lived in Chapel Hill, right. I was there for between three and four years in that position. The triad experiment in the outpatient area didn't work. It worked for medicine specialty clinics but it didn't work very well for other areas. And that and some other things that were going on, I knew I needed to move on. A faculty position opened up in the School of Nursing for a clinical instructor. So I left at what I call in academic terms, halftime, the end of a calendar year. And started, I guess it was in January of '77, at the School of Nursing in Chapel Hill.

Hayes: They have the same peccadilloes and practices of various ranks and so forth, so you were coming in with a master's degree. But by being a clinical instructor, you didn't have to have a Ph.D. and they didn't expect or want you to have it. They wanted your practical experience.

Gray: That's right.

Hayes: Tell us what a clinical instructor--

Gray: A clinical instructor then and now, probably is somebody whose primary responsibility is supervising nursing students, full clinical instruction. In other words, in a health care delivery setting.

Hayes: Were you still in the hospital?

Gray: I frankly don't remember what my assignment was. I did that for a semester. And I had students somewhere, but I don't remember where that was. And it was in the hospital. The School of Nursing was about to begin a major curriculum revision that would encompass both the undergraduate and graduate programs. And in those days, Chapel Hill had only an undergraduate and a master's degree offering.

Hayes: So they were moving to a Ph.D.?

Gray: No. They were going to revise the existing curriculum. I was interested in participating in that, so I contacted the dean and said, "I'd like to work with that project." And sometime before the summer was over, I got a response from the dean who said, "I received your request and we think it's too much for one person to basically be a support person for the curriculum revision. So we're hiring you and another person, a woman, to work halftime with curriculum development and half time with clinical teaching." So I was off on another adventure. I don't remember how long a curriculum revision took, but I guess about two years. And I had the opportunity to work with this bright, bright woman whose name was Georgia Eckelman [ph?], who was doing some certificate work in organization development while she was doing all this other stuff. So I got to learn about organization development, and the two of us worked primarily as, I guess you could call us professional staff, for the administration of the School of Nursing. We went through the curriculum revision and then Georgia and I were again the professional staff for running the school for a while, and I can't remember exactly how long that lasted. There was a period of time that there was no associate dean, and we facilitated an integrated working group of the chairs of the department, who handled the decision making for the school.

Hayes: So you were almost as an assistant dean.

Gray: I said in retrospect after Georgia left, I functioned as the assistant dean of the School of Nursing. I never thought about it that way when I was there, but that's the way it was.

Hayes: Who was the dean that you worked for?

Gray: Laurel Cobb.

Hayes: Is this a large school? I don't have any sense of nursing schools. How big?

Gray: I don't know what the enrollment was then, but I guess that the undergraduate enrollment was around 200 or more. And the graduate enrollment was probably around 100. It got to be very clear to me if I wanted to continue a career in academia I needed to have a doctorate. So I started fishing, and after two or three tries, wound up admitted to the doctoral program in the School of Education. So I did that.

Hayes: But you don't need to have a doctorate in nursing?

Gray: No.

Hayes: Is there a doctorate in nursing?

Gray: There is a doctorate in nursing. I was looking at doctoral programs in the mid to late seventies. I think there were around 20 nursing doctoral programs around the country. There was not one in Chapel Hill at that time, or there was not one in North Carolina. The doctoral programs looked very much like the educational doctoral programs to me. And I was living at Chapel Hill, I mean various things. So what happened was that I did the Ph.D. in education at Chapel Hill under the GI bill.

Hayes: But not an Ed.D.

Gray: No, not an Ed.D.

Hayes: Wow, that's different.

Gray: Well, I'd gotten some counseling from various people who made it, I thought, clear that if I were going to get the degree, I should get a Ph.D. Because the Ed.D.-- or another degree that I'd looked at was the Public Health degree, Doctor of Public Health-- are considered to be professional degrees instead of research degrees. So I applied for and got into the Ph.D. program in Education, and did, I guess two-thirds of that or so on the GI bill.

Hayes: Did you finish the program?

Gray: I finished the program. Hallelujah.

Hayes: Wrote the dissertation on nursing?

Gray: Yes. My dissertation focused on nursing team leadership, and that was an interesting story.

Hayes: I'm curious about what courses, then, were you taking. Management or administration of education? In other words, how were you keeping your focus knowing you were going to go back into nursing?

Gray: I'll give you an opinion, perception. The School of Education was undergoing an overhaul. They'd gotten a bright new dean in who was moving things along. And he got things to, I'd say, about a halfway point and died. So at the time I got to the School of Education, things had just stopped dead in their tracks. And they were working on an organization development doctoral program. So that's what I applied for, because I was interested in organization development. Well, my degree is actually in Adult and Higher Education, because they never got the transition completed. So the coursework that I had was very much focused on organization development, with some, I'd say, mandatory stuff in education that I guess everybody who went through the education doctoral program had to take.

Hayes: Some of it was psych?

Gray: Yeah, some.

Hayes: Did you ever drift over to business school?

Gray: I had talked with the business school in my earlier quest for doctoral programs. I didn't have calculus, and I didn't have this and I didn't have that. So it just was not the place for me to be doing the doctorate in business. I did some business-related courses, but I don't remember now specifically what.

Hayes: I'm just saying the terms seem to blend. Psych education and business seem to have... They're all separate, but they have elements that are the same, because organizational theory is taught in lots of different programs.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: Were you ever taking anything from the nursing faculty, then? Not really, not from a nursing-nursing __________________.

Gray: No. The School of Nursing kept me on as a graduate student, facilitating this integrated working group that I had talked about earlier, while I was in the doctoral program. We had a number of faculty people who went to doctoral programs and retained their faculty positions. I, philosophically, had problems with that. And I knew that by giving up my faculty position, I'd freed it up for somebody to take it who could have it full time instead of trying to jerk things around and cover the bases. So I just resigned. And I was very pleased that the School of Nursing was willing to continue me as a graduate student.

Hayes: But that kept your finger in nursing.

Gray: That kept my finger in nursing.

Hayes: How long was the doctoral program?

Gray: I was in the program three and a half years.

Hayes: It's a long time to be working completely out of... If you would have come back to say, "I'm here again," there's still that element of...

Gray: During my tour through the doctoral program, the School of Nursing succeeded in hiring an associate dean, and she actually was on my doctoral committee. So that was another sort of "in."

Hayes: And the thesis was related to nursing.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: And you were using the nursing literature primarily, or both?

Gray: Yes. I was using-- I suppose my dissertation mentor would say it's not a theory-- but Hersey and Blanchard's Motivational Leadership, I guess is what it's called, as a focus for what I was doing. So I was really looking both at some leadership theory, and then its application or whatever in nursing practice.

Hayes: So now you're admitted [ph?]. Did you go to graduation?

Gray: No.

Hayes: I ask that because so often people don't ________________. At that level, you'd been in school a long time. You enjoyed school? You obviously liked going to school, or not?

Gray: I must have, because I learned a lot.

Hayes: Two bachelor's, a master's, and a Ph.D.

Gray: Well, I have yet another master's degree I haven't talked about. I spent a lot of my career in school as a student.

Hayes: As well as a teacher. Let's do a timeframe. What year are we in now? You're finishing the Ph.D. program at Chapel Hill...

Gray: I finished the Ph.D. in December of 1982.

Hayes: A Ph.D. with a background in nursing, and male. Pretty unusual?

Gray: In those days, yes. Probably still relatively unusual.

Hayes: I know you didn't think that way necessarily, but I just wondered if you looked around and went...

Gray: Well, we could go back to one of the themes that you brought up earlier, and that is that I had gone off to another discipline to do the doctorate. It was very shocking to parachute back into nursing as a faculty member. And I did have a faculty position at the School of Nursing, I picked up a faculty position. Because there were all these things that had happened in nursing since I had sort of left--

Hayes: In three and a half years?

Gray: In three and a half years. And remember, I hadn't necessarily been involved in a lot of practice stuff prior to that, so I had to back up and learn a lot of things on my own. Nursing theory, for example, was beginning to be a hot topic, and we can debate about whether the stuff that people call nursing theory is really theory. But whatever it was, I didn't know anything about it. And nursing seemed to believe that students who were coming through both undergraduate and graduate programs needed, I'll say, to be at least aware of those conception frameworks.

Hayes: Give us a sense of nursing theory. About patient behavior and that kind of thing.

Gray: Well, I think nursing theories are attempts to explain what nursing is.

Hayes: So some of the professional issues within nursing...

Gray: Well, I wouldn't say professional issues. There's always been a grand question, "What is nursing?" And I'm not satisfied that there's an answer today. But some people like Sister Calista Roy, for example, tried to quantify, document, whatever, what nursing is. There's still somebody's phrase floating around, "If you can't name it, you can't own it. If you can't describe it, you don't know what it is," that kind of stuff.

Hayes: Is this coming out of the always conflicted as an extension of medicine or of doctors' moods, that separation? Is some of that the difference between...

Gray: Well, if we talk about it in terms of quantification or identification issues, medical practice may be somewhat easier to identify than nursing practice. I mean, physicians do X, Y, and Z, and for P, Q, and R reasons. Nurses do something or other for God knows what reasons. Often because that's the way we've always done it. There's a lot of discussion nowadays about evidence-based practice, which I can see fairly clearly for medical practice but that's spilled over into nursing, and I'm not so sure where that is at this point.

Hayes: It seems to me there's a lot of nursing or patient relationships and so forth.

Gray: Interpersonal relationships.

Hayes: ...which don't lend themselves as well to some of this bean counting, numbers and so forth. And there's a sense today that we may have lost something by not having that.

Gray: One of the early nursing theorists was Hildegarde Peplau, who attempted to quantify some of that stuff.

Hayes: So you got a position.

Gray: I got a position.

Hayes: Tenure track, ready to go, or just to fill in?

Gray: You know, I really don't remember.

Hayes: Obviously, it wasn't important.

Gray: I assume it was tenure track, but I don't remember that it was or it wasn't. I was working, I guess, about half time for the associate dean and teaching the other. Whatever it was, it was a mix that didn't work for me. I wasn't happy with it. And so I remember I went in to see the associate dean one day and she said, "Well, what are you going to be doing next year?" And I said, "I don't know but it's not going to be here." So I decided it was time for me to move on.

Hayes: You were in Chapel Hill for quite a while.

Gray: A long time.

Hayes: [inaudible] back and forth.

Gray: I was actually in Chapel Hill, that tour, I think it was 13 years.

Hayes: You moved, interestingly, within the structure, but you'd actually been there quite a while.

Gray: There actually was an ad in the newspaper that my mother sent me, I know that her influence was there again for this position in Wilmington as the director of, I'll call it the RN to BS program. Baccalaureate degree program for registered nurses. In other words, people who had a diploma and associate degree programs who didn't have baccalaureate degrees could go back and get the degree.

Hayes: Which happened to you.

Gray: Yeah. And I had been working with some students in Chapel Hill who were in that kind of track at Chapel Hill, so I thought, well, I know something about that. So I applied for the job, and in 1984 I came to Wilmington and came in that position.

(tape change)

Hayes: Okay, we're back with Dr. Allen Gray, and Sherman Hayes University Librarian, and before we roam in on Wilmington, I just wanted to make sure, was there any continuation of the military?

Gray: Yes. Yes, and no.

Hayes: Leading question, because I know that you stayed in the reserves in some capacity for quite some time.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: So through this 13 year period now, or ten, or whatever we were at Chapel Hill, was the navy part of your...

Gray: In the early part, yes, and in that latter part, no, and I'll explain what that means. I was, the navy was just an excellent experience. I mean, my active duty years at Pensacola made such a tremendous impact on me professionally, and I wanted to continue. So I searched around, and found out that it was possible to drill, which means to go to meetings periodically at Chapel Hill, and I drilled with I think it was a research company. Those folks were primarily line folks. Let me back up and explain a little bit. In the navy there's "the line," the regular navy folks who drives ships and do that kind of stuff. And then the staff people, who are like physicians, nurses, chaplains, supply corps, and a civil engineer corps, that kind of stuff. In other words, not the war fighters. So the people who were in that research company were university faculty and that kind of thing, so it was really exhilarating to be a part of that group. For some reason the research thing didn't continue, and I don't remember now what happened to it, and then I drove for a while with a Datel [ph?] company, and I wasn't getting paid. I mean, you drove for free in those days.

Hayes: Oh, but were you officially in the reserves?

Gray: I was in the reserve. I signed a reserve agreement that said, "Yeah, I'm willing to continue in the reserve for some period of time."

Hayes: And you were vulnerable to call up.

Gray: Yeah, but that was not much of a probability in those days.

Hayes: Yeah, but I'm just saying...

Gray: Yeah, I was vulnerable to recalling. For a variety of reasons, I stopped drilling. It just didn't make sense.

Hayes: But really you mean going to meetings.

Gray: Going to meetings, right.

Hayes: And in the summer, you have to have [inaudible]?

Gray: Well, some time during the year, you could go on active duty for training, and you-- I guess I always got paid, but it seems to me that there was some question. You might go and not get paid. Well, you know, I wasn't interested in that. So for a variety of reasons, I stopped drilling. I didn't drill for ten years.

Hayes: But you were still a member?

Gray: But I was still in the ready reserve.

Hayes: Interesting.

Gray: What was really also interesting was that I had been promoted to Lieutenant 03 by that time, I mean by the time I was in Chapel Hill, and so when I came to Wilmington, oh, I can't remember. Some how or another I had gone to an American Nurses Association convention in New Orleans, just before I came here, and I had managed to set it up so the time at the convention counted as navy drill time. And I had to get a new ID card, and had gone to a navy facility in a New Orleans area to get the ID card, and I had been promoted to Lieutenant Commander, and I didn't know it. That was really funny. So when I came to Wilmington, I was a Lieutenant Commander, and sort of tiptoeing around the idea of what am I going to do with the navy? And I called somebody who said, "Well, sir, there's money there, and all you have to do is go drill and you get the money. And if you don't get it, they'll use it for something else." So I came, I went to the Reserve Center in Willington, and signed a ready reserve agreement, and started drilling.

Hayes: You use the term "drilling" as a verb.

Gray: Drill means show up for one weekend a month, and do navy stuff.

Hayes: Okay.

Gray: I mean, that's the simplistic...

Hayes: Was it medical stuff at this point?

Gray: And it was medical stuff, yeah.

Hayes: Was there a medical unit, per se?

Gray: Yes, there was a medical unit here in Wilmington at the Reserve Center. When I first signed up, affiliate, how ever we talk about it, somebody sent me around to see the commanding officer of the medical unit who spoke to me briefly and said, "You could be the commanding officer of this unit," and I said, "Oh, I don't think so." One year later I was the commanding officer of the unit. So I was again against a steep learning curve.

Hayes: But you had to organize [inaudible].

Gray: I was responsible for the whole shooting match. It was very, very interesting. I had some wonderful people working with me, who, I guess one doesn't think about juniors as much or as very much, but that certainly was the case here. I mean, junior to me in terms of my being the commanding officer and these folks weren't, but they knew how to play the navy game, because they'd been playing it, and I didn't. but I knew some other things that they didn't know, so the fact that I had a PhD...

Hayes: Now who would be in the medical unit?

Gray: The people in the medical unit were nurses, physicians, medical service corps officers, and corpsmen.

Hayes: Now, with the unit up the road, were you involved with them at all, or not?

Gray: The unit here in Wilmington was affiliated with the navy hospital at Cherry Point.

Hayes: At Cherry Point?

Gray: Right. So, yes. We were up and down the road to Cherry Point.

Hayes: A practical element there, of service to that hospital.

Gray: Maybe.

Hayes: All right.

Gray: Sometimes.

Hayes: Or participation [inaudible].

Gray: Sometimes.

Hayes: Yeah.

Gray: I suppose we can weave the navy story in as we go through the Wilmington story, because from that point, it all runs very parallel.

Hayes: Yeah. I just didn't want to forget that.

Gray: All right.

Hayes: Because I know it's been an important part.

Gray: Oh, it's been a critical piece.

Hayes: [inaudible]

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: And service.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: So Wilmington, give me a sense, you know, it's 2005 now, and you came in...

Gray: '84.

Hayes: So just over 20 years ago.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: Different school? Different place?

Gray: If someone had been able to show me what UNCW looks like today when I walked on this campus in 1984, I would have said, "That is not possible."

Hayes: Both in a physical and programmatic sense?

Gray: Both. Both.

Hayes: So what was it like in '84 when you got here? How would you, as an outsider, put a snapshot on it?

Gray: Well, I was accustomed to UNC Chapel Hill, or to me it's UNC. It always has been, and always will be. And so this was, you know, who knows what it is, go check it out.

Hayes: Yeah.

Gray: Very small, very provincial. The people who were here, many of them were people who had started the place as a junior college, community college, whatever...

Hayes: That generation was still here?

Gray: Oh, yes.

Hayes: How old was the nursing program when you came here?

Gray: Well, the nursing program here was really sort of an anomaly, I think. There was an associate degree, a two year nursing program on this campus, and that program was, like, 20 years old.

Hayes: But it was a two year program?

Gray: It was a two year program.

Hayes: Wow.

Gray: It was not so uncommon in those days for associate degree programs to be on college or university campuses.

Hayes: Community colleges [inaudible].

Gray: No. No. So the program had been a two year program, and for reasons that I'm not terribly clear about, the powers that be decided to put up four year pre-licensure program, so the year I came they had the curriculum together pretty much for the pre-licensure four year program, and they had nothing for the RN baccalaureate degree program, and they have the two year associate degree program continuing, and it was a Department of Nursing in the College of Arts and Sciences. It wasn't a school.

Hayes: Okay. So they brought you in, do you think particularly, because of that experience, the RN [inaudible].

Gray: I hope so.

Hayes: Is that what you worked in?

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: [inaudible].

Gray: What happened was I came in, and the department chair said, "We've gotten a grant from Kate B. Reynolds, and they're paying $25,000 for a faculty member to develop a baccalaureate program for RN's." So my salary at this university was $25,000 a year, and I thought, "Hmm, well, I'll take a chance." So in...

Hayes: Well, I don't know. Is that high, low...

Gray: That was low.

Hayes: Okay.

Gray: That was less then what I was making at Chapel Hill.

Hayes: I don't know what 1982...

Gray: I don't know what I was making there, but...

Hayes: Yeah, okay.

Gray: But that was very low. But they only had the soft money, and that was it. So it was, like, take it or leave it. So I had the charge to develop the curriculum for the baccalaureate degree of program for RN's, and that's it, and I thought, "Well, how am I supposed to do this?" So...

Hayes: Another challenge.

Gray: Being a creative sort, I whooped and thought, and said, "You know, RN's who come back for a degree have some information base. There's some other information base that's on a standard baccalaureate program that they wouldn't have, and there are probably some areas of overlap. So I took the objectives for the entire pre-licensure program, and sat down, and categorized them as something that RN's probably already know, probably don't know, or may know. And the person who was spearheading the pre-licensure program, Jenny Payne [ph?], and I worked very closely. I did my analysis, asked her to do the same thing, we compared notes, tightened up loose spots, what's that called? Entered rater reliability, and then developed courses for RN's from the objectives that we felt RN students had not attained, or that they might have attained in part.

Hayes: Wow.

Gray: So basically we came up with a curriculum for the RN to BS program, and started teaching-- I guess I had a year for developing the program, and then we started the following year.

Hayes: But did the grant go away? Did you become...

Gray: Yes, the grant went away, and they replaced the soft money with the hard money.

Hayes: Good. The more permanent money, I guess you would use those terms.

Gray: Yes. It had established the School of Nursing by then.

Hayes: Oh, right at that point?

Gray: Yes. It must been about '85.

Hayes: '85, and so now it became the School of Nursing.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: You don't necessarily comment on good or bad, but who were some of the people when you came in? You had a transition nursing faculty that was old two year folks, and now you're moving to this much bigger entity. Who were some of the folks who were there?

Gray: Well, it was a very interesting situation. The university had hired Marlene Rosenketter [ph?], who had-- I don't know when she had completed a PhD at St. Louis, but not very long before. An interesting aside, I understand she came and was not qualified for the position, because she didn't have a degree in nursing. She had degrees in other disciplines. The Board of Nursing in North Carolina requires that faculty and/or deans have at least one graduate degree, a Masters or a Doctorate in nursing. So she did the Masters degree in nursing at East Carolina, after she was hired, which I thought was very interesting.

Hayes: But she already had a PhD.

Gray: But she had a PhD in education.

Hayes: [inaudible]

Gray: [inaudible] Yeah.

Hayes: Well, that's interesting.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: Some of the other faculty then that were...

Gray: The other faculty...

Hayes: Initially you designed the course with...

Gray: It was Jenny Payne. There were faculty people who had been teaching in the associate degree program, and there were a few of those who moved over to the baccalaureate program. Let's see if I can remember. Jenny Payne, Helen Majette did skills lab, Nancy Gilerunt [ph?], who I had known at Chapel Hill. Actually, Helen Majette had been at Chapel Hill, too, but I hadn't known her. Jane Lowe, who was here for a long time, and with the associate degree program. Theresa Stone [ph?]...

Hayes: And you would use part timers heavily, as you would today for clinics and so forth?

Gray: No.

Hayes: No?

Gray: No. I'm trying to remember if there were other people, and I can't pull up any others. But we, I think it was around 25 pre-licensure students, and a handful of RN students. You know, that size of faculty could handle the situation.

Hayes: How much longer did the two year program last?

Gray: The two year program must have phased out about '86, or so. I mean, the last class much have graduated about then.

Hayes: So you really were in an interesting transition there.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: And did it evolve that that RN program became large then, and transitioned?

Gray: No. It never became large. The RN program was set on campus. In other words, people had to come to campus to go to class. I think that was a deterrent. I can't remember how many people we ever had. There were any number of interesting issues. Marlene Rosenketter was very concerned about getting the place accredited by the National League for Nursing, which the only accreditation body at that point, and we worked very hard to accomplish several things. One was to have an RN program that was, well, not really a mirror image, but had the same focus and philosophy as the pre-licensure program. In other words, the assumption is that a person graduating from the UNCW School of Nursing, whether it was as a pre-licensure student or an RN baccalaureate student, came out with the same kind of preparation. Never mind that the RN's already had a lot of experience, and whatever. And that was something that seemed to be very important to the National League for Nursing in those days. So we did that.

Hayes: For the outsider listening in, this accreditation makes a lot of difference. In other words, it's a statement of substance and worth.

Gray: Standardization for the profession, I guess.

Hayes: Right.

Gray: One of the things that's key is that in those days, and I suspect it's still true now, graduate programs looked a lot more favorably at people who came from accredited programs, as opposed to people who did not, and in fact, some graduate programs wouldn't even entertain applications from people who didn't come from accredited programs. So, if you wanted career mobility, in terms of education, you better be looking for an accredited program. Where do I go from here?

Hayes: Well, what were you teaching at that point? You know, you kind of talked about curriculum and so forth.

Gray: All right.

Hayes: I assume that you were teaching.

Gray: Yes. I was teaching primarily in the program for RN students, but I also was teaching courses in the pre-licensure program, because we had so few faculty. I taught leadership and management, research, but primarily those kinds of things.

Hayes: Totally [inaudible].

Gray: And I did some clinical teaching, as well.

Hayes: Organizational theory [inaudible].

Gray: Right, yes. I already had it.

Hayes: A question I've always been interested with nursing is, you know, the clinical versus the classroom, sets you so far outside the normal boundaries in the university, and I'm just wondering if you could speak to some of those battles over the years, and, you know, how many were in the clinical, and what is this clinical, and how do you get credit for doing clinical. It seems like it's awkward probably 27 years. It's always there, you know, that kind of...

Gray: Well, I'm not really sure what you're getting at. The clinical is always there.

Hayes: Because that practice was really, really important.

Gray: Right. Practice is important, I guess for lots of reasons. For pre-licensure students, we're talking about bringing people in off the street literally, and teaching them how to be nurses, and one learns how to be a nurse by being a nurse. So the clinical or the practicum, or whatever you want to call it, amounts to giving people some information base, taking them to a place where people are delivering nursing care, and have them deliver nursing care under the supervision of a faculty person. Medical education is somewhat similar. For RN's it's a bit different, because those people already have a license, and they're out there practicing as nurses. So it's a matter of figuring out things that they probably don't know, and then putting them in those kinds of situations like community health, and providing some degree of supervision for them while they're learning.

Hayes: They wouldn't have to do as much clinical if you already have the RN [inaudible].

Gray: No. That's right.

Hayes: [inaudible]

Gray: Right.

Hayes: Did they come sometimes with conflict with some of those basic courses in biology and English, and so forth? I mean, did you have all those problems of trying to fit their previous college experience?

Gray: Those kinds of issues were big issues for many RN students. Marlene Rosenketter seemed to have the opinion that if a course, say an anatomy and physiology course-- I'm only repeating stuff that I've heard, not that I've ever heard her talk about it, but it seems that there were a lot of people in the community who had the impression that they'd taken, say an anatomy and physiology course here at UNCW, and had gone through the associate degree program here, and that course was like a three credit course, theoretically. And we required for the pre-licensure program two four credit anatomy and physiology courses.

Hayes: Okay.

Gray: So people would come to see Marlene and I gather they came away with the impression that she was saying, "Well, we require four credits, and you only have three, so you're going to have to make up one credit in anatomy and physiology." And people said, "You've got to be kidding." So people didn't come. When I started looking at it, I developed a very close relationship with the Registrar's Office, and we agreed that a course is a course, never mind the credits. So if you'd had a three credit anatomy and physiology course, and that course was deemed to be roughly equivalent to the ones we required, then you got credit, and you made up the credit hours in something or other else.

Hayes: Oh, so you didn't tie it right to that course.

Gray: No.

Hayes: Because that'd be almost impossible to get the one hour. Then they were stuck with taking the whole...

Gray: That's right. It makes no sense.

Hayes: [inaudible] they had to have eight core credits, they still had to take another.

Gray: That's right. That's right.

Hayes: Because if they'd gone through a two year program, it's unlikely they'd have everything the same.

Gray: So I did things-- what is it? Mary Popins talks about something that makes the medicine go down more easily, somehow or another? "A little bit of sugar makes the medicine go down." I collaborated with Tim Ballard, who taught anatomy and physiology, and he let me have his final exams, and I just the final exams myself, cold, and I made somewhere between 60 and 70 percent. I mean, I hadn't looked at an anatomy and physiology in years, and I said, "Look, if these RN's can come in, and they've had anatomy and physiology, and they can do 65 percent or whatever on these tests, then we'll give them credit for the anatomy and physiology course that they've had, and we'll move on." That worked.

Hayes: Yeah, because I don't think you retain everything anyway. I mean, you lose so much, so that's pretty good if you can get 65, 70 percent after. That's good.

Gray: Right. Right.

Hayes: And Tim Ballard is still teaching there, in fact.

Gray: I don't know.

Hayes: Yeah, I think he is teaching [inaudible]. You had to always work with biology, because they were part of your entry weight, or they were part of the...

Gray: That's right.

Hayes: Were there other courses like that? Chemistry? Did the nurses always have to do chemistry?

Gray: We played games with chemistry, because the chemistry course that was the part of the associate degree program no longer existed, or there were all kinds of crazy things, so during my years as the coordinator of the RN to SC program, I had repeated negotiations with the Chemistry Department, but we could work it out. So...

Hayes: Now, as the years go by, are your numbers going up?

Gray: No.

Hayes: Was it steady? Was it surge? I mean, what-- I'm after the whole nursing program.

Gray: Yes, the nursing undergraduate program, the numbers went up, yes.

Hayes: And you've been retired how long?

Gray: A little over a year. About a year and a half.

Hayes: So what are the numbers now?

Gray: I don't know.

Hayes: How about in 2004 when you were there?

Gray: I don't remember.

Hayes: 300, 400, 500? I mean, just to get a sense of it.

Gray: I guess around 200 undergraduate students, and maybe as many as 30 graduate students.

Hayes: Is the RN program, your whole career, you didn't run that, right?

Gray: No.

Hayes: But is that still a viable method for people to take, do that? I mean, it's not big, but...

Gray: The RN to BS program? The track still exists.

Hayes: People are stepping into it, if they happen to have that RN? Or is it a more normal practice now, more and more just do the four years? Get them both, do you get them both?

Gray: Well, the career mobility is an issue. There are a lot of RN's around who don't have a baccalaureate degree, and if people want to go to graduate school, they either have to have a baccalaureate degree or get themselves into an RN to MSN program track.

Hayes: I know what you mean.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: You can have an RN to go right into it.

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: Do we have one of those?

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: We do. At some point you had mentioned we would get back to the navy.

Gray: To the navy.

Hayes: So we've been on a track for a while, but good...

Gray: Well, let's see if I can do the navy thing fairly quickly. I said previously that I started drilling again here in 1984. A year later I was commanding officer of, they called it the hospital unit then, and I was in that position for two years. I had a tenure to whatever, two years. Then that was '87 I guess. Then I just drilled for a while.

Hayes: Did you get any promotions at this point? Or what...

Gray: Not quite yet. In 1990, I got called up for active duty for Desert Storm.

Hayes: Interesting. Which is where? You went...

Gray: I went to Cherry Point. What happened was that unit was still a Cherry Point unit, affiliated with the Naval Hospital Cherry Point, so the whole unit got called up, and we all went up to Cherry Point, and...

Hayes: Was this 50 people, a 100 people...

Gray: About 50, 60 people. We were backfill, which means that there active duty people at Naval Hospital Cherry Point who had gotten pulled out of Cherry Point and sent to Saudi Arabia, and so we were there to be replacements.

Hayes: And Desert Storm was a response to Sadam Hussein's invasion of...

Gray: Of Kuwait.

Hayes: Kuwait.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: And then our response into Iraq.

Gray: Right. Right.

Hayes: [inaudible]

Gray: So I spend nine months on active duty at Naval Hospital Cherry Point.

Hayes: Could you still live here, and drive back and forth?

Gray: No. I suppose I could have, but that didn't make sense. I mean, that's a two hour commute. So, no, I lived on base in the bachelor officer's quarters.

Hayes: So you took a leave from the university?

Gray: Right. Right.

Hayes: And what did you do there then?

Gray: I walked in, and they said, "Oh, you've got a PhD. We'll put you in education and training." And I thought, "Oh, no." So that's where they put me, but the director of education and training said she had just gotten from North Carolina from California. She'd been, excuse me, down in Oakland, I think, the Naval Hospital Oakland, and she couldn't understand that in California navy corpsmen could take the licensure exam to become LPN, licensed practical nurses, but they couldn't do that in North Carolina. So my job got to be doing a study that provided justification for in the end, it was military [inaudible] across all services, to do some additional work and qualify to take the licensure exam for LPN in North Carolina.

Hayes: And they can now?

Gray: No, they cannot now. They could-- after I finished this work and the Board of Nursing approved that whatever it was we generated, but after about two or three years, they'd had a low pass rate, and the Board of Nursing killed it. So...

Hayes: So you served for nine months?

Gray: Nine months.

Hayes: And everyone else had that same kind of pattern? The whole unit?

Gray: Right.

Hayes: So they would call the whole unit...

Gray: That's right.

Hayes: ...not to deactivate, but they would release you as a unit.

Gray: Pretty much, yeah. Nowadays they call up individuals, not units.

Hayes: Well, I heard that...

Gray: Right. So I found out while I was at Cherry Point that I'd been selected for promotion to Commander 05, and I came back. I was a Lieutenant Commander for a long time. I thought it would never end. I came back to Wilmington in 1991, the summer of '91, and oh, I've lost track. Sometime fairly soon after I came back to Wilmington I was selected to be the Commanding Officer of the hospital at the Reserve Center in Wilmington again, and during my command, the affiliation changed from Naval Hospital, I'm sorry, from Cherry Point to Camp Lejeune.

Hayes: How much bigger...

Gray: Actually, I think it was Charleston somewhere in the middle there, but anyway, we wound up being affiliated with Camp Lejeune.

Hayes: Did that change your own practice here that significantly?

Gray: No. No. Then I finished the tour as Commanding Officer in '94, and by that time, I was on leave from UNCW again, with a post-doctoral fellowship in medical informatics up at Duke University. When I came back from that in '96, I was here...

Hayes: So you didn't have to go to [inaudible] for that two year period when you were up there.

Gray: Actually, being a graduate student, I could do certain educational stuff that would count as drill time.

Hayes: Oh, good.

Gray: I did have to come back to Wilmington periodically for administrative stuff, but I didn't have to come back every month. Good question. I'm trying to remember. I must have been promoted to Captain in '94. '96, I guess.

Hayes: For those who think sometimes more in army terminology, a captain is...

Gray: Is an 06. It's equivalent colonel.

Hayes: A colonel.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: [inaudible] it's clear you were at a very high level in the navy, right?

Gray: Yes, right.

Hayes: What would you go after a captain?

Gray: Admiral. Rear admiral.

Hayes: There are various levels of admiral.

Gray: Right. Right.

Hayes: Did you make it to admiral?

Gray: No. No, that's another story. (laughs)

Hayes: [inaudible]

Gray: Yes, that's another navy story. But let's deal with what we're dealing with.

Hayes: All right, back to nursing.

Gray: No, not back to nursing yet. Let's wind up the navy first.

Hayes: All right, okay.

Gray: In 1996, I guess it was, I was promoted to captain, and new situation had developed. The navy was beginning to reconfigure the medical reserve, and there was an opportunity to be commanding officer for the reserve Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune, so I applied, and I got it. And I was the reserve commanding officer for the Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune from 1999 through to 2002.

Hayes: Now what did that entail?

Gray: That was another challenge.

Hayes: You weren't in charge of the whole hospital?

Gray: No, but I was in charge of all the reserve medical folks who reported there.

Hayes: So if somebody had to be there for some assignment, or somebody, there was a call up...

Gray: Right. That's right.

Hayes: ...you'd obviously get involved.

Gray: That's right.

Hayes: And you did, what? Planning for what would happen if...

Gray: Right.

Hayes: That kind of...

Gray: Right.

Hayes: So was that much more frequent that you had to go...

Gray: I spent a lot of time at Camp Lejeune during those years.

Hayes: Right.

Gray: Lots of time. I was responsible for all the medical units, navy medical units in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and part of Missouri. I had I guess around 500 personnel, and 20 detachments.

Hayes: Did you make sure that they did drill, and [inaudible] that kind of thing?

Gray: Well, let's talk about it in terms of fitness reports. Fitness reports are evaluations, and wrote the fitness reports for the detachment officers in charge for all those 20 detachments, and those officers in charge wrote fitness reports for all the people who drilled in their unit. So...

Hayes: Wow. Was there a recruiting element as well? Trying to make sure that people would come into that, or were you responsible for that?

Gray: I wasn't responsible for recruiting. Our responsibility was training...

Hayes: Readiness.

Gray: That sort of thing, yeah.

Hayes: And would lots of these people, they would have to rotate through Lejeune? Did you see all these people, or how...

Gray: I saw a lot of people. We had a standing policy that every, that people were to do their active duty for training, their two weeks, at Lejeune.

Hayes: From all those...

Gray: From all those places. Right.

Hayes: Wow.

Gray: And that people could ask to have a third year off. In other words, if they did two years at Lejeune, and wanted to do something else on the third year, they could request that, which they might have gotten permission for, and they might not have. One of the really interesting things that happened during that tour was that the navy developed and implemented a centralized database for all medical personnel, reserve medical personnel, and we actually were one of the early folks to use that, because we recalled people to active duty for backfill at Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune, it must have been in January, early 2002, because they pulled active duty people out of Camp Lejeune and sent them down to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to staff the detainee camp down there.

Hayes: From Afghanistan.

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: So you had another [inaudible] there.

Gray: That's right. That's right. So we, and I was intimately involved in naming names, and whatever, calling people up for replacement to backfill at Camp Lejeune.

Hayes: Because you wanted backfill of the right talent, right?

Gray: Right, right.

Hayes: Not just anybody, but different specialties. And you didn't know, until they told you, you didn't know who was going down to Guantanamo. I mean, it was...

Gray: Right, right.

Hayes: And how long did that backfill last?

Gray: Those folks were on active duty, I don't remember, some of them for around six months, and some of them up to a year, I think.

Hayes: Was that, would you say, a common practice in the navy to try to use the reserves in the backfill in the...

Gray: Yes, right.

Hayes: [inaudible] time out.

Gray: Right, right.

Hayes: It's not always that case in the other services, it seems, where who units are going...

Gray: Not necessarily.

Hayes: ...you know, directly to the...

Gray: Right.

Hayes: But would being in the navy-- in some of those conflicts it was more of a ship-based personnel that were over in the conflict. I mean...

Gray: Not necessarily.

Hayes: You would have even ground based hospitals and so forth, and...

Gray: Yes, there would be ground based hospitals. One of the things to keep in mind is that a subset of the navy department is the marine corps, and the navy provides medical services for marines. The Department of Defense has gotten smart, I'd say, and moved away from trying to provide services to active duty people service specific. I mean, they'll put up a hospital, a temporary hospital, a medical facility someplace that could be staffed by army, navy, air force, or some mix of those.

Hayes: Whoever can fill it.

Gray: Yeah. Well, whoever's decided it's going to be their assignment.

Hayes: Okay. So you don't have that kind of arbitrary division as much.

Gray: I think less than there may have been at some time in the past.

Hayes: When you were at Lejeune, you were working with marines quite predominantly, the fighting force, and then you were the medical service for the marines. Did you see other services coming in, in the sense of exchange or talking, or so forth, or was there not so much of that?

Gray: I didn't see much of that. The hospital, I expect, would see anybody who was Department of Defense personnel. One of the interesting things about the position I was in was that, the plan was if the active duty executive officer of the Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune went away, then I was supposed to be recalled on active duty to be the replacement executive officer, who's really the person who runs the place. I got to do that for a week or so for one of my active duty for training periods at some point of time during that period, but I didn't actually get recalled to do that position.

Hayes: Did it break your heart?

Gray: No. I didn't cry one bit.

Hayes: Actually, when you add that all up, that's really a lot of military service in your career.

Gray: Yes, right.

Hayes: Weekends, and in this period were you going up two and three times a week, when you were in that role?

Gray: No. I don't know how often I was up there, but I was up there a fair bit.

Hayes: Good folks? You enjoyed the experience?

Gray: Oh, yes. Yeah.

Hayes: And is the navy able to sustain its medical programs?

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: [inaudible] talk about are people, you know, staying in, or going, or so forth.

Gray: Well, navy's having difficulty recruiting medical folks at this point in time, and some people, especially reservists, I think some reservists who get recalled to active duty, physicians, in particular, who lose a lot of money from practices if they're off playing navy, aren't inclined to continue. But I understand that there are some folks who reopening [ph?] soon.

Hayes: And so let's finish the navy career. Are you still active navy?

Gray: No, I retired from the navy on my 60th birthday last year.

Hayes: And at a rank of captain.

Gray: Captain 06.

Hayes: That's great. And you would receive, then, all the benefits of all those years of service.

Gray: I do. I am retired navy.

Hayes: As you had had this other life with respect to nursing. (laughs)

Gray: Well, that was nursing, but with a twist.

Hayes: With a twist, because there was always nursing. Did you feel like you could bring back all kinds of things in the classroom from that? I mean, it's not like you were totally isolated?

Gray: Oh, of course. No.

Hayes: Organizational things? I mean it seems like a natural...

Gray: Oh, all kinds of things. All kinds of things.

Hayes: As the university changed from practice and teaching to include scholarship, how did the Nursing School, or how did you come into that process? I mean, you mentioned...

Gray: A loaded question.

Hayes: It's a loaded question?

Gray: A loaded question.

Hayes: I didn't mean it to be a loaded question.

Gray: Well, I'm going to take the easy route, and talk about the other degree first, and then we'll come back to the scholarship.

Hayes: Okay.

Gray: I had a variety of adventures here that we haven't talked about, and we will, and in 19, around 1992, '93, I had an opportunity to apply for a post-doctoral fellowship in medical informatics. That was funded by the National Library of Medicine at NIH. I'd never written a grant proposal before, or not that magnitude, and I thought, "Oh, my God." But I did it, and I submitted the thing, and I got the score back, and then one day I got a phone call, saying, "This is whoever it was at the National Library of Medicine," that the person they'd awarded the fellowship had decided not to come, and I was next in line, and wanted to know if I was still interested. I think that was, say toward the end of fall semester, and they wanted me to start in January. And I said, "Well, I can't do that. I mean, I really don't think it's ethical to jump ship in an academic situation at half time." So delayed it, and I started the thing in August of 1994. So, excuse me, I had a three year post-doctoral fellowship that was supposed to give me background for career shift, or whatever, in medical informatics.

Hayes: Tell us what that was.

Gray: Medical informatics, well, it's computer applications for healthcare, basically.

Hayes: Wow, that's like, in that particular time period, exploding as far as applications goes.

Gray: Right, yes.

Hayes: Now was it...

Gray: And it still is.

Hayes: Yeah, it's really...

Gray: It's hotter now than it was then.

Hayes: And it wasn't nursing medical informatics.

Gray: No.

Hayes: It was all.

Gray: Yes, medical informatics is a term that may be a misnomer of sorts. It could best be called healthcare informatics, but that's not what it was called at that point.

Hayes: And did you have a background in computing or mathematics?

Gray: I had done a number of course here on the UNCW campus in the Business School, in their, I can't remember what they call it.

Hayes: Career innovation systems?

Gray: But that sort of thing, yeah.

Hayes: And what were the courses called then? That you taught? I mean, you taught actual courses at the Business School?

Gray: No, I didn't teach them. I took them. I was a student.

Hayes: Oh, I thought you actually taught them.

Gray: No. These were undergraduate courses. No I had at some point decided that I'd really like to check out this informatics business, and had taken a number of courses, and the opportunity came along to apply for the fellowship, and so I did.

Hayes: And it paid anything? And it wasn't-- it didn't hurt you to do it.

Gray: Yes. They replaced my salary here. So what I wound up doing...

Hayes: Which was hopefully higher than $25,000 by this time.

Gray: It was, I don't remember what it was. It was around $40,000.

Hayes: No, I'm just kidding.

Gray: Well, it still, it's a key issue, because I characterized those years as helping me prepare for retirement, because they replaced my salary here, and out of that, I had to pay tuition at Duke, which is a private school.

Hayes: You had to pay it?

Gray: I had to pay the tuition, and I had an apartment at Duke, and I had a house here.

Hayes: Right.

Gray: And so somehow or another it all worked out. I said I ate lots of beans, but that didn't hurt me, and I learned to live very simply.

Hayes: But it's funny that they had you pay it. Usually a fellowship would include the tuition.

Gray: The deal was that they gave me a chunk of money, and said, you know, "Whatever you do with it, but you have to pay tuition." They did give me I think it was $3000 a year extra to put towards tuition, but still, that didn't [inaudible] much of a dent at Duke.

Hayes: And by being a post-doctorate fellow, you said you did earn a Master's degree? Now, did that just come along in the process? Or...

Gray: No. Actually, the design of the post-doctoral, the post-doc, as they say, was for me to be involved with people who were doing that kind of work, and to learn something about it. But the person who was my sponsor said very early on, "You might as well get a piece of paper out of this," and they were funded at that time, there was a joint medical informatics training program between Duke and UNC Chapel Hill, so I did the program, and did the Duke version of the program.

Hayes: So your Master's degree is from Duke.

Gray: Is from Duke, right.

Hayes: Well, some diversity is good, right?

Gray: Well, I said after three degrees from Chapel Hill, one from Duke didn't hurt.

Hayes: Doesn't hurt. You could go to either sporting event and still be faithful.

Gray: Well, I was just back on the Duke campus last week for something or other, and I was very proud to walk around and say, "I've done it." Yeah.

Hayes: Now, besides courses then, were you doing a lot of independent research? Was that what a post-doctoral fellow, was that the type of...

Gray: That didn't actually happen.

Hayes: Okay. I just didn't understand or know what a fellow does.

Gray: Right. For a variety of reasons, that didn't happen, and I think perhaps that was the intent of the program, but that's not the way it fell out.

Hayes: And when you came back from that, did you introduce course in nursing and to your students?

Gray: When I came back here from Duke, things were just beginning to evolve with distance education, and out of that putting course online. So I thought I don't see much opportunity to deal with medical informatics here, and I chose not to leave here, so I started looking at the business of putting courses online, and over the years, between that time, which was around '96, '97 and my retirement, I succeeded in putting a number of RN to BS courses online myself, and providing support for several other people and putting additional courses online, so that around, I guess, 2002 or so, the entire RN to BS program nursing courses were online.

Hayes: Do you teach only online that program now?

Gray: Yes, right.

Hayes: No real live on campus classes?

Gray: The last years that I was teaching, I did the teaching, I taught primarily online. For some courses had students come in maybe three or four times during a semester for group meetings.

Hayes: Did that broaden your audience, then, that started taking those courses?

Gray: Yes, yes.

Hayes: To what, a region? Or a whole state? Where would you say last students were primarily from?

Gray: Most of the students were in Southeastern North Carolina, as far away as Raleigh to the west.

Hayes: Onslow [inaudible]

Gray: Onslow, actually up around Emerald Isle somewhere up that way, to the north, and down to Buford, South Carolina.

Hayes: You got some South Carolinians.

Gray: Right. We had one student who had started in Jacksonville, who was married to an active duty marine, and the marine was transferred to Paris Island, so she went with him, and finished up the degree down here.

Hayes: That's great. Do you feel that that training in informatics made this easier for you?

Gray: It did.

Hayes: Yeah. That you weren't thrown by this whole process.

Gray: No.

Hayes: They were lucky to have you available to help with that, because it looked like that was the future, moving to the online. Was there anybody else in your department that had, well, I shouldn't say it that way.

Gray: I wouldn't say it that way.

Hayes: Was there anybody else who had a background...

Gray: The skill set? No.

Hayes: No.

Gray: We had, well, one of the people I worked with very closely was Susan Sherring [ph?], who's since retired. She also was new to the online stuff, and she and I worked closely together, and actually put I guess a couple of things together online for the graduate program. And she got to be quite adept at that. Sue Kim Godwin [ph?] also worked closely with me, and she's very good at that sort of thing.

Hayes: Well, are even the traditional courses going [inaudible] too, or has it mainly been your program that's gone online.

Gray: It's been mainly the RN to BS program. I think they're using some web enhancement in the other courses, but not putting the whole course.

Hayes: Do you mind if I change tapes real quick? You do have time?

(tape change)

Hayes: Okay, we're back. I know those of you who are doing the transcript would realize that we were back. We're back with Dr. Allen Gray, retired nursing faculty?

Gray: Right.

Hayes: You really are retired. Not a phased retired.

Gray: No.

Hayes: You're retired.

Gray: Done.

Hayes: In North Carolina, you're done.

Gray: That's it.

Hayes: And retired from the navy.

Gray: That's right.

Hayes: But fortunately still talking to us about his USCW experience and his early life experience. Should we talk about the career bumps?

Gray: Bumps, yes.

Hayes: Is that the best way to do that?

Gray: That's a good way to do it.

Hayes: Or the process. You came in on a grant.

Gray: Right.

Hayes: You came in as, did they switch you to an assistant professor at that point?

Gray: I came in as an assistant professor, right.

Hayes: And a normal run would be five, six years? I don't know what the average is, how many years someone-- you get a renewal license, or was UNCW even that sophisticated in '84? You know, now it seems very structured.

Gray: Yeah, my sense was that there was some structure there in '84. Probably people are more attentive to the structure at this point than they were then. I came in as an assistant professor on a tenure track, and I was promoted to associate professor, in must have been '89. I'm guessing that's about right.

Hayes: With tenure?

Gray: With tenure, right.

Hayes: And you had to do all the normal, fill out million forms and reports.

Gray: Fill out reports. I was very concerned, because my early years here, I spent my time primarily with generating the curriculum for the RN to BS program. I come from Chapel Hill, and I knew that the name of the game was publish. Well, I've published a handful of things, but not much. And I was really sweating the deal, but I had done the self study, had coordinated, organized, whatever you say, the self study for the initial national accreditation with the School of Nursing.

Hayes: Wow, and they passed?

Gray: And they passed, yes. There was no problem with that. And I think that had some bearing on the whole situation. At any rate, I was reviewed and approved.

Hayes: Great.

Gray: So that was very nice.

Hayes: And you got the associate when you get the tenure? Is that how it works?

Gray: Yes. Right. I got the two, and in my case where [inaudible].

Hayes: To the person listening, tenure's pivotal because it's a lifetime contract. That's the assumption?

Gray: Well, it's sort of gentleperson's agreement I guess, that a faculty member can continue indefinitely, is my understanding.

Hayes: Short of...

Gray: Short of, yes.

Hayes: [inaudible] although that's difficult I guess today even, I mean, it is unusual compared to the most of us [inaudible] who work in [inaudible] their future is always in doubt.

Gray: Right, right.

Hayes: And it's to protect the faculty and encourage them to continue their career, and also to be independent in their viewpoints, right? I mean, that's the whole idea.

Gray: More or less. Yeah, I think there's some aspect of freedom of speech associated with the tenure, or conferring tenure. At any rate, I experienced a convergence of affairs. In 1990, it must have been early in the summer of 1990, I was on active duty for two weeks, or some period of time, down at the Navel Hospital Charleston, South Carolina, and I came home for the weekend, and I went by my mailbox in the School of Nursing, and there was note, a letter, whatever, from the dean saying, "Your position as Director of the RN to BS program," or access program is what we called it then, "has terminated." No explanation, no nothing. Just sort of a letter.

Hayes: Did he mean the position, or your employment?

Gray: Your assignment to that position.

Hayes: You're still...

Gray: Well, I was a tenured faculty member, so I was still there.

Hayes: And was this an administrative assignment of sorts or...

Gray: Well, I guess so.

Hayes: Yeah.

Gray: Let's say that that position is one the dean determines and assigns, and in that case it would be roughly parallel to a dean being assigned by a provost. In other words, the dean serves at the pleasure of the provost.

Hayes: Right.

Gray: So the Director of the RN access program serves at the pleasure of the dean.

Hayes: Now, was that a 12 month slot?

Gray: No, it was a nine month slot.

Hayes: It was. I was just curious, because sometimes those directors have to come through the [inaudible].

Gray: Well, it was kind of interesting, because I was hired on a 12-- I'm sorry, on a nine month appointment, and I never had anything in my tenure at the School of Nursing other than nine month appointments, but I often worked 12 months, and sometimes I worked and got paid for the summer, and sometimes I didn't. I think, I know the first few years that I was here, I taught summer school, one session. I don't think I ever did both, I don't remember. But at any rate, the work that needed to be done was 12 month work, and the pay that got paid was 12 month pay, and sometimes not.

Hayes: And sometimes not.

Gray: Actually I think I was hired on a ten month appointment, because that's what they were doing in those days. But at any rate...

Hayes: And what time of the year was this?

Gray: It was probably May, June. I don't remember.

Hayes: So this would be the position for the next academic year.

Gray: Yeah. So I thought, "Well, we'll sit tight and see what happens," and nothing happened. And in August of 1990, I received in my mailbox one of those little cards that says you have a certified letter at the post office, like on a Friday. So I went down to the post office on Monday, and the letter was a letter from the provost of the university, and it said, "The university is initiating proceedings to discharge you from the faculty." And that's all it said, and I'm going, "Oh, my God. What's this all about?" So toward the end of that week, I got a phone call from, a message saying, "Your navy unit is on alert." What? And that must have been about Thursday or Friday, and Saturday morning I got a phone call from the reserve unit CEO's wife saying, "The unit's being called up. Report for duty on Sunday to the Naval Reserve Center in Wilmington." So I knew I had this stuff coming up with the university, and I was being called up to active duty, and I thought, "What am I going to do?" So I talked to one of my brothers. I have two brothers. One is an administrative law judge, and I said, "I need an attorney." I had talked with a guy who had drawn up a will for me earlier that week, and he had said, well, he couldn't handle something like that because it was educational law, or something or other, and he wasn't prepared to deal with that. So my brother said, "There's a guy in Wilmington whose name is Garry Shipman, and he does his homework. I've heard several cases that he's been involved in." So I got in touch with Garry Shipman, and he met me at his office, I think it was on a Saturday, and looked at the situation, said, "If you give me a retainer, I'll take the case." I needed some paperwork drawn up for the navy. I already had a will. I can't remember what it was, but some sort of legal document that he did, and I mean, I was just astounded that he'd do that, and I went off to Desert Storm for nine months.

Hayes: Without any knowledge?

Gray: Without any knowledge of what was going on here. Nothing.

Hayes: What would have been, if nothing would have happened in this letter, what would have been the normal practice when the military calls you up like that? What can the university do? They have to honor that.

Gray: They couldn't do anything.

Hayes: They continue-- they don't pay you.

Gray: No, they put me on leave.

Hayes: Leave. That would be the normal...

Gray: That's right.

Hayes: So this is before Desert Storm, so the military had nothing to do with the letters as far as you could tell.

Gray: No, no.

Hayes: But that was an interesting juxtaposition.

Gray: Yes, right.

Hayes: Emotionally, it wasn't quite as successful to have both of those things...

Gray: Difficult, yes.

Hayes: And you physically, then, had to move to...

Gray: I physically moved to Cherry Point, and I lived on base in the bachelor officer's quarters for nine months. I came back here in June of '91, and the deal with the university stuff was that the moment I went on active duty, the clock stopped ticking for the university stuff. So they had to sit on it for nine months.

Hayes: Okay. Did they talk to you, or did you have to do anything?

Gray: No.

Hayes: No.

Gray: I never heard a word, nothing.

Hayes: And your lawyer didn't hear a word.

Gray: No.

Hayes: So it just stopped.

Gray: It stopped.

Hayes: Interesting.

Gray: When I got back, I had been in touch with the lawyer while I was on active duty, so when I got back, we had a plan, and I could request the charges, so I did, and I received the charges, and I remember chasing the mailman down, because he delivered one of those little certified cards to my mailbox, and I knew he was somewhere in the community. I chased him down to get the charges, because I wanted to know what it was that I was supposed to have done that required my being discharged from the university. And the charges were just frivolous. One of them, for example, said I had been angry with Marlene Rosenketter at some point, and had shaken my fist in her face causing her to fear for her safety. I thought, "This is crazy." And it was really funny that I would tell people, and still tell people even today, that that was one of the charges, and people get down on the floor and roll around and laugh, and say, "You?" Well, yes. At any rate, we proceeded with...

Hayes: Who was the provost at that time?

Gray: The provost was...

Hayes: Moss [ph?]?

Gray: No.

Hayes: Cahill?

Gray: Cahill.

Hayes: I'm just curious. For people, when you say the provost office it would be Charles Cahill.

Gray: Charles Cahill. Right. There were several meetings, and this, that, and the other, and...

Hayes: But prior to this letter...

Gray: No indication.

Hayes: No charges?

Gray: No nothing, nothing.

Hayes: No meetings?

Gray: No communication. None.

Hayes: With management. No human resources, letter in your file?

Gray: No, nothing. No. no.

Hayes: In your record, as far as accomplishments were normal.

Gray: Reasonable.

Hayes: As you thought were concerned.

Gray: Yeah.

Hayes: No student charges. Okay.

Gray: I remember that the university system attorney came down and had a session with some people. I don't remember now who those people were. They may have been the people who were on the hearing's committee, because there would have been a hearing. And the university was represented by an attorney from the Attorney General's office, the State Attorney General's office, who happened to be a black woman. I don't remember her name. And I heard an anecdote that the attorney from the Attorney General's office had said to Marlene Rosenketter words to the effect, "Your charges are a piece of shit, and I've never lost a case, and I'm not about to start now." I don't know what happened, but I do know that Marlene Rosenketter withdrew the charges, and declared that I could not have an office in Hoggard Hall, which is where the School of Nursing was.

Hayes: Now, wait a minute. Let me go over this again.

Gray: Yes.

Hayes: You had this process, and then someone-- were you teaching at this point?

Gray: No. This was early August, before classes started I guess.

Hayes: And the charges...

Gray: Oh, I got the charges in June. So all this stuff was going on during the summer.

Hayes: But the charges were withdrawn.

Gray: The charges were withdrawn. She withdrew the charges.

Hayes: Or did the university withdraw the charges?

Gray: Whatever. It's all the same thing.

Hayes: Okay.

Gray: Right. She generated the charges, and whoever withdrew them. But there was a stipulation that I not have an office in the School of Nursing, so she arranged for me to have an office in the library. I was not to be in the School of Nursing for anything.

Hayes: What about teaching?

Gray: I had no teaching assignment.

Hayes: But you were paid.

Gray: I was paid. So she said, "Here are your instructions. You are to do this special project." And I looked at the special project, I don't remember what it was now. It was something or another about something called nursing centers that didn't make any sense to me at all, and I had several discussions with my attorney, and he said, "Dr. Gray, I want you to do the project." And I said, "Yes, sir. I'll do the project." So...

Hayes: (laughs) Was there a public hearing?

Gray: Well, let me get through, let me get through the details.

Hayes: Later, okay, okay.

Gray: All this stuff was going on in the front end of the fall semester, so in December sometime, I don't know what it was. Maybe it was after the fall semester was over, along comes another certified letter, another set of charges. I had an assignment, and I didn't do it. And so I don't remember now how some of this stuff shook out, but there was an opportunity-- the thing had to be heard by the faculty hearings committee, and there was an opportunity, I could request that it be public, and I did. So we had, I remember three days of hearings, here in the library, up in the auditorium.

Hayes: How many people were there?

Gray: I wouldn't say the place was packed every day, but it was well attended. Very well attended.

Hayes: [inaudible] Interesting.

Gray: Yeah. Some days it was practically full, and other days not quite so full, but it was never empty. So we went through three days of hearings. The faculty hearings committee made a recommendation to reinstate me. Well, I'd never-- I had just been removed from teaching and whatever, and that recommendation went to Chancellor Leutze, I don't know, it must have been May or so.

Hayes: So for a whole year, you were doing the project.

Gray: Yeah, and continuing to get paid. But in exile, or isolation, or something, I'm not supposed to be in the School of Nursing buil