A retirement reception for Dean Robin Froman, R.N., Ph.D., F.A.A.N., will be held on Tuesday, March 4.
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Robin Froman, R.N., Ph.D., F.A.A.N., who will retire as dean of the School of Nursing on March 31, will be remembered for many significant accomplishments. One of her most important achievements was bringing more than $686,000 in state funding to the school to establish a continuing funding source to address the national shortage of nurses.

Dean Froman also helped establish a more equitable pay system for nursing faculty and has been a proponent for faculty recognition and achievement. She also is known as an expert in psychometrics, the design of measurement instruments used in research.

A retirement reception for the dean will be held from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 4, in the Academic & Administration Building lobby.

“We are grateful to Dean Froman for her energy and many accomplishments in the School of Nursing and wish her well with her new ventures in retirement,” said UT Health Science Center President Francisco G. Cigarroa, M.D.

Major state funding for nursing program
Regarding the state funding increase, “Dean Froman developed a business plan to increase undergraduate enrollment by 20 percent over two years. This is a positive response to legislative emphasis on increasing the number of nurse graduates in Texas,” Carol Reineck, Ph.D., R.N., F.A.A.N., chair of the Department of Acute Nursing Care, said.

The funding — the second-highest among public and private nursing schools in the state — was awarded in the fall of 2007 by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s Professional Nursing Shortage Program. The funding will be used to add eight new nursing faculty members and 86 additional nursing students over two years, beginning with the current semester.

“In addition to contributing more nurses to the workforce, this funding allows us to plan for a couple of years and build a revenue stream. When this money is spent, we expect that we will have sufficiently increased enrollment by then so that more state funds will be awarded to the school in two years to fund salaries for even more faculty members. This will allow us to again increase our enrollment. We hope that this will eventually help us provide a self-sustaining source of funding for our faculty and school,” Dean Froman said. “I am very grateful to President Cigarroa and Mr. Michael Black, our chief operations officer, for working with us on this business plan.”

More equitable compensation for faculty
Regarding faculty compensation, Dean Froman said that she was proud to have been able to move all of the school’s tenure-track faculty from nine-month to 12-month contracts.

Dean Froman also helped establish a pay system that was based on academic rank and educational preparation. “For some people, this represented a $5,000 to $10,000 increase in their salary.”

Faculty recognition
Adrianne Linton, Ph.D., R.N., chair of the department of Chronic Nursing Care, noted, “Dean Froman has promoted faculty recognition by nominating faculty for national activities and honors.” This resulted in four faculty members being named fellows in the American Academy of Nursing, the nursing equivalent to the Academy of Science, in the past two years alone — more than any other Texas university.

“Dean Froman also has been a strong advocate for recognition of teaching faculty with awards each semester. She established awards for faculty who consistently go ‘above and beyond’ that which is expected,” Dr. Linton said. Based on student evaluations of their teachers, the teaching awards honor nine exemplary faculty members each semester who serve as teachers in the program. “This helps raise the overall level of teaching in our school,” Dean Froman said.

A circuitous route to nursing
The dean came to the UT Health Science Center more than four years ago from The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston where she was a professor, associate dean for research and director of the office for nursing research and scholarship. While there, she devoted considerable time to developing measurement tools for use in others’ and her own research on the awareness and use of advance directives within minority groups.

Dean Froman followed the unusual route of entering nursing after earning a Ph.D. in educational psychology. Hired to evaluate and teach social service classes, Dean Froman said, “I ended up teaching nurses and found them to be the most stimulating students I had ever had. When I completed my doctorate I immediately went into an undergraduate program in nursing so that I could become a nurse and teach nurses, too.”

In looking back on her 33-year career in education and nursing, Dean Froman said, “I’ve been at four universities and had appointments at seven schools during my career. Of all the places that I’ve worked, this is the place that is closest to my heart. I feel that I’ve both received more here and contributed more here, even more than at my alma mater.”

Dean Froman plans to move to the wine country of Sonoma County, Calif., where she will consult in the academic and research fields, continue as associate editor for Research in Nursing & Health and pour wine in a tasting room.