Southeastern NEWS
Southeastern Louisiana University
Public Information Office
publicinfo@selu.edu
SLU 880, Hammond, LA 70402
504/549-2341/fax 504-549-2061
Date: 9/24/98
Contact: Christina Chapple 101
Editors: Photo accompanies release
SLU SCHOOL OF NURSING'S TATE RETIRING AFTER 30 YEARS
HAMMOND -- Elienne Tate remembers when the upperclassmen of Southeastern
Louisiana University's nursing program fit in a station wagon.
Every Tuesday, she drove the vehicle, packed to the max with books, baggage and
students, to West Jefferson Hospital, where she guided her half-dozen young charges through
their "clinicals" the on-site laboratory experience part of their curriculum.
At the hospital, the students slept in an unfinished doctors lounge in the attic, while Tate
camped out in space set aside for on-call anaesthetists. On Thursdays, she steered the SLU crew
back to Hammond.
"I did that for three years," Tate said, "then we had to have two station wagons, then a
van."
The station wagon vignette illustrates the theme that inevitably runs through Tate's
reminiscences about her three-decade involvement with Southeastern's nursing program: growth.
Tate, who will retire as dean of Southeastern's School of Nursing on Sept. 30, has seen the
program expand from less than a dozen students in the 1960s to more than 1,100 majors. Today,
the over 400 upperclassmen provide their own transportation to clinicals and occupy their own
well-equipped classroom building across Essen Lane from Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in
Baton Rouge.
In December, 101 confetti-tossing, tinsel-trimmed seniors will march into the University
Center to receive their bachelor's degree in nursing. And among the always exuberant group will
be the School of Nursing's 2,000th graduate.
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ELIENNE TATE Add One
On Sept. 17, a large crowd of campus and community well-wishers gathered at
Southeastern's Alumni Center to give a fitting send off to the diminutive dean who has loomed
large in the School of Nursing's history. Tate, said President Sally Clausen, has been
Southeastern's "little giant."
"It is so very easy to brag about the School of Nursing at Southeastern," said Clausen.
"Dr. Tate provided us with the reputation that Southeastern now enjoys. She has been the School
of Nursing."
A native of little Holmwood southeast of Lake Charles, Tate decided as a senior in high
school that nursing might be a good career choice. "My dad wanted me to go into pharmacy, I
thought I wanted to be a veterinarian," she said. "But then I thought being a nurse would be
nice." After graduation from Northwestern State University, she worked for while, then joined a
nursing school friend at the University of Maryland to pursue a master's degree. Offered a
teaching job in Texas, she chose to return to her alma mater, NLU, as a member of the nursing
faculty and was assigned to Northwestern's Baton Rouge clinicals campus.
"I had married a fella from this area (Bill Tate, former guidance counselor at Hammond
High School and the Hammond Area Technical Institute) and he happened to go to the
Presbyterian Church, where Opal Carl went," Tate recalled. Carl founded Southeastern's nursing
program in 1964. "So, Opal caught him at church one day and said, I understand you married
someone who has a master's degree in nursing and teaches.'"
"I came over (to Southeastern) and interviewed and I sort of liked it," Tate said. "I
thought it was a good opportunity for someone young, with the program just beginning."
Tate arrived on campus in time to teach the program's first graduating class. The Class of
68 had three students, Ava Lou Ledell, Lynn Robinson and Maxine Harper; the Class of 69 had
six, including Donnie Booth, who is succeeding Tate as interim dean.
When Betty Messersmith, who had succeeded Carl, decided to retire in 1970, "President
Clea Parker called me over and asked me if I wanted to head the program. I was very young,
about 28 years old, and when you're young you think you know everything," said Tate, laughing.
"Master's degree-prepared people in nursing were very scarce at the time, so I felt, yeah, I could
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ELLIENNE TATE Add Two
do it."
Academic reorganization in 1976 turned the young director into a dean and the fledgling
program into the School of Nursing.
Young or not, Tate had to call on a combination of administrative, diplomatic and even
political skills through the decades to manage the rapidly growing nursing program, which was
fed by its graduates' sterling reputation and the health care field's urgent demands for nursing
professionals.
Milestone accomplishments in Tate's career include guiding the school to accreditation by
the National League for Nursing, securing a brand new state-of-the-art building in Baton Rouge
as home base for the clinical program and helping to create a unique master's degree consortium
involving Southeastern, McNeese State University, the University of Southwestern Louisiana and
Southern University.
She is particularly proud of both her faculty and her students. The percentage of students
annually passing the state nursing licensure examination stood at 100 percent for a number of
years and consistently has held in the high 90 percent range. Southeastern's nursing faculty was
the first in the state to have100 percent of their professors with master's degrees. Forty-two
percent now have doctorates and Tate expects that number to reach 50 percent in the next five
years. "We've grown our own," she said proudly. "Any number of our faculty who have been
hired with bachelor's or master's degrees have gone on" to get additional education. Tate herself
earned a doctoral degree from Louisiana State University during her years at Southeastern.
As a tribute to Tate, her faculty and members of the medical community have established a
scholarship in her name, to date pledging or collecting more than $16,000 for the endowment..
At her retirement reception, Tate was characteristically down-to-earth and humorous as
she responded to the accolades. "All that's been accomplished in the past couldn't have been done
without leaders who believed in all we were doing and faculty, staff and students who believed we
all knew what we were doing," she said.
"The hardest thing about leaving is that I really work with the nicest people," said Tate,
who doesn't plan a leisurely retirement. With her son, Walton, having recently graduated from
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ELLIENNE TATE Add Three
Southeastern and enrolled in law school, Tate said she decided, "If I was ever going to do
anything different, now was the time."
Tate is taking on a "new and different challenge" as nursing consultant for the Louisiana
State Board of Nursing. "I will review all the Louisiana school's annual reports to see if they meet
the board's rule and regulations, make accreditation approval visits, and work closely with the
schools to support quality nursing education in Louisiana," Tate said. "I think it's going to be
fun."
- SLU -
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