Nursing Students Protest Exam, Voice Concerns

The graduating class of the Division of Nursing in the College of Pharmacy, Nursing and Allied Health Sciences (CPNAHS) walked out of an examination, threatening the department’s accreditation, yesterday afternoon in an attempt to bring their concern out into the open.

Students felt uncomfortable taking their second Leadership and Management exam of the semester after they had voiced unresolved concerns regarding the first exam.

This problem is one of many the students say they are facing in their department.

“We have some really pressing concerns. We feel like again and again we are coming to this point of conflict,” said Sharita Liser, vice president of the nursing department’s senior class and senior nursing major.

This school year is the department’s second round of probation for local accreditation with the Washington, D.C. Board of Nursing. Under stipulations of the probationary period, if the school does not produce a graduating class they will automatically lose accreditation.

After their professor, Judith Hinton, refuted their demand to either accept a take-home exam or an extension to study for the test, nearly the entire class walked out. Hinton told students that there was no guarantee she would have to administer a make up test and would give each student no credit for the exam.

During a meeting directly after the students walked out they discussed their concerns with their professor, Interim Dean of Nursing and Co-Coordinator of the Leadership and Management course, Mamie Montague, Dean of CPNAHS Beatrice Adderly-Kelly, Ph.D., and the deans of Student Affairs.

Liser said they outlined that they felt unprepared and uncomfortable taking the new exam, why they were walking out and that they had attempted several times to express their concerns with different parts of administration only to be ignored.

“It speaks about how this department feels about me and how Howard feels about me,” said Shunta Beed, a senior nursing major.

Liser was compelled to digitally record the meeting on her MP3 player after Montague denied any previous meetings she had with the students regarding their situation. She told Liser that there was no way for her to prove they had met.

“This one-part event is an explosion of things that have been happening to us for a long time,” said LeSabre Bowens, senior class secretary and nursing major.

With a snowball of problems within the department, the problem with the course is just one of many. Students complain that the Socratic teaching method of their class is ineffective for 71 students.

Liser said the administration responded with “punitive threats and coercive powers,” attacking individual students with threats of no graduation and questions of their character.

Students feel that the administration has tried to divide them, but believe their strength is in numbers.  The students said they will not back down until their situation is resolved.

Adderly-Kelly and Montague told students that a response will be given to them today between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. If there is no response, the students plan to take the matter directly to the Mordecai Johnson Administration Building to the provost’s office.

One student asked during their student forum following the administrative meeting, “If they don’t want people marching uphill, what is uphill they don’t want us to have?”

Not only are the students acting in their own interests, but also in those of classes to come.

Claudia Benjamin, a senior nursing major, said a nurse she works with at Howard University Hospital is a graduate of the school’s nursing program and in 1997, her class sat-in for attention and decided to concede their efforts when the administration bucked.

Benjamin points out that in 2007, 10 years later, it is their responsibility to ensure that the class of 2017 does not face the same problems.