For much of Skidmore College’s history, many of its students in the natural sciences were nursing majors, studying biology, chemistry, and physics as scientific foundations for their professional training in medicine. Skidmore welcomed its first nursing students in 1922, the year the New York State Board of Regents approved collegiate status for the former Skidmore School of Arts. Skidmore founder Lucy Skidmore Scribner and the institution’s first president, Charles Henry
Keyes, were building what they saw as a technical and professional college where women would be trained for serious work but also personally enriched by the knowledge, breadth of vision, and power of appreciation gained by study of the liberal arts.

Back in 1903 Lucy Scribner began the Young Women’s Industrial Club to provide girls and women with the necessary training to support themselves, but she and the other directors of the YWIC were also concerned to train women to serve their communities and their country. Beginning in 1911 with the establishment of a normal department to offer teacher training in business, home economics, and music, the YWIC transformed itself into the Skidmore School of Arts. It soon added training for future teachers of health and physical culture, a program that would provide some of the resources for the foundation of a nursing program. Keyes took
Lucy Scribner’s dream of a local extension school and deepened it into a college for women that provided both vocational training and an education in the liberal arts, which made Skidmore unusual among American women’s colleges of the period. Working with Dean of the College Sarah Gridley Ross, Keyes added faculty in biology, chemistry, physics, and other liberal arts departments, and significantly raised the new college's academic standards. He also made plans to add degree programs in library science, nursery school education, and the rapidly developing profession of nursing.

In 1922 Keyes was approached by the directors of the Mary McClellan Hospital in Cambridge, N.Y., a rural town some 27 miles from Saratoga Springs. The 60-bed hospital, founded by prosperous drug magnate Edwin McClellan and named for his mother, was in the process of building Florence Nightingale Hall, a dormitory for student nurses donated by Edwin’s brother Robert and his wife, Irene Ward McClellan. The hospital had hired Myra M. Sutherland to be a
superintendent of nurses who would establish a nurses’ training program. Keyes, Sutherland, and the McClellans envisioned a nursing course that would bring honor and attention to both college and hospital, turning out graduates who would become teachers of nursing, superintendents of hospitals, or leaders in the rapidly expanding profession of public health. Keyes was particularly pleased at the prospect of establishing a new program without the necessity of hiring additional faculty or building new laboratory space, as the medical staff and laboratories of the hospital were modern and well-equipped.

Building on its existing major in health and physical education—whose director, Minna Mary Rohn, had both an MD from the University of Michigan and a doctorate from the Harvard Technical School of Public Health—Skidmore was able to design a five-year program leading to both a diploma in nursing and a bachelor of science degree. Students would spend their first two years at Skidmore, taking liberal arts requirements including English, history, biology, chemistry,
physics, and psychology. Summers and the next two years would be spent at Mary McClellan, where students’ work would be exchanged for room and board in Florence Nightingale Hall. The final year would be spent back at Skidmore, in studies of both nursing and liberal arts.

Rohn left the college in 1924. Her successor as chair of the Health and Physical Education Program, Clara Greenough, a Smith graduate with an MD from Northwestern, moved part of the second clinical year to Yale to provide a greater range of experience in nursing practice. But very few students joined the program, and even fewer completed it: the first nursing major, Edith May Wills, graduated in 1927; the second, Marion Elizabeth Frederick, in 1929. In 1928 Henry T.
Moore, who had become Skidmore’s president after Keyes’s death in 1925, found an outstanding full-time leader for the program in Agnes (Ann) Gelinas, who had earned her RN at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, taught in two hospital-based nursing programs in Massachusetts, and recently completed her BS at Columbia Teachers College, where she was also a graduate student in the master’s program. Gelinas expanded Skidmore’s nursing faculty and attracted more
students, but the program’s budget was limited to the amount the college received from tuition paid by students during their clinical years. The program’s limitations made it difficulty to fulfill the promise of its catalog, that “trained nursing gives the young woman greater opportunity to develop her natural potential than any other calling.” Despite the financial limits the Depression placed on the college, the program began to attract more students: 19 (in all five classes) in Gelinas’s first year, 33 by 1931, and 45 by 1939. But most students did not graduate, dropping out for financial reasons, or leaving to marry, or transferring into other programs at Skidmore. Seven women graduated in 1936, but this number would not be surpassed until World War II.

Gelinas secured a series of annual grants from the Rockefeller Foundation between 1934 and 1943 which subsidized the training of public health nurses, and in 1944 the National Organization of Public Health Nurses officially recognized Skidmore as a model progra. Gradually, Skidmore expanded the variety of its clinical experiences to include work at the Butler hospital in Providence, R.I., for neurology, Yale’s school of nursing for pediatrics, the Mt. McGregor tuberculosis
sanitarium, and East Harlem Nursing and Health Services for public health. The five-year program was compressed to 50 months, allowing nurses to graduate in the fall of their fifth year at Skidmore. The Skidmore nursing faculty grew with the addition of Irene Carn, a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing who had earned BS and MA degrees at Columbia Teachers College, and in 1935 the National Association of Collegiate Schools of Nursing accepted Skidmore for membership. The president’s annual report for 1936 identified a special endowment for the school of nursing as one of the four major needs of the college. Increasing enrollment eventually improved the department’s financial status but stretched the accommodations at Mary McClellan, even when student nurses spent much of their clinical program at other hospitals.

By late 1939 Gelinas and Karn had become convinced that the war in Europe would spread to America, dramatically increasing the nation’s need for nurses. The Depression had limited the growth of the Skidmore department, and had caused many other college and
hospital training programs to close, meaning that existing programs were going to have to expand—and expand swiftly. So Agnes Gelinas investigated possible hospital affiliations in Boston and New York City. Irene Ward McClellan, a Skidmore trustee since 1934, supported the possible move and continued her strong advocacy for the nursing department. (In 1964 the department would be named in her honor.)

Two months after America’s entry into the war, Skidmore’s nursing program moved from Cambridge to the New York Post-Graduate Hospital, which eventually became part of New York University. At the same time, the department announced two tracks for the program, one a four-year option with the second and third years in New York City, the other an accelerated three-year wartime track. From 1942 to 1947 Skidmore trained nurses in the United States Cadet Nurse Corps, a federally funded program to respond to the critical need for nurses. Although the 40 freshman nursing majors who began the program in September 1942 would not graduate until the war was nearly over, 20 Skidmore graduates served as Army nurses and five as Navy nurses, beginning a tradition of service in wartime that continued through Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf War. Nursing continued to be a popular major in the postwar era, and Skidmore’s baccalaureate nurses began to fulfill the ideals of the men and women who had inaugurated the program: while most American nurses were graduates of hospital programs, Skidmore’s nurses, with their prestigious baccalaureate degrees, became nursing administrators, professors of nursing, and chairs of nursing departments in colleges and universities.

In 1965 Agnes Gelinas, who had developed and led the program for 38 years, always holding her students to the highest possible standards, retired and was awarded an honorary degree by the college. The nurses who graduated in 1965 honored her with a formal pledge:

We, as professional nurses graduating from Skidmore College, do solemnly pledge to uphold the principles and ideals of nursing.
We shall endeavor to promote health, to alleviate pain, both physical and emotional, and to cooperate with others who share these aims for the patient, the family
and the community.
We shall endeavor to develop our abilities and potential toward personal and professional growth through continued education.
Believing in the dignity of man, we shall strive to uphold these principles without bias, prejudice or selfish motives.
We dedicate ourselves to these ideals.
-June 5, 1965

The new leader of the Department of Nursing, Jean Campbell, had earned BS and MA degrees from NYU and a PhD from Columbia Teachers College. After serving as a faculty member at St. Johns, NYU, and Queens College, she had become a consultant to the National League of Nurses. Skidmore nurses were in four-year programs, and most spent their second and third years living in the residence hall at 550 First Avenue or in Fahnestock Hall on East 20th Street, returning
to Saratoga for their last year. Under Campbell, the NYU affiliation continued, but students also had clinical experiences at the New York Infirmary, the Veterans Hospital, the Visiting Nurse Service, and other agencies. Skidmore College continued to be a leader in nursing education, but the program needed more space and Campbell advocated for a building of its own. The college’s resources were stretched very thin at this time by the decision to build a new campus, yet in 1969
Skidmore purchased and renovated a building at 325 East 38th Street.

Increasingly, American nurses were finding that a baccalaureate degree was necessary for professional progress, so in 1971 Skidmore’s University Without Walls worked with Jean Campbell to offer a bachelor’s program for registered nurses. As early as World War II, Skidmore’s program had welcomed graduates of hospital programs who wanted to continue their educations, and the UWW program built on that, using a combination of independent study, practical assessment, and traditional coursework to educate these new students, who ranged in age from 21 to 54. By 1977 there were enough UWW nursing students to justify the hiring
of a full-time coordinator of the program, who joined 15 other full-time nursing faculty members.
Women’s expanded public role in the early 20th century and the simultaneous expansion of medical science and technology meant that America needed nurses at the same time that increasing numbers of women sought higher education, leading to a growth in college and university programs like Skidmore’s.

But the social and cultural changes of the 1960s and ‘70s opened up other health-related vocations to women. Especially after 1972, when medical schools could no longer discriminate against female applicants, nursing programs such as Skidmore’s saw a sharp decline in qualified applicants. At the same time, the cost of providing high-quality nursing education increased, so that Skidmore’s program, with empty rooms in an expensive Manhattan building, began to run a serious deficit. All this at a time when the college’s very small endowment was being challenged by the difficulties of building a new campus.

Jean Campbell retired in 1973, and one of Skidmore’s own, Patricia Evans ‘55, became acting chair while a national search was conducted for Campbell’s successor. Since Skidmore had become coeducational in 1971, the nursing program was now open to men, and Stephen Jones, a recent Union graduate who had started out in pre-med but wanted to connect more closely to patient care, became the first male nursing graduate in 1978. But even coeducation couldn’t solve the admissions crisis in nursing: applications dropped by 50% between 1974 and1978. The new chair, Joan Walsh (who, like Campbell, was active in the NLN), joined the college in 1978, just in time for an external review of the nursing department. Concerned by some aspects of the UWW program, Walsh began to replace it with another program for nurses without college degrees, but that took time to establish, and in the meantime the New York City building had more space than students.

A first-year nursing class of only 23 students, and annual deficits of over $300,000 in the program, spurred Skidmore’s board of trustees to appoint a task force of trustees, students, faculty, and alumni to examine the department and suggest solutions to its problems. The task force report in late 1981 recommended strategies to increase applications and broached the idea of moving the program out of New York City, home to 17 baccalaureate programs, of which Skidmore’s was the most expensive, albeit one of the most reputable. But in February of 1982 the board, discouraged by another small pool of nursing applicants, recommended the closure
of the program.

Students, faculty, and alumni vigorously protested the dismantling of the nursing major, and the college faculty voted 75 to 9 against it. But the trustees held firm, convinced that the college simply could not afford to continue the major without gravely lowering its standards. They voted to end the program in March 1982, allowing currentl enrollees to complete their degrees. Gloria Caliandro, one of the department’s senior faculty members, heroically agreed to chair the major until the last student graduated in 1985, and a vital chapter of Skidmore’s history drew to a close.

Although no nurses are graduating from Skidmore today, nursing at the college is hardly over. Skidmore nursing alumni remain active and influential in the profession, as nurse practitioners, administrators, professors, and other crucial public servants. They serve their country in the armed forces and in veterans’ hospitals. They advocate for the profession locally, nationally, and internationally. They spread the scientific gospel of evidence-based nursing. And they remain loyal to their fellow alumni, grateful to their devoted faculty, and committed to the ideals they first encountered as nursing majors at Skidmore College.