Fizzy Business - Regis College

With her broad background and experience,
not only as a doctor but also as a public policy planner
with an insider knowledge of the insurance
industry, England became a sought-after adviser
on health care on the national level.
In 1990, England moved to Washington, D.C.,
taking over as president of Washington Business
Group on Health. During these years, she worked
with Hillary Clinton and her staff and collaborated
closely with Tipper Gore and with Rosalynn and
Jimmy Carter. She and Rosalynn worked together
on legislation with Senator Kennedy.
“Rosalynn and I met when I was president of
the American Psychiatric Association. I was lobbying
on the Hill a lot, and we became advocates together.
We both have the same mission,” says England,
“to provide mental health and substance use care
for everybody.”
Their friendship has endured the passing years
and the changing tides in health reform. When
England became president of Regis she invited
Carter to campus to receive an honorary degree
at the presidential inauguration convocation.
} People
call this decade a transformational
period for Regis. And
it has been so because of England. When she arrived
in 2001, the future of Regis looked dim. Its enrollment
was shrinking and so was its endowment. Many
small colleges were closing their doors, and it looked
as if Regis might follow suit.
“Small liberal arts colleges are destined to go out
of business if they don’t adapt,” says England. “We’ve
adapted by building on our strengths and growing
our nursing program, especially at the graduate
level. If we didn’t have it, the liberal arts program
would be out of business.”
Before establishing a doctoral program in nursing
practice in 2007, the college established the excellence
of its undergraduate major in nursing and
broadened the base of its course offerings with
a health-care orientation. The multiple-entry graduate
nursing program offers various master’s programs
and has a healthy enrollment. It is turning
out masters- and doctorally trained nurses who are
taking on needed leadership roles in public health,
nursing education, and administration, and it has
been named a Center for Excellence in Nursing
Education—the first such school in New England
to receive this honor. “I’m very proud of the focus
on health in our graduate programs,” says England.
“It meets the needs of the community.”
This shift into building up the health science
offerings was a deliberate and farsighted choice
for England. She believes that Boston is a locus for
health-care related industries, and thus health-care
related jobs. She wants Regis students to have those
employment options.
“So much of contemporary science is directly related
to the health-care field,” says England. “The sciences
used to be isolated, but medical schools have integrated
them, nursing schools are integrating them.”
This shift in academic offerings and focus, along
with immediate and strict cost cutting, helped Regis
turn the corner economically. But it wasn’t enough.
“We weren’t growing fast enough,” she says.
“When we looked at the data, we saw that women
were coming to Regis not because it was an allwomen’s
college, but because we had nursing or
some other specific program. A lot of women’s colleges
were going coed at the time.”
So she put the issue of coeducation on the table,
again (it had been discussed, seriously, several times
in Regis’s history). And, typically, pursued a careful
feasibility study so that any change at the college
could follow the evidence.
In the past, Regis had been one of only a few good
Catholic colleges for women in the Boston area, but
since the 1970s it had been competing with formerly
all-male Catholic schools like Boston College and Holy
Cross, which had gone coed and attracted women,
who increasingly desired a coed college experience.
So despite her personal wish that Regis continue
as an all-women’s school, England saw with the
impartial eye of a scientist that accepting men would
stem the erosion of undergraduate enrollment.
She knew this would be a difficult change for
alumnae, and she dealt with it as she did all the
important changes she implemented—slowly and
with lots of conversation and input from all quarters.
The faculty supported it, but it was a harder sell to
some alumnae.
“The older alums took it much better,” she says.
“Their own children didn’t want to go to women’s
colleges. The recent alums found it harder. But we
spent a lot of time with them. It was all transparent.
We worked it through for a year and a half.”
Now, going on four years since Regis went coed,
the student body is 25 percent male. And as predicted,
as the male student numbers have increased,
so have female applicants.
The student body is also very diverse—both in
ethnicity and religious affiliation. Now 50 percent of
Regis students are minorities, and only 50 percent
are Catholic.
This shift in student population wasn’t planned,
says England. Rather, there was a shift in Greater
Boston’s population. Regis still educates the children
of working- and middle-class families from
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