title: At the centre of research.
abstract: WHEN CLAIRE FAGIN became the Dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in 1977, the school admitted 30 students to its first year class, and graduated the same number. It had six full-time faculty, no doctoral programme, no research programme and no clinical connection to the prestigious Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP). Its position within the university was precarious. Few knew of its existence or understood its mission. Students were often referred to as 'those dumb nurses.' Almost no one outside of nursing considered its scholarship scholarly or believed the discipline had anything to contribute to the construction of new knowledge about either health or human experience.