We need a less sensational viewpoint of the Frontier Nursing University fight

I feel I need to write regarding the story of Frontier Nursing and the removal of a stained glass window from their Hyden campus. I don’t pretend to know the real story behind what happened down in Leslie County, but I am perplexed by the one-sided coverage in the Herald-Leader. Though I am from Versailles, a place Larry Webster describes as representing the haute couture of Central Kentucky —something I didn’t realize from driving down Main Street here — I have nothing to do with Frontier Nursing.

I wish Bill Estep, Larry Webster, and Rutheford Campbell would have read Tom Eblen’s article on Frontier Nursing published in the Herald-Leader in 2014. It would have afforded them a less sensational viewpoint about the current situation. I understand the need to sell newspapers, but the coverage of this story has been absurd from the very beginning, and it’s not getting any better.

From Eblen’s article, they would have learned that Frontier Nursing has not been delivering babies in the mountains for more than 40 years. By the 1980s, Frontier nurses mostly provided home health care to elderly people. The school struggled until it came up with a new, visionary business model in the late 80s — distance learning. “It pioneered many of the online methods now beginning to revolutionize all higher education”, wrote Eblen in 2014. With distance learning, FNU could hire top-notch faculty to teach vital skills to those in under-served areas. The school grew into the nation’s largest school for nurse-midwives. Its graduates work in all 50 states and seven foreign countries. Ninety percent are women, and 70 percent live in rural areas. “They come to the Hyden campus only two or three times: for a few days of orientation, a few days of clinical simulations and, if they wish, for their graduation ceremony,” wrote Eblen.

Isn’t this a good thing, something to be proud of? Well, no, not from reading the Herald-Leader’s recent coverage, and especially not to writer Rutheford Campbell and Hyden Mayor Carol Graham Joseph. They pine for the days of local nurses riding on horseback into hollers to deliver babies, and possess an incredible ability to channel the spirit of Mary Breckinridge, the founder of Frontier Nursing back in 1925. Somehow, they divine she would have preferred not to help people all over the world and become a visionary leader in healthcare, but to instead stay a big fish in a small pond and local, a business model that unsurprisingly coincides with their own self-interest and perhaps other things as well.

You know someone has weak arguments when they invoke spirits and demons. No doubt these folks realize they have no legal or moral claim on the private property of a neighbor, nor are entitled to have a say in the ministrations of a private corporation. Mayor Joseph and Campbell seem particularly naïve, demanding the “return” of a stained glass window the school owns to “them.” Instead of being grateful, the recent gift of a $2 million piece of property to the city by FNU only further fuels their outrage and sense of entitlement. Mayor Joseph insists the gift is meaningless without the return of the window. Rutheford scoffs that the gift “changes nothing” and “eliminates a troublesome asset from its balance sheet”. He goes one step further, channeling Mary Breckinridge, to demand the school change its successful business model and start delivering babies in Leslie County again, presumably on horseback. Apparently no good deed to people in Leslie County goes unpunished.

A county that overwhelming votes for candidates who want to abolish affordable healthcare should not feel someone else owes them that responsibility.

Guy Kemper is an artist in Versailles.

This story was originally published September 16, 2020 at 1:12 PM.