Remembering Rheba: a tribute to Dr. Rheba de Tornyay, editor emeritus 1926-2013.

The distinguished career of an inspirational nurse leader, educator, trailblazer, colleague, and friend came to a close with the passing of Dr. Rheba de Tornyay in September 2013, at the age of 87. Rheba served as Editor of the Journal of Nursing Education from 1985 to 1991, a time during which the Journal refocused its mission on publishing high-level research and scholarship. As both an editor and a national nursing leader, she was sometimes a lone voice advocating for support of nursing education scholarship at a time when the profession had identifi ed clinical scholarship as its top priority. Rheba served as Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Washington (UW) from 1975 to 1986 and as a professor there until she retired in 1996. During her tenure as dean and professor, the UW School of Nursing gained national prominence in research and doctoral education. As noted in the UW press release (n.d.): Though she was dean for slightly more than a decade, Rheba de Tornyay’s impact and infl uence extended far beyond her time as dean at the School of Nursing. Her legacy of excellence and achievements will continue into a nursing future that she helped to create and shape. Dr. de Tornyay’s accomplishments would be exceptional in any era; they were extraordinary in the context of a time and place when nursing was struggling to be recognized as a profession. Rheba’s impact on nursing education extends well beyond her roles as dean and editor. Her landmark book, Strategies for Teaching Nursing (de Tornyay & Thompson, 1971), was an unquestioned standard in the fi eld. During my graduate education in the 1970s, I was among the thousands of fortunate aspiring faculty members who were taught to teach using Rheba’s text as the framework for our practice micro-teaches. I can attest to the impact of this experience on my own understanding of ways to engage students in learning and my survival during my early years as a young faculty member. I got to know Rheba personally when we traveled together to Japan to speak at a seminar sponsored by St. Luke’s College of Nursing in Tokyo. I was a bit intimidated at the prospect of co-leading the seminar with this legendary pioneer. But her warmth, candor, willingness to engage in deep discussion about educational scholarship, and openness to ideas at odds with her own quickly put me at ease with her. During our time together in Japan, we formed a friendship that spanned the next two decades, created numerous opportunities for mentorship, and led to my appointment as her successor as editor of the Journal of Nursing Education in 1991. During her doctoral education in the mid-80s, one of my colleagues had the privilege of serving as Rheba’s teaching assistant. She recalls witnessing Rheba’s advocacy, remarkable integrity about who she was, and the principles she held: Rheba often talked about how the health care dollar needed to be redistributed.... When I had dinner with her shortly before she passed away, she told me about her experience seeking a caregiver for herself. She was referred to an agency by the staff at her retirement complex and, when interviewing the owner/manager, she asked how much of the hourly fee the caregiver was paid. She was outraged to learn it was less than half and confronted them with their exploitation of their caregivers. She refused to engage their services and subsequently found and engaged an agency that reimbursed their caregivers two thirds (or so) of the hourly rate. Further, she informed the staff of the retirement complex about their referral and not only urged that they to no longer offer that agency for referral but additionally described how to assess whether agencies exploited their caregivers. That was Rheba...always acting on principle, always advocating, always generous with sharing her learning and understanding. (Gail Houck, personal communication, October 29, 2013) This kind of activism is reminiscent of other stories of Rheba standing up for her principles. As a student at Mount Zion Hospital School of Nursing in San Francisco, she was marked by the faculty as a troublemaker. She organized her fellow nursing students, complaining about their working conditions and the invasion of privacy when their mail was opened. She helped organize the Bay Area Student Nurses Association, which resulted in her losing all privileges at the school and being restricted to her room for the purpose of “refl ecting on her attitude” (Houser & Player, 2004, p. 190). Rheba went on to have a stellar and storied career, mentoring hundreds of young nurse educators and researchers, and elevating the role of nurses and nursing organizations such as the Institute of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson