Dean Frazier's Message Honoring National Nurses Week 2025
Dear Columbia Nursing Community,
This week, starting on May 6, marks the beginning of National Nurses Week, a time to honor nurses and nursing’s central importance to our nation’s health. This year, this annual observance is occurring at an unusually difficult time for academe in general and certainly for the great university that our beloved school is a part of.
The challenges we face will be ongoing. But we are strong, we are nimble, we are strategic, and—most importantly—we are part of an amazing nursing community.
There are two things that I believe make the Columbia Nursing community so robust and resilient: First is a point of agreement—our collective, shared commitment to nursing’s core values of human dignity, integrity, autonomy, altruism, and social justice. And second is actually a point of difference—the fact that a diverse community like our school also gains strength from our varied views and divergent perspectives. We rely on each other to generate innovative ideas and to consider new ways of thinking as we move into the future.
As we navigate the uncertainty that lies ahead, let us be mindful of the value of kindness and respect and of seeking solace from our school’s mission to improve the health and well-being of the patients and communities we serve. Our focus on research, education, and practice—a legacy we have sustained and taken pride in ever since our founding more than 130 years ago—will not falter!
Nurses Week falls just before commencement. What a wonderful milestone we all have to look forward to as we get ready to celebrate our school’s greatest source of pride and joy—seeing the students from all of our programs graduate in a couple of weeks, bringing the world the nurses we all need, now more than ever. As our graduates begin the next steps in their individual journeys, they, too, will go forth into the world carrying nursing’s values with them.
So as we kick off National Nurses Week and look forward to commencement and all the activities leading up to it, I hope you will feel the solidarity of the community around you.
Please join me in honoring nurses everywhere.
Lorraine Frazier, PhD, RN, FAAN
Dean and Mary O’Neil Mundinger Professor
Senior Vice President, Columbia University Irving Medical Center