Maureen Baksh-Griffin, assistant professor of Nursing, CSCC and Dr. Bill Seymour, CSCC president.
Maureen Baksh-Griffin, assistant professor of Nursing, at Cleveland State Community College, has been selected to participate in the 2015 Tennessee Board of Regents’ Maxine Smith Fellows Program. TBR is the governing body for 46 universities, community colleges and technology centers throughout the state.
The Maxine Smith Fellows Program was originally created as a TBR central office Geier initiative designed to provide opportunities for African-American TBR employees to participate in a working and learning environment that would enhance work experience and career development.
The objectives of the program are:
? To increase the academic and professional credentials of the Fellows;
? To allow Fellows to observe and participate in decision-making situations;
? To provide Fellows the opportunity to experience how policy is made at the institution,
senior administrative and governing board levels; and
? To help increase the number of qualified applicants from underrepresented groups for
senior level administrative positions at TBR institutions.
“One of my colleagues, Tracey Wright, introduced me to the fellowship in January of 2014,” stated Baksh-Griffin. “I had never heard of Maxine Smith prior to her introduction. Tracey and I first met serving together on a multicultural fair planning committee two years prior. We bonded over a similar global perspective with a local focus. My parents were both registered nurses who emigrated from Pakistan to NYC in the late 1960’s, so I can’t help but have a global perspective.”
Each Fellow will be assigned a mentor at the TBR central office, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission or one of the other TBR schools. The Fellow works with a mentor to develop a Fellowship work plan. Baksh-Griffin’s mentor is Dr. Anthony Wise, president of Pellissippi State Community College. She is working on a project that relates to providing student engagement solutions to psychosocial factors that affect their success.
Ms. Baksh-Griffin stated, “The Maxine Smith Fellows program is a prestigious, longstanding initiative of the Tennessee Board of Regents which is crafted to provide a professional career development experience for underrepresented employees. The competitive program is designed to augment the number of qualified candidates considered for leadership and senior administration level positions within the TBR system. While I was honored, I did not understand how competitive the program was until I met fellows from other TBR campuses around the state, some of whom shared that they had applied several times before they were selected. Since then, I have become very clear on what a privilege it is to be part of this fellowship, not only because of the fellows and their varied background and experience, but because of who Maxine Smith was and what her influence as a civil rights activist has been on the local and state level.”
Ms. Baksh-Griffin earned two bachelor’s degrees in New York before moving to Tennessee to complete her master’s degree. She has one B.S. in Human Communications from City University of New York and the other in Nursing from New York University.
“I ended up in Tennessee because I was searching for a program that would help me make sense of the loss of my brother, Michael Baksh, on September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center, and that led me to a BSN-PhD program in the College of Nursing at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The program was initially titled Homeland Security Nursing, and it fit what I saw was my new calling…disaster nursing. During my time at UTK, the program title changed, and I managed to earn a master’s degree in nursing. My MSN is in now in Global Disaster Nursing. Recently, I have opted not to complete my PhD in nursing at UTK, and have been accepted into a doctor of nursing practice program at Southern Adventist University which will begin this fall.”
Ms. Baksh-Griffin has been at Cleveland State for the last three years and currently teaches full-time in the evening program. The hybrid/part-time evening option is an initiative that allows students the opportunity to study nursing even while working full-time.
“I am a firm believer in servant leadership, and serving my students by sharing a global perspective and a preparedness mindset is what I do. It, too, is a privilege. The Maxine Smith Fellowship is an opportunity to learn and to grow in leadership and administrative skills with a broader perspective of shared governance, decision making and policy implementation. Thus far, it has helped me to see a larger scope of administrative issues/needs across the state-wide system.”