As Dr. Anita Hufft looks to retire this summer, she won’t be leaving a career as an astronaut that she envisioned when she was a youngster – she will depart Texas Woman’s University (TWU) as one of the nation’s foremost nurse educators.
As dean of the College of Nursing at TWU’s three campuses in Denton, Dallas and Houston, Hufft is a sought-after consultant and insightful contributor to nursing publications. And she is widely renowned within the nursing profession as an expert on forensic nursing and psychology, psychiatric and mental health nursing and nursing education leadership.
Yet, “I was not one of those people who always wanted to be a nurse,” says Hufft, the daughter of World War II veterans who was born in Detroit, spent her formative years in the Philippines and graduated high school in Florida. Her dream was to become an astronaut, and with that in mind she entered the University of Maryland as a chemistry major.
It wasn’t long, however, before Hufft began to consider nursing at the “encouragement” of a “very traditional father” who was a health care administrator in the military and expressed skepticism about her career options with a chemistry degree. A newspaper article about a military nursing program at the university compelled her to switch majors, she says, and she graduated from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing with a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1970.
Hufft, whose mother was a Woman’s Army Corps medic stateside, later returned to school, earning a master of nursing degree in psychiatric and mental health nursing from Louisiana State University (LSU) in 1976. She went into private practice as a registered nurse and pursued other interests, later going back to school and earning a Ph.D. in nursing from TWU in 1987.
“Teaching was the last thing I was going to do,” Hufft says. But she had already dipped her toes in that pond as a graduate student, when she had an opportunity to teach part-time and enjoyed it.
After earning her doctorate, the Army veteran decided to go into higher education. She had appointments at a half-dozen schools – including LSU, William Carey College and Spalding and Indiana universities – before becoming professor of nursing and dean at the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at Valdosta State University in 2004.
