This story is part of a series marking the 50th anniversary of SUNY Jamestown Community College's Cattaraugus County Campus in Olean and its impact on the region. Visit sunyjcc.edu/News to read additional articles.
---
Dottie Oakley never thought about teaching until she saw a newspaper ad for a job opening at SUNY Jamestown Community College.
It was 1981, and she needed to return to Cattaraugus County to help care for her mother.
“I never was going to teach,” Oakley said recently. “This was the only job available. So, I guess we try it and see. You see, I haven’t quit yet. I’m still here.”
The position required Oakley to spend a year learning on the Jamestown Campus before launching a nursing program from the ground up in Olean in 1982.
Nursing program in 1981.
As the Cattaraugus County Campus celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, nursing has grown into one of its signature programs. More than four decades later, the woman who helped build it is still on campus, sharing her nursing knowledge with first- and second-year students.
After doing some quick math, Oakley revealed that she is 87 years old. For 45 of those years, she has been a JCC employee.
“Not many people are still teaching at that age,” she said.
And hers is far from an honorary role.
Though Oakley retired from full-time teaching in 2015, she still delivers at least one lecture each year, proctors quizzes, helps first-year students in campus labs, and oversees redemonstrations.
"That’s a sit-down job,” she said of redemonstrations. “It’s sitting in the lab watching them perform the skills we have taught them over the weeks. I can toss in my three cents in those situations. I still get my time.”
Even during the summer, Oakley stops by her office on the first floor of the Allied Health and Sciences Center several times a week to see how graduates have performed on their board exams.
“They’re always eager,” she said of the students. “The first day of school, I’ll be seeing all of them. The door is open. They know they can come in and have that private conversation if need be and I’ll send them to the right places hopefully.”
One of the students Oakley taught at JCC was 2015 graduate Melanie Murphy, who returned as an adjunct instructor in 2022 and moved into a full-time role in 2024.
"It was the instructors that were instructing me and now I'm working alongside that really made me feel this is something that I want to do long term,” Murphy said. “I wanted to kind of get my feet wet, get some experience in the nursing world, and then I wanted to bring that back to home.”
Murphy feels at home working with fellow instructors Jennifer Visbisky, Rose Dunn, Laura Williams, and Heather Burrell. Visbisky has been a mentor Murphy often leans on for guidance.
"One of the big things that I love about this campus is, even though we're a small campus, we're a pretty mighty campus,” Murphy said. “And I say that because everybody is very in tune with each other. Everybody lends a helping hand. Everybody lends a smiling face. It's very community-centric here.”
is a JCC graduate and has been an instructor at the college since 2022.
Like Oakley, Murphy came to JCC without teaching experience. But both brought years of nursing experience that would become an important part of what they could offer students.
Murphy spent nearly a decade working as a registered nurse at UPMC Cole in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. Oakley graduated with a nursing diploma from Gowanda State Hospital in 1959. She worked for a couple of years at Erie County Medical Center before moving to New York City with friends, where she worked for the Manhattan Veterans Affairs for more than a decade.
“I was smart enough to figure out that I had better take advantage of where I am,” Oakley said. “Also, at that time of the century, there were (college) grants galore.”
With the help of those grants, Oakley earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University before accepting an administrative position in Stamford, Connecticut.
“It took me not too long to figure out that that was not for me,” she said. “All you did was paperwork, meetings, things like that. You lost all your patient care.”
When Oakley arrived in Olean as the campus' only full-time nursing instructor, JCC was located on Homer Street and rented classroom space at the former Transfiguration Parochial School, where nursing classrooms and labs were housed.
At the time, JCC provided only the second year of an associate degree in nursing. Oakley said licensed practical nursing programs offered by BOCES, St. Francis Hospital and a location in Bradford, Pennsylvania, prepared students before they transferred to JCC. When two of those LPN programs closed, the college expanded to offer both years of the nursing program in the late 1980s.
By then, the nursing program had moved to JCC's new downtown campus location on the third floor of the former Montgomery Ward department store building. The program moved into the Allied Health and Sciences Center after JCC's expanded Olean campus opened in 2003.
Through the changes and the years — from being a new teacher building a new program to changing classroom locations and working with different college administrators — Oakley has endured.
“I brought my professional into it,” Oakley said. “It wasn’t just textbook. I had so many experiences to share. I was able to do that. I have shown some of the other faculty how to intermingle that. You’ve got to be out there. You’ve got to get your hands in it.”