Fizzy Business - Regis College

12
REGIS TODAY
When she arrived in
2001, the future of
Regis looked dim.
Its enrollment was
shrinking and so
was its endowment.
and still thinks of as home. That’s where it started,
and it’s the axis around which her life has revolved
all these years.
The daughter of a policeman and a nurse, Mary
Jane England acquired her passion for fairness, for
family, and for communities in her working class
Irish Catholic neighborhood, within the embrace of
St. Columbkille Parish.
It was the kind of community where the doors
were always open and people went in and out of each
other’s homes and lives. The parish church was a
big presence in the community, both physically and
spiritually. It instilled the families with a sense of
neighborhood identity and cohesion. Neighborhood
was valued, and neighborhood values governed the
life of the community.
“We were loyal to each other,” says Dr. England.
“We felt very safe. If anyone needed help, you never
said no. There was a sense of equality, everybody
was the same.” Literally, in those days everybody
in those neighborhoods was the same. All Catholic.
“We didn’t know Protestants. We thought everyone
was Catholic!”
At the time, social norms dictated that girls would
marry and have children. Though education for girls
wasn’t discouraged, its main goal was to help a girl
find a job to supplement her husband’s income—a job
in a field where flexible hours would allow motherhood
and duties in the home to come first.
But Mary Jane England had different plans for
herself. Today, the 72-year-old, tall, slim, her blond
hair pulled back from a youthful, intelligent face,
has a commanding presence. One can easily see
how as a young woman, her beauty, brains, and
poise would attract the interest of her teachers.
England declared early on that she wanted to be a
doctor, and her parents supported this idea enthusiastically.
So did the Sisters at Mount St. Joseph
Academy, where she went to high school, and at
Regis, where she got her undergraduate degree
in 1959.
“The message I got is that if God gave you talents,
you had to give something back multifold,” she says.
So she went to medical school at Boston University,
specializing in child and adolescent psychiatry.
She married, and her children were born during
her medical training, which included stints in San
Francisco and Hong Kong. When she and her husband
returned to Boston, England took a job at St.
Elizabeth’s Hospital in Brighton, about half a mile
from her home.
When her father died several years later, she and
her family moved back to her childhood home to look
after her mother. Her children grew up there in the
same neighborhood that had shaped her, connected
to the parish church and the community. Though
she currently lives on the Cape when she’s not in
residence at the college, that house on Goodenough
Street is still an England home—her daughter Kara
lives there.
In those early years of practice in the 1970s,
England was starting to think about how to improve
delivery of mental health care, shifting from a medicalized
hospital setting to a neighborhood-based, more
family-friendly structure. She opened a neighborhood
clinic and soon began advocating for this model.
England became a leader in the movement, which
eventually led to a total restructuring of state
mental health services. Under her watch, maltreated
children and young adults in institutions
like Bridgewater, Belchertown State School, and
the Northampton State Hospital were moved into
community residences.
She helped steer this revolution in social policy,
working with Governors Frank Sargent, Michael
Dukakis, and Ed King, and when the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts created DSS (the Department of
Social Services), England helped design the new
agency and took the helm there for several years.
From DSS, England became a dean at the JFK
School at Harvard, where she taught public administration
and honed her political skills in what could
arguably be an even more thorny milieu than state
politics—higher education. After Harvard, responsibilities
at the Prudential Insurance Company of
America, as vice president in charge of developing
mental health policy and coordinating mental health
quality assurance, schooled her in the insurance
industry. While she was there, she also developed and
directed for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation a
$25 million grant program for comprehensive home-
and community-based services in mental health for
youth with mental disorders in 20 states.