National expert in family and health public policy joins college faculty
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Empowering Through Hope:
New Distinguished Professor William Lofton Turner makes an impact through policy and spirituality
William Lofton Turner has always had a natural ability to help people solve problems.
A university dean noticed it and steered Turner, then an undergraduate student, to become a marriage and family therapist. The National Institutes of Health noticed it and awarded him research grants to study underserved families. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation noticed it when they offered him a mid-career fellowship at the Institute of Medicine, National Academies of Science. And then-Senator, now President, Barack Obama noticed it when he selected him in 2007 to carry out his health policy fellowship and do some of the foundational work on what eventually became the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Now students in the College of Leadership & Public Service will benefit from that problem-solving ability and the selfless spirit that has motivated his work through the years: Turner has joined the newly established college as a distinguished professor. He will teach courses for CLPS students in addition to serving as administrative counsel to Lipscomb’s president on diversity issues and community engagement.
Turner began his educational journey with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but a conversation with a leader at the Brooks Avenue Church of Christ in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he attended, influenced his life plans and sent him to Abilene Christian University for his Master in Marriage and Family Therapy degree.
“He observed I was good at working with people and had a natural ability to help people solve problems,” Turner said of Dr. Dan Blazer, dean of medical education at Duke University. “He suggested that I do graduate work in family therapy, and the more I investigated it and other psychosocial disciplines, the more I liked family therapy’s systematic approach.”
He began his career as a clinical therapist, but quickly his interest in the science behind the clinical techniques he used led him to pursue research, a decision that changed the trajectory of his career. After graduating from ACU, he enrolled at Virginia Tech University and earned his Ph.D. in human development with an emphasis in marital and family therapy. He joined the faculty as an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky and was successful in obtaining grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He was quickly promoted to full professor with tenure at UK. That led to a tenured full professorship at the University of Minnesota, one of the top family therapy programs in the nation, he said.
At Minnesota, Turner became involved in collaborative efforts with the university’s public policy center, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and that involvement resulted in a personal revelation about his research.
“I found that the work I was doing had profound implications for the policies that govern our health care and our nation around issues of family, especially poor and underserved families,” he said. “I was doing ground-breaking work, but I realized it was primarily being read by other researchers.
“In my research, I discovered that the promotion of family strengths is really important, so any sort of legislation that supports a strong family is really important. Second, people in vulnerable situations need mechanisms that support and encourage them in moving out of their vulnerability rather than perpetuating or punishing them for being in that vulnerable position. We sometimes create policies that limit people. We need policies that help people move in an upward trajectory as opposed to policies that are primarily punitive.”
Acting on his desire to directly impact vulnerable families, Turner applied for a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship, a highly prestigious fellowship in health care, usually reserved for physicians, Turner said.
Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy fellows receive six months of training on health care policy at a national level at The Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, D.C. Then they are placed to work in the office of a U.S. congressman involved in health care policy for at least a year.
“RWJF fellows provide a valuable service to congressional offices, and they are highly valued among the senators and U.S. House members, so there is some competition to obtain their services,” Turner said.
He applied to five congressional offices and chose then-Sen. Obama, who in 2007 was just starting his presidential campaign. Turner resonated strongly with Senator Obama’s scientific, evidence-based approach to crafting his legislation, he said.
“I really wanted to find a way to translate the work that I do into meaningful policies that can have a much broader effect on real-world communities and organizations,” he said. “I think legislation and policy need to be based on good science…not merely on polls.”
Turner worked side-by-side with Obama’s chief legislative advisor, Dr. Dora Hughes, for a year-and-a-half to craft bills regarding Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, food safety and autism treatment, as well as several key re-authorization bills. He also helped coordinate the initial Senate hearings that contributed to the development of the bill that eventually became the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
“That legislation started with a white paper by Obama’s chief health advisor at the time. Based on this white paper, we started holding hearings in the Senate, and I was there to help organize, arrange and brief those who attended those hearings,” Turner said. “Major entities engaged in the nation’s health care participated in these hearings, from physicians to insurance industry officials.
“We took all the information we gleaned from those meetings and distilled it down to compromises and language that we could use in the bill. We had to decide what parts had insurmountable opposition… It was like trying to move mountains at times!”
Working in Senator Obama’s office during his presidential campaign “gave me access to things that no other fellow ever had,” Turner said. “I am still the only Robert Wood Johnson Fellow in its more than 40-year history to work for someone who eventually became President.”
When Obama was elected, rather than working for the presidential administration, Turner’s heart called him back to academia. He returned to the University of Minnesota and in 2009 moved to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, as a professor and endowed chair, where he taught health policy classes and developed a research program called the HOPE Center, a working group he calls a “translational research center” that does research on hopefulness in low-income and minority communities and determines the best ways to programmatically enhance hopefulness in similar communities.
In Nashville, his involvement as an elder at Schrader Lane Church of Christ and his wife Rietta’s (Ed.D. ’14) enrollment in Lipscomb’s education doctorate program, introduced him to Lipscomb and its spiritually integrative educational focus, an approach he found appealing.
“Spirituality is an important part of who I am and what I do… I found myself at a point in my life and career where I wanted to more overtly express and integrate spirituality in my work and more overtly assert values and themes that reflect spiritual concepts,” he said. “I believe that Lipscomb provides an environment where I can more fully realize this goal.
“People, especially vulnerable populations, often find themselves in difficult circumstances, sometimes because of oppressive systems that are forced upon them or sometimes because of poor personal decisions and choices. However, I think that as a nation we need to better understand how to promote and advance a sense of hopefulness in people’s lives and provide opportunities that encourage a realistic hope that life can be better.
“As a nation, we need an understanding that, as in the words of Civil Rights Attorney Bryan Stevenson, ‘people are more than the worst thing that they have ever done.’ There is redemption. We need policies that engender hope for betterment and that recognize that just because you did a bad thing at one point in your life, doesn’t mean you will always be that way.”
In addition to teaching and administration, Turner will also move his HOPE research to Lipscomb and plans to involve CLPS graduate students in the research projects. A book on hopefulness is in progress, and Turner may also teach a Lipscomb course in the future on the science of hopefulness.
In addition, as a member at the Schrader Lane congregation, Turner has come to know some of the Nashville leaders of the civil rights movement and hopes to create, collaboratively with Lipscomb, an oral history on the role of African-Americans in churches of Christ in the civil rights movement.
“I am thrilled to be a part of the College of Leadership & Public Service. This will be the first time in my career that I have been part of the beginning of a college,” Turner said. “It’s exciting to be part of the beginning stages of the development of a college that has the potential to have such a strong and sustained impact.”