 Following her retirement, Abdellah taught as a professor at the College of Nursing at the University of South Carolina; and established and served as the acting dean of the first federal graduate school of nursing at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS).Abdellah was passionate in the effort to improve nursing education.Early in her career, while working for Yale University, she became frustrated by the lack of scientific basis in the National League of Nursing guidelines, and proceeded to burn a stack of the curriculum guides in the Yale courtyard.