Cleaning up, starting over at Tulane
Richy Leitner was about to begin his second year at Tulane University late last summer when Hurricane Katrina disrupted his life and academics. This week, he's back in New Orleans as the university prepares to reopen its classrooms.
During my orientation training this week, I got a chance to hear Tulane President Scott Cowen speak. He came to address all the orientation coordinators and resident advisers and whoever else may have been in the room. Cowen, who's always charismatic and engaging, was this time naturally speaking about the effects of the hurricane on the university, the city, and all the engineer–offending changes that were made as part of the school's renewal plan.
What really struck me initially about his speech was how much havoc had been wreaked on the university itself. I had seen pictures online of a few windows blown out of freshman dorms, but from most of the reports, I had heard it sounded as if the school had escaped relatively unscathed. Apparently, I heard wrong. In this kind of situation, I guess everything is relative. Sure, the school wasn't torn apart and left for condemnation, but there is a pretty wide gray area in between that and getting away clean. Put two thirds of the campus flooded and strewn with debris of all sorts in that category. The school had to spend $200 million just on physically repairing the campus. Cowen said that, although he would never admit it before, when he first saw what it would take to get the school back into working order, he thought Tulane University would never open again. This was something of a shock to me.
Sure the possibility had surfaced when I talked in the fall with my friends at James Madison University about what I would be doing this semester. But it never really entered my mind that that might actually happen. No friends here had ever really considered that there would simply be no university to return to as we bided our time at our various fall schools. But luckily that was not the case, so we never had to deal with that scenario anyway.
Cowen covered many issues in his speech. There are a lot of things you don't really think about that it takes to get the school back open. Take the lack of schools in the area. How then do you get the faculty and their families to move back? Tulane has to open its own charter school for these kids and other area children. Problem solved, but a new set of expenses and work to do.
After covering a variety of other issues, including those regarding the city and not just the school, Cowen opened the floor for questions. People didn't take it easy on him because he is the school president. The disgruntled engineers were the most aggressive in calling the renewal plan into question, which is completely understandable since their majors are being cut, but if the money numbers that Cowen gave out hold up, it seems hard to argue with the plan on anything other than a personal level. He talked about the safety of the city, saying that despite the abandoned areas it is safer than ever before. Most of the criminal element moved out of the city when the storm hit and has yet to return. He said that environmentally the city was quite safe as well, despite some reports about unsafe water to drink and the like.
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