The Big Easy’s Big Test

New Orleans awaits the outcome of the post-Katrina academic year.

By Meredith Turk, Northwestern University

NEW ORLEANS—Researchers are calling the forced evacuation resulting from the 2005 hurricane season along the Gulf Coast one of the largest movements of Americans since the Great Migration. In New Orleans, a little less than half of the pre-storm population has returned, and the rest remain spread across the United States. In some parts of New Orleans, streets are peppered with FEMA trailers and residents eager to rebuild. Other areas, such as the much-discussed 9th ward are eerily vacant. Still other parts of the city are filled with “For Sale” signs next to a five foot high watermark.

This fall, colleges and universities that emptied last fall and partially reopened in the spring will attempt to return to normal. August 29 is not only a day of remembrance, as Gulf Coast residents reflect on a year of uncertainty. For freshman at Tulane University in New Orleans, it marks the last day of orientation—a year after freshmen were told to re-pack their dorm rooms and Green Wave gear, and follow a human wave out of town. They returned only to tie up loose ends amidst the city’s infamous post-Katrina chaos.

“Not a single Tulane student got his or her feet wet during this whole mess,” said Lance Hill, the executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane, who came back to find his newly renovated institute feet deep in black flood water. Even though students avoided the worst of Katrina, some still find cause for concern, with this year’s hurricane season at its height and the city’s levee system still in disrepair. Fearing another evacuation, some other schools have decided to push the beginning of their fall semester back to October, when hurricane season is officially over. “It’s the idea that one’s child could end up in a public shelter that gets to parents,” Hill said.

Tulane University student Lee Marinelli signs into her dorm in New Orleans with Tulane volunteer William Kethman Thursday, Jan. 12, 2006, on the first day of classes since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in August. (AP Photo/Cheryl Gerber)

In many cases, it’s the parents and not the students about whom the schools worry. Undergraduates, who are often still financially dependent on their parents, can be influenced by their parents’ concerns. Hill said he thinks most upperclassmen will return to Tulane, as was the consensus at other schools in the area. Even most students who studied elsewhere last school year are coming back. Transferring for one’s senior year is not at all ideal. Other schools are granting New Orleans students’ extensions for applications, but little special flexibility; transfer credits from Gulf Coast schools are treated like transfers from anywhere else.
 

But the “true litmus test,” Hill said, will be this year’s incoming freshman class. This month Tulane is expected to greet a class only a little more than half of its normal size. As an institution that is highly dependent on tuition for funding, it can only hope for a fast recovery. Tulane has already spent a great deal of money to get its most important buildings up and running by spring semester last year.

If the student population is in question, just as uncertain is the faculty. Even a reduced student population needs professors, but in December Tulane cut 230 faculty positions, 65 of them tenured. The school was allowed to lay off tenured faculty because of special provisions that allow layoffs due to economic exigencies. In a climate where tenured faculty can be cut, professors lack job security and might look for work elsewhere. In fact, several professors told me they were concerned that if they create trouble for the administration they may face a decrease in departmental funding. Because of this, reputable professors may not necessarily be fired but forced to decrease costs by downsizing departments or taking on more teaching hours.

The political situation for faculty is also delicate. As controversial city planning schemes take form in neighborhoods all across New Orleans, university administrators are on planning boards of groups such as The Bring New Orleans Back Coalition and the Louisiana Recovery Authority. A professor, without the protection of tenure, might think twice before speaking out against planning ideas that his or her university supports.

The challenges are different for different schools. Tulane and other big name schools have always attracted theout-of-town crowd. On the other hand, Loyola University New Orleans, Dillard University, University of New Orleans, and Southern University of New Orleans attract a more local, commuter demographic.

How the out-of-towners get their news about New Orleans has been one of the city’s biggest struggles yet. According to Marianne Marcell, research analyst at University New Orleans’ center for Hospitality research, a survey conducted in March 2006 illustrated that a significant number of tourists still inaccurately believe that there is standing flood water in New Orleans, that the French Quarter has been severely damaged, or that water is still unfit for drinking. Potential students from outside the region might hold similar misconceptions. Meanwhile, the potential students of schools with a more local base may not yet have returned to the region.

Until the recent upsurge in Katrina anniversary coverage, the reporting from the immediate aftermath of the storm still flavored the external perception of the city. If it bleeds it leads, says the newsroom aphorism, but not everything is still bleeding. New Orleans has major problems still, but the wetness on the ground is from the daily 3 p.m. rains, not Katrina. Regardless of reality, the outside perception remains that New Orleans is fundamentally a dangerous place. Out-of-towners left Mardi Gras 2006 to locals, and if enrollment numbers are any indication, it’s no different for local colleges and universities.

Some schools, however, are using their locale to attract a different crowd of students. For instance, Tulane now offers the nation’s first master’s program specializing in disaster management. Students are at the forefront of many community organizing projects in the Crescent city. Mardi Gras Service Corps and The Phoenix of New Orleans are just two examples of student-led organizations that are advocating for a number of neighborhood planning initiatives.

When it comes to researching post-Katrina issues in the Gulf Coast region, Tulane and other local universities have a different angle than outside schools. Several universities such as Harvard and Yale have conducted research in New Orleans, but local researchers have the on-the-ground knowledge and established facilities to do more.

Colleges and universities in New Orleans face remarkable challenges and some rare opportunities after Katrina. Schools may be handing out fewer school-spirit key chains and water bottles to freshmen this year, but it’s too soon to know what will work and what won’t in the recovery. To know that, we will have to watch closely though this fall and into the future.

Meredith Turk, a senior at Northwestern University, spent the summer volunteering and researching community organizations in New Orleans.

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