Tulane University attracting idealists

By Peter Schworm, Boston Globe Staff | May 1, 2008

NEW ORLEANS - The mossy live oaks gracing Tulane University's lush green quads have reclaimed their pre-Katrina glory, their arched boughs now nearly brushing the ground. The city's beloved streetcars, sidelined for more than two years, are again gliding down St. Charles Avenue alongside the campus, their steel wheels rolling slowly past miles of stately Queen Anne and Victorian mansions.

Two-and-a-half years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, vast sections remain damaged and half-deserted, and many fear the Crescent City will never be quite the same. But Tulane has not only recovered from the storm, it has rebounded to new heights that place it among the country's most sought-after schools.

Drawing strong interest from students across the country who joined recovery efforts in high school, Tulane has seen its applications double this year from 17,000 to 34,000, a remarkable increase for an established institution that Tulane officials believe may be the largest jump in the country this year. Overwhelmed by the volume, the university stopped accepting applications in January, or thousands more probably would have applied.

Tulane's newfound level of popularity sprang from an aggressive post-Katrina marketing campaign that sought to let families know that New Orleans was safe, and let students know the city needed their help. The overwhelming response from civic-minded students has elevated Tulane's national stature and selectivity, and marked a major milestone in the school's, and the city's, recovery.

The scope and speed of the turnaround, just two years after the smallest incoming class in recent memory, have stunned Tulane officials and higher education observers across the country. In many ways, the storm that caused an estimated $650 million in damage, flooded much of the campus, and forced it to close for a semester, has lifted the college to higher ground.
"We never envisioned, to be honest, there would be this positive of a change this quickly," said Tulane's president, Scott Cowen, who works in Gibson Hall, an impressive stone structure built in 1894."The message of public service really resonated with students out there."

New England, and Massachusetts in particular, are leading the resurgence. In the six New England states, applications soared from 809 to 1,963 over the past year. The number of Massachusetts students applying rose from 372 to 983, after plummeting the two years after Katrina.

And on a distinctly Southern campus where students wear shorts and flip-flops in January, where people smile and say hi to passersby, it's also easy to hear the Boston adjective "wicked" and spot Red Sox and Celtics garb.

Tulane has traditionally drawn students from across the country, especially the Northeast, but university officials say the current interest is unprecedented.

"We've drawn a huge number of kids who have been exposed to New Orleans during high school and want to help the city rebuild," Earl Retif, Tulane's vice president for enrollment management, said in an interview. "It appeals to the idealistic."

Across the quiet, elegant campus, where fliers tout volunteer opportunities in the city, students said they came to Tulane for its academic quality and location in one of the world's great cities. But many also said they came as a gesture of solidarity with a wounded city, eager to put their idealism to work on the pervasive social ills Katrina exposed.

Students volunteer at health clinics, tutor in public schools, and help fix up vacant lots, overgrown parks, and shuttered homes. Some also work restoring wetlands.

"I think the negative press New Orleans got really helped Tulane," said Sara Potash, a freshman from Brattleboro, who earlier this year helped raise money to rebuild a park as part of a business seminar. "As a student, you want to help a situation like that. You want to be part of something bigger than yourself. You want to fix it."

Applications have also risen sharply at several other New Orleans schools, including neighboring Loyola, Xavier, and the University of New Orleans.

Tulane's renaissance has drawn national attention and widespread admiration among higher education specialists and consultants, who say the university's strategy to highlight the needs of post-Katrina New Orleans has paid off. Once thought of as somewhat of a party school, Tulane has quickly emerged as a progressive bastion.

"They decided to turn the misfortune that befell the city into a call to service, and it worked astonishingly well," said Barmak Nassirian, a spokesman for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "They have become a different kind of destination."

Retif said he read countless personal essays in the fall about students' volunteer experiences in New Orleans that described "the people they met and what it meant to them." It showed him that Katrina gave Tulane a visibility and civic-minded cachet that traditional marketing could never accomplish.

"Usually you have to go out on the road to visit students, at great expense," he said. "After Katrina, they were coming to us by the thousands."

Among them is Courtney Turcotte, a Tulane-bound student from Arlington who went to New Orleans three times with a church group to help clean up and restore gutted houses. Even in the aftermath of the storm, the city and the campus brimmed with hope and resolve, she recalled.

"It was so full of life," she said. "Everyone seemed so involved, so committed."

In Katrina's wake, Tulane officials felt a sense of duty to help New Orleans rebuild, and also anticipated that they would begin attracting students who were more socially engaged. In 2006, they announced a sweeping public service center, becoming the first major research university to require public service for graduation.

Vincent Ilustre, executive director at Tulane's Center for Public Service, said more than 1,300 undergraduate students now fan out across the city at schools, hospitals, and other volunteer sites through 81 service-learning courses. A course in educational psychology takes students into grade-school classrooms; a course in neurology takes students into hospitals.
Ilustre, a 1997 Tulane graduate, said today's students are far more interested in the city beyond their neatly kept quads.

"Tulane was certainly in its own university bubble," he said. "Now they want to have a sense of belonging in their community. They are looking to give back, and to be part of something bigger."

Reed Wendorf-French, a freshman from Cohasset, began his first semester with a seminar on the city's healthcare system before and after Katrina and included volunteer stints at a health clinic. He said that students and Tulane are choosing each other.

"Students want to come here so they can get involved, and Tulane does a good job of picking them out," he said. "So it's going both ways, and I don't know a single person who isn't involved in something."

Tulane's resurgence has not come easily.

After Katrina, administrators eliminated five undergraduate and 26 graduate programs, cutting more than 150 full-time faculty positions to create a smaller, more streamlined university. They then embarked on an ambitious marketing effort.
"We felt we needed to get the word out that New Orleans isn't underwater," Retif said.

Tulane's many native New Englanders have fallen hard for New Orleans' character and culture. They down po' boys at Parasol's, stay up late to hear jazz at Tipitina's, and wake up to chicory-laced coffee and warm beignets.

At the Maple Leaf Bar on a recent evening, they quaffed local brews and sang along to the R&B classic "Don't You Just Know It," by native Huey "Piano" Smith on the jukebox as a jazz band prepared to take the stage.

New Orleans and Tulane have always gone hand-in-hand, and students and university officials are hopeful that Tulane's resurgence will soon be New Orleans'.

"We live and die together," Retif said.
Peter Schworm can be reached at Schworm@globe.com

A New Orleans portrait of grief and hope

In a corner of New Orleans, in a neighborhood called Gentilly, next to the infamous 17th Street canal that breached during Hurricane Katrina 1-1/2 years ago, there are signs of hope and grief – and evidence that so much more needs to be done.

Volunteers who come to this city acquire some understanding of American history circa 19th century, as well lessons in failed 21st century domestic policy, while lending a hand in the enormous rebuilding process that daily confronts New Orleans residents.

On a recent Saturday morning, I accompanied a group of ACORN volunteers who gutted a small, one-story brick Gentilly house. Fourteen were students from Elon University in North Carolina and an equal number of bloggers from all over the country who post and contribute to first-draft.com, a progressive blog that gets an average of 2,500 visitors a day. They called themselves the Katrina Krewe.
After a short orientation by ACORN’s volunteer coordinator, (don’t swing the crowbar wildly; position the ladder firmly before climbing on it; put the face mask over your nose and mouth), volunteers, ages 18-70, went to work, tearing sheetrock off the walls and hauling it out to the street.

The house had hardly been touched since the storm, and the yard was completely overgrown. A mountain of debris and Christmas decorations were set out by the curb, along with lamps, a wheelchair, stereo, microwave, dining-room table and world globe. A black Fleetwood Cadillac was grounded beside the house, its tires completely flat. In the back yard, a raised plastic swimming pool sat empty.

The owners of the house, sisters Elizabeth and Ava Burnette, evacuated to Fort Worth, Texas and New Iberia, La. Elizabeth is an entrepreneur with a disabled son who hopes to start a home for foster children. Ava is a nurse.

“I plan to return,” Elizabeth said decisively in a phone call to Fort Worth. “That’s our house, so we will be returning. It is very precious to me,” she said of the home where she and her sister were raised. “The house is paid for and the taxes have been paid,” she said.

No one from ACORN’s Home Cleanout program had yet called to say the house had been gutted but is infested with termites. It is uncertain whether it can be rebuilt.Their father had been a landscape architect and designed many of the grounds around Dillard University, nearby. Their mother, Florence Burnett, 70, passed away last April from the stress of Katrina and dealing with FEMA, Elizabeth said.

“I send my love to those college students who helped clean my house,” Elizabeth Burnett said.

The rest of the neighborhood is a mix of occupied and empty homes and FEMA trailers, still in use. It seemed uncertain whether the majority residents would ever be back. Many were elderly, said Elizabeth, and had died as a result of the stress caused by the hurricane.Behind the house is a community garden begun in the 1960s, which is still being cultivated. While the gutters began their work, I inspected the garden. Macon Fry, the community garden coordinator for Parkway Gardens happened along in his truck, greeting me with a smile.There are grapefruit, lemon and Satsuma trees in the garden, he said, and the gardeners are raising grass for the Gulf Coast Wetlands Restoration Project. They’re also hoping to start a flower farm, Fry said.

The garden sparkled with dew and friendly handmade signs invited visitors to join in the volunteer effort. The leafy vegetables grown there get distributed to needy people.

The greenhouse was rebuilt, plant beds made, compost bins and rain cisterns built by Common Grounds volunteer gardeners, “They’ve been sensational,” Fry said.

When the gutters took a break, the next-door neighbor brought 120 chicken wings over for lunch. He lived in a FEMA trailer, but let them use his bathroom since there was no plumbing in the gutted house.

“I think what we did was for the neighbors,” said Scout, a First-Draft.com blogger. “I don’t know if that house is salvageable, but the neighbors were happy because it was an eyesore and it was not safe.” Elizabeth said drug dealers had occupied the house for a time.

“That was the second house I gutted,” Scout said. “It’s the first step. We are not even talking about rebuilding,” she said. “The pace is so slow.”

Scout reminded the Elon students that the residents of this neighborhood are like their parents.
A Russian exchange student with the Elon group said her country thinks of the United States as rich, but this was shocking. “Your people don’t have homes,” she said.

“It is such a sad statement about America,” Scout said. “It’s incredible when you see other countries get it. Qatar gets it better than Joe Schmoe in Cincinnati.”

On her first trip, Scout visited the Ninth Ward, but for the second, she went to Lakeview, which was largely middle-class. There she spoke to a man working on his home. “We did everything right—we played by the rules,” he said. When Congress visited Lakeview, he was among the residents who tried to flag down their bus. “I wanted those people from Congress to see my wedding picture,” the man said about mementos ruined in the floodwaters.

“This could happen to you—broad neglect and abandonment by the government,” Scout said. “You almost have to see it to believe it and to grasp the scope,” she said of the flooded neighborhoods. “I’ve tried to convey that to people in an effort to get Congress to come down.”

Scout, who has been blogging from Madison, Wis., since 2004, visited New Orleans for the first time in the late 1990s. “I thought at the time it was the most unique city in America.” She made her first post-Katrina trip in February 2006. After she wrote that she wanted to go to New Orleans, the blog raised the funds for her trip within 24 hours.
“You can fly in and take a cab to the French Quarter and everything doesn’t look that bad,” she said. The devastation is just a few blocks away and continues on for miles.

“We talk about how important New Orleans is culturally and how important it is financially with all the oil and gas,” Scout said. “I come from social work and I’ve seen bad things, but it’s almost like another planet.

Alison, aka Athenae, from Illinois, who also blogs on First-Draft, had never met her fellow bloggers nor been to New Orleans before the gutting trip. “I came down with very few expectations, but seeing it had enormous impact,” she said. A journalist, she focuses her First-Draft writings on moral values and ethics in journalism.

“New Orleans has a character that is unique and inspires devotion,” Alison said.

“What offends me,” she said, is why people outside New Orleans say, why should I care?”

“People want to think it’s handled. Failing that, they want to blame the locals,” she said. If we can shove our responsibility into some dark corner, or on Mayor Nagin, then we don’t have to lift a finger, she said.

“When we say we can survive without New Orleans, what’s next? These places are not expendable.” When some part of America is destroyed, then America must rebuild it. Otherwise, none of us are safe, she said about the lack of a national disaster response plan. We cannot so easily give up, she added.

“I have so much admiration for the people who live here,” Scout said. They know how to live there—good food, good music, good stories."

“How many cities are there that people would fight this hard to save? Scout asked.

Read the Katrina Krewe's stories here.