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UConn helping hand
kept New Orleans
students on track

Photo: Tulane University

By Kenneth Best

As the helicopter rose up from a levee along the swollen Mississippi River on Aug. 31, 2005, Scott S. Cowen ’68 (BUS) saw for the first time the true devastation Hurricane Katrina had wrought on New Orleans.

For four days the president of Tulane University rode out the storm with several other high-level administrators on the first floor of the university’s recreation center.

After the rains and wind subsided and he first surveyed the damage to Tulane’s main campus a few miles north of the French Quarter, Cowen saw roofs needing repairs, broken windows and tree branches strewn on the ground.

“It wasn’t that bad,” he recalls about his first thought at the time. “It was just a matter of cleaning up and patching.”

Then Lake Pontchartrain pushed its levees to the breaking point and New Orleans began to drown, along with much of Tulane’s two campuses.

Tulane president Scott Cowen ’68 (BUS) speaks with staff in front of the Reily Student Recreation Center on the flooded Tulane campus after Hurricane Katrina.

Photo: Tulane University

Two-thirds of the 84 buildings on the main uptown campus and the 17 buildings on its downtown campus would suffer more than $600 million in damage. With the entire city already evacuated, including Tulane’s 2,514 faculty, 4,000 staff and its 13,214 students, Cowen and his remaining staff began their own escape, which took 72 hours.

The first time they tried to get a helicopter, the airspace over New Orleans was under military control. The second effort failed because landmarks were underwater and the pilot could not locate them.

Finally, a Tulane graduate guided a helicopter pilot close to the uptown campus. To reach the helicopter, Cowen and the staff scurried to find transportation via Tulane’s resources. They found a campus motorboat and siphoned gasoline from nearby cars to start it. Reaching dry land, they hotwired a golf cart so they could reach a dump truck for the trip to higher ground near the Mississippi.

They carried “welcome” banners intended for freshman convocation to make an “X” so the helicopter could identify a landing area. When the helicopter landed, it was on the other side of a locked fence, so they drove the truck through the fence. They flew to meet a plane sent by a Tulane trustee that took them to Patterson, La., for the night.

The next day, they traveled to Houston, where for seven weeks Cowen and 60 administrators lived in a hotel and would direct the effort to preserve one of the nation’s oldest top-rated private education and research institutions.

“I wasn’t sure you could close a university for a semester and come back,” Cowen recalls, sitting in his office on a warm Louisiana afternoon two years later. In the days before Katrina hit, he was preparing to welcome Tulane’s largest and most academically successful class of freshman students, just a few months after announcing a $700 million fund-raising campaign, the largest in Louisiana history.

Tulane had closed only once before in its 173-year history. That was for three years during the Civil War.

“I knew we couldn’t close for a year and come back,” he says. “It was pretty clear after the storm that this was an event of catastrophic proportions and the university would never be the same as before.”

When Tulane reopened five months after Katrina, a plan was in place to reduce the size of the university by focusing resources on its top academic and research programs and helping to rebuild New Orleans.

More than 1,000 part-time and full-time staff and approximately 190 full-time faculty positions were eliminated, academic programs were combined or eliminated and there was a temporary  reduction in athletic teams competing in the NCAA. Now, two years later, Tulane has 10,600 students, 1,600 faculty and 3,000 staff.

Today in New Orleans, daily news reports still describe the lingering scars of Katrina and the tortoise-like movement of the Louisiana Recovery Authority and Federal Emergency Management Agency in response to the storm.

While some sections of the city, including the French Quarter, are thriving, recovery in the most storm-damaged areas, such as the Ninth Ward, remains a daily struggle.

Yet there are uplifting reports of efforts to rebuild the local economy and the city’s infrastructure. There are also stories of individual successes to rebuild against sometimes staggering odds.

Standing out among those stories is the emergence of Cowen as one of the leading figures in the New Orleans recovery, not only for his decisive leadership in restoring Tulane but also for the vital role he has played in the region.

Scott Cowen ’68 (BUS) speaks at the Bring New Orleans Back committee meeting in January 2006 as New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin listens.

AP Photo/Udi Bottoni

The characteristics of Cowen’s leadership during Katrina have been evident since his days as a student in Metuchen High School in New Jersey, where he was active in student government, played football and was voted “Did Most for MHS While in School.”

He arrived at UConn as a business and accounting major intending to play football; however, weight loss from a viral infection ended his playing days.

“I had a very positive experience at UConn,” he says. “During the 1960s, UConn was a pretty activist place. After I couldn’t play football I got interested in student politics and I got a great education.”

After his recovery, Cowen turned his attention to student activities, eventually serving in the Student-Faculty Senate, as pledge master of his fraternity and as academics chairman for the Class of ’68.

Initially headed for graduate school, he was drafted into the military just before the lottery was established during the ramp-up for the Vietnam War. Cowen decided to enlist in Infantry Officer Candidate School.

He was posted in Turkey with the Army Security Agency for the last of his three years and after completing his service, he earned both a master’s and a doctorate in business management at George Washington University.

He began to establish his credentials as a business and accounting professor at Bucknell University and then spent 23 years at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he served as dean of the Weatherhead School of Management for 14 years. He was named the 14th president of Tulane in 1998.

At breakfast while awaiting his flight to Houston two years ago, Cowen began writing his first message about the task of rebuilding Tulane on a napkin which he then forwarded to the staff gathered in Texas for posting to the university community, a practice that would continue until the campus reopened in January 2006.

“It is difficult to describe what this situation feels like for those of us involved,” he wrote in one of his earliest e-mail messages. “It is surreal and unfathomable; yet, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Our focus is on the light and not the darkness.”

Cowen says three decisions made within the first 48 hours of his arrival in Houston were critical: keeping all faculty and staff on payroll for as long as possible at what would cost $165 million, knowing that most, if not all, were uncertain about their evacuated homes and families and the future of their university; contracting with a national firm to begin repairing the campus; and talking with the leaders of national higher education organizations to make arrangements for students to have an academic home for the fall semester.

That move resulted in 6,000 students attending 600 colleges and universities around the United States, including UConn (see story on the next page ).

“Thereafter, we’d meet every single day to discuss what we needed to get done that day,” Cowen says. “What you try to do is break down overwhelming tasks into smaller steps so you could actually make progress every day. It’s a classic triage exercise.”

For the nearly 60 Tulane administrators in the Houston hotel, each day was a challenge as they quickly recognized that their tasks involved much more than working to reopen for classes.

“We were not only rebuilding as an institution but also a community to support that institution,” recalls Earl Retif, long-time registrar who is now vice president for enrollment management.  “He had us looking at grocery stores, elementary schools and more. You never knew what your task was going to be that day.”

“To retain and re-recruit faculty and staff, President Cowen understood that he, and Tulane, would have to think about not only the quality of Tulane’s ‘product’ but also the quality of life in the city of New Orleans,” says Thomas S. Langston, chair of the department of political science at Tulane, who is also a vice chair of the University Senate and a member of the President’s Faculty Advisory Council.

“The university’s role in founding a new charter school for the community that would open its doors at the same time that Tulane re-opened is a great story. It was exceptional that the president reacted to (Katrina) effectively and quickly, improvising a solution that has become a model for the rest of the community.”

Another model Cowen developed to help New Orleans is a public service requirement for undergraduate students to complete their degrees. Students take classroom courses for a semester and then are placed for a semester in a variety of locations around the city to complete their service.

For example, students in sociology courses assist the city attorney’s office to rehabilitate blighted neighborhoods. Cowen credits the university faculty for developing a “substantive” public service program that is “a rigorous academic experience.”

“Scott has been a tremendous leader in the community,” says New Orleans city councilman-at-large Arnold Fielkow, who worked with Cowen to develop a program that recruits New Orleans civic leaders to meet with national business leaders and the media to provide information about the city’s status and seek assistance for the post-Katrina recovery.

“He is actively involved with the New Orleans rebuilding effort. He is tremendously respected in all corners of the community. It is a very unique challenge that Scott and Tulane have put out to their students. It will pay dividends for our community in the decades to come.”

The thoughts of Tulane students who spent the fall 2005 semester at UConn support that view.

“President Cowen was honest with us in the details of the recovery, even though they were sometimes grim,” says Taylor Felice of Woodbridge, Conn., who graduated with a marketing degree last May.

“More importantly, he made everyone, including our parents, confident that Tulane, like the city of New Orleans, would survive. His constant participation in the city’s recovery not only helped thousands, but it encouraged others to become involved.”

“The hurricane forced everyone to make tough decisions,” says Randy Sorge, an environmental biology major from Bridgeport, Conn., who will graduate in 2008.

“President Cowen had to make a lot of sacrifices within the university to get it re-opened…Tulane would not have recovered the way it did without him at the helm. He was always strong and positive. He is a man who earned my respect.”

“Because Scott has exhibited such strong leadership, there was a push for him to run for mayor,” says Yvette Jones, Tulane’s chief operating officer and senior vice president for external affairs.

“To me that was the ultimate crossing of the relationship between the university and the city. He has consistently said he has no interest in public office. His feeling is that by rebuilding Tulane, we’re helping to rebuild the city.”

The effort to rebuild Tulane’s undergraduate enrollment to pre-Katrina levels is also paying dividends. Students were helped by continuing their studiesat universities such as UConn and the free, seven-week summer session in 2006 that Tulane offered to students enrolled during the entire 2005-06 year.

By the fall 2010 semester, Retif says, enrollment is expected to be back on track to previous levels.

“Clearly a lot of factors are involved in restoring our enrollment, but Scott is an extraordinary salesman,” Retif says, recalling a mother who earlier this year sent Cowen an e-mail expressing indecision on whether her daughter should go to New Orleans. Cowen called her that night. The student enrolled in the fall.

Cowen says the Katrina situation taught him and his staff some enduring lessons about the university’s capabilities, its relationship to the people of New Orleans and the commitment of the Tulane community.

Asked what he learned about himself from the crisis, he says, “I give a lot of credit to our team. I happen to be their voice. We kept calm, focused, hopeful and wouldn’t quit. That gives you a lot of confidence.

“After you’ve been through that, there’s not too much people can throw at you that will get you rattled,” he adds.

“I think you always ask yourself if you were really tested with a crisis if you could meet the challenge or not. Historians will say whether I did or didn’t. I did the best I could.”

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UConn helping hand kept
New Orleans students on track

When UConn responded to a request by the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities for members to help displaced college students from New Orleans universities, 21 undergraduates from Tulane were among the 41 students from colleges in The Big Easy that arrived in Connecticut in September 2005.

With the fall semester already underway, UConn quickly organized an assistance team that included academic counselors and staff from admissions, student life, residence life and the Registrar’s Office to help the students from New Orleans.

UConn admissions officer Bob Hopson, left, assists Sarah Welinsky, a Tulane University student from Woodbury, Conn., and her father, Gary Welinsky, at a registration session for students displaced by Hurricane Katrina in September 2005.

Photo by Peter Morenus

The goal was to match up students with classes comparable to those in New Orleans universities and settle everyone into housing.

“We had 6,000 students at 600 schools,” says Earl Retif, vice president for enrollment management, who as Tulane’s long-time registrar understood the logistics of creating new student files over a few days instead of what normally takes several weeks.

“We got great cooperation from schools such as UConn.  It was amazing the stories we heard from our students. It was an unbelievable tribute to the institutions that helped us. Everybody agreed to get the students as normal a life as possible, as quickly as possible. We’re incredibly grateful for what they did.”

Taylor Felice, a marketing major who spent the 2005 fall semester in Storrs and graduated from Tulane last spring, says, “The staff was incredible in working with me to catch up on the work that I missed while waiting to decide what to do.”

“There is no doubt that deciding to go to UConn kept me up to speed when I came back to Tulane,” adds Randy Sorge, now a senior environmental biology major at Tulane. “I am completely on track for graduation in May. Many of my friends have had to sacrifice their summers taking classes to make up for Katrina.”

At the time, Tulane President Scott Cowen ’68 (BUS) expressed his appreciation for the role UConn played in assisting Tulane students. “Knowing that a number of our students were taken in by my alma mater was truly touching,” he said. “I knew they were in good hands.”