Katrina on Campus

Students displaced by the most devastating hurricane on record make new lives for themselves with the help of colleges and students across the country

Andrew Garib, Campus Progress | Link | Dwight Blass, Class of 2005 at Tulane University, was wandering through Durham, North Carolina, shopping for dress clothes for his upcoming law school interviews when I reached him on his cell phone last Friday. His home university initially advised its students that they would be back the Wednesday following the landfall of the largest hurricane in American history. So all he brought with him from Louisiana was his iPod, a bathing suit and a sack of dirty laundry. Now, two weeks later and 900 miles away from New Orleans, Dwight is one of 69 students from Katrina-affected colleges and universities studying at Duke University and wondering what is going to happen next.

Tulane students are not alone. Hurricane Katrina forced young people, staff and faculty at Dillard, Xavier University, the University of New Orleans and other institutions of higher learning on the Gulf Coast from their first few days of studies. In the midst of stories of bureaucratic bungling leaving Katrina victims in the cold, colleges and universities from across the country have stepped up to fill the academic void that the winds and water of Katrina left behind.

What They Can Do for Their Country

Because New Orleans schools evacuated the bulk of their students, the vast majority avoided the most deadly and devastating impacts of Katrina. But now, far from their homes and their campuses, many students have their own far less grave but still challenging set of issues to deal with as they cope with both the aftermath of Katrina and trying to make it to graduation.

Colleges and universities from California to New York, from Texas to Canada have opened their doors to displaced students. These schools are doing what they can: urban campuses with little housing available, such as George Washington University in Washington, DC, have been able to accept a handful of undergraduate, graduate and professional school students. Larger schools in rural areas were able to accept more students, upwards of 170 at Cornell University in central New York. Dozens of far-flung universities, ranging from the University of Texas system, Howard University and Southern University to the University of Nebraska, UC-Berkeley and Hamilton College, are doing their part to restore a sense of normalcy to the academic lives of student victims of Katrina.

Back in Durham, North Carolina, Tulane’s Dwight Blass, son of Duke graduate Jeff Blass, was eligible for Duke’s Katrina program because of his father’s alumni status. Duke, like many schools, required that students be either sons or daughters of alumni, siblings of current students or residents of the local area (in Duke’s case, the Carolinas). Once arriving at Duke, however, displaced students were given the royal treatment: full tuition, books, supplies, housing, and personalized academic advising.

Native students have done their part in making their displaced New Orleans peers feel welcome. Hilaria Salinas, a fourth-year Tulane architecture student now calling Cornell University home, was surprised at how welcoming and helpful Cornellians have been. “A [fellow] Nicaraguan student [at Cornell] e-mailed us and asked if we needed help,” said Salinas. Both Hilaria and her sister Isolda escaped their stricken Louisiana campus and are continuing their studies in Ithaca.

“It’s not just touching, but impressive,” said Blass of Duke students’ outpouring of compassion and care.

With the help of generous students opening their apartments and dorm rooms to strangers, colleges and universities like the University of Pennsylvania have been able to provide even more students with housing.

Many schools accepting displaced Louisiana students have been generous with their tuition and financial aid arrangements for Katrina victims. “The main issue is to make students feel welcome. No one is turned away for financial reasons,” said Nicola Pytell, Public Information Officer at Cornell’s Press Relations office. “Penn is basically doing Tulane a big favor,” said Tulane senior Kelsey Sreebing, whose foster school, U. Penn., refused tuition from those who had already paid at Tulane and will take tuition from Katrina-affected students only to send it back to their beleaguered New Orleans academic institutions.

Universities and colleges are doing what they can to keep entire academic communities afloat. Academic departments across the nation are opening their doors to visiting faculty from Katrina-affected institutions. Howard University established HBCURelief.org, a website dedicated to organizing the relief effort of Katrina-affected historically black colleges and universities. The top administration of Dillard University is now operating out of GWU’s District of Columbia campus.

Underestimating the Crisis

Hilaria Salinas, along with her sister Isolda, left her New Orleans apartment a day before the storm with a few changes of clothes, her computer and her bathing suit. Kelsey Sreebing, a Classical Studies major, took only clothes in which to go out, heels and skirts in tow. In fact, every New Orleans student I talked to who left the Gulf Region before landfall had no idea that they would be spending the rest of their semester studying at a distant institution.

Students admit there was complacency when warnings of the storm first aired. “I’ve evacuated six different times before,” said Kelsey. “We figured we would be back in less than a week, [that it was] nothing out of the ordinary.”

Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency on August 26, two days before the storm hit, and schools ordered mandatory evacuation by Saturday the 27th. But according to some Tulane students, the university administration let them believe that things would be back to normal perhaps as soon as the following Thursday, September 1. Even after Katrina’s landfall, according to Sreebing, Tulane reported that school would resume as early as September 7, until university officials realized the extent of the damage, which required indefinite termination of school functions.

Despite the culture of complacency, some students were more concerned than others. Jonathan Slowyer, a junior Tulane transfer from Binghamton, had barely begun his first term in New Orleans when he began to worry about the impending storm. “We didn’t get a mandatory evacuation,” Slowyer said. By Saturday evening, however, television news reports made him believe that the storm was “gonna be doomsday.”

“It must have been different for freshmen and kids who had never been to New Orleans,” said Slowyer, referring to the differing attitudes towards the storm between those new to hurricane weather and seasoned veterans like Hilaria Salinas.

But according to many of the students I spoke to, this wasn’t just a lesson for complacent New Orleans residents. “[The authorities] weren’t prepared,” Salinas said. “We expect that in Nicaragua. This shouldn’t happen in the States. The president didn’t seem ready for this. New Orleans looked just like a third world country.” Sreebing cited federal funding for state emergency preparedness as an issue. “The problem stemmed from the government in Louisiana, but also the federal government. People knew this could have happened.” Blass focused his criticisms on “today’s politics of appointing people not based on their abilities,” referring to former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael “Arabian Horses” Brown, who has since stepped down under pressure.

Feeling—and Responding to—the Pressure

There certainly was some anxiety on the part of students at the receiving end of the mass student exodus out of the Gulf Coast. Andrea Dinneen, a student at Rice University in Houston, only six hours’ drive from Tulane, said that many students had some concern about the large influx of new students. Rice has been particularly generous, accepting 120 students on a campus with a mere 3,000 undergraduate students. “That’s like a whole new class in one college,” Dinneen told me a few days before the students from Louisiana arrived.

Nevertheless, Rice administrators, students and faculty have creative solutions to the seemingly daunting problems. Dinneen’s sociology class is taking academic advantage of the situation by integrating studies on the impact of the hurricane on campus and the surrounding community, including “Astrodomestics” – what Dinneen’s class calls the Katrina victims who are currently being housed in Houston’s Astrodome.

Despite the eerie circumstances, school administrators are keen on installing a sense of normalcy in the lives of affected students. Rice’s homecoming game was supposed to be played against Tulane. That game will still take place as scheduled.

Schools are also focusing on helping their own students who are natives of the Gulf Coast. Cornell junior and New Orleans native Mimi Tsai received personal care from both the university and her College of Hotel Administration. Schools like Cornell have offered counseling and financial advising to enrolled students affected by Katrina. “It’s nice to not feel like a number, to have [the administration’s] attention not just to correct your tuition,” Tsai said.

There is one issue that colleges and universities have not yet had time to begin tackling. Ed Graf, a guidance counselor for 16 years at New Orleans’ Isidore Newman private school, is concerned with how Louisiana high school seniors will be able to apply for college with the possible loss of their academic and financial records and a difficult to track diaspora of references. Louisiana high schools are also having a tough time tracking their students, who may be at new high schools where the curriculum doesn’t coincide with what students have been doing at home.

Whereas many private schools that serve higher income students have begun to track and locate their students, Graf explains that may not be the case for many other New Orleans young people. “I’m worried about public school kids, who might not have that kind of network available to them,” Graf said.

Student Spirit Triumphs

Despite everything that’s happened to him, Dwight Blass walks into his last year at college with an unexpected excitement. “I feel both sadness and excitement. This is a great opportunity to study at Duke,” one of the most respected institutions of higher learning in the country.

Pytell found the tenacity and focus of the displaced students particularly impressive: “[The situation] shows the commitment of students to stay on track.”

Tenacity is hardly enough to describe what’s behind Dwight Blass’ latest project. Before the hurricane, Blass headed CACTUS, Tulane’s largest service organization. While the organization’s 24 original projects are now on hold, a 25th, called the NOLA Hurricane Fund, headed by four of Blass’ fellow CACTUS leaders, has already raised thousands of dollars in Katrina relief aid through its website, nolahurricanefund.org. Displaced Tulane students Adam Hawf, Kevin Lander, Stephen Richer and Aaron Rubens have taken the semester off in order to coordinate the relief effort.

Online, there’s more evidence that the spirit of New Orleans college students has hardly faded. At tulane.spatang.com, Tulane students can post a public message listing, among other things, their names, graduating years, current locations, working e-mail addresses, and whether or not they plan on returning to their alma mater, in the hopes of re-connecting with the school from which they were torn. Among the hundreds of answers to that last question, users would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of ‘no’s’ amongst the hundreds and hundreds of resounding ‘yes’ responses.

From the mouths of the students themselves: “New Orleans is home,” “I would wear scuba gear all day if I had to,” “I’ll be back even if I have to walk there from Ohio,” “Ya’ll don’t give up on New Orleans.”

See our one-pager on Katrina End.