An Interview with Felipe Smith

This interview was conducted on December 1, 2007, in New Orleans, Louisiana, in Suite Jazz on the corner of Frenchmen and Decatur.

ROWELL: You have the privilege of serving as a professor at Tulane University, the premier institution of higher education in New Orleans. In what ways did Hurricane Katrina and the flooding affect higher education in New Orleans?

SMITH: Well, the consequences in some ways depended on where the institutions were located and from which populations they draw their student bodies. The reason this is important is that the locations of the institutions within the city reflect something of the social structure. You have in the Uptown area on the St. Charles corridor, near the river, Tulane and Loyola University, side-by-side, but further away from the river and closer to the lake, you have Xavier—also Uptown but in close proximity to the canal system connected to and much closer to the lake, and which therefore had much more substantial structural damage than did Loyola and Tulane. The location of Tulane and Loyola near the river meant that they were on higher ground than that of the rest of the city, because over a long period of time the river has built up a natural levee.

The areas that the other universities are located in, especially the public universities like The University of New Orleans, Delgado, and Southern University at New Orleans, is on land that was previously reclaimed from marshy uninhabitable ground nearer the lake as well, and therefore closer to the area that flooded more substantially. Since the flooding was mostly caused by levee breaches in the canals that feed into and out of the lake, the well-established private institutions closer to the river and the more historic part of the city had much less structural damage. And because Tulane's student population tends to be not as local as the other institutions, the core facilities of the University, the surrounding infrastructure, and the University's specific challenges in reopening meant a different manner of addressing post-Katrina issues from schools that drew from a more local working-class population and suffered proportionally more infrastructure damage. The public institutions have had a much more difficult path to restore sustainability, which involved many more stakeholders in the conversation because they have to go through the state legislature and other bureaucratic hurdles that private institutions did not have to do.

I'm more familiar with the Tulane situation, but I think with all of the institutions the immediate response was a downsizing of faculty and of support employees, so that in the midst of this larger catastrophe, we had the loss of jobs in all of these institutions which contributed to the larger displacement and unevenness of return of people into the city. At Tulane the number has been conservatively estimated in the hundreds in terms of staff positions and also in the hundreds in terms of faculty positions especially in the medical school and engineering programs. Tulane to my knowledge has been able to within two years return almost to its former levels of student recruitment and in part that has been done because its main campus was more or less intact, and it was able to present itself as fully operational relatively soon after the flooding. Therefore Tulane was able to market the university in terms of students coming here to be a part of the rebuilding effort. In other words, they seized upon the national attention to the city in order to appeal to students who might have a sense of public-spiritedness about the opportunity to contribute to the rebuilding process.

Other institutions I don't think have as yet had as great a success in terms of getting back their student numbers, but all have returned to functioning. There were a lot of post-Katrina concerns about safety, concerns about the viability of the parts of the city where the institutions were located, whether or not there would be enough housing, and whether previous occupants would be returning. So I think Tulane has weathered the storm, because we have had...