After Katrina, Colleges Turned to Internet Technology to Stay in Touch With the World

By ANDREA L. FOSTER and JEFFREY R. YOUNG

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The Internet was designed for disaster, and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the global computer network largely performed as planned, serving as a critical communication tool for colleges hit by the storm.

Though campus networks at many colleges in New Orleans and other areas of the Gulf Coast remained offline on Thursday because of storm damage, officials were able to activate off-campus Web sites that they had set up for emergency purposes and use those to keep students, faculty members, and others informed. Thanks to the distributed nature of the Internet -- which was originally engineered to let leaders communicate in the event of a nuclear attack or other catastrophe -- university officials easily routed visitors to the new emergency sites.

Tulane's home page, usually a glossy portal for Tulane University, became a bare-bones announcement page that looked like a blog. The same was true for the Web sites of Nunez Community College, in Chalmette, La., the University of New Orleans, Xavier University of Louisiana, and many more.

The simplified Web sites sought to answer the questions that were being asked in the storm's wake: Is everyone safe? Will faculty and staff members get paychecks? Will students have classes this term?

"We think communications are very critical at this juncture," said Deborah L. Grant, Tulane's vice president for university communications, speaking by telephone from the university's temporary base of operations in Houston. She and other officials had left Tulane's campus a few days earlier by motorboat, she said, "puttering down what used to be a street." Without the Internet "there would be such a void in communication," she added.

For several days, of course, those at colleges hardest hit by the hurricane discovered what life was like without any technology, or basic necessities for that matter. Many in New Orleans and other areas were frustrated by a vast outage of cellphones, BlackBerrys, and other communication devices, which left them cut off from the outside world. So even though the Internet held the answers to survivors' questions, few could see those answers until they reached safety beyond the storm's reach.

And not all colleges were able to get an emergency Web site up and running, even more than a week after the storm struck.

Other colleges, higher-education associations, and technology companies rushed to help the affected institutions get their messages out, re-establish communication systems, or set up online classrooms to let teaching continue.

The Internet also quickly became a meeting place for students and professors to trade pictures and stories of harrowing evacuations, to seek out offers of assistance, or to find out how to become volunteers themselves.

"I've never been prouder to be part of Generation Y, or whatever they call us," wrote Josh Britton, a senior at Louisiana State University, on his blog. He said that students are "not ready to go back to school -- not the ones I've talked to, at least -- and not just because they don't like homework. It's because they feel like there are bigger things to be done. There is comfort to be given, labor to be done, meals to be served."

No Loss of Critical Data

Several colleges reached by The Chronicle this week said they believed their computer systems had survived the storm with no loss of critical data.

Many officials said they had shut down their Web sites and e-mail systems before the storm hit, as a precaution to help prevent the loss of data that can be caused by sudden power failures.

That was the case at Millsaps College, in Jackson, Miss., which shut down its network for one day. "We have not lost any data," said Blake A. Copeland, coordinator of technical services at Millsaps. "Everything came up fine."

Tulane officials also shut down their e-mail and Web servers before the storm. With the administration operating out of Houston, no one has yet tried to restore the systems, but the computers and their data are believed to be intact.

The university set up a temporary e-mail address from Houston for anyone to send officials questions. More than 3,000 messages poured in during the first days it was set up, said Ms. Grant. She said a team of staff members is sorting the messages, identifying key concerns, and posting answers to those concerns on the emergency Web site.

Tulane also plans to offer a weekly online chat with the university's president, Scott S. Cowen, or other top officials, every Friday.

The Louisiana Community & Technical College System, a sprawling system made up of 49 campuses, is keeping students, professors, and other staff members informed about storm-related news through a Web page linked prominently from its home page.

Walter G. Bumphus, president of the system, speaking from his temporary office in Baton Rouge, said about 20,000 students at six of the system's campuses -- Delgado Community College, Nunez Community College, and four technical campuses -- had been affected by the storm. Some campuses were totally submerged, others were partly under water, and still others suffered significant water damage, he said. The Web servers and phone systems on those campuses were still knocked out as of Wednesday, but officials hoped to have the Web sites and a telephone hot line functioning by next week.

A hot line set up before the storm by Spring Hill College, in Mobile, Ala., helped that institution communicate with its students and staff. This week the phone line's recorded message said that 270 Spring Hill students and their families had been affected by the storm, and that the college was providing them with clothing and other assistance.

The campus suffered a power failure but was able to keep its Internet systems running with its backup generators. "We had no disruption other than the brief time between when the power went out" and when the generator got up and running, said Gregory Walker, communications director for Spring Hill, a Roman Catholic institution that serves about 1,200 undergraduates.

Thanks to its backup systems, Grantham University, a for-profit online university that serves about 8,000 students, managed to continue operating even as its offices took major storm damage.

Four out of the five buildings in its office complex, in Slidell, La., 30 miles northeast of New Orleans, were destroyed. But Grantham is still operating because it had backed up all its servers -- for human resources, finance, customer-relations management, and other departments -- at a facility in Reston, Va.

"It was kind of a surreal thing," said Tom Macon, the university's chairman and chief executive. "As staff members evacuated to places near and far, the university was fully operable. We were having exams, enrolling students, re-enrolling. And this was all happening as Katrina was ripping down buildings."

Officials acted quickly after the storm, moving the institution's headquarters from Slidell to Kansas City, Mo., where it now operates out of a high-rise office building. Grantham was already planning to move its administrative and academic offices to Kansas City sometime next year, said Mr. Macon. The storm accelerated the process.

Lending a Hand

Some colleges that were spared the wrath of the storm moved quickly to help its victims.

Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, which was not significantly affected by the hurricane, became a makeshift camp for federal and state emergency-response teams. The university's information-technology staff members scrambled to set up phones, network connections, wireless access, and computers on the campus to assist officials working on relief efforts, said Brian D. Voss, chief information officer at the university. Initially most of the officials were from state agencies, but then federal officials began to arrive.

Mr. Voss said he had suspended day-to-day technology maintenance for the university soon after the storm and told his staff members that, aside from keeping the university's administrative system running, they should focus their efforts on helping those responding to the emergency with their information-technology needs.

"I've gone from being the CIO of a higher-education system to the person in charge of providing IT support for hurricane response, relief, and analysis," Mr. Voss said.

The university had a stockpile of about 60 phones that use voice-over-Internet protocol, and staff members set them up on the campus. Meanwhile, the university placed an order for an additional 100 such phones. Aviva, the vendor that supplies the university with the phones, donated another 100 to the university. Other vendors have come to the university's assistance, too, said Mr. Voss. IBM donated 100 laptop computers, each worth about $2,500, to the university's relief efforts.

Information-technology staff members also had to help process the admission and registration of 1,000 students who had enrolled at Louisiana State because they were unable to attend their own hurricane-ravaged colleges.

Many higher-education associations set up Web sites to post announcements from affected colleges and to help with relief efforts.

Educause, the higher-education-technology consortium, created a Web site where colleges affected by Hurricane Katrina could get in touch with other institutions that might be able to lend a hand. As of Thursday, dozens of colleges and organizations had posted messages on the site, offering to host colleges' Web sites, send staff members to rebuild computer networks, and accept displaced students.

The Chronicle also set up a Web page posting storm-related announcements by colleges and academic groups.

Blackboard Inc. was among the many technology companies that offered free services to colleges in the storm zone. It announced that it would provide Web hosting for colleges that use its software so that colleges affected by the storm could still teach courses online even while their campuses were closed. The University of New Orleans was among the five institutions that took the company up on its offer this week.

"The number of online courses offered this semester will be significantly greater than in past semesters," Scott L. Whittenburg, associate vice chancellor for assessment and institutional effectiveness at the university, said in an e-mail interview. "We understand that most of our faculty and students have evacuated to sites around the nation (and world), but the vast majority have Internet access and are interested in maintaining the academic programs at UNO."

Blog Postings

On a smaller scale, countless individual students and professors who had fled New Orleans or other storm-ravaged areas set up blogs to provide information to their peers.

Tony P. Vanky, a fourth-year architecture student at Tulane, created a blog after evacuating to his parents' house, in Ann Arbor, Mich., from his New Orleans home.

"I was worrying about my house because I live off campus," he said, explaining why he had started the Web site. "I just used it to try to get a forum for people to find information not just on whether there's going to be class this semester or not, but whether they have homes to go back to or whether their friends are safe." His Web site received more than 13,000 page views in its first two days, he said.

Kim Koster, director of communications for Tulane's dean of faculty, created an unofficial Web site where professors could check in to report they were safe and to see if their colleagues were safe. She posted updates from her boyfriend's parents' house, in Longview, Tex., or from a nearby Starbucks. In two days she had posted a list of more than 200 professors who were safe. "I think I've had three and a half hours of sleep, but it's also really gratifying," she said. "It's helping me. On a very little selfish level, it's distracting me."

A few days later, Tulane's emergency Web site began asking professors to check in, and it created a database to keep track of the responses. The university had not posted the list by Thursday, however.

Ms. Grant, of Tulane, also noted that working long days was therapeutic, or at least left no time to think about how much her own life, and those of her colleagues, has been shattered by the storm.

"Did our houses survive the hurricane, the water, any looting?" she asked. "Everybody in our group here is basically in the same boat."

"Being here with our colleagues and working these 15-hour days, you just push," she said. "The work has been a lifesaver."