Dillard U.'s President Scrambles to Raise Money and Spirits for a Beloved Historically Black College

By ERIC HOOVER

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Ask any graduate of Dillard University about the Avenue of the Oaks, the two rows of ancient trees that line the heart of the campus. They will reminisce about sitting against the broad trunks and about marching under the interlocking limbs on commencement day. In flights of fancy, some will say they have felt the arms of those giant oaks reach down and embrace them.

This week Dillard's displaced administrators and students wondered when, or if, they would ever see those trees again. Hurricane Katrina had left the historically black college, located in New Orleans, under as much as eight feet of water. There were reports that dead bodies had been sighted in some of the buildings. Then, late on Thursday, fires reportedly destroyed several buildings on the campus.

Although Dillard officials had not yet surveyed the damage, restoring the campus may cost the university tens of millions of dollars and untold hours. Officials hope to reopen the campus in January and allow returning students to take two semesters' worth of courses before August. But for now the institution's future is as uncertain as that of its devastated city.

Still, Marvalene Hughes, the university's new president, insists that Dillard is not doomed. The campus had inspired her to leave her previous job, as president of California State University's Stanislaus campus, and the Alabama native is prepared to fight for the survival of the small private college she has long adored.

Ms. Hughes, who started at Dillard in July, has barely stood still since the hurricane first appeared on radar screens. The day before the storm hit, she escorted all of the university's 2,100 students onto buses, gave them pep talks, and sent them away. Then she drove to her sister's house, in Eutaw, Ala., which became her temporary headquarters. Ms. Hughes had just lain down to sleep that first night when the telephone rang: One of the buses carrying Dillard students to Centenary College, in Shreveport, La., had caught fire. She drove nearly 400 miles to visit with her students, all of whom had escaped safely.

The president spent the next week in a bedroom at her sister's, picking up the telephone at 6:30 in the morning and not putting the receiver down until midnight. Ms. Hughes tracked down staff members and students, consulted with insurance agents and federal emergency-management officials, and contacted education associations. While Tulane University's president worked out of a Houston hotel with a small staff, Ms. Hughes did the jobs of a half-dozen people. Her husband and sister scribbled notes to her and passed them under the closed door. She escaped the fray, briefly, by cooking comfort food, like fish stew, while her sister took telephone messages.

After the levees broke in New Orleans, Ms. Hughes refused to accept that Dillard's 55-acre campus was under water. Finally she heard from two of the university's engineers that the campus was flooded. Until then, she had held on to the hope that Dillard might reopen this fall.

"I was determined I was going to turn this around immediately," she says. "Then the sense of reality hit. Imagining our university in water was a trauma all of us had."

On the telephone, some administrators and parents cried. Ms. Hughes had to force herself not to do the same.

Deep Need

One week after the hurricane, Ms. Hughes received an unexpected invitation to attend a celebrity-studded benefit in Miami. After Jamie Foxx, the actor, introduced her to the crowd, she says, several potential benefactors (whom she declines to name) offered to help Dillard financially. The university, which has a $50-million endowment, will need to dig into some deep pockets to restore its campus.

"The scale of effort that it's going to face is tremendous," says Michael L. Lomax, president and chief executive officer of the United Negro College Fund and a former president of Dillard. Mr. Lomax says that the university's substantial insurance and federal aid will help Dillard, but that it may have to operate temporarily in a different location. His organization has begun raising at least $5-million to help students from Dillard and other affected colleges to study on different campuses this fall.

The National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, a Maryland-based organization that represents historically black colleges, has helped place more than 9,000 evacuees from three institutions -- Dillard, Southern University at New Orleans, and Xavier University of Louisiana -- at other colleges.

But how many of those students will return to Dillard? Eleanor Drabo of Washington, D.C., says her son, Leon, a freshman at Dillard, doubts that the university will reopen anytime soon. But she says her son, now taking classes at Howard University, is willing to wait for the university to recover.

"He hasn't taken off his Dillard shirt since he came back here," says Ms. Drabo. "He said whatever he has to do to be a Dillard graduate, that's what he'll do."

Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown University and a graduate of Dillard, understands the passion that many students feel for the campus. She can still recite the university's alma mater, "Fair Dillard," which begins, "Gleaming white and spacious green, we love thy every blade and tree."

Ms. Simmons says the pride that Dillard students take in the striking appearance of their campus -- with its white buildings and sprawling lawns -- transcends mere aesthetics. "Dillard," she says, "has for so long been the route many of us have taken to middle class -- that for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the beauty of the site is a way of orienting them toward making a life for themselves that would include the beautiful."

Many education officials consider Dillard, whose alumni include Ellis Marsalis -- the patriarch of the legendary jazz family -- a cultural and intellectual treasure. The institution comes in 14th in U.S. News & World Report's ranking of Southern comprehensive colleges. It is a tight-knit campus, where administrators help students carry boxes up to their dormitories on move-in day. Over the last decade its enrollment has climbed from 1,600 to a high of 2,300 last year, with an increasing number of students coming from outside the Gulf Coast region.

To recover, however, the college is likely to depend greatly on the help of larger, wealthier institutions, says Ms. Simmons. Officials at Brown and many other colleges have offered to send staff members to Louisiana to help Dillard restore its campus and plot its survival.

The university's motto is ex fide, fortis -- "from faith, courage." This week, as Ms. Hughes prepared to establish a temporary home base in Washington, D.C., she expressed her faith in Dillard's future by repeating a slogan of her own. "Dillard is coming back," she told colleagues, reporters, and herself, over and over. "And it will be better."