Putting a University Back Together

Tulane's president, working 350 miles from the campus, says reopening by spring is essential

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Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live discussion with Scott S. Cowen, president of Tulane University, about his institution's efforts to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

Special report: The Gulf Coast's colleges begin to grasp the damage done

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By JEFFREY SELINGO

Houston

Dressed in a yellow Tulane University golf shirt, navy pants, and stocking feet, Scott S. Cowen, the university's president, makes his way around a crowded suite at the Four Seasons Hotel here, stepping among the many members of his staff spread around the floor. Over the din of ringing cellphones, he grabs a pear from a fruit bowl and momentarily pauses to observe the scene: impromptu meetings in almost every corner, a group trading recently established Yahoo e-mail addresses, and a pair of administrators swapping stories about where to get the best deals on clothes in their new hometown.

Mr. Cowen, a tall, burly man with a crop of white hair and a booming voice, finds an open spot on the floor, sits himself down, and glances through a pink spiral notebook, bought off the shelf along with bagfuls of paper clips, file folders, and Post-It notes at a local OfficeMax. The notebook is organized by day, listing his rapidly expanding list of tasks. He flips the page backward with a pen to see what he has accomplished, then removes his glasses and rubs his eyes.

"This is a nightmare," he says softly.

For a man who seems to thrive in crisis mode, it is a rare departure from his self-assured demeanor of the past few days.

A business-school dean who assumed Tulane's presidency eight years ago, Mr. Cowen has now taken on the role of general here in the university's war room, as the New Orleans institution attempts to recover from the devastating blow Hurricane Katrina dealt to its campus 350 miles away. Within days of the storm, he made the first of what are sure to be many gut-wrenching decisions, canceling the fall semester for the university's 12,000 students.

Yet last week, even as pictures of a flooded New Orleans repeatedly streamed across CNN on the hotel television set in front of him, Mr. Cowen vowed to reopen the campus sometime in the spring. He maintained that he has little choice if Tulane is to survive as a national research university. Enrollment is the lifeblood of any tuition-dependent institution, and Tulane's students, now scattered on campuses across the country, will eventually move on with their college careers.

"I don't see how any university can be essentially out of business for one year and hope to recover from it in any shape or form of what they looked like before," says Mr. Cowen. "We will be back in the spring. We've got to be ready. If not, we might as well close all the doors and walk away. I mean, how long can New Orleans be closed?"

For now, though, the task at hand for the 50 administrators and staff members who have relocated here with their families is enormous, complex, and unprecedented in American higher education: how to run a $700-million operation from a remote site without financial systems, student and employee records, office space, or a reliable communications network.

Nothing, not even the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, could prepare a university for a situation quite like this.

"On 9/11, New York was still functioning," says Mr. Cowen, a line he will repeat in an interview with a Houston radio station later in the day. "We've never had an incident that I know of in the history of the United States when an entire city was closed down and people were uncertain when it would reopen."

"There is no script for this. There is no road map for this. We're writing it as we go along."

From Boat to Plane

Since he arrived here in Houston the weekend following the storm -- after a harrowing escape from the campus that featured a boat, a hot-wired golf cart, a dump truck, a helicopter, and finally a private plane -- Mr. Cowen has been working nearly nonstop, shuttling from meeting to meeting.

All last week, he began his day here just after dawn in a ninth-floor suite ("Don't worry," he reminds everyone, "we're not paying Four Season rates."), leading conference calls with top lieutenants in remote locations to assign them jobs for the day, or conducting interviews with the likes of CBS and NPR "to show the world Tulane is alive and well."

On this morning, eight days after the levees broke in New Orleans, flooding the city but leaving most of Tulane's Uptown campus dry, he kicks off with a daily briefing with his inner circle in a downstairs conference room. There, with a bagel in hand and framed by three flip charts outlining the agenda, he starts off, as usual, with what he calls the previous day's "wins." Payroll for full-time employees is up and running; health-care benefits will continue and will allow faculty and staff members to use doctors wherever they are now; and a university admissions event the night before in Houston drew more than 200 prospective students and parents.

There is no time for celebration, however, and Mr. Cowen, determined and focused, plows right into today's goals. The most important: sending rescue teams to retrieve mail believed to be in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Dallas, and then delivering it to Houston. Tulane desperately wants to get its hands on tuition checks and any other payments owed the university. While the university has business-interruption insurance that covers payroll and other essential expenses for a few months (as well as property insurance that pays for damages to its campuses), the university must hoard as much cash as possible to carry it through the shuttered fall semester and beyond, preparing for the possibility of a smaller student body in the spring.

Even so, Mr. Cowen says, "we have enough resources to go on for a long time."

In Philadelphia, a team of university officials is trying to piece back together the institution's vast financial systems. A critical set of computer backup tapes was recovered at a storage facility across from the Louisiana Superdome, but other records remain on a campus server, requiring yet another rescue mission. For now, the group here is flying blind. They have no idea, for instance, who has and has not paid tuition for the fall semester.

With tuition making up a third of its annual budget, Tulane needs those dollars. It plans to keep tuition payments made for the fall, as well as room, board, and fees. It will credit room-and-board payments to the students when they return in the spring (or refund the money if they don't). Under an agreement forged by the American Council on Education and other associations, Tulane and other Gulf Coast students affected by Katrina will take classes at other institutions free, but receive academic credit from their home colleges later on. If Tulane students take the semester off, they will get a credit for tuition in the spring; if they end up at a college that charges them, they won't pay twice.

While grateful for all the offers of help coming from other institutions, Mr. Cowen is also worried about those colleges' persuading the students to stay permanently. "I would strongly encourage them not to allow them to transfer to their institution until such point, if it ever came, where it was deemed impossible for them to come back to Tulane," Mr. Cowen says. "They have to give us a chance to get back on our feet."

The concern over enrollment is real. Following a conference call with the vice president for enrollment management, Richard Whiteside, who is stationed with his staff in Richmond, Va., near the university's supplier of recruitment materials -- yet something else abandoned on campus -- Mr. Cowen agonizes in particular over this year's freshmen. After all, they were on the campus for just a few hours when they were evacuated. They are "the most vulnerable" to leaving for good, he says, "because they haven't had the opportunity to experience New Orleans and they haven't had the opportunity to bond to the institution."

A Smaller University?

Whether Tulane leaders need to begin planning for a smaller university is still unclear. "No question, we'll be different in one way or another," says Philip Greer, vice chairman of Tulane's Board of Trustees, who flew here for a day last week to assess the situation. "We're going to suffer. A lot depends on New Orleans."

Exactly how the university will change may become more apparent over the next two months, Mr. Greer predicts. As chairman of the board's investment committee, he plans to talk with other trustees about quickly reallocating parts of the university's $810-million endowment to make it less risky and more liquid.

Fund raising will require a new approach as well. Just six months ago, Tulane announced the public phase of a $700-million campaign, to end in 2008, that has already raised 70 percent of the money in gifts and pledges. Last week, as part of his twice-daily message on the university's scaled-down Web site, Mr. Cowen announced the creation of a new campaign, dubbed the Tulane University Hurricane Rebuilding Fund. "Money donated to this fund will be used to support all activities required to rebuild the university," the president wrote. "These funds are absolutely necessary if the university is to rebound from this tragedy."

Financial help may also come from other places. With 6,000 employees, Tulane is one of the state's largest employers, so "if we get back, New Orleans gets back," contends Mr. Cowen. That's the message he delivered last week in a phone conversation with John Breaux, a former U.S. senator from Louisiana, urging him to help return sewer service to New Orleans. "If we had sewer service, I could bring in water and power and we could be running," Mr. Cowen says.

As Mr. Greer, the trustee, left to return to his Connecticut home last week, he was comforted by the thought that Mr. Cowen has the experience to deal with Tulane's ordeal. "At the heart, this is a business problem and Scott is a business person," says Mr. Greer. "We're going to come back from this stronger than ever."

Walking the Dog

Blind optimism or not, Mr. Greer's sentiment was seemingly shared by every top Tulane employee here. Most of them had abandoned their homes a week earlier without packing a suitcase. As they worked overtime trying to put the university back together, they were also attempting to do the same with their own uprooted lives.

A few left the war room to enroll their kids in local schools. Tori Johnson, the university's general counsel, took a quick break one afternoon to walk her dog. And Paul Barron, a law-school professor who was pressed into administrative duties here, was trying to figure out how to get DirecTV service at the corporate apartments he and the other officials would be renting for the fall so he could watch his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers.

This week the skeleton crew of administrators will move to temporary offices in Houston. It took Mr. Barron and Yvette M. Jones, the university's senior vice president for external affairs, only a few hours to allocate the space, a process that Ms. Jones wryly noted would take countless meetings on campus. "It's amazing how those battles don't mean much anymore," she says.

Plenty of tasks remain, as do countless questions. Tulane's disaster-recovery plan never prepared the university's senior officials for this scenario. So they improvise. The institution is working with the Association of American Universities to open up space on the group's member campuses for Tulane faculty members and researchers. A little more than 10 percent of the university's employees still get paper paychecks, so new addresses must be acquired. And payroll managers are looking for ways to allow workers to easily change their tax withholdings on the Web in order to put more money in their pockets right away.

Even in the midst of all that is unknown, planning for the future continues. Tulane admissions officers still travel the country, holding gatherings for high-school students, next fall's prospective freshman class. The session held in Houston last week that Mr. Cowen counted among Tulane's "wins" was the first since Katrina hit.

The pitch made to students and parents at a Marriott hotel here, five miles from where Tulane's leaders were gathering, was obviously revised at many points along the way by the hurricane. The admissions officer, Ian Watt, read e-mail messages from displaced Tulane undergraduates praising the university and reminded the group that mailing addresses and phone numbers for the admissions office will change, although he was unable to provide that information just yet.

"I want to focus on the future," Mr. Watt told the group, moving to his usual set of talking points -- the opening of an expanded student center, the university's successful baseball team, and a planned expansion of the faculty ranks. "The New Orleans you will encounter a year from now will be strong. Tulane is going to thrive."

During a question-and-answer period, nearly every inquiry from the audience centered not on Katrina's impact but on the nuts and bolts of admissions: SAT scores, declaring a major, references, and registering for classes. In this surreal setting, only two questions acknowledged Katrina. One visitor asked what address to use for reference letters. Another guessed correctly that open houses for prospective students on campus would be canceled this fall.

Afterward many students said their plans to apply to Tulane would not change because of the hurricane. "It seems like they have everything under control," said Mindy Schultz, a high-school senior who reported receiving at least two e-mail messages from the Tulane admissions office in the last week. Her mother, Elyse, was equally optimistic. "As long as New Orleans is ready for them, she can go," she said.

Another mother, Laurie Dreyfuss, was a little more cautious about the plans of her daughter, Amanda. "I just keep thinking, What if this happened next year, when she was there?" Still, she said, Amanda's decision about where to enroll next fall would probably hinge on what it always did: aid. And aid, in a broader sense, is exactly what controls the future for Tulane as well.