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September 2005
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CAMPUS NEWS |
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| AU Moves to Help Displaced Gulf Coast Students
Students from campuses forced to shut down after Hurricane Katrina are being welcomed at AU, where the university has waived tuition, administrators have found them housing, advisors have registered them for classes, and fellow students are doing their best to help them feel at home. The hurricane left thousands of students without a campus as Gulf Coast colleges and universities struggle with the aftermath of America’s worst natural disaster in a century. The calls to AU from displaced students and their parents started coming even as people were still being evacuated from the flooded region. As of Friday, September 23, 115 displaced students had enrolled, according to acting provost Ivy Broder. 87 are enrolled in an undergraduate program, 7 are graduate students, and 21 are studying at the Washington College of Law. About 90 percent of the incoming students have arrived from Tulane, but students from Loyola, Xavier, and the University of New Orleans are also on campus. As a rule, these students have already paid their tuition at their home schools and will not need to pay for their semester at AU. Tulane president Scott Cowen has publically thanked those universities who, like AU, are stepping up to help by waiving tuition and permitting late registration. “These are students who adore their home schools and we know that,” said Meg Weekes, associate dean of academic affairs, School of Public Affairs. “We just want to help them continue their education while their home schools get back on their feet.” Both Tulane and Loyola are said to have suffered only minimal damage, but both are closed indefinitely and operating from temporary administrative bases in Houston. Tulane’s temporary Web site is still calling on faculty to make every effort to contact their department chair or dean. Meanwhile the students have scattered, by necessity. Even as refugees were still being evacuated, the phones began ringing with inquiries from students determined to continue their studies. Some were seeking to enroll as provisional students. Others decided to make the best of the situation by spending a semester with the Washington Semester Program, which by late last week had accepted 19 Tulane students and two from Loyola. The majority have tuition waivers. Dean David Brown expects those numbers to increase slightly, though he said, “we’re near our saturation point, both in terms of our housing and classroom capacity.” Nearly all of the Washington Semester program’s 13 seminars are full, though students are still being placed in the journalism and American politics sections. “We’re focusing on getting students up to speed quickly, helping to place them in internships, and making them feel welcome here,” said Brown. The Kogod School of Business has worked hard to integrate students into classes that mesh with their areas of interest. “It certainly was something of a challenge to find space in the classes, but our faculty did a great job of over-enrolling students into classes,” Kogod assistant dean for undergraduate programs Lawrence Ward said. “Our dean, Dick Durand, was absolutely adamant that whatever it would take to accommodate those students, that’s what we would do. He expressed the need to reach out to these students before the phone calls started, so we were all ready when the calls did come.” Most displaced students are drawn here for a variety of reasons. “There’s no pattern,” says CAS academic advisor Anne Kaiser. One temporary CAS student lives two blocks from campus, but another came all the way from the Virgin Islands. Many have friends on campus or relatives in town. A big plus has been AU’s ability to house the unexpected students either in residence halls or Park Bethesda. They’ll find no shortage of concerned faculty members and staff, many of whom have ties to the Gulf Coast themselves. Beth Cralley of the psychology faculty did her doctorate at Tulane, and although her course on Understanding Human Behavior already had a large enrollment, she knew it was being held in a large room that could accommodate more students. “I knew last week I had extra chairs. So... I said, ‘Go on, fill ’em up.’” At least two displaced students have joined her class. Some classes incorporated the hurricane into the syllabus, with SOC students analyzing the media’s coverage of Katrina and, in Wendell Cochran’s Advanced Reporting class, spending the semester on Washington’s response to Katrina. Staff members, too, have been affected by the tragedy. Rachel Friedmann, gallery manager at the Katzen Arts Center, recently received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Tulane and has family in New Orleans. Two of her aunts stayed and weathered the aftermath together, living on peanut butter sandwiches while waiting for a boat that could let their pets come along. Friedmann invites any displaced students or alumni to drop by the Katzen gallery if they’d like to talk. A memorandum from acting president Neil Kerwin was issued on Sept. 2, in the midst of evacuation efforts. "True to our university’s tenet of 'ideas into action, action into service,' a number of efforts to help have been launched by students, faculty, and staff," he said, noting events that included a Service of Reflection at Kay Spiritual Life Center and a variety of student government initiatives. "AU has moved magnificently and quickly to help serve these displaced students," says Nanette Levinson, associate dean, SIS. “Everyone at this university has really stepped up to the plate.” -by Sally Acharya, with additional reporting by Adrienne Frank and Mike Unger, originally published in American Weekly | |||
