AUGUST 26, 2015
Volume: 59 Issue: 1
driftwood.uno.edu
K AT R I N A X Evoking memories on anniversary
Charles Nicholson Managing Editor On Aug. 29, 2005, devastation and despair fell upon the city of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina made landfall with its 174 mileper-hour winds and a nearly 30-foot storm surge. Ten years later, that devastation has not been forgotten, especially by those most affected by it. As the nation looks back on that unfortunate time, so must ‘the Heartbeat of the Crescent City’, the University of New Orleans. Just as any establishment that faced the full force of Katrina, the UNO lakefront campus was in ruin. However, that didn’t stop classes from resuming for long. “When the storm hit, most everybody associated with the university evacuated. By the time we realized how severe it was, wherever we were, the biggest challenge was trying to locate faculty, administrators and students,” said Kevin Graves, Interim Dean of the College of Education and Human Development, as well as the College of Liberal Arts. Graves has been a faculty member at UNO for nearly 35 years and a dean since 2004. Graves and his colleagues at the time were pressured to make sure faculty and students alike were okay. At this point, UNO was still a part of the Louisiana State University system and the UNO faculty were allowed to work from there to begin their recovery process. “Baton Rouge was pretty well protected from adverse effects of
University avoids dreaded departmental cuts
the aftermath of the storm and there is a (UL) system building on the LSU campus. And the LSU system gave UNO basically a conference room to set up shop...to try to reach out and contact all these people. And so we endearingly referred to that room as the ‘War Room,’” said Graves. In the “War Room,” the chancellor, vice chancellors and administrators worked to get a network going to connect the UNO faculty, all while working off of laptops. With enough time and effort, they came to some success. “We couldn’t get in contact with people’s cell phones, we couldn’t get cell phone coverage. But we found out that text messages would go through more likely than a regular phone call. So we started to immediately put together a new fall semester in which students would be able to take courses online,” said Graves. Many professors, wherever they evacuated to, continued to teach their classes online. Students were, however, not limited to online courses. Any student who enrolled in a university, even out of state, was able to attend tuition-free so that they could complete their fall semester. The administrators contin-
Tori Bush Driftwood Staff As the fall semester of the new school year begins, it is clear there are significant budget cuts for this school year. However, there is a sigh of relief that more severe decreases did not come to pass and the academic colleges of UNO are able to focus on providing quality education. “I’m feeling more positive,” said
ued to work out of Baton Rouge until early October when they moved to the Jefferson
campus. “I made my first trip (back) here, in about mid-September, under police protection
and national guard support to retrieve files and information that we needed. You have to understand that we left that Friday afternoon before the storm hit on Monday unsure of what was before us and I frankly fully expected we’d be back on campus (sooner). If not for the levees failing, we would’ve been,” said Graves. Even though the administrators were hard at work right after the storm passed, the fall semester didn’t start back up until Oct. 10 that year. UNO was, however, the first university in the city to resume classes, in any manner, while other schools like Tulane and Xavier didn’t start until January. Though it was a tight fit, classes did take place during that three-month timespan, with finals taking place between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Thanks to all of the perseverance and dedication between students and faculty, approximately 700 UNO students graduated in January of 2006. “I will always look to the ingenuity of the administration of that time. We were committed and dedicated to the UNO students and we did everything we could to empower
our faculty to teach online, to come back and teach in the Jefferson center so that our students could have a fall semester. And they did.” While the administration of the time must be applauded for their work in restarting the fall semester, there is still the question of just how prepared UNO was for a situation like this. “I don’t believe it was as well-defined as it should have been,” said Graves regarding how UNO prepared for Hurricane Katrina. “ But what we learned from that experience was that our evacuation system and hurricane preparedness needed to be very detailed, which it is now. We have more resident students now than we did then. So now, as a result, our first response is to get our resident students in Pontchartrain Hall to a safe place.” UNO and New Orleans as a whole have benefitted from updated disaster preparation and recovery as well as improvements in the levees and flood mitigation. But Graves believes there’s another important issue that needs tackling. “I think one of the overarching problems in terms of hurricane season is complacency. It had been 40 years since we had a significant storm with Hurricane Betsy in 1965,” said Graves. “I remember vividly that afternoon leaving the campus when a member of the Geography faculty came in with a map he printed off the internet and said to all of us in the college office ‘I think this is gonna be bad.’
Steve Johnson, Dean of the College of Sciences. “There are challenges ahead so we need to focus on enrollment and retention and providing great services.” While the official budget for UNO is not yet approved, the Office of Business Affairs reported that approximately $117,000 was lost from the budget this year due to cuts in higher education from state lawmakers. The total budget for this year is approximately $101 million,
down from approximately $102 million last fiscal year. While these cuts are still significant, it is much less than many anticipated this past spring when state lawmakers threatened to cut 20 percent of UNO’s budget, approximately $20 million. Many cuts were made across the state due to a $1.6 billion deficit in the state budget. Peter J. Fos, President of UNO said, “We appreciate the difficult
choices made on behalf of higher education by members of the legislature. Because of their diligence and creativity, the state’s colleges and universities were able to avoid the most dire budgetary predictions in the short-term.” While budgetary cuts of $117,000 are significant, few of those cuts were made directly to academic programs.
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