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Authentic NEW ORLEANS Culture
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SECOND-LINE PARADE
President Mike Fitts follows Dr. Michael White’s Original Liberty Jazz Band after the President’s Convocation for new students in McAlister Auditorium on Aug. 24. The parade experience is one among many special New Orleans traditions that President Fitts and Tulane students embrace. (See “My New Orleans Moment,” on page 48.)
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Contents 22
SEPTEMBER 2018 / VOL. 90 / NO. 1
DEPARTMENTS
3 Letters
4 In Brief
UP FIRST
8 EMPIRE Exhibit 9 Screens vs. Books 10 Athletics 11 Leadership
Mike Fitts makes longterm commitment.
12 Opinion
Satyajit Dattagupta, vice president for undergraduate admission, advocates for diversity as it enriches the experience of all students.
M A I N F E AT U R E
DEEP DIVE IN THE JAZZ ARCHIVE
New Orleans jazz is a living, breathing, evolving force, but its origins in the early 20th century require special preservation. That is the job of the Hogan Jazz Archive.
13 New Orleans
A sojourn in Cuba by a native New Orleanian.
14 Research
Thibodaux, Louisiana, is probable site of a 19thcentury massacre.
WAVEMAKERS
36 Audacious Giving TULANIANS
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The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South commemorates the city’s Tricentennial.
Femaissance co-founders Madeline Rose and Halle Kaplan-Allen follow in the footsteps of Lynda Benglis, one of the bestknown sculptors of her generation.
(DE) COLONIZING THE COAST
39 Class Notes 40 Ampersand 43 Impression 44 Impression 45 Farewell 46 Tribute VIEWPOINT
48 President’s Letter
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FEMINIST ART IN NEW ORLEANS
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GATHERING MOSS
New Yorker, New York Times contributor and creative writing professor Thomas Beller reflects on arriving to teach at Tulane 10 years ago and making New Orleans his home.
QUOTED
“There is a season for everything. A time to be born and a time to die. And a time to live in New Orleans.” THOMAS BELLER
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ABOUT THE COVER Artwork by Peter Horvath, with images courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University Archives, Tulane University Communications and Marketing, and Fallen Fruit.
EDITOR
Mary Ann Travis CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Melinda Whatley Viles EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Faith Dawson
CONTRIBUTORS
Marianna Barry Barri Bronston Mary Cross Alicia Duplessis Jasmin Angus Lind Mike Strecker
Yeah, You Write From the Editor
Tulanian is here! We’re back to our original name. The Tulanian was established in 1928 as the university’s flagship publication. Since 2011, the magazine was named Tulane. Now what’s old is new again. We’ve updated our design to be bold, contemporary and timeless. For the launch of the new Tulanian, we chose authentic New Orleans culture as our theme to explore the rich, amazing and diverse culture of the city and state of which the university is so much a part. We also want to welcome Libby Eckhardt as the new vice president for communications and marketing. She is the former chief communications officer for Ohio State University’s College of Arts and Sciences. Libby has already pointed us in an exciting new direction with the magazine. Stay tuned for what happens next!
SENIOR UNIVERSITY PHOTOGRAPHER
Paula Burch-Celentano SENIOR PRODUCTION COORDINATOR
To the Editor
GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
Bruff Commons
Sharon Freeman
Marian Herbert Bruno Kim Rainey PRESIDENT OF TULANE UNIVERSITY
Michael A. Fitts
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR STRATEGIC INITIATIVES AND INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
Richard Matasar
VICE PRESIDENT FOR UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING
Libby Eckhardt
Tulanian (ISSN 21619255) is published quarterly by the Tulane University Office of Communications and Marketing, 31 McAlister Drive, Drawer 1, New Orleans, La. 70118-5624. Business and Editorial Offices: 200 Broadway, ste. 219, New Orleans, La. 70118-3543. Send editorial and subscription correspondence to Tulane University Office of Communications and Marketing, 31 McAlister Drive, Drawer 1, New Orleans, La. 70118-5624 or email tulanemag@tulane.edu. Periodicals postage is paid at New Orleans, La. 70113-9651 and additional mailing offices. Opinions expressed in Tulanian are not necessarily those of Tulane representatives and do not necessarily reflect university policies. Material may be reprinted only with permission. Tulane University is an affirmative action/equal opportunity institution.
POSTMASTER
Send address changes to: Tulanian magazine, Tulane Office of University Communications and Marketing, 31 McAlister Drive, Drawer 1, New Orleans, LA 70118-5624.
ulanian magazine is online at T communications.tulane.edu/magazine.
Thank you for the update [“Yeah, You Write,” Tulane, June 2018] on Bruff Commons. I believe I learned as much drinking coffee sitting under the old oak tree, talking to students and faculty, as in the classroom, though I learned a great deal in the classes, too. I attended Tulane from November 1943 until 1948 as an undergraduate and graduate student and drank coffee under the oak tree in front of the Bruff Commons and had my meals in the building known as the Bruff Commons. It was there I witnessed the great lunch “Mutiny” staged by the U. S. Navy personnel about which I wrote to Angus Lind. I am now writing to thank you for straightening out the name and time when I knew the Bruff Commons intimately. Again, I say, Thank you for the great magazine I have known and read since 1946. Tom Lenfestey, A&S ’46 Tampa, Florida
Fake News I look forward to your inspired magazine, and read and re-read each issue with great interest. I am always so thrilled to see a mention of someone I may know from my years at Tulane, 1989–1997. I received my MS/PhD in psychology, where I spent much of my time at Percival Stern Hall
and Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. Angus Lind mentions in his article, “Fake News” [Tulane, June 2018], Professor Fred Koenig, and Dr. Koenig’s search for Truth by debunking and disabusing cultural myths and urban legends. There was even a rumor that Dr. Koenig had once written for the National Enquirer. Even 20 years after graduation, I can still hear his distinctive voice, and I remain fascinated by social psychology. Thank you, Fred Koenig. Roll Wave Roll. Paul Frankel, G ’97 Memphis, Tennessee
Quilting Concerns I read with interest the article in the latest Tulane [ June 2018] magazine entitled “Quilting Bee” by Alina Hernandez. As an avid quilt designer, teacher and textile artist, the concerns regarding copyright are constant. Deborah Schupp, NC ’70 Brandy Station, Virginia
Genuine Heroes Your graduates [Drs. Charity Dean, Brett Wilson and Jenni Nix, “Disaster-tested Doctors,” Tulane, June 2018] were heroes during the Jan. 9, 2018, debris flow. I don’t use “hero” casually. Scott N. Wilson Santa Barbara, California
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In Brief ACADEMICS
IN THE NEWS
C U LT U R E B E A R E R S
THREE NEW DEANS
WALTER ISAACSON
INTERSECTION
• Iñaki Alday is the new dean of the School of Architecture. A renowned designer and experienced and innovative administrator, he comes from the University of Virginia architecture school, where he was the founding director of the Yamuna River Project, an interdisciplinary, international program that aims to revitalize the ecology of the Yamuna River and the essential relationship between the river and life in Delhi, India.
University Professor Walter Isaacson has joined CNN’s late-night public affairs show “Amanpour & Company” as a contributor. Isaacson also published an essay, “Shaped by Water: The Mississippi Remains the South’s Most Vital Artery,” in the Aug. 6–13, 2018, issue of TIME magazine.
Dedicated to the late architecture professor Mac Heard, Sweet Spots: In-Between Spaces in New Orleans is an interdisciplinary collection of essays by mainly Tulane contributors about the city “often viewed as an island floating dreamily above the south coast of North America, somewhere between the United States and Latin America.”
• Brian Edwards, an interdisciplinary scholar and author, is the new dean of the School of Liberal Arts. He came from Northwestern University, where he founded and directed the Middle East and North African Studies program and was a professor of English, comparative literary studies and American studies. He’s the author of Morocco Bound and After the American Century.
A. HAYS TOWN EXHIBIT
• Thomas LaVeist, a national expert on equity and health, is the new dean of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He also holds the new Presidential Chair in Health Equity. LaVeist spent 25 years at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and, most recently, he was professor and chair of health policy and management at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. Alday, Edwards and LaVeist join another new dean at Tulane—Kimberly Foster of the School of Science and Engineering (see Tulane, June 2018).
tulane.it/isaacson-amanpour
ARCHITECTURE
An exhibit, curated by architecture professor Carol McMichael Reese, honors A. Hays Town (A ’26). “Town’s popular—and perhaps abiding—legacy is as a regionalist who sought to create an indelible image of home in Louisiana,” said Reese. The exhibit is at Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana. tulane.it/hays-town-exhibit
QUOTED
“It’s a very strategic site for a city. It made sense at the time.” RICHARD CAMPANELLA, geographer and architecture professor, on the founding of New Orleans in a Washington Post story on the city’s tricentennial.
CLASSICAL STUDIES
ROMAN TOMBS Allison Emmerson, an assistant professor of classical studies in the School of Liberal Arts, won the Rome Prize offered by the American Academy in Rome and an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship. Emmerson plans to spend the academic year 2018–19 in Rome, finishing her upcoming book, which will analyze how tombs were a central feature of suburbs within the ancient Roman world. tulane.it/roman-tombs
ACADEMICS
FULBRIGHT SCHOLARS Eight alumni and two current students have received grants from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to conduct independent research in Morocco, Peru and Zambia, or work as English teaching assistants in Brazil, Colombia, Estonia, Jordan, Malaysia and Poland in 2018–19. “The Fulbright award is a natural extension of a Tulane education with its similar values of reciprocity, international engagement and promotion of mutual understanding among nations,” said Charlotte Maheu Vail, Tulane’s Fulbright Program adviser and director of the Honors Program. tulane.it/fulbright-grantees-2018-19
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UNDERSTANDING THE GULF COAST IS KEY TO RESILIENCE A national report on the future of the Gulf Coast draws heavily on the work of two Tulane University scientists who have spent most of their careers studying coastal systems in Louisiana and around the world. The report, released in June from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, calls for improved understanding of the Gulf Coast system to promote resilience of coastal communities and ecosystems under rapidly changing environmental conditions, such as sea-level rise, flooding, marsh and wetland loss and subsidence. The committee that drew up the report included researchers from around the country, including two from Tulane—Vokes Geology Professor Torbjörn Törqvist and adjunct professor Alex Kolker. The report recommends that the National Academies’ Gulf Research Program create an integrated program that focuses on understanding the evolution of the coupled coastal system. The program should support collaborative, multidisciplinary research teams and deliver easily accessible observational data and model results, the report says. “Because of the long-term changes that we’ve experienced in the Gulf and that are expected to continue as sea level rises, now is the time to think about long-term plans as to how the physical system and human system are likely to evolve together,” said Kolker, who is also an associate professor with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. tulane.it/GRP-report
MEDICAL RESEARCH
HALTING CANCER CELLS Asim Abdel-Mageed, Zimmerman Professor of Cancer Research at Tulane School of Medicine, and his colleagues were part of a team that published research in Scientific Reports this spring that examined whether drugs already approved to treat other diseases or conditions could be effective in blocking the spread of cancer cells. tulane.it/halting-cancer-cells
NEUROSCIENCE
BRAIN INSTITUTE The Tulane Brain Institute received a five-year, $1 million Comprehensive Enhancement Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents. “Our goal is to build research facilities for Tulane neuroscientists that are among the best in the country,” said Jill Daniel, Gary P. Dohanich Professor in Brain Science and founding director of the Brain Institute. (See page 38 to read about a Priddy Family Foundation gift to the institute.) tulane.it/brain-institute-grant-2018
PHYSICS AND ENGINEERING
NANOTECHNOLOGY Michael Naguib, an assistant professor in the School of Science and Engineering, won prestigious awards from the NANOSMAT Society and the American Ceramic Society this year. Naguib specializes in two-dimensional materials and electrochemical energy storage. His group at Tulane focuses on developing novel energy materials. tulane.it/nanotech-awards
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IN BRIEF
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
MORE PRAISE
SPORTS LAW
Two-time National Book Award winner and Tulane Professor of English Jesmyn Ward continues to earn praise for her 2018 commencement speech with the advice to “persist, work hard.” Forbes, Fast Company, Business Insider and TIME included Ward in their lists of the best commencement speeches this year. Also, Ward published an essay, “My True South: Returning Home to a Place I Love More Than I Loathe,” in the Aug. 6–13, 2018, issue of TIME magazine.
Gabe Feldman, professor of law, on NPR about online sports betting: “The reason we’ve had sports gambling as cardinal sin No. 1 in professional sports is the risk to the integrity of the game. As we all know, part of the popularity of sports is the uncertainty of outcome. And so anything that might interfere with that uncertainty of outcome is of a major concern to the leagues.”
tulane.it/commencement-speech-2018
E A RT H A N D E N V I R O N M E N TA L S C I E N C E S
GIS CERTIFICATE When searching directions using Google Maps, tagging your location on social media or requesting an Uber ride from your smartphone, you are utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS)—systems designed to present spatial data. Now, Tulane students can learn more about managing this type of technology by enrolling in the region’s first complete GIS Certificate Program. “That’s the beauty of GIS, you can use it for anything,” said Reda Amer, professor of practice in the School of Science and Engineering’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, who directs the program. tulane.it/GIS-certificate
P R I M AT E R E S E A R C H C E N T E R
tulane.it/gabe-feldman-npr
QUOTED
“There were ... efforts on the part of Black people to adopt names that ... gave a nod to the continent.” NGHANA LEWIS, associate professor of English and African diaspora studies, in an OZY.com story about naming trends.
DESIGN THINKING
HOW DO YOU CHANGE CAMPUS CULTURE? Approximately 50 Tulane students who enrolled in a new course, Project IX: Student Design to End Sexual Assault, presented creative, bold and thoughtful ideas for shifting campus culture around sexual misconduct to the Tulane community at an event on May 2. tulane.it/change-campus-culture
NIH $42 MILLION GRANT The National Institutes of Health has awarded a five-year, $42 million grant to the Tulane National Primate Research Center to continue its mission of biomedical research, focusing on finding cures, treatments and preventions for infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, Lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis. tulane.it/NIH-42-million-grant
SOCIAL WORK
‘VISIONARY’ RECOVERY Patrick Bordnick, dean of the School of Social Work and a pioneer in the use of virtual reality for substance abuse assessment and intervention, was recognized for his work at the Association of Recovery for Higher Education Conference in July.
J.L. Residence Hall turns 100 Josephine Louise House—home to generations of Newcomb and Tulane women—is 100 years old this year. The Newcomb Alumnae Association is planning a brunch on Sunday, Nov. 11, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., to celebrate. Today, J.L. remains the only allwomen residence hall on campus. In 2017, Newcomb College Institute launched Spark, a residential learning community in J.L. for first-year women to engage in courses and programming focused on gender, leadership and social change. “Living in J.L. was a formative part of my undergraduate years,” said Catherine Edwards (NC ’72), a J.L. Centennial Celebration committee member. “Lifelong friendships were made.” Join the Facebook group “100 Years of Josephine Louise House” (facebook.com/ groups/JL100) to share photos from your time in J.L.
tulane.it/visonary-recovery
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“A tremendous amount of research has come out that shows hitting children is counterproductive and leads to more harm than good.” CATHERINE TAYLOR, associate professor of global community health and behavioral sciences, author of a study of doctors’ views of spanking published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
WORK-LIFE BALANCE Katherine Johnson, an assistant professor in sociology, is exploring how working mothers find a balance between breastfeeding their infant children and their daily career commitments.
In addition to Frazier going to the Magic, Parry Nickerson was drafted by the New York Jets and Ade Aruna by the Minnesota Vikings. Baseball players Grant Witherspoon, Will McAffer and Kody Hoese were picked by the Tampa Bay Rays, the Toronto Blue Jays and the Kansas City Royals, respectively.
tulane.it/work-life-balance
P U B L I C H E A LT H
VIRAL DETECTION A new study from the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine shows that, depending on the interpretation criteria, blood tests can distinguish recent Zika infections in areas where dengue is endemic. Dengue and Zika fevers are both mosquito-borne tropical diseases.
“It does speak to the quality that’s here and our ability to recruit,” said Tulane athletic director Troy Dannen.
tulane.it/viral-detection COMMUNITY MINDED
SCHOOL CHOICE STUDIES The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Science has awarded a five-year, $10 million grant to Tulane to launch a national school choice research center to study and find ways to improve the way school choice policies work for disadvantaged students. tulane.it/school-choice-studies
When Melvin Frazier was drafted by the Orlando Magic in the second round of the NBA draft, it marked a milestone in the history of Tulane athletics. Not only was it the first time since 1997 that a Tulane basketball player was picked in the NBA draft, it was the first time in more than two decades that Tulane had student-athletes drafted in the NBA, the NFL and MLB. What’s more, Tulane was one of only 24 schools that could boast such a feat.
SOCIOLOGY
E D U C AT I O N R E S E A R C H
SPORTS
SIX STUDENT-ATHLETES GO PRO THIS YEAR
PEACE CORPS NAMES TULANE NO. 1 For the fourth consecutive year, Tulane University is ranked first among graduate schools for the number of volunteers who join the Peace Corps. There are 27 alumni currently serving, 22 from the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. In addition to leading the graduate school pack, Tulane also ranks No. 5 among medium undergraduate schools with the most Peace Corps volunteers. This ranking is up from No. 10 in 2017 and is based on the 33 alumni volunteering worldwide. tulane.it/peace-corps-no1
COMMUNITY MINDED
PRESERVATION PROJECT School of Liberal Arts anthropology graduates Jayur Mehta and Ted Marks engaged students from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in a summer project focused on preserving the past and restoring Louisiana’s coastal landscape. Funded by the National Geographic Society, they studied an 800-year-old site in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, which was once home to the ancestors of tribes like the Chitimacha and the Atakapa.
Dannen says the number of Tulane athletes playing professionally is a nice little “fun fact” to share with prospective recruits, many of whom aspire to become pros. “You can reach that level here,” he said. But Tulane’s major recruiting enticement is education. “When you recruit, you sell your edge, you sell your advantage. And here it’s the degree, the academics.”
QUOTED
“I always wanted to build and invent things, and engineering was a way to do that.” LUKE HOOPER, who invented a game, Lumen, which won a 2018 Edison Award for innovation. Lumen is billed as “the world’s first game to capture the true magic of wireless power.” Hooper earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tulane.
tulane.it/preservation-project
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Up First
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TRICENTENNIAL
BREAKING
Screens vs. books: The book always wins, professor says BY FAITH DAWSON
I EMPIRE EXHIBIT BY ALICIA JASMIN
If one could enter a door that leads inside a mind full of historic memories, that experience might feel the same as walking through the EMPIRE exhibit at the Newcomb Art Museum. The exhibit’s four rooms showcase an assembly of more than 400 objects pulled from archives at Tulane University. The artists, Los Angeles–based Fallen Fruit, created the exhibit to serve as one immersive work. “When visitors walk in, they see beauty,” said Thomas Friel, coordinator for interpretation and public engagement at the museum. “But when you peel back the layers you’ll find invasive flowers on the wallpaper, beautiful furniture that once sat inside a brothel, and inaccurate depictions of Native Americans.” In this exhibit, there are no labels. Guests are offered the opportunity to develop their own ideas about what the art installation is all about. The “Women’s Room” (facing page) highlights more than two dozen portraits of women, many of whom are significant in the history of Tulane and Newcomb College. Those featured represent “empowerment, freedom, oppression, celebration, beauty, gender, life and death,” Friel said. The room also contains books and a three-panel “posture mirror” used by 20th-century female students to check their bearing—an exercise that emphasized their need to have both public and private personas. In another room of the exhibit is Brandan “BMike” Odums’ Alchemist (above) (2015) (9 feet by 9 feet, spray paint and gold leaf on unstretched canvas), a recent gift to the museum by an alumnus. In the exhibit’s art guide, museum director Monica Ramirez-Montagut writes that the project in celebration of the city’s tricentennial allows viewers “to experience a moment of collective creation, one that in [Fallen Fruit’s] words is a ‘true and real moment where everything is possible’ and a moment, just like New Orleans, where ‘everything can be redefined.’” The exhibit is on display through Dec. 22, 2018.
s book culture old-fashioned in a society that’s overrun by screens? Michael Kuczynski, a professor of English in Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts, says no. “Books provide us with a window on the global history of learning, and you can’t get that from a computer,” he said. “A lot of so-called modern concepts in education that we think we’ve invented, like design thinking and social entrepreneurship, are in fact aspects of the history of manuscript and early print culture,” he said. In May, Kuczynski was inducted into the Grolier Club, an international society of bibliophiles and scholars. He is the first Tulane faculty member to join the prestigious society and was nominated by a fellow member, Stuart Rose, a Tulane parent and book collector. “It’s a great honor not just for me individually but for Tulane as an institution,” Kuczynski said. “It’s a very eclectic group of people.” The club is based in New York City but has 800 international members: people who buy and sell books, librarians, academics and other book lovers. The club was founded in 1884 “to foster the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper, their art, history, production and commerce.” The club takes its name from Jean Grolier, a 16th-century French book collector and patron of an Italian press. The Grolier Club network, exhibit space and reference library will benefit Kuczynski’s research as a medievalist. He said that he looks forward to “promoting some of our campus book history resources, such as holdings at Howard-Tilton and Amistad Research Center.” Kuczynski is confident that books will remain part of the educational environment and that book history will continue to be an important field of study.
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UP FIRST
ATHLETICS
TROY DANNEN SEES FAN BASE RALLYING ’ROUND
“I saw our fan base, our alumni base, rally around us,” Dannen said seven months later. “It wasn’t, ‘Tulane found a way to lose again’ or ‘Woe is us.’ I felt that everyone had united. They really understood where the program had come in the first two years under (head coach) Willie (Fritz).” Dannen was speaking from his office on the third floor of the Wilson Center, just outside Yulman Stadium. It was midJuly, and he was already feeling the buzz surrounding the start of the 2018 season. “There’s a different level of hunger,” he said. “The Tulane freshman class is the highest ranked Tulane has ever had. Everyone realizes we belong here and we can beat anyone we play in the league.” Dannen, who has been on the job for nearly three years, readily admits that football takes up a lot of his time. But being an athletic director, he says, is so much more. Since taking the helm of Tulane athletics in December 2015, he has hired several coaches, reorganized his staff and introduced sailing
BY BARRI BRONSTON
T
ulane athletic director Troy Dannen was as nervous as any Green Wave fan that November afternoon at Ford Stadium in Dallas. The Wave was one yard and nine seconds away from becoming bowl eligible, and Dannen was already envisioning the end zone celebration. There certainly was a celebration, but as the clocked ticked down to 0:00 it was the Mustangs of SMU who were doing the chest bumping and dancing. As Tulane quarterback Jonathan Banks ran toward the goal line, he was met by an SMU linebacker, who officials said tackled him before he crossed the goal line. Despite the controversy surrounding the play—which was covered by Sports Illustrated, ESPN and other national media outlets—Dannen knew this would be a tough loss to overcome. But he also knew that something positive would come from it.
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as a varsity sport. He resurrected the Angry Wave logo. And he’s traveled far and wide as part of the Wave 100 fundraising campaign, which aims to grow Green Wave Club membership and to tell the story of Green Wave student-athletes, coaches and staff. Looking ahead, Dannen is hoping to raise enough money in the coming years to build a comprehensive performance center and a tennis competition facility. “The weight room needs to be improved, we need to add more space, more amenities, more academic support space,” Dannen said. Such improvements can only enhance recruiting efforts, putting it on a level comparable to such private institutions as Duke, Vanderbilt and Stanford. “Since the ’98 (undefeated) team, we haven’t given the fans a lot to embrace,” he said. “People will walk away if you’re not successful and you’re not fun. And winning is fun. I’m a big believer that people are waiting for good things to happen so they can get engaged and involved.”
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LEADERSHIP
HOW TWEET IT IS ;
When news of President Mike Fitts’ contract extension posted on social media in June, several people replied via Twitter.
“Well deserved President Fitts! Congratulations!” Arman Sadeghpour, PhD
“Great news, indeed!” Kimberly Foster
LEADING THE WAY BY MIKE STRECKER
The Board of Tulane announced a new contractual agreement with President Mike Fitts that will run through the academic year ending June 30, 2023. Doug Hertz, Board of Tulane Chair, cited Tulane President Mike Fitts’ transformative leadership when he announced in June that the board had secured President Fitts’ commitment to remain at Tulane. “The Board of Tulane’s early action in securing Mike’s long-term commitment is a testament to how highly we regard, appreciate and value his leadership,” Hertz said. “Our national rankings have risen dramatically,” added Hertz. “Each year our incoming classes have broken records in terms of their academic achievements and their level of civic engagement. The diversity of our incoming classes has also increased substantially as Tulane is attracting top students from all backgrounds.” Tulane has consistently shattered fundraising records since Fitts’ arrival in 2014, and in December launched “Only the
“Niiice.” Audacious,” the university’s most ambitious quest to secure the future of its pioneering research; recruit and retain the world’s best faculty; increase scholarships and financial aid to attract the best students from across the globe; and build on the strategy to create a learning experience powered by innovation, firsthand experience and community service. Tulane has also grown physically under Fitts, who served 14 years as dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School prior to becoming Tulane’s 15th president. Major building projects under Fitts include the more than $35 million Goldring/Woldenberg Business Complex; the transformation of Mussafer Hall into the central location for services dedicated to student success; the building of new residence halls; and construction of The Commons, a three-story, $55 million, 77,000-square-foot marvel that will house a new dining hall, multipurpose meeting spaces and a permanent home for the Newcomb College Institute.
Sara Brady PR
“Now, if they can just fix the potholes.” flyoverland
“Good! I like him.” Jen Dozier
“We love Mike Fitts!”
Jenny Flexner Reinhardt
“These past few years that Mike Fitts has served as president of Tulane University have been nothing short of transformative.”
“Wonderful news. Hope he can prepare young men and women for the real world and support an unbiased political environment, especially with the faculty. He’s done a great job of improving campus safety!”
DOUG HERTZ, Board of Tulane chair
Clare Westwood
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UP FIRST
OPINION
CULTURAL EXCHANGE BY SATYAJIT DATTAGUPTA
I believe Tulane University needs to be a leader in welcoming students from other countries, cultures and every socioeconomic background. It enriches the lives of the students who come here, whether they grew up in New Orleans or are arriving in this country for the very first time. Every year millions of students take the brave step of leaving their homes and families behind to attend college in another country. The United States has historically been the leading destination for these scholars. Our world is more connected and networked than at any point in history. Goods and services cross the globe along with people and ideas. This results not only in indispensable products like smartphones and hybrid automobiles but in deep and positive changes to our now interlocked cultures. Having a classroom that reflects our increasingly shared reality is vitally important. As companies expand globally, the ability to interact with and understand different cultures and peoples becomes a vitally important facet of future career success. Just as technology shapes our ability to communicate, our classroom culture directly impacts how and what students can learn from one another emotionally and culturally. My experience as an international student has helped me understand the many positive values of this new reality in a very concrete way. When I came to this country at the age of 18, I had to learn so many things from scratch. But by living in a nation built upon hundreds of years of immigration from every part of the world, I came to see that I was just one of so very many who had come here in search of a better life. Coming to the United States from India, I learned much from the people I met. In turn, they learned from my life, my experiences and my culture. By sharing our lives, 12
“ Understanding different ways of living and thinking provides a rich context for learning about any field of study.” we had the ability to immeasurably shape our undergraduate experience and futures for the better. My story is one of many, but it’s a reflection of a larger truth. Traveling to study in another country is not only a big leap for the individual, it also results in a cultural exchange that helps create a smarter, broader and more compassionate world for every student. We are living in a time when many international students are wondering if studying in the United States, long the top goal of international students, is wise. “Will I be safe in America?” “Am I welcome?” These are some of the questions we in admissions now often hear from prospective international students.
Tulane is on the right track when it comes to international students, but we still have a long way to go. How we invite and support international students was a major topic of conversation July 10–13 as Tulane and Loyola universities hosted the International Association for College Admission Counseling (IACAC) conference, the largest gathering of college admission counselors in the world. For 300 years, the city of New Orleans has beckoned immigrants from across the globe. These new arrivals made the city what it is today and will also create the New Orleans of the next 300 years. Satyajit Dattagupta is vice president for enrollment management and dean of undergraduate admission at Tulane.
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NEW ORLEANS
THE CUBA CONNECTION
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BY ANGUS LIND, A&S ’66
Angus Lind explores the cultural ties between Cuba and New Orleans, sometimes described as “Latin America’s most northern city.”
’d like to report that Cuba is beguiling, enchanting, charming and a really fun place to visit like Key West, which lies 86 miles north. But after three days in Havana, the capital of the so-called “Pearl of the Antilles,” I’d say none of those adjectives fits. Cuba has left me bewildered, saddened about its oppressed people, its poverty, and the unfulfilled opportunities and potential that could be realized but are so far in the distant future, if ever. If you’re thinking about Cuba as a fun, relaxed, hip island vacation where you can chill, I have a word for you: Jamaica. Don’t get me wrong—there is beauty and entertainment in Cuba. In Havana Vieja (Old Havana) are majestic edifices, several of them resembling the Cabildo and the Presbytere in New Orleans. But not all the buildings look like this. Many are in disrepair, need paint, and it is obvious there’s been no maintenance in decades. Many of the taxis you take are vintage, pre-1959 brightly painted convertible Buicks, Chevys, Dodges, Chryslers and Plymouths. Very cool riding in cars with fins. But step out into the countryside, as our large travel group did on the bus ride to and from the airport and to Hemingway’s estate, and you see sights that are more than disconcerting: People cutting grass with machetes, not lawnmowers. A horse-drawn ancient wooden work wagon. People walking miles on the side of a road carrying bags. Washtubs and clotheslines everywhere. Shanties with rusted-out corrugated tin roofs and tarps with large rocks on top holding them down. A truck with its bumper tied to a post on the corner so it wouldn’t roll downhill. Brakes? I’m thinking not.
Beloved by Cubans, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Martha lived in Cuba for 21 years (1939–60) during which time he wrote seven novels, including The Old Man and the Sea. They purchased a gorgeous home in farm country on eight acres many miles from Havana. The home is chock full of big game trophies and thousands of books and artifacts. He hosted a fishing tournament and there is a picture of the 59-year-old author presenting the winning trophy to 33-year-old Fidel Castro. A fix? Es posible. We saw colorfully attired Latin salsa dancers doing mambos, rhumbas and sambas. We heard mariachi bands play “Guantanamera” as much as we hear “When the Saints Go Marching In” in New Orleans. Despite the hardships, most Cuban people seem to have a love for their country and a good sense of humor. There are differences between government guides and the guides that we hired out of Miami because the government guides present a rosy picture of almost everything, are fluent in misinformation and excuse anything that is amiss with a simplistic “This is Cuba.” All of which makes it no easier to feel the true pulse of Cuba—because it is a complicated, enigmatic country. Hemingway did not know today’s Cuba. But maybe the easiest way to explain it away is a prophetic line from The Old Man and the Sea: “Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”
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UP FIRST
Biological Anthropology
EARTH BENEATH DUMP SITE OFFERS CLUES TO RACIAL MASSACRE BY MARY ANN TRAVIS
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rom Somaliland to El Salvador, Peru to Guatemala, Davette Gadison has brought her passion for justice to her studies in forensic anthropology—drawn to mass gravesites in countries torn apart by civil war. This spring, however, Gadison, a Tulane School of Liberal Arts graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, stayed right here in southeast Louisiana. Using ground-penetrating radar, she surveyed a site in Thibodaux where a sugar cane labor strike was halted on Nov. 23, 1887. White vigilantes had rounded up striking African-American workers, killing many of them. Estimates of the number of workers who were murdered range from 30 to 60. The bodies were thrown into one grave; in the decades following the event the site became the city dump, Gadison said. Although a strong oral history exists, especially in the black community, the event had largely been repressed from written records—until the publication of The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike (The History Press, 2016) by John DeSantis. Now Gadison is a consultant on the project, working with a professor from the University of Louisiana–Lafayette to decide the next step. From her pending report based on analysis of the ground-penetrating radar survey, Gadison will recommend if, where and how to excavate. Like relatives of murdered people interred in mass graves around the world, community members in Thibodaux want a “proper burial” for the victims, Gadison said. 14
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RESEARCH
Like relatives of murdered people interred in mass graves around the world, the Thibodaux community wants a “proper burial” for the victims, Gadison said. She recalled that in the first forensic anthropology class in which she ever enrolled, the professor presented a photograph of a mass grave in Iraq, in which a hundred people were buried. “It was very fresh. People were recently murdered, not skeletonized. Just seeing the pit … I couldn’t understand. It was horrible. Ever since, I have that image in my mind.” At that point, Gadison decided to focus on large-scale events and human rights violations as a forensic anthropologist. While surveying the Thibodaux site in May, Gadison visited a barbershop next to the American Legion building located near the site. The barber told Gadison that he’d heard for years older people talk about the killing event, which apparently took place in a span of two and a half hours. “But he didn’t realize that it was actually real. That it really happened.” Through Gadison’s efforts, though, evidence of what actually occurred should be revealed. There may be other massacre sites in the area, too, she said, which is “disturbing, very disturbing.” “I have a passion for justice,” Gadison added. “It’s strong in me. That’s what is fueling my drive for this work.” John Verano, professor of anthropology, is Gadison’s adviser. He has decades of experience doing excavation and analysis of human remains, most notably at ancient sites in Peru.
He said that Gadison and other anthropology graduate students whom he’s mentored and trained are impressive. “They know how to dig beautifully. They know how to analyze skeletons.” Gadison herself is “diplomatic, savvy and self-reliant”—essential traits in the field in often remote areas of the world. As she tracks the disappearances of people, she’s letting the dead speak, really. “This is important public service,” Verano said. Through Gadison’s efforts at the Thibodaux massacre site, she can “help to confirm that something did happen and that there was a mass grave,” he said. Then she can “identify, if possible, the general characteristics of these victims and perhaps how they died.” Calling attention to the site will “possibly jog the memory of living people who are descendants or distant relatives of these people,” Verano said. The outcome will be to “finally, ideally, give them a proper burial as all humans want proper mortuary treatment of their relatives.” Gadison’s work is “contributing to living people and bringing to light the past that they may not have known of,” Verano said. “It gives visibility to things such as the Thibodaux massacre that many people never heard of. It was forgotten and buried in history.”
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In a historic John Swanton photo (above), circa 1900–1910s, a United Houma Nation family is shown on a Louisiana bayou with a house made of palmetto leaves in the background. In a 2010 photo (below), Ian Batherson (B ’11), a student in Laura Kelley’s Living History service-learning course, records the landscape of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe in South Louisiana.
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(DE)COLONIZING THE COAST The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South commemorates the city’s Tricentennial with a symposium focused on the Indigenous people of Louisiana. BY REBECCA SNEDEKER
PHOTOS COURTESY NEW ORLEANS CENTER FOR THE GULF SOUTH
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had been troubled as the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Orleans approached this year by the glut of promotional Tricentennial messages and aesthetics that read as unwittingly pro-colonialism. Our French roots looked to be cause for celebration, but the Indigenous Tribes, who lived here for thousands of years before the arrival of the colonizers who claimed and renamed this place, were nearly invisible. I mulled: What could the anniversary teach us about the Native-colonial encounter three centuries ago, as well as about this moment in our world and our future together? An attempt to answer this question came about through a partnership between Adjunct Professor of History Laura D. Kelley, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South Assistant Director Denise Frazier and others, who coordinated the daylong symposium “Indigenous Spaces, French Expectations: Exploring Exchanges Between Native and Non-Native Peoples in Louisiana,” this spring. For 13 years, Kelley has collaborated with members of Louisiana’s French-speaking Tribes. She teaches the service-learning course Indian Tribes Down the Bayou: Native American Communities in Southeastern Louisiana and is the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South partner in the Third Coast residential learning community in Sharp Residence Hall. The symposium was a step, with more to follow, toward having a more informed conversation about Louisiana’s Indigenous peoples and their cultural heritage, the value of understanding all they have lost and contributed, and how critical their input is for the rebuilding of our vulnerable coastline.
Nature’s Tapestries Monique Verdin, artist and member of the United Houma Nation Tribal Council, installed the symposium’s artistic centerpiece, woven palmetto tapestries on the branches of an oak tree near Newcomb Hall. The tapestries held photographs of Verdin’s family and friends in the Mississippi River delta, binding a way of life to place. Jars of native pollinator seeds were nestled amongst the tree’s roots and a big, blue shrimp net hung from a branch overhead onto a circular bench surrounding the tree’s thick trunk. Verdin’s living assemblage beckoned in the sunlight, providing space for quiet reflection and chance encounters, a view of images from the coast and waters, and time with the dazzling live oak tree, whose life preceded all of ours. “The nature is quite resilient if you let it do what it wants to do,” Verdin said, about medicinal plants and nature. “Where plantations once sat, petrochemical plants and prisons now sit. That is the reality along the banks of the Mississippi River. Colonization has left a mark that is tied to a corporate, extractive economy, and we have to recognize that we can’t just keep taking. The nature has its own rights, and we need to live within them. And if we respect that, we will be blessed in return.”
What could the anniversary teach us about the Nativecolonial encounter three centuries ago, as well as about this moment in our world and our future together? 17 9/10/18 4:44 PM
Dare to Look Within During the symposium, we locked into place—the soft land beneath us—and traveled time, from the formation of this earth dumped by the Mississippi River to archaeological concerns about when and whether to disturb what it holds, and on to linguistics analyses and musicological revelations. For our team at the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, the symposium was a time—like any other day—to practice one of our mantras: Dare to look around. Dare to look within. And to welcome our guests to do this, too. The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South brings scholars, artists and practitioners from different backgrounds together for learning and collective contemplation of often-uncomfortable topics. Our hope is that participants will leave these experiences altered and energized, with more nuanced and fact-based knowledge and with a refreshed ability to consider their own agency on earth. In our world of screens, busyness and calls to action and service, we are arguably desperate for welcoming, educational experiences where we can absorb and sit with truths of our times. Participants in the symposium included French social scientists from the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, whose research focuses on former and existing French colonies, and leaders of the French-speaking Native Tribes of Southern Louisiana, often collectively called the “Petites Nations.” These Tribes (the Alligator Band of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation, Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-ChitimachaChoctaw Tribe, Pointe-Au-Chien Indian Tribe, Tunica-Biloxi Tribe and United Houma Nation) whose dramatic influence on Europeans and Africans has long been understated and is often misunderstood, are now at the forefront of global climate issues. Because of coastal erosion and rising sea levels, they are forced to choose whether to build higher in order to remain on their ancestral lands or to leave their homeland and migrate inland. In addition to the Native tribal leaders and our French guests, faculty, students and graduate students from Tulane’s schools of Liberal Arts, Architecture, and Science and Engineering, and the ByWater Institute, as well as other universities and community members participated. Elizabeth Ellis (SLA ’10), a former student of Laura Kelley’s, a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and a 18
professor at New York University, described how the small, agile Petites Nations strategically played the French, Spanish, British and Africans to protect themselves against larger Native Tribes’ political power conflicts, the chaos of the Native slave exchange, and the ongoing increase in colonial land claims and military force. Tulane PhD candidate Shane Liefan analyzed a 1718 Chitimacha calumet cere mony through which he revealed how Indigenous processional rituals may have influenced musical parading traditions that still exist today in New Orleans. I sat there riveted, as he complicated the familiar narrative that almost always focuses on Europe and Africa. For many of us, the day was packed with these experiences, shifting from storylines we thought to be true, yet were incomplete, because the
Indigenous parts of the stories have been fundamentally ignored in most educational settings for so long. Discussions went deep into the present-day life of tribal members and pressing issues: ongoing legal struggles for federal recognition, ramifications of levees and levee failures, the BP oil spill and chronic, smaller spills, and the potential impacts of various coastal protection and river diversion plans. It is widely known that coastal erosion is caused by the channeling of the Mississippi River by 20th- and now 21st-century engineers, canals and pipelines cut by the oil and gas industry, rising sea levels due to climate change, and seismic activity. Lesser known are the intimate details of when cultural heritage is tied to place and that place is disappearing quickly, and what is left is being poisoned by toxic chemicals.
These Tribes ... whose dramatic influence on Europeans and Africans has long been understated and is often misunderstood, are now at the forefront of global climate issues.
In a showcase of current research projects and engagement opportunities, Amy Lesen, research associate professor at the ByWater Institute, described how her collaboration with the Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe flips the script on older research approaches by implementing community-determined research agendas. [See “Slipping Into the Sea,” Tulane, September 2017] Graduate student Sunshine Best presented AhnAya, an app project that catalogues traditional plant knowledge and was developed in collaboration with tribal members. Presenters spoke in English, French, French Creole and Native languages, fluidly moving from one language to the next. All the words began to feel like embodiments of humans, of how related and melded we all are and how
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Isle de Jean Charles along the coast of Louisiana has lost 98 percent of its land since the 1950s. Its residents—members of the Biloxi-ChitimachaChoctaw Tribe—find a way to survive as they forge a model for other coastal communities facing similar existential threats.
familiar and unfamiliar we are to one another. There were formal and diplomatic transatlantic greetings and funny moments that reflected our common humanity. The presence of many languages, and examples of how these languages are evolving, helped convey the longevity, richness and complexity of our cultural encounters and exchanges. Tulane undergraduate student Nathalie Clarke served as translator for a roundtable of tribal members, reminding all that there is a place for remarkable students of all educational levels to shine in our programming. Her live translation also served more generally as a reminder of the kind of miracle that communication among peoples is.
PHOTO BY PAUL MORSE
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Though their methods and language differ, the geographer, archaeologist, historian, musicologist, botanist and artist learned from one another.
Clockwise from top: Palmetto tapestry and photos by Monique Verdin of the United Houma Nation; Nazia Dardar of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe; PhD candidate Shane Liefan speaking on the 18th-century Chitimacha calumet ceremony; and Rebecca Snedeker, author and symposium co-chair.
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Interdisciplinary Learning In the “interdisciplinary” exchange of the symposium, the contours, distinctions and strengths of singular disciplines drew out ways in which they inform one another. Though their methods and language differ, the geographer, archaeologist, historian, musicologist, botanist and artist learned from one another. Each presenter “played” their own disciplines like different instruments, and the result was akin to an orchestral fullness, towards holistic knowledge. From my own experience at this symposium, and reinforced later by feedback we received, the symposium offered the chance to commune across borders, creating camaraderie to fuel our spirits to stay alert and open. In our region, with global issues that soon all coastal peoples will face, we must establish models that help us see and accept where we are, and support us in being creative and respectful in our solutions. During closing remarks, I asked everyone to hold hands, close their eyes and allow an image to surface. We were simply a group of human beings, sitting with truths of where we come from and where we are, brimming with care, questions and aspirations, and recognizing the humanity in one another. How is colonization not just a historical phenomenon, but a process that is still being done and undone? Look around. Look within. Rebecca Snedeker is the James H. Clark Executive Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, an interdisciplinary, placebased institute that was founded in 2011 and is now a cornerstone of the Tulane School of Liberal Arts. Documentation of the Indigenous Spaces, French Expectations symposium can be found at the NOCGS website: https://liberalarts. tulane.edu/programs/nocgs Inaugural co-chairs Snedeker and Kelley extend thanks to the School of Liberal Arts, Department of Anthropology, Department of French and Italian, Center for Public Service, Murphy Institute, and Office of Academic Affairs and Provost for supporting the NOCGS Indigenous Symposium. The second annual NOCGS Indigenous Symposium will take place on April 2, 2019.
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DEEP DIVE IN THE
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J
E
JAZZ
ARCHIVE New Orleans jazz is a living, breathing, evolving force, but its origins in the early 20th century require special preservation. That is the job of the Hogan Jazz Archive. BY GWEN THOMPKINS, NC ’87
PHOTO BY GEORGE FLETCHER, COURTESY HARRY V. SOUCHON SR. COLLECTION
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hat’s the hat. Yes, it’s the very one that jazz guitarist and raconteur Danny Barker wore. Deep in the recesses of the Hogan Jazz Archive, cocked discreetly on a shelf, is a taupe-colored fedora with a wide brown ribbon and a deep dent in the center of the crown. It’s easy to overlook, given all there is to see down here—yards and yards of sheet music and precious vinyl recordings, letters, books, old phonographs, musical instruments. In the mid-1960s, the head on which that particular hat sat had the brilliant idea to save what was then a struggling brass band tradition in New Orleans. If Barker and his Fairview Baptist Church Christian Band had not inspired future generations of young people to reclaim their musical heritage, New Orleans would be a different place entirely. A quieter place. With fern bars. And better traffic flow. But an important part of the city’s soundscape—the social aid and pleasure club parades and the jazz funerals and all the music-filled traditions that mark the bonds of community and the passage of time—would be a memory. The Hogan is one of the last two major university jazz archives in the nation (the other is at Rutgers) and is essential to the world’s understanding of the beginnings of jazz, black gospel music of the 20th century and the golden era of New Orleans R&B. Its more than 2,000 tapes of oral histories are a never-ending cache of teachable moments for musicians, academics and fans.
“The artifacts speak to you because they’re not just surfacelevel artifacts,” said ethnomusicologist and Tulane associate professor of music Matt Sakakeeny. “Let’s say it was 1959 and Richard B. Allen, one of the Hogan’s first curators, is going out to interview the Barbarin family about their place in the New Orleans jazz tradition. Well, it’s not until you get to the archive do you understand that he’s showing up at the door with a portable reel-to-reel recorder, a giant machine. So, now you know (the Barbarins’) address. He would type up his notes so you might understand what a person was wearing that day, or how old they were or what kind of shape they were in, what family members were around. Also included is a letter that the archivist has from the city—because it’s Jim Crow and a white man like Allen is not legally allowed to go into the space of a black family or even sit in a bar with a black patron. So, these archivists had official letters from the city saying, ‘Police, don’t obstruct this work that is being undertaken.’ Maybe that gives you a sense of the dynamics of an oral history interview.” The Barbarins are one of many musical families in New Orleans, and mellophone player Isidore Barbarin was Danny Barker’s maternal grandfather. Barker’s cousin, Charles Barbarin Sr., was a co-leader of the Fairview band. A drummer in the family, Uncle Paul Barbarin, played frequently with Louis Armstrong and wrote “Bourbon Street Parade,” one of the best-known songs in the New Orleans canon. And yet, no stranger walking into the Hogan Jazz Archive, located at Jones Hall on Tulane’s uptown campus, would guess that, or suspect any of the treasures that lie within the archive’s closed stacks. It’s quiet in here. Like, “Twin-Peaks’’-David-Lynchwhat’s-gonna-happen-next quiet. Less really is more when it comes to noise in a place where people are trying to think. But the archivists fill the void—Alaina Hebert, Lynn Abbott and, for more than 40 years, curator Bruce Raeburn. They steer visitors to materials that might excite them. They also send visitors to the archive’s glass-encased listening rooms to hear recordings at full blast (OK, full-ish). Researchers from the entire jazz diaspora come to consult with them—Europe, Japan, Australia, China, Canada, Alaska, the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, Pontchartrain Park and even Dixon Hall on Tulane’s campus. For Sakakeeny, input from Hogan archivists led to an unexpected discovery. While researching his 2013 book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans, Sakakeeny found evidence that shed new light on old assumptions about New Orleans brass band music. Like nearly everyone else,
(Previous page) Kid Ory’s Band—Ed “Montudie” Garland, Buster Wilson, Edward “Kid” Ory and Archie Rosati. (This page, left to right) Isidore Barbarin and Danny Barker. (Facing page) Richard “Dick” Allen interviews bassist Alcide “Slow Drag” Pavageau, with William “Bill” Russell.
PHOTO BY RALSTON CRAWFORD
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COURTESY JACK BRADLEY COLLECTION
* The Rebirth Brass Band’s 1989 song, “Feel Like Funkin’ It Up,” remains a popular favorite along the parade route in New Orleans. The song signaled a change from the traditional brass band repertoire, confirming a younger and sassier sound.
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PHOTO BY BILL SIMMONS, COURTESY FORD FOUNDATION COLLECTION
he’d thought the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth brass bands were transformative—the first to build their repertoires from popular, danceable, radio-friendly music. But the fabled Olympia Brass Band, a favorite of traditional jazz purists, apparently felt like funkin’ it up,* as well. Archivists at the Hogan showed Sakakeeny vertical files of news clippings, songs and other ephemera that revealed a friskier Olympia. Turns out, they were doing what the younger Dirty Dozen and Rebirth were doing, but more than 20 years earlier. “They were the hot, new, current band of the 1950s when Fats Domino and Professor Longhair and Dave Bartholomew were making New Orleans the center of R&B and soul and eventually funk music,” Sakakeeny said. “Olympia was playing that style of music in this ancient brass band ensemble. So I realized the story of the Olympia being these tradition-bearers was only part of the story.” ALL PHOTOS COURTESY HOGAN JAZZ ARCHIVE
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Jazz Letters Jazz pianist and bandleader Jesse McBride is usually on the lookout for vinyl. After studying under the likes of Ellis Marsalis and multi-instrumentalist Harold Battiste at the University of New Orleans, McBride earned a master’s degree in musicology at Tulane in 2011 and is now a professor of practice. He takes his students to the Hogan, usually one at a time, and together they listen to vintage recordings and sometimes transcribe the melodies. “There are so many records that can never be put on a CD—and even CDs are really done now,” he said. “From the 1920s to the 1980s, there are some recordings that are only on LP, especially jazz recordings. Think about all the Cedar Walton records that got put out and how many will never be reproduced. Walton was a great pianist. He played with Art Blakey. He actually went to Dillard (University) with Harold and Ellis.”
McBride asks his students what they want to hear and then pushes them toward a warren of rabbit holes. Case in point—the Tulane undergraduate listening to stride piano player James P. Johnson, the man who taught Fats Waller and accompanied Bessie Smith on “Backwater Blues.” Johnson wrote popular and classical music, including an opera in one act with librettist Langston Hughes. “(My student) was listening to ‘Carolina Shout.’ That’s a great tune,” McBride said. “I said, ‘I know a place where we can go listen on LP, because you might want to hear it the way it came out, when it was released. Then, in looking through those James P. records, we can just see who’s around there alphabetically. If Johnson is there, ‘H’ ain’t too far. Go to (pianist Earl) ‘Fatha’ Hines and check out his records. ‘L’ ain’t too far. Check you out some Lil Hardin playing on a Louis Armstrong record. Or, let’s maybe explore and see if anybody has 25 9/6/18 5:35 PM
“ If Johnson is there, ‘H’ ain’t too far. Go to (pianist Earl) ‘Fatha’ Hines and check out his records. ‘L’ ain’t too far. Check you out some Lil Hardin playing on a Louis Armstrong record.” JESSE MCBRIDE
recorded ‘Carolina Shout’ in a different era. Or we could hear someone that was influenced by Johnson.’” McBride is also eager to contextualize the contributions of musicians whose lifework reflects the often troubled times in which they lived—segregation, ill health, personal danger. “They attacked Nat ‘King’ Cole onstage,” he said, alluding to a 1965 incident in Birmingham, Alabama, when Cole was singing to an all-white audience and segregationists rushed the stage, injuring his back. “They attacked Harold,” McBride said, remembering that his mentor—Harold Battiste—was evacuated from a concert in the South while touring with Sonny & Cher. Battiste—a black man—was their musical director. “He tells them stuff they need to hear,” said archivist Lynn Abbott. “He tells them the truth.” Down on the bottom floor of the archive, there’s an infinity of truth. Abbott opens a box plainly marked: Al Hirt papers, 1959–1977 MSS 006 Series 3: Correspondence Re: Lip Injury Box 5 of 8 In 1970, the Dixieland trumpeter’s career was in doubt. A flying brick split open Hirt’s lip during a carnival parade. The New York Times reported the incident in a story titled, “New Orleans Ends the Most Violent Mardi Gras Season in Years with 600 in Its Jail.” Hirt required stitches, which
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threatened his embouchure, and the outpouring of public support was immediate. But, like all good artifacts, the letters raise as many questions as the brick:
“You don’t have to be a jazz fanatic to get something deep out of here,” Abbott says, standing near blues writer Robert Palmer’s books. This is where to find tape of Harrison Verret, who taught his brother-in-law Fats Domino to play piano. Or every research note and draft of Just Mahalia, Baby, Laurraine Goreau’s 1975 biography of Mahalia Jackson. The Hogan negotiated for 20 years for Louis Prima’s papers and effects. His room is next door. And downstairs is a 45-rpm single from the blind guitar player Snooks Eaglin—his first—called “Jesus Will Fix It For You.” When Danny Barker’s personal archive drowned at his home in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina, his family and friends trusted the Hogan as the place to hold much of what was left. That’s why his hat is on the shelf downstairs. The fedora, Barker’s burgundy fez and the green cotton cap he wore for the 1987
From Vancouver, B.C., Canada: Big Al—Don’t lose your cool, man. —Small Al And from Iowa City, Iowa: Dear Mr. Hirt, I was shocked and sickened to hear of the tragic “accident” that befell you this week in New Orleans. It is surely a frightening thing how easy it is for someone insignificant and worthless to bring down someone great … I have read a good deal about Vitamin E in the prevention of rigid scar tissue … For you the prevention of bad scarring means your whole life … I have always loved hearing you play and I sincerely hope I may have the pleasure of hearing you for many years to come. — Sincerely best wishes, Marilyn Trumpp (Mrs. Donald G. Trumpp)
Voices in the Ether Hogan archivists want to maintain their unmatched trove of oral histories online, so everyone can have access. They boast the best customer service of any jazz archive anywhere in the world. It’s fun coming down here. With their reference request forms in triplicate and neatly stacked stacks, Hebert and Abbott create an environment in which all manner of connections can be made.
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TV movie, “A Gathering of Old Men,” are reminders of the many months I spent researching him for The Historic New Orleans Collection. In 2016, editors were reissuing his memoir, A Life in Jazz, and needed a new introduction. I didn’t see the hats back then. But other, first-person material made Barker, who died in 1994, seem as alive as ever. His voice is on tape. And hearing a voice beats reading a transcript any day. That could be why the silence here helps. It allows sounds that are carrying over generations a chance to be heard. Ever hear Alice Zeno, mother of the traditional jazz clarinet player George Lewis, speaking on tape? It’s Alaina Hebert’s favorite oral history. Mrs. Zeno says she was born on June 7, 1864, but it’s more likely she was born in 1865, less than two months after the end of the Civil War. Her mother and grandmother were slaves. When she speaks with jazz historians Bill Russell and Dick Allen, she’s about 94 years old.
But the way she speaks! French was Mrs. Zeno’s mother tongue. She was also conversant in English, Creole, German, Spanish and some Wolof—the language of her ancestors in West Africa. On the tape, she often sounds like a grown man’s mother. But then, she can sound like a darling young girl: Alice Zeno: “Sometimes, when I see George look(ing) down, then I begin to sing to cheer him up.” Bill Russell: “Could you sing a part of a little song like that right now, or even hum it?” Alice Zeno: “Anything would come to my mind. Ah, yes, them was the good ole days. We think we have it hard now. No, no … ” “Maybe simpler times with family is what she’s talking about,” Hebert said, “when you think about everything she lived through in her life and that she worked herself almost to death to raise George (Lewis)
Members of the Olympia Brass Band—Kid Thomas Valentine, Milton Batiste, Josiah “Cie” Frazier, Ernie Cagnolatti and Henry “Booker T” Glass— perform during the funeral of Papa John Joseph.
and provide him with an instrument on a maid’s wages. She’d lost several children, some were stillborn, some died in infancy, so she had that on her mind. Her mother told her, ‘If you call him “George” it’ll bring good luck and he’ll live.’” The archive doesn’t tape new oral histories anymore, which ethnomusicologist Matt Sakakeeny is hoping will change. He’d like to see more modern musicians, bands and people of interest represented and stronger collaborative ties with other archives in the city. Whether that happens will depend on university leaders, the director of special collections and the successor as curator to Raeburn, who retired this year. In the meantime, Hebert and Abbott are keeping up the customer service. “One of the missing links of the New Orleans brass band tradition is, how did the music sound during the origins of jazz,” Sakakeeny said. “I brought this question to the archivists at the Hogan Jazz Archive, and they said, ‘We recently discovered film footage of a 1920s Mardi Gras parade.’ Well, who cares, right? Almost all 1920s film footage is silent. Well, we watch the video and for some odd reason there is sound.” The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club hired a brass band for their parade on Carnival Day, circa 1928, Sakakeeny said. “And you hear maybe 15 seconds of brass band music. Very little melody going on, but what do you hear? You hear the bass drum playing what in New Orleans we call the ‘Big 4,’ the four-beat—Duh. Duh. Duh. DUH-DUH! We knew we were onto something when we thought that brass band and jazz musicians were playing this syncopated, African-derived, polyrhythmic music back in the teens and ’20s. But we couldn’t actually prove it. And now, we have these 10 to 15 seconds of audio only because people with a lot more patience than me are combing through the artifacts that are available.” So, never mind the silence. Rewards await. Anything can happen at the Hogan. Gwen Thompkins is a New Orleans-based journalist and host of the weekly public radio show “Music Inside Out.” musicinsideout.org
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Lynda Benglis created The Wave of the World when she won a contest sponsored by the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans. Owned by the city of Kenner, Louisiana, The Wave of the World sat in disrepair for years after Katrina until the Helis Foundation funded its restoration. The sculpture/ fountain is now on display in a City Park lagoon by the New Orleans Museum of Art. BY LESLIE CARDÉ
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FEMINISTS IN THE VISUAL ARTS L
ynda Benglis was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana. As a child, she traveled the bayous, waterways and channels that led to the Gulf of Mexico. “I preferred being on the water,” she said. She liked thinking about nature. She’d make little boats from sticks, mossy forms and leaves. “All artists are in a kind of situation that patterns their early memories,” she said. Waves always intrigued her—“little Gulf waves because that’s the first that I saw.” A 1964 graduate of Newcomb College, Benglis was a student of artist Ida Kohlmeyer (NC ’33, G ’56). Benglis moved beyond New Orleans to become an internationally known artist—and the first truly feminist artist.
Radical Sculptor An iconic and iconoclastic feminist, Benglis took aim at the male-dominated art establishment of the 1970s. Not only did she flip the notion that so-called “feminine” values included passivity, modesty and gentility, she positively asserted her sexual and cultural power, and pushed for gender equality in the art world. “I’ve realized that what we’ve learned to do is repress our titillations or our feelings about what we see, and we call it taste,” explained Benglis. “What is the way we see, what do we respond to, without creating a taste that’s agreeable to everyone? I’m not trying to satisfy anyone.” Considered a radical, she pushed the boundaries of traditional art-making materials. Forsaking canvas when she poured PHOTOGRAPH BY CRISTA ROCK
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gallons of latex paint directly on the floor of a New York gallery to create Self-portrait in 1970, Benglis was a stark contrast to the fashionable art of the day. By pouring effervescent industrial foam material used in insulation over chicken-wire molds, she produced what looked like lava flows. This process led her to the stunningly layered wave effect seen in the avant-garde sculpture/fountain The Wave of the World (1983–84). “In color, form and content, her art was a major departure from the dominant trend towards minimalism at the time,” said Katie Pfohl, curator of modern and contemporary art at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). “At a moment in the art world in which many male artists were working a very restrained palette of black and white, and with very geometric minimalist form, her large pours in hot pink, electric yellow and royal blue were shocking. Lynda really did fly in the face of traditions both as a female artist entering the male-dominated world of large-scale sculpture, casting and welding, and as an artist who wholly embraced sexuality 29 9/6/18 5:37 PM
and the body. I would consider Lynda Benglis one of the best-known female sculptors of her generation.” Tulane adjunct professor of art and New Orleans native Nicole Charbonnet, whose unusual work is exhibited at NOMA, as well as in galleries in New Orleans, New York and Santa Fe, says she doesn’t consider herself a feminist artist, per se, but says she’s well aware of how far female artists have come, thanks to the trailblazers. Not surprisingly, the heart of Charbonnet’s art harkens back to a very female persuasion. “My art starts with a collage very much like quilting,” said Charbonnet. “My grandmother quilted, and as I watched her I realized that you could take so-called trash and turn it into something whole and usable,” remembered Charbonnet. “As a female, you learn this craft through osmosis. I grew up in the South, and, as a woman, got scraps from society. As any minority or disenfranchised group, you learn to make something out of what you’re given, and for me, it has always been a metaphor.” The current generation of female artists has entered a more accepting and inviting world, albeit a challenging one in the wake of today’s edgy political climate. They will not settle for scraps or leftovers.
Femaissance “It was after the Women’s March in 2017, the hope for the first female president had been dashed, and suddenly an opportunity for a guest curation for an all-female art exhibit at a gallery on Royal Street presented itself,” said Madeline Rose, a 2015 Tulane graduate and content creator, whose history includes an internship in marketing and digital media at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. “Over coffee with my best friend, it was decided we’d embark on this new venture, providing a platform for female artists in an
“ All artists are in a kind of situation that patterns their early memories.” as-yet-untitled femme space. The idea was that I would tell a narrative, based on my art history background, that would include themes of female identity, and the concept
of equality and inclusivity from different angles, and Halle would handle the event direction.” Halle is Halle Kaplan-Allen, also a 2015 Tulane University grad, who majored in sociology and communication. Her ideas about bringing the community together in terms of social justice issues were a perfect melding with the original project at the French Quarter Gallery. “We set about finding female artists on Instagram and looked for works that would bring attention to many of society’s inequities,” explained Kaplan-Allen. “Along the way, we knew we needed a special name under whose umbrella we could position these works of art. When Maddy called me and said she had come up with the name Femaissance, a mashup of words alluding to a female renaissance, we knew we had hit on something.” “Femaissance” opened in November 2017 at the Oleander on Royal in the French Quarter, and enticed visitors with a poster featuring Shelby Little’s painting, Lilith, whose namesake had a personal meaning for Rose. “In the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, there’s a large sculpture called Lilith, created by Kiki Smith in 1994. I went to high school across the street from the Met, so was always familiar with this work,” said Rose. “Lilith is the personification of the snake that tempted Eve throughout the history of art, particularly since the Renaissance. Lilith tempting Eve, therefore, is probably the first-ever example of women being pitted against one another, particularly over a man.” This is the narrative from which Smith draws in her piece. “Eve is the genesis of how society often treats women who buck tradition,” said Rose. “And, this painting of Shelby’s not only referenced Lilith, but humanized her. Stylistically, it paid homage to Matisse, Manet and Rousseau. And since ‘Femaissance’ was about rebirth and renewal, it seemed like a perfect fit to lead our story.” The exhibit encompassed a variety of surprising art, which had implications well beyond the aesthetic of their mediums, be it paint on canvas or photography. “Artist Emily Ferretti did a piece called Egg Boobs,” explained Kaplan-Allen. “She photographed women’s naked chests with fried eggs on their nipples, alluding to Instagram’s censoring of the female body part. The eggs over her actual anatomy, ironically, made the photos ‘acceptable’ on the photo-sharing site.”
(This page) “Femaissance: Primavera” exhibit opens in the French Quarter during festival season in April 2018. (Facing page, left to right) Femaissance co-founders Madeline Rose and Halle KaplanAllen, Proserpina by Anna Koeferl and Rape of Proserpina I by Kayla Wroblewski.
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So successful was the exhibit that another one followed on its heels, this one called “Femaissance: Primavera” … the word primavera meaning spring in many of the romance languages and signaling a rebirth of ideas. “We opened in mid-April 2018,” said Kaplan-Allen, “which overlapped with festival season here in New Orleans, and we had gotten an incredible mention in Vogue in an article called ‘What To Do in New Orleans While You’re There for Jazz Fest.’ ” Inspired by Botticelli’s Primavera, a Renaissance painting, the show was a nod to the accomplishments of women who shaped New Orleans’ post-Katrina renaissance, but most importantly, the exhibit was all about providing a safe haven for women in an artistic space that spoke to a whole array of feminine issues. “During ‘Femaissance: Primavera,’ so many women walked in and told us their most intimate stories,” recounted Rose. “Drawn in by the welcoming pink walls in the gallery, women felt comfortable sharing their stories about the struggles of womanhood. The space seemed to invite and encourage conversation. It certainly fueled our energy to make sure more shows keep happening.” Unable to use their previous venue in the Quarter, the Femaissance founders called their next show “Proserpina in Exodus,” after the Roman goddess of the Underworld, who is a life-death-rebirth deity. That installation PHOTO, TOP LEFT BY WILL BROWN
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was seen throughout the city in various female-owned small businesses through mid-September. In October, “Proserpina” as a full-scale exhibit comes to the Lighthouse Building, 743 Camp Street, in New Orleans’ Central Business District for the entire month. “You know, New Orleans is that rare midsized city where artists can actually make a living … particularly female artists,” said Michael Plante, professor of art history at Tulane. “Walk into any gallery and by and large you’ll see predominantly male artists. So, many women have moved on to galleries outside New Orleans to be a part of larger installations, reach bigger audiences and fetch heftier prices for their work in major cities like New York and Los Angeles. “Joan Mitchell is an important artist whose foundation funded an artist’s retreat in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans in 2015. At the time of her death in 1992, Mitchell’s abstract expressionist artwork was selling for around $200,000. Just recently, her auction prices went crazy … in the $25 million category. “Lynda Benglis has multiple homes around the world … in NYC, Santa Fe, Greece and India, and has virtually outgrown the marketplace in New Orleans, not in an artistic sense but because the number of people in this city who will buy artwork for a million dollars or more is limited,” explained Plante.
But, the founders of Femaissance— Rose from New York City originally and Kaplan-Allen from Washington, D.C.— have vowed to keep meaningful art in New Orleans accessible to the masses. “A lot of art is inaccessible for socioeconomic reasons, or it’s for a certain class of person, or it requires understanding in technical ways,” mused Kaplan-Allen. “Femaissance has turned that concept on its head. Yes, there are art history references in the pieces that will be in ‘Proserpina,’ but the art is for everyone and has a universal appeal … and we think that is really cool.” Feminist art burst on the scene decades ago, but art historians, curators and appraisers alike agree that it is here to stay.
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New Yorker, New York Times contributor and creative writing professor Thomas Beller reflects on arriving to teach at Tulane 10 years ago and making New Orleans his home.
BY T H O M A S B E L L E R
One night 10 years ago on Canal Street I am on Canal Street in my car late at night. Or perhaps it’s not late. But it’s dark. Even on Canal and Rampart streets, at the edge of the French Quarter, the darkness of New Orleans at night seems, to me, to be of a character and depth with which I am not familiar. I have just moved down to New Orleans from New York City to start teaching at Tulane, but I am without my wife and daughter, or any of my possessions except my car. Even the car, a used Audi A4, seems unfamiliar to me, having been driven down from New York City by a New Orleans local named Donna, with whom I shared a drink after she delivered the car. She is a French Quarter resident and tells me stories about how Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are adjusting to their new neighborhood. Jolie had wandered into a bar the other day and sat there for a couple of hours talking to everyone, she said. Donna’s voice is wispy and melodic—I guess you could say dreamy—and seems to contain information about my new city that goes beyond the words she is saying. I think of that dreamy-sounding voice a few days later when I am on the Claiborne Avenue overpass, near the Superdome, and a car on the otherwise empty road drifts out of its lane and almost hits me. I honk the horn, feel aggrieved, but a moment later, as I pull up beside the reckless driver at the red light, I see the window lowering and a woman at the wheel. She says, “I’m sorry. I’m just so tired,” in a way that is so genuine and 32
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civilized that all the driver venom—the most insane-making kind—that I was about to deliver, mostly through a glare, but perhaps with a few words to back it up, evaporates on contact with her remark. Her voice had the same wispy, melodic, almost childish quality as Donna’s. Now I am making a right on Rampart Street off Canal, there are no cars on either side or behind me, and I move slowly so I can look around. It is a dark, forlorn corner of the city. The Saenger Theatre, across the street, is shuttered and mute. Suddenly, the whole scene is lit by flashing blue lights. I look in the rearview mirror, see the police car and pull over to let it pass. To my amazement, it pulls in behind me. I wonder if it is possible to get a ticket for driving too slowly. The officer is a burly African-American who explains that I had made a right turn from the center lane. I tell him I hadn’t realized this and offer that I just moved here to teach at Tulane and still don’t know my way around—lobbying as much as possible, in other words, to be given a break on the ticket. “What do you do at Tulane?” he asks. “I’m a professor,” I say. “What do you teach?” “Creative writing.” “Interesting.” “It is?” “ Yeah.” “Why?” “Because I’ve been working on a novel.” “Really? What’s it about?” “Hard to say.” “Do you have a character?” I ask. “I don’t really have a character,” he says, “but I have a voice.” I am suddenly very interested in this guy. I want to know about the voice. In the ensuing bit of conversation, I more or less offer to look at his work should he ever want to show it to me. I want to report that I gave him my business card but I don’t think I even had a business card from Tulane at that point. At any rate, he had my license and knew my name. But I never heard from him. I have no idea if the voice was ever matched to a character on the page, or if the pages ever amounted to a manuscript, let alone a book. But I think about this guy, sometimes. I think about the way he looked wistfully down dark and empty Rampart Street and sighed after he told me about the book, as though his character was supposed to meet him on this very corner but was, once again, a no-show. He didn’t give me a ticket. 34
One night 10 years ago on State Street My first weeks in New Orleans were spent alone in a space that I now know to have been one side of a camelback shotgun, a modest-enough sounding description of real estate. To my eyes, it was a palace. Every time I entered it I felt elated that I could live in such a place for the first minute, but by the time I made it to the kitchen, in the back, I began to feel a bit strange. Part of what unnerved me was its scale—something like 2,000 square feet on two floors with a front porch and a patio in the back for about what a studio apartment on 11th Street in New York City had cost—but mostly the problem was that it was empty. There is something strange about living in an apartment with absolutely nothing in it besides you and some clothes and your laptop. Eventually, I bought a lamp and a towel and a pillow and set up a little nest for myself to sleep for the two nights a week I was in town. I was flying back to New York City every week to be with my wife and baby while we waited for Worldwide Moving to deliver our possessions. Like, for example, a bed. It wasn’t unreasonable for my wife to want to hold off coming down with the baby until we had something to sleep on, but her wariness extended to the perimeter of the reasonable, and maybe just beyond it. She kept insisting, for example, that there could be a hurricane. “Of course there could be a hurricane,” I said. “But we can’t organize our lives around the possibility.” “I just don’t want to go down there and have to fly right back up,” she said. So my first weeks at Tulane in the fall of 2008 involved my flying down on an empty plane and spending two nights in my empty empire on State Street sleeping on my towel. Then I flew back to New York on an empty plane. And then one day the airport was so packed with people it was like the fall of Saigon. My flight was booked and there was a crowd on standby. A hurricane had entered the gulf. Gustav. It hit New Orleans. I watched it all on TV in New York, an accidental evacuee. This hurricane’s distinguishing feature, in hindsight, was that there was a mandatory evacuation, and it was chaotic. I have a vivid memory of seeing a body of water lapping against and then overtopping—but gently, and just a little—the new walls that had been built at the 17th Street Canal, the very place that had collapsed during Katrina.
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It was a strange sensation. On one hand, I had nothing more to lose than a towel and a pillow. On the other hand, this was the scene of my immediate future. How far into the distance I didn’t know. But now I do, 10 years later. The commuting continued for almost another whole month because Worldwide Moving insisted the hurricane had made the requirement that they deliver our stuff within two weeks null and void. At first, I was understanding, then I was less understanding, then I was upset. And then I settled into a kind of pleasurable war against a guy named Aaron who ran the company out of a little office in Florida. You could put together a whole anthology of stories composed of baroque experiences with moving companies. Mine involved a single-minded harassment of Aaron by phone, fax, email, but mostly phone. I left a lot of messages. Like Saul Bellow’s Herzog, I felt a kind of liberation in going a little crazy, and the liberation took the form of monologues on the voicemail of Worldwide Moving. “Aaron, I am living alone in a white room with nothing in it,” is how one began. “What do you call a person who lives alone in a white room? No padding, but still. What do you call such a person? Crazy! Aaron, you call such a person a crazy person! My possessions must be delivered or this condition will only get worse!” It was during this time that I had my strange encounter with the policeman on State Street. He saw me walking haphazardly up the middle of the State Street at night and pulled the cruiser to the side of the road. He got out, summoned me over. I lifted my eyes from the ground and explained to him as best I could that I had lost my wallet and was looking for it. The officer was a white guy, burly, ginger hair in a center part. From his perspective, I was a large male walking in an agitated manner down the middle of the block, a bit unsteady, and this man was babbling something to him and declining to obey his request. So he restated it more forcefully, taking his hand off his hip and stepping into the street as though to say, “You come here, or I am coming there.” I cannot quote exactly what he said to me, but I remember the sudden chill I felt at realizing that I pissed off a cop. I am aware of a certain perversity in a white guy in Uptown New Orleans in 2008 expressing fear of a police officer, but it occurred to me that I seemed either crazy or drunk. I went over to him and started to explain. I was living in an empty apartment that is
so large it was disorienting, I said. I was commuting to and from New Orleans every week. I had embarked on a trip to Whole Foods with my wallet on the roof of my car. Now I was worried it had fallen off the roof while I was driving. I was looking for it on the route between my place on State Street and Whole Foods, etc.
... these merits—the warmth of human interaction, or the way that places, however imperfect, gather meaning and significance over time—are valuable. Maybe invaluable. He didn’t disbelieve me, exactly, but it was necessary for me to explain this for a while. Then he let me go on my way. The legacy of this event might have been the threat in his voice for that one moment, or it might have been the memory of me scanning the streets looking for my wallet, consumed by a panic that was exacerbated by the very act of looking, since who finds themselves in such positions other than crazy people or those who are too disorganized to be trusted with a wife and baby? But the legacy is that at some point, a police cruiser pulled behind me. It was the same cop. He asked if I had found it and when I said no, he said he would keep an eye out. And then 15 minutes later he was back again, behind me, now with the big police spotlight mounted on the side of his car, lighting up the street, rolling along behind me. We must have spent 10 minutes, maybe more, moving slowly down the street like this, me and my new buddy, looking in vain. In the end I went back home, trekked the considerable distance from the front door through the parlor room, the dining room, the living room, down the short hallway, past the bathroom, and into the kitchen, where my wallet was sitting on the kitchen counter.
The moss of civilization I recently read an article in the London Review of Books that talked about how automation and the coming digitization of the economy were problematic for civilization. For all the ways the new technology would save time and money, it argued, it would also uproot many longstanding relationships in the workplace—the presence of secretaries and clerical staff, for example—that, however inefficient, nevertheless have the ancillary benefit of a certain warmth in human relations that are maintained over time. One reads arguments about the downside of our digital world all the time and this one didn’t strike me as exceptional, except that it was weird to hear the word “secretary.” Then I realized that the article was published in 1994 and it became much more interesting. One line stood out, and I will quote from memory even if it’s a bit off: The moss of civilization takes time to gather, and it needs a stable foundation on which to grow. What he meant, I think, was that structures and systems that could be improved from an efficiency point of view have merits that are hard to perceive if all you are thinking about is efficiency, but these merits— the warmth of human interaction, or the way that places, however imperfect, gather meaning and significance over time—are valuable. Maybe invaluable. Which is like calling an artwork priceless—it doesn’t mean it has no value, just the opposite. You couldn’t match its value with money. I have lived with this image for a few months, and though it doesn’t pertain in any direct way to New Orleans or my time here, I can’t help but ponder it in that light. There is a season for everything. A time to be born and a time to die. And a time to live in New Orleans. And to feel that a world that once seemed empty of anything familiar has become populated by people and places that have meaning. Thomas Beller is an associate professor of English at Tulane. He is the author of Seduction Theory, a collection of stories; The Sleep-Over Artist, a novel that was a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2000; How To Be a Man: Scenes From a Protracted Boyhood, an essay collection; and J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, a biography that won the New York City Book Award for Biography/Memoir. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker’s Culture Desk, The New York Times and Travel + Leisure magazine. 35
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Wavemakers Record-Breaking Fundraising Year
T
ulane University again smashed its fundraising record, raising more than $150 million in the 2017–18 fiscal year, exceeding last year’s record-breaking year by nearly $25 million. Generosity takes audacity, and a record 25,000 of Tulane’s family of alumni, parents and friends have taken up the challenge of the “Only the Audacious” campaign with characteristic boldness. Since its launch on Dec. 8, 2017, the historic $1.3 billion campaign has rapidly gained momentum, shattering previous records and gaining more Tulane supporters than ever in the university’s 184-year history.
Almost 6,000 new donors joined in making a tremendous impact campuswide on students, campus research and faculty. President Michael A. Fitts cheered the achievements. “I am so proud that so many members of our community have taken up the challenge posed by ‘Only the Audacious’ and rallied around the campaign. Together, their heartfelt passion will bring about an even stronger, even bolder Tulane, and it’s so exciting to be a part of that transformation.”
ENDOWED SCHOLARSHIPS TOTAL COMMITMENTS
CAMPAIGN GOAL
1.3 BILLION $
TO DATE
$
99,565,984
$
CAMPAIGN GOAL
125 MILLION + FACULTY EXCELLENCE
914 MILLION
350
$
ENDOWED FACULTY POSITIONS
RAISED SO FAR
TO DATE CAMPAIGN GOAL
400
RESEARCH TOTAL RESEARCH COMMITMENTS TO DATE
$
214,711,596 4 OF 10 PRESIDENTIAL CHAIRS FUNDED TO DATE
ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT
44,886 ENGAGED ALUMNI
CAMPAIGN PROGRESS 36
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TO DATE CAMPAIGN GOAL
50,000
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New Donor Fund is Flexible, Easy
WAVEMAKERS
SCHOLARSHIP SUPPORTS DREAMS OF MED SCHOOL
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hen he was accepted to Tulane University School of Medicine, Dr. Hugh “Glenn” Barnett II knew that the cost of tuition might prevent him from attending the prestigious school. But a doctor who graduated almost five decades earlier, Dr. Julian Hawthorne, had established a bequest for scholarships that put Barnett’s dreams within reach. Now, on the occasion of his own 50th reunion, Barnett (A&S ’64, M ’68) and his wife, Karen, have made a generous gift to the legacy of Julian Hawthorne (M ’20), whose scholarship continues to give deserving future physicians the power to follow their own dreams by attending Tulane School of Medicine. “If not for the Hawthorne scholarship, I would probably not have been able to attend
Tulane School of Medicine,” said Barnett. “Tulane was a wonderful opportunity. The education and training I received prepared me for a satisfying and productive career in neurosurgery.” Over the years, Hawthorne’s scholarship award has been instrumental not only in Barnett’s life but in the lives of so many Tulane medical students. Eight Hawthorne scholarships were awarded in the 2017–18 academic year alone. While he was a medical student, Barnett attended a scholarship reception where he and fellow award recipients met Hawthorne’s wife, Agnes, an event that highlighted for him the personal impact of giving. Barnett is elated to bring Hawthorne’s generosity full circle through his recent gift, which will make the Hawthorne scholarship even more powerful. “I hope our gift helps students who are doing well but might not be able to attend Tulane otherwise,” Barnett said. “Tulane was a great experience for me, and it’s a good feeling to share with others.”
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hen alumni Alan and Katy Stone first met during freshman orientation, Tulane was set to play an important role in their shared future. Now, the couple want to play a part in supporting the university’s future. They chose to establish a Tulane Donor Advised Fund as an easy and effective way to streamline their generous support. “We truly grew up together, and we did it here at Tulane. Tulane is very sentimental for us,” said Alan (E ’83, L ’87). He and Katy (E ’83) were each fortunate enough to have a professor who mentored them and became invested in their success. “Having someone take an interest in us and our path was incredibly important and helpful to us.” Katy became interested in creating a donor-advised fund as soon as she learned that the Office of Gift Planning was establishing one specifically for Tulane donors. The vehicle proved an ideal way for the dedicated and generous Tulane supporters to have their contribution professionally managed while continuing to support a wide range of passions at Tulane—and all from a single account. “I think it’s a good way to give,” Alan said. They support a variety of university initiatives, including the Waldrup-Crosby diversity scholarship at Tulane Law School and STEM programs at the School of Science and Engineering. “The bedrock of our society is education, but without people giving of themselves in time and money, it won’t survive.” The couple is on the Tri-State National Campaign Council for the “Only the Audacious” campaign, and they are confident about Tulane’s bold future. “I like the idea of being audacious,” Alan said. “I think Tulane has a bright future; I think it will continue to distinguish itself as a research institution.” Katy and Alan enjoy working with the staff at the Office of Gift Planning, who made it easy to establish their donor-advised fund and take the next step in their giving strategy. “They’re not only great, they’re great fun,” Alan said. “It’s a great team.”
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WAVEMAKERS
Priddy Family Foundation Pledges $1 Million to Tulane Brain Institute
T
ulane University’s Brain Institute received a $1 million pledge from the Priddy Family Foundation to endow and establish the Priddy Family Spark Research Endowed Fund. The fund will provide competitive awards to faculty for research support that advances the research priorities of the brain institute. “We are excited about our involvement with the Tulane Brain Institute and are honored to be a part of such a great undertaking,” said Robert Priddy (UC ’68). “After years in venture capital, I know when I see a quality venture, and investing in early-stage scientific research at Tulane will have tremendous returns for humanity in the future.” The criteria for awards from the Priddy Family Spark Research Endowed Fund will be based on the scientific merit of the project, the potential to elevate the national visibility and reputation of the Tulane Brain Institute, and the capacity for future support from competitive national funding agencies. “Robert Priddy is one of our most distinguished and loyal alumni. He and his wife, Kikie, share a passion for encouraging academic excellence at all levels—from K–12 to graduate school and beyond,” said Tulane President Mike Fitts. “This latest act of generosity from the Priddy Family Foundation will provide opportunities for Tulane students to join the efforts of Tulane Brain Institute researchers in exploring age-related dementias and other neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, post-traumatic stress, autism, schizophrenia and a host of other issues critical to understanding the brain and improving lives worldwide.” The awards will support early-stage research and bridge funding, including stipends for graduate and undergraduate research assistants. “We are so grateful to the Priddy family for this incredible gift and their belief in the work that we are doing at the Tulane Brain Institute,” said Jill M. Daniel, the Gary P. Dohanich Professor in Brain Science and director of the institute. “Having this permanent source of research support for our faculty will enhance our ability to attract and retain the top neuroscientists in the country.” “This remarkable gift will allow the Tulane Brain Institute faculty to take risks in their research as they test early-stage ideas and gather pilot data to increase their competitiveness for external funding,” said Laura Levy, vice 38
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“The gift will provide long-term support for the kind of bold and innovative research that could lead to real breakthroughs in our ability to understand and treat brain disease.” Laura Levy, vice president of research
president for research at Tulane. “The gift will provide long-term support for the kind of bold and innovative research that could lead to real breakthroughs in our ability to understand and treat brain disease.” Robert Priddy spent 30-plus years in aviation, starting three airlines from scratch, all of which were successful operations and ultimately sold to larger airlines. He then spent several years in personal venture-capital investing before co-founding Comvest Investment Partners, a private equity fund managing over $3 billion in assets in both equity and debt funds. Since retiring, he manages his personal investments as chairman of RMC Capital, LLC.
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Tulanians
Submit your news to alumni.tulane.edu/news and follow @tulanealumni on Facebook to share your memories and join the conversation.
When did you first consider yourself a Tulanian?
When Camellia Grill accepted my check in payment for my omelette as long as I had Tulane ID. Timothy Rood, A&S ’84
My first Tulane football game in the Superdome, 1982, cheering on the Green Wave with my suitemates from Phelps Hall. Michael Gross, A&S ’86, M ’90
HELLO WAVE Philadelphia-area alumni gather at the home of current parents Lindy Snider and Larry Kaiser (A&S ’74, M ’77) to welcome first-year students from Philadelphia to the Tulane family on Aug. 1, 2018.
1960 1969 ROBERT D. “BOB” LAWRENCE JR. (A&S ’60)
held a book signing of his work, Bogalusa Memories: A Conversation With Bob Lawrence, in July at the B&C Hall in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The book discusses the history of the city, which was founded on Oct. 17, 1908, when the largest sawmill in the world, the Great Southern Lumber Co., started operations. The company built Bogalusa from scratch in the middle of a 600,000-acre pine forest in only nine months, giving it the nickname “The Magic City.” The book covers the loss of individualism by pioneers turned mill
workers and explores their dependency on the company. Lawrence is a former editor of the Bogalusa Daily News and a civic activist. ELIZABETH BUTLER MOORE (NC ’60) and ALICE COUVILLON (NC ’71, G ’72)
have written several successful children’s books together, including Mimi’s First Mardi Gras, Mimi and Jean-Paul’s Cajun Mardi Gras, and Louisiana Indian Tales. For 30 years, Moore also worked as a columnist for the St. Tammany community news sections of The Times-Picayune. EUCLID A. ISBELL JR. (M ’62) is the
author of The Humor and Wisdom of the Aged, a comedic collection of stories from elders.
After 46 years of work in the oilfield service industry, RICHARD E. ROGERS (A&S ’69) published a memoir called Growing Up To Be In The Oilfield, A Seventy Year Journey. 1970 1979
Routledge published Digital Healing: People, Information and Healthcare, a book by MARC RINGEL (A&S ’70). Ringel considers the work to be a significant piece of his legacy as a longtime practicing physician and teacher.
Hearing the streetcar chugging along during freshman English class in the basement of Gibson. Stephanie Yoo, B ’90 The comments above answer a question posted on Facebook by the Tulane University Alumni Association. Connect with TUAA at facebook.com/tulanealumni.
Fulbright Scholarship honoree SCOTT KELLERMANN (M ’71, PHTM ’78) returned to the United States after a nine-month Continued on page 41
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AMPERSAND ALONG FOR THE RIDE
BRYAN BATT
ACTOR & AUTHOR
Actor Bryan Batt (A&S ’87) knows that a career in show business can have as many twists and turns as a carnival ride. “My career and life have been like a roller coaster, but considering my family, that’s just perfect, and I love it!,” said the native New Orleanian, whose inherent sunny outlook and fondness for thrills is heavily influenced by his childhood spent at Pontchartrain Beach, the iconic local amusement park owned and operated by his family from 1928 through 1983. “My maternal grandmother, Hazel, was a well-known dance teacher in New Orleans, and my paternal grandfather, Harry Batt Sr., founded Pontchartrain Beach. Somewhere down the line, I developed this same affinity for entertainment,” said Batt.
After graduating from Tulane in 1985 with a bachelor of arts degree in theatre, Batt brought Big Easy charm to New York stages. Batt landed leading and principal roles in beloved Broadway standards like Sunset Boulevard, Cats and Beauty and the Beast. He next plans to work on staging Dear Mr. Williams, a show that he wrote exclusively for the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. Batt has also appeared on both the small screen and silver screen. His portrayal of Salvatore Romano on AMC’s lauded drama series “Mad Men” earned him two Screen Actors Guild Awards. This October, Batt will play the role of a clairvoyant in need of an exorcism in Tales From the Hood 2. The sequel to the 1995 cult film favorite is executive produced by Spike Lee. Batt is also set to appear in another horror film called Darlin’ and has started filming a new movie called American Reject, a comedy centered on a cast-off contestant from a reality singing competition.
BEACH READ Before he ever opened the storied Art Deco-inspired Midway at the end of New Orleans’ Elysian Fields Avenue, Bryan Batt’s grandfather was known for a different line of work. Harry Batt Sr. founded the Home Ice Company and often delivered ice to Newcomb College and Tulane University during sweltering temperatures. After the success of his first two books, She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Mother: A Memoir 40
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and Big, Easy Style: Creating Rooms You Love to Live In, which he co-authored with Katy Danos (NC ’85), Bryan Batt decided to chronicle his grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit through the story of how “the iceman became a showman.” Batt received inspiration to pen the work after sifting through stowed-away items kept in his mother’s garage after she passed away. “My brother and I thought we were going to find Jimmy Hoffa in there,” joked Batt. “She kept tons of boxes from my father’s Pontchartrain Beach office—stuff that was previously not seen before.” After discovering his grandmother Marguerite’s journals and copies of the beach’s newspaper, Breezy Brevities, in the mix of park memorabilia, Batt once again collaborated with Danos to highlight the glory days of the Midway in a new book called Pontchartrain Beach: A Family Affair. “It all came together last summer. We hunkered down and turned Katy’s living room into our work space,” said Batt. “Pontchartrain Beach was part of my very being. It was such a beloved New Orleans institution and was in our family for the entire length of its run,” added Batt. “I was 14 years old when my grandfather passed away. I didn’t realize the impact that he had made until doing research for this book. He was an incredible man.” The work features photos, stories and commentary covering the park ’s illustrious history. “People who are not from New Orleans or who never visited Pontchartrain Beach will still enjoy the book, because we all share similar memories of our local amusement park,” said Batt. Pontchartrain Beach: A Family Affair (Pelican Publishing) will be released this fall.
Continued from page 39
period of teaching at the Uganda Nursing School, which he founded. He also received the New York University School of Dentistry’s Harry Strusser Memorial Award for Excellence in Public Health, and the American Medical Association’s Nathan Davis Award for Excellence in Medicine. He will teach global health and tropical medicine at the University of San Francisco. In March, SHIRLEY SPARKS-GREIF (G ’71) published an article, “A family-centered program to break the cycle of addiction,” in Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services. She is an associate professor emerita at Western Michigan University. MARLENE ESKIND MOSES (NC ’72, SW ’73) is an internationally recog-
nized family law expert and founding manager of MTR Family Law PLLC in Nashville, Tennessee. She was elected as president-elect of the International Academy of Family Lawyers (IAFL) during its annual meeting in Tokyo. IAFL is a worldwide association of practicing lawyers who are recognized by their peers as the most experienced family law specialists in their respective countries. CYNTHIA SHOSS (NC ’72, L ’74) was
inducted into the Tulane Law School Hall of Fame on May 10, 2018. Shoss is co-chair of the Global Insurance Group at the law firm Eversheds Sutherland in New York. SHERRY KARVER (G ’78), an art instructor
at Laney College in Oakland, California, was honored to be featured alongside other artists from all over the world in the 40th issue of international magazine Art Reveal. 1980 1989 CYNTHIA MAHMOOD (G ’81, ’86) serves as
the Frank Moore Chair in Anthropology at Central College in Pella, Iowa. Specializing in the study of political violence, Mahmood was previously a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and at the University of Maine. She has published six books and dozens of articles. JOSE R. COT (A&S ’85, L ’88), a part-
District of Louisiana. He will serve a three-year term. The committee assists with the administration of lawyer disciplinary enforcement. PETER URBANOWICZ (A&S ’85, L ’89) was
appointed to serve as chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in January 2018 following the Senate confirmation of Alex M. Azar II as HHS secretary. He is responsible for coordinating the efforts of all operating and staff divisions. The HHS portfolio includes all of the federal government’s key healthcare payment, social services and public health activities. Urbanowicz was previously a managing director with Alvarez & Marsal. During the administration of President George W. Bush, he served as principal deputy general counsel at HHS. CASSIE WORLEY (NC ’85) is fulfilling
duties as vice president and secretary for the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity board of directors. Following serving two years at the U.S. Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, PAUL FRIEDRICHS (A&S ’86) was promoted to brigadier general and assigned as command surgeon at Air Combat Command. REV. LARRY M. JAMES (G ’86) published House Rules: Insights for Innovative Leaders. He also received the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council’s Distinguished Health Service Award. DAVID KUSHNER (A&S ’86, M ’89) col-
laborated with Tulane professor of anthropology John Verano and ANNE TITELBAUM (SLA ’08, ’12), an assistant professor of anatomy at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, to publish a study called “Trepanation Procedures/Outcomes: Comparison of Prehistoric Peru With Other Ancient, Medieval, and American Civil War Cranial Surgery.” The work examines trepanation—an early type of skull surgery—practices in Peru over a period of nearly 2,000 years and presents data on trepanation demographics, techniques and survival rates collected through the analysis of more than 800 trepanned skulls discovered in Peru through field studies and through the courtesy of museums and private collections in the United States and Peru.
ner at Hurley & Cot APLC in New Orleans, was appointed to the Lawyer Disciplinary Committee of the Eastern
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TULANIANS continued Submit your news to alumni.tulane.edu/news and follow @tulanealumni on Facebook to join the conversation.
1990 1999 TYLER NICHOLS (B ’90) , a Tulane
Alumni Business Association board member, was named as a member of the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity board of directors. Habitat for Humanity works with sponsors, volunteers and communities to eliminate poverty housing. KEVIN BARRON (B ’92) achieved the
status of certified revenue cycle leader through Healthcare Business Insights. This certification is awarded after the completion of 29 educational modules and a comprehensive examination, and is recognized with the professional credential of “CRCL.” Based in San Antonio, Barron is also a fellow of the College of American Health Care Executives and a fellow of the Healthcare Financial Management Association. PEGGY SCOTT (B ’92) received the Society
of Louisiana CPAs’ Lifetime Membership Award to recognize her extensive record of achievement to benefit the future of CPAs throughout Louisiana. A pioneer in her field, she became the first female office-managing partner
where she previously served as chair and CEO. She is also on the LSU College of Business Dean’s Advisory Council. RHONDA WELLER-STILSON (G ’92) serves
as the inaugural dean of the newly formed Holland College of Arts and Media at Southeast Missouri State University.
God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State is a new work of nonfiction by Lawrence Wright (A&S ’69), Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower. Wright’s book incorporates material from his New Yorker works and Texas Monthly articles.
Boston office of Brown Advisory as a portfolio manager, where she will construct custom discretionary investment portfolios to help the firm’s clients manage their strategic investments and asset allocations. She brings more than two decades of experience in the wealth management industry and was previously the chief investment officer at Sandy Cove Advisors in Hingham, Massachusetts. DEBORAH ROTH LEDLEY (NC ’94) had two books published — The Worry Workbook for Kids: Helping Children to Overcome Anxiety and the Fear of Uncertainty and Making Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Work: Clinical Process for New Practitioners. Since 2006, Ledley has been in private practice in Philadelphia, where she primarily works with patients combatting anxiety disorders. She says she still has very fond feelings for Tulane, and a group of her best friends from college just attended her daughter’s bat mitzvah.
to senior vice president at Shore Fire Media, a boutique public relations and online marketing firm with offices in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, New York; and Nashville, Tennessee. Hanks began working with Shore Fire Media in 2000 after working at Autotonic, a public relations and radio promotion company, and New York City–based record store Other Music. He lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood
with the accounting firm of Deloitte. She also held executive roles in health care, including chief operating officer and chief financial officer at Blue Cross. Scott is now board chair for Cleco and is on the Blue Cross Foundation board,
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UNPARALLELED POET
KATE SALTONSTALL (B ’93) joined the
MATT HANKS (TC ’95) has been promoted
LONE STAR STATE OF MIND
When did you first consider yourself a Tulanian?
Doing community work as a member of CACTUS. Selarstean Magee Mitchell, NC ’76, B ’01
Written in the spirited voice of Sarah Richards Doerries (NC ’92), Watch Your Trees is her posthumously published collection of poems. Doerries taught creative writing at Tulane and served as assistant director of Tulane College Student and Alumni Programs and as assistant dean of the Newcomb-Tulane College Office of Cocurricular Programs.
of Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two daughters.
I took the campus tour before applying, and after it was done, a random set of parents and their kid started asking me questions about Tulane. Since I had just toured that morning, I could answer everything they happened to ask. It was great—they thought I was already a student, and in a few months, I actually was ;) Lua Walter, NC ’04, M ’11
The comments above answer a question posted on Facebook by the Tulane University Alumni Association. Connect with TUAA at facebook.com/ tulanealumni.
BUSINESS GRAD’S BIRTHDAY
Marie Louise Tureaud Grosch (B ’49) will be celebrating her 90th birthday on Oct. 16, 2018. She will honor the special occasion during a family reunion taking place at Thanksgiving. She is very proud of her Tulane degree, and her family believes that she may be one of the oldest living female business graduates from the original College of Commerce and Business Administration.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan selected JASON STANEK (TC ’97), a longtime federal civil servant and Capitol Hill adviser, to serve as the next chairman of the state’s Public Service Commission — the body that sets utility rates across the state, reviews plans for large power plants and oversees regulation of taxis and other common carriers. Stanek is senior counsel to a U.S. House of Representatives energy subcommittee. For 16 years, he worked for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. CHRISTINE TENLEY (L ’98) joined the Atlanta office of Burr & Forman LLP as a partner in the firm’s labor and employment practice group. She is an employment litigator with a wide variety of first chair experience in employment discrimination, traditional labor, wage and hour, and restrictive covenants and trade secrets litigation. Tenley represents a variety of companies, ranging from small businesses to international corporations.
2000 2009 THOMAS MULLIGAN (TC ’01, SLA ’07, ’15) is on the faculty of Georgetown
University’s McDonough School of Business. His book, Justice and the Meritocratic State, was published by Routledge and discusses hot-button political issues and makes concrete policy recommendations. These issues
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include anti-meritocratic bias against women and racial minorities and the United States’ widening economic inequality. The work will be of keen interest to philosophers, economists and political theorists.
STYLE GUIDE A Practical Guide to Fashion Law and Compliance, a new book by Deanna Clark-Esposito, Esq. (L ’02), provides a fresh approach to building a fashion business. Released by Fairchild Books of Bloomsbury Publishing, the comprehensive text offers guidance on how to implement the law into day-to-day business operations and examines significant current issues impacting the fashion industry.
In May 2018, MATTHEW CHARLES CARDINALE (TC ’02) received his law degree, graduating magna cum laude from Gonzaga University. Cardinale says that Jean Danielson, the late director of the honors program at Tulane and associate professor of political science, initially advised him to get a JD several years ago. Cardinale currently lives in Atlanta, where he drafts legislation for local council members and governments. BILL JONES (B ’03) teamed up with fellow alumnus ALBERT MACK (UC ’04)
to create TBD Management Group, a management and investment firm specializing in mergers, acquisitions and operations of companies that provide mission-critical products, services and solutions in diverse industries. Jones, who serves as the firm’s chief financial officer, lives in the Las Vegas area with his wife and two children. KATIE JONES (B ’04) was recently named
a partner at the law firm of Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP, where she focuses her practice on civil litigation, particularly in product liability defense. Jones lives in Stuttgart, Germany. She and her husband welcomed their first child.
IMPRESSION
CATHERINE FRESHLEY
A
s a painter, Catherine Freshley (SLA ’09) puts the familiar into focus. The Portland, Oregon, native’s acrylic landscapes capture the vast beauty of her natural surroundings, rendering expansive sunsets that blanket plains in luminous color or endless open roads accompanied only by drifting clouds ahead. “They’re never really extraordinary or remarkable scenes. I just feel like I have to document them. I think I’ve always felt a really strong connection to place and to land,” she said. While attending Tulane, Freshley felt that same drive to preserve places but worked in a different medium—creative writing. As a double major in economics and English, Freshley centered her creative writing thesis on how the concept of home is represented in literature. “My thesis was about this place that’s really important to me—this tiny, idyllic town on the Washington coast, where my dad grew up and where my sister and I spent our summers,” she said. “I was always gripped with this fear that it would go away and that these natural places that were formative in my life would be consumed by new development or cease to exist. I just had to save it in my writing.” After graduating, Freshley began her career working in digital advertising and brand strategy at Peter A. Mayer Advertising in New Orleans. In her spare time, she explored her lifelong interest in art, utilizing canvases as time capsules PHOTO BY NICOLE FRESHLEY
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to conserve austere yet exquisite spaces. “Advertising was a great way to combine my creative and artistic interests with a business mindset,” she said. “That experience taught me everything I needed to know about how to market and make sales as an artist.” After working with the agency for seven years, she departed in March 2016 to fully devote her time to painting. “For me, painting and making art are not really negotiable. I have to do it,” said Freshley. “I also want to dispel the ‘starving artist’ idea and help other artists understand that it is possible to make a living.” Freshley compiles helpful advice and tips about her experiences on her website (catherinefreshleyart.com) in a series of blog posts for fellow artists. Now living in Wichita, Kansas, Freshley steadily sells paintings and prints. She has also undertaken some notable commissions, including artwork (“Oklahoma Sunset,” above) for the NBA team Oklahoma City Thunder. As part of its 10th-anniversary celebration, the team commissioned several artists to create original works for the Founders’ Lounge Hallway in the Chesapeake Energy Arena. Freshley stretched a sprawling late-fall sunset across a large triptych. Dappled with the team’s colors of blue and orange, the striking sky illuminates the three canvases. “The Thunder is not just Oklahoma City’s team; it’s really the state’s team. Much of the state is rural and driven by agriculture and ranching, so my art seemed like an appropriate way to speak to the state’s heritage and the current life of so many residents,” said Freshley.
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TULANIANS continued
KATE PARKER HORIGAN (PHTM ’06, ’13)
published a book called Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative. Based on long-term research that Horigan began when she was a student at Tulane, her work examines survivors’ narration and commemoration of large-scale disasters.
TIMELESS TRADITIONS
Suzanne B. Strothkamp (NC ’88) attended Tulane from 1984 through 1988 and served as a resident adviser in Josephine Louise Residence Hall alongside four of her friends. Though Strothkamp and her friends live in different cities, the group has gathered for a reunion every year since 1989, documenting all their adventures and memories in a travel journal.
CLAYTON JONES (B ’06) explores man-
agement and investment opportunities across a broad range of markets as a principal and director of portfolio operations at TBD Management Group in Las Vegas. Jones celebrated his first wedding anniversary, and he and his wife are expecting their first child in the fall of 2018. BLAKE ROTER (TC ’06) was named to
Chicago’s seventh annual “Double Chai in the Chi: 36 Under 36” list of young Jewish movers and shakers. The Hebrew word “chai” means “life.” Presented by the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago’s Young Leadership Division and Oy!Chicago, a website for Chicago 20- and 30-somethings, the list shines a spotlight on the city’s Jewish future and recognizes the contributions of this generation. The young professionals featured are noted for
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IMPRESSION
TANIA TETLOW / PAMELA S. WHITTEN
T
wo Tulane University alumnae have assumed leadership positions at universities this fall. Tania Tetlow (NC ’92), previously the Tulane University Felder-Fayard Professor of Law, senior vice president and chief of staff to President Mike Fitts, now leads Loyola University New Orleans, as that school’s first female president and the first layperson as well. Pamela S. Whitten (B ’85) took over as the fifth president of Kennesaw State University, Georgia’s third-largest university, in July. As a Tulane student, Tetlow earned a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies before enrolling at Harvard Law School. While on the Tulane faculty, she served as director of the Domestic Violence Clinic and later as a co-director of the university’s Wave of Change initiative against sexual violence on campus.
When Tetlow assumed the presidency at Loyola, which was founded in 1912 and where she has strong family ties, she officially inherited the college’s Jesuit traditions. “For centuries, Jesuit education has focused on educating the whole student, building intellect and forging character, and inspiring students to go out and change the world,” Tetlow said. She added that she looked forward to working with the student population. “Loyola has an amazing group of students, almost a third of whom are the first in their family to go to college,” she said, noting that the university is vital to the New Orleans community. “It has been an engine of opportunity since my grandfather was able to go to college on a football scholarship in the 1920s.” Whitten took over at Kennesaw State after having served as senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Georgia. At UGA, she increased experiential learning opportunities like student research, as well as reduced class sizes and improved advising services for students. Faculty research also thrived under her leadership. “My vision for the university is to make Kennesaw State a place where students are the center of the universe, and where faculty and students collaboratively pursue research and community outreach opportunities that
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making a difference through their work, giving back in their free time and earning distinction in the Jewish community and beyond. RICHARD NERE (SLA ’08) was admitted
to the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology. 2010 2018
UNIVERSITY LEADERS Tania Tetlow, left, (NC ’92), is the first woman and the first layperson to lead Loyola University New Orleans. Pamela S. Whitten, right, (B ’85), took over at Kennesaw State University, the third-largest university in Georgia, in July. Both Tetlow and Whitten said they looked forward to working with their university’s students, faculty and staff.
The Idea Village, a support hub for startups and the organizer of the annual New Orleans Entrepreneur Week, named JON ATKINSON (B ’11) as acting CEO. Atkinson is the co-founder of the local investment fund Lagniappe Angels and led Loyola University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development. He also volunteers as a member of the investment committee of the New Orleans Startup Fund and co-founded the Changemaker Institute at Tulane, an accelerator program for social ventures. He previously worked in commercial banking for Hancock Bank and as a community development leader for Trufund Financial Services.
Farewell We say goodbye to Tulanians whose deaths were reported to us during the past quarter. Elise Greenwald Jacobs (NC ’34) Mary Riess (NC ’40, G ’46) Gene G. Carp (A&S ’42, M ’44) Marie Massa (UC ’42) Yolanda Rodriguez Brennan (NC ’43) Hubert Clotworthy Jr. (E ’43) Rodney C. Haase (B ’43) Bodie E. Douglas (A&S ’44, G ’47) Theo H. Harvey Jr. (A&S ’44) Alexander V. McBee (M ’44) George M. Roy (E ’44) Mary Reed Horn (SW ’45) Mary McConnell Sherrouse (NC ’45) Forrest F. Lipscomb (B ’46) Sibyl McGee White (B ’46) Geraldine Smitherman Wray (NC ’46) Michel A. Becnel Jr. (E ’47) Shirley Pailet Frisch (NC ’47) Henry A. Millon (A&S ’47, ’49, A ’53) Harold B. Walker Jr. (E ’47, ’48)
enhance intellectual growth and positively impact lives,” Whitten said. Whitten also praised the people who make up Kennesaw State. “From the moment I visited Kennesaw State, it was clear that the faculty, staff, students and alumni are deeply committed to this university and that commitment extends to the partnerships that we have with the broader community, our trustees, and business and civic leaders.” Whitten earned a Bachelor of Science in Management from the A.B. Freeman School of Business.
FOUR DOWN, ONE TO GO
You could say that Daniel V. Sullivan’s (TC ’09, LA ’14, M ’18) post-secondary education at Tulane University has been five degrees of perspiration. In May, Sullivan graduated with his fourth Tulane degree, from the School of Medicine. He previously earned two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree. Also a Tulane PhD candidate, Sullivan started a pathology residency and fellowship at the University of California–San Francisco this summer.
Jack C. Benjamin Sr. (A&S ’48, L ’50) Nicholas J. Gagliano (E ’48) Norris J. Landry Sr. (B ’48)
TECH TALE On July 31, Deborah Dixon (B ’11) released her new novel called Connected, Inc. Incorporating sci-fi and fantasy elements, the tech thriller follows startup CEO Christian Moynahan as he encounters a relic of his past and faces the inherent complications of his own technology.
Griff C. Lee Jr. (E ’48) Roberta Doggett Lochte-Jones (NC ’48) Elvia Weingart Pfefferle (NC ’48) Jules E. Simoneaux Jr. (E ’48) Otto C. Brosius (PHTM ’49) Sherman H. Bruckner (M ’49) Juan L. Correa (M ’49) Janet Abadie Diamond (NC ’49) Robert C. Overall Sr. (E ’49) Samuel W. Sulli (B ’49) Edward L. Johnson (A&S ’50) Bernard N. Marcantel (L ’50) Suzanne Saussy Stewart (NC ’50) William W. Thames (A&S ’50)
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TULANIANS continued Submit your news to alumni.tulane.edu/news and follow @tulanealumni on Facebook to join the conversation.
Marilyn Rosenthal Weiser (NC ’50, G ’54)
Fernand F. Willoz III (A&S ’52, L ’57)
John H. Boyd Jr. (A&S ’58)
John J. Houlahan Jr. (B ’60)
Harold T. Brinson (A&S ’51)
James G. Burke Jr. (A&S ’54, L ’59)
David J. Foulis (G ’58)
Robert G. Price (A ’60)
Robert J. Fairchild (M ’51)
Maryann Gordon Martin (SW ’54)
Jimmie H. Grant (M ’58)
Daniel M. Rencher III (M ’60)
Gerald P. Falletta (A&S ’51, M ’55)
Leo F. Wagner Jr. (A ’54)
Ronald J. Levy (B ’58)
Jerry N. Rojo (G ’60)
Martha Faison Hawley (SW ’51)
George S. Webb Jr. (G ’54)
Alba Marie Morrison (SW ’58)
Sivert R. Dombu (A&S ’61)
Robert K. Mayo (L ’51)
Dominick R. Gannon (A&S ’55)
Claiborne Harris Moulton (NC ’58)
Ronald J. Haggerty (B ’61)
Peter J. Pizzo Jr. (A&S ’51)
Frances Wendland Geary (NC ’55)
Herman S. Napier (G ’58, ’67)
William R. Hardcastle (A&S ’61, M ’64)
Dan W. Rogas (A&S ’51)
Jackie Pressner Gothard (NC ’55)
Robert D. Nichols (A&S ’58, M ’61)
Berline Taylor Harrison (NC ’61, G ’62)
Effie Stockton (NC ’51)
Roland G. Toca (A&S ’55)
Richard C. Arsenault (A&S ’59)
Albert P. Michelbach (M ’61)
Donald J. Baker (B ’52, L ’56)
James G. Prator (A&S ’56)
Don W. King (E ’59)
Ernest V. Richards IV (L ’61)
Patricia Williams Davidson (NC ’52)
Barbara Jean Huber Dearie (NC ’57)
Marie Mahorner (NC ’59)
Patsy Blankenship Wellons (SW ’61)
Y.R. Furuno (SW ’52)
Fernando G. Farah (A ’57)
James O. Manning (M ’59)
Billy R. Eubanks (M ’62)
Ray G. Hooper (A&S ’52, M ’55)
Oliver Holden Jr. (A&S ’57)
Harold F. Parker (UC ’59)
Thomas D. Giles (M ’62)
Louis E. Mailhes (B ’52)
Mary Norman Longenecker (NC ’57)
Arnold Roufa (A&S ’59)
C.R. Moen Jr. (B ’63)
Patricia Reinerth Reed (NC ’52)
Robert L. Taylor (L ’57)
Manship Smith Jr. (A&S ’59)
James P. Conner Sr. (A&S ’64, L ’67)
TRIBUTE
DR. JOHN OCHSNER
J
ohn L. Ochsner, MD (A&S ’48, M ’52), New Orleans’ most renowned and celebrated cardiovascular surgeon, died on July 6, 2018, at the age of 91. John was the second son of the famous Dr. Alton Ochsner, who was chairman of the Department of Surgery at Tulane University (1927–56), a founder of the Ochsner Clinic, and the first to associate cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer. John Ochsner, like his two brothers, attended Tulane for undergraduate and earned a medical degree from the School of Medicine. John completed general and thoracic surgical training at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. His mentors were Drs. Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley, two of the world’s most accomplished surgeons. In 1961, John chose to return to New Orleans and to the clinic that bore his family name. Due to his dynamic personality, professional leadership and devoted civic involvement, he quickly became the “face” of cardiovascular surgery in New Orleans and the Gulf South. John performed many “firsts,” notably the first heart transplant in Louisiana in 1970 and many complex congenital heart operations. He performed over 12,000 operations in a career that spanned 57 years.
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Under his leadership, more than 950 heart transplants have been performed. In 2008, the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute was founded in his honor. He was chairman emeritus of the Department of Surgery at Ochsner and clinical professor of surgery at Tulane. He received the Outstanding Medical Alumnus Award from Tulane in 1998 and the Michael E. DeBakey Surgical Society Award in 2000. John trained scores of talented and grateful cardiothoracic, vascular and general surgeons. He authored over 350 medical articles, chapters and films. He was president of the prestigious American Association for Thoracic Surgery and the Southern Surgical Association, and chairman of the American Board of Thoracic Surgery. His greatest civic honor was his reign as Rex, King of Carnival, in 1990. John was larger than life! He was engaging, witty, handsome, always impeccably dressed and in command. His charm and the twinkle in his eye lit up every room. In essence, John was the quintessential “Southern gentleman” who indeed became one of the “giants” of surgery, to which he made reference in his 1993 American Association for Thoracic Surgery presidential address. Farewell, my friend! —P. Michael McFadden, MD (M ’74) is a clinical professor of surgery at Tulane University, and professor of clinical cardiothoracic surgery and surgical co-director of lung transplantation at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California–Los Angeles.
Tulanian Magazine september 2018
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David A. Maurer (M ’64)
Dorothy Toby Coxe (NC ’71)
M. A. Stroud (A&S ’81, L ’84)
La’Shonda Burds (SW ’05)
Carolyn Pratt Perry (NC ’64)
Luis G. Iglesias (G ’71, ’78)
Nathalie Walker (L ’81)
Sanford B. Kaynor Jr. (B ’07)
Richard X. Sanchez (A&S ’64)
Don M. Maultsby (G ’71)
John J. Rooney (A&S ’82)
Brian J. McKenna (B ’07)
Larry F. Rambis (A&S ’65, G ’69)
H.G. McQuage Jr. (SW ’71)
Sara Proctor Turner (SW ’82)
S.D. Turner III (B ’09)
Richard A. Slocum (G ’65, ’69)
H.T. Engelhardt Jr. (M ’72)
Anthony R. Berretto (L ’85)
Tyrone C. Turner (B ’09)
Tony M. Toledo (M ’65)
Marcella Ziifle (L ’72)
Sherri Gabaeff Goldstein (NC ’86)
Marsha Owen (B ’11)
R.W. Wagner (A&S ’65, L ’67)
Morteza M. Mehrabadi (G ’73, ’79)
Albert G. Wagner (A&S ’87)
Matthew L. Berry (SLA ’14)
Adelle Abramson Shaw (NC ’66)
Lewis V. Murray III (A&S ’73)
Jorge D. Donato (B ’88)
Ellyn Mintz Stetzer (NC ’66)
Thomas R. Pixton (L ’73)
Lenny C. Katz (A&S ’88)
Loraine Evans (NC ’67)
Richard L. Rubin (SW ’73)
Michael S. Tarsitano (A&S ’88)
Susan O’Boyle Farrell (NC ’67)
Allyn Padawer Udell (NC ’73)
Jorge L. Inga (A&S ’91)
Edward P. Harris (G ’67)
Tony O. Champagne (A&S ’74)
Rita Pounds Jacobs (G ’91)
John G. Loftin (L ’67)
Frederick T. Fisher (G ’74)
Kathleen Martin (L ’91)
Ofelia Rodriguez Granadillo (SW ’68)
Jonnie Farmer Welman (G ’74)
Jack Forbes Jr. (A ’93)
Gerald H. Greenfield (B ’68)
William C. Wright II (A ’75)
Tom C. Bruff (M ’94, PHTM ’94)
Fred M. Sandifer III (M ’68)
David W. Nelson (PHTM ’76)
Stephanie Stephens (PHTM ’94)
Wesley J. Watkins III (A&S ’68)
Leonardo J. Bertucci (A&S ’77)
Wendy McNeil Kelley (L ’96)
Robert B. Church (SW ’69)
Charlotte Mayer Mathes (SW ’77)
Katrin Kohl (PHTM ’96)
Ellen Conlon (NC ’69)
Charles C. Blancq III (G ’78)
D. M. Bowen (TC ’97)
Gary M. Foster (A&S ’69)
Thomas J. Stephenson (A&S ’78)
Rachel Petersik (B ’99)
George C. Kleinpeter Jr. (E ’70, ’74)
Jeffrey R. Zoub (A&S ’78)
Gwendolyn Brennan (E ’00)
Edward P. Buvens (SW ’71, PHTM ’78)
Michael D. Levine (B ’80)
Lindsay Carlsten McGrath (NC ’02)
Michael D. Cossey (L ’71)
Billy R. Moore Jr. (L ’80)
Antoinette Hibbs (UC ’03, SCS ’07)
KEY TO SCHOOLS SLA (School of Liberal Arts) SSE (School of Science and Engineering) A (School of Architecture) B (A. B. Freeman School of Business) L (Law School) M (School of Medicine) SW (School of Social Work) PHTM (School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine) SoPA (School of Professional Advancement)
A&S (College of Arts and Sciences, the men’s liberal arts and sciences college that existed until 1994) TC (Tulane College, the men’s liberal arts and sciences college that existed from 1994 until 2006) NC (Newcomb College, the women’s liberal arts and sciences college that existed until 2006) E (School of Engineering) G (Graduate School) UC (University College, the school for part-time adult learners. The college’s name was changed to the School of Continuing Studies in 2006.) SCS (School of Continuing Studies, which changed its name to the School of Professional Advancement in 2017.)
DOWNLOAD THE NEW TULANE ALUMNI EVERGREEN APP Stay connected with Tulane wherever you are! Search Tulane EverGreen in the Apple or Google Play stores to get started!
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VIEWPOINT
My New Orleans Moment BY MIKE FITTS, President
W
hen did you first know you were a New Orleanian? I suppose that’s a funny question for many of you who can trace your family’s Crescent City roots back for generations. For me, I know it wasn’t the first time I ordered my sandwich “dressed” or when I caught my first Muses shoe (I’m still working on a Zulu coconut). It wasn’t when I attended my first Jazz Fest or thought, “It feels a little cooler today,” when the thermometer had dipped down to 85 degrees (in October!). These may have been steps on my journey to becoming a New Orleanian, but they were not the final destination. No, I think I became a New Orleanian when I realized how much place matters here. You often hear people refer to an “Only in New Orleans moment” when describing something so unique, magical, charming, crazy or audacious that it could only take place in or near area code 504. Our music, our food, our culture, our language and every sweet New Orleans idiosyncrasy is rooted in the city’s location. It was this location, ideally situated for trade and defense, that made New Orleans the capital of French Louisiana. It was also this location that bred annual yellow fever epidemics that devastated the local population and prompted a group of young physicians to establish the Medical College
of Louisiana—what would later become Tulane University. Our location continues to present vast advantages (we were recently ranked America’s No. 1 college city and one of the top locations for startups) as well as challenges that power Tulane research and discovery. From infectious diseases to environmental threats to health disparities, to the challenges facing K–12 education, New Orleans is a fertile crescent for ideas, innovations and breakthroughs. And, of course, New Orleans is a muse for writers, musicians, artists, thinkers and seekers of all kinds. New Orleans also attracts a certain type of student—innovative, creative, daring, bold and willing, on average, to travel more
Our music, our food, our culture, our language and every sweet New Orleans idiosyncrasy is rooted in the city’s location. 48
than 900 miles from their hometown to join what is the most national, most eclectic student body in the country. These students seek authenticity and the deep human connections for which New Orleans is famous. Here they encounter a curriculum defined by place, too, and join a faculty who are as audacious as themselves—more willing to take new approaches and untried paths than those who inhabit more traditional places of learning. At many universities, knowledge is compartmentalized in silos of expertise unavailable to scholars from other fields. In our open, collaborative, unfettered, unsiloed city and university we address issues of local concern that also provide solutions to world problems. There may be only one Mr. Okra or Dr. John or St. Charles streetcar line, but it turns out that many “Only in New Orleans moments” happen daily on the world’s stage. Our location in one of history’s most culturally significant and environmentally challenging regions means we can make a difference in the lives of people around the world—no matter “where y’at.”
Tulanian Magazine september 2018
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WAVE 18 ’
HOMECOMING • REUNION • FAMILY WEEKEND
NOVEMBER 9-11, 2018
The President’s Town Hall
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9
10:30–11:30 A.M. DIXON HALL
Celebrating Undergraduate Class Reunion Years 1973 • 1978 • 1983 • 1988 1993 • 1998 • 2003 • 2008 • 2013 & YOUNG ALUMNI (’14-’18)
The Green Wave take on the Pirates vs.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10
tailgating on Berger Family Lawn before game
Plus, don’t miss:
BACK TO THE CLASSROOM FACULTY ENRICHMENT SERIES | CARNIVAL, CONCERT AND FIREWORKS ON THE BERGER FAMILY LAWN
Register today at homecoming.tulane.edu Tulanian-cover-Sep2018-FINAL.indd 4
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Office of Communications and Marketing 31 McAlister Drive, Drawer 1 New Orleans, LA 70118-5624
A vibrant French Quarter street is a joy to explore by bike or on foot. At the end of the day, New Orleans’ culture, history and architecture are on full display.
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