LETTER TO UNO ALUMS

April, 2007

Dear UNO Alumni,

            Wherever this finds you, in the Greater New Orleans area or elsewhere in the country or around the world, as UNO graduates, you have no doubt followed with sadness and horror the tragic events in New Orleans over the last year and a half. It is our sense, however, that the national media have not covered – because of the situation’s enormity and complexity, not been able to cover -- the story of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in its entirety. UNO’s important part of that story, for instance, has not been much covered at all.

            A great city needs a great public university, and for the last half century the University of New Orleans has endeavored with ever greater success to fill that role. Founded in 1958, UNO opened its doors as an undergraduate college with approximately 1,500 freshmen in attendance, black and white together; the first racially integrated public university in the South, our proud legacy for diversity established in our opening moments. These 1,500 students were twice the number expected. And UNO has been exceeding expectations ever since, infrequently with the resources we needed and deserved to accomplish the many things we have. 

Today, UNO has evolved into a comprehensive research university with students studying in five undergraduate colleges or the graduate school and choosing among 50 majors, 40 masters and 11 doctoral programs. UNO's students come from across the country and from nearly 100 foreign countries. In addition to our programs in New Orleans, we operate international programs in five European countries, in the West Indies, in Latin American and in Asia. On August 28, 2005, we had both instituted new, higher admission standards and sustained our historically largest enrollment of 17,300.

            Unfortunately, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans and its great public university both now face huge challenges. The city has lost housing for 300,000 people and that means that 60% of the city's residents have relocated outside its boundaries. The metropolitan area has lost a third of its citizens. Meanwhile, UNO has lost a third of its students along with the missing core population base. The lost tuition revenue from the displaced students has placed a severe strain on the university's ability to operate.

            The sorrow that the remaining residents of New Orleans face is manifest in the sagging houses that line the streets you must travel to reach UNO. In neighborhood after neighborhood, homes are windowless, abandoned, forlorn -- properties drooping into uselessness like chocolate figurines left too long in the summer's heat. So short a time ago each of these decaying edifices was someone's home where good, spicy food simmered in the kitchen and the laughter of full lives echoed within its walls. Now the air smells of mold and mildew, and inside the walls silence reigns. Ruined lawns, broken sidewalks and snaggled streets breed despair, house to house, block to block.  Very recently, the process of demolition has begun, and once vibrant neighborhoods are giving way to a series of rubble-strewn vacant lots.

            The sorrow we face is registered in every destroyed school, its playing children vanished, in every church where hymns are no longer sung, in every store where goods are no longer sold, in every café, restaurant and bistro where our good food is no longer served and where friends no longer gather.

            Those of us who work at UNO know this devastation. For these are our houses and those of our colleagues and those of our students and those of our friends. These are the homes of our chancellor, our vice-chancellors and deans, our department chairs and their faculty. And wherever we now reside, in new or repaired locations, in white FEMA trailers in our driveways, or in a FEMA village north of our Lakefront Arena, we cannot reach our UNO offices without driving through flooded neighborhoods, where heartbreak is our daily passenger.

            Those of us who hail from New Orleans know something about the great flood of 2005.  It was a disaster made not by nature but by man. Hurricane Katrina did not sweep over our city; it broke through to our city. Our levees were high enough, but they were not strong enough. Our homes were lost, our lives were altered, not as an act of God, but as an act of negligence, not as the product of inevitability but as the byproduct of irresponsibility.

            The current sad state of New Orleans teaches us immediately that we must do better. We must immerse ourselves in research, and we must employ the research that we undertake. We must educate a populace so that this tragedy is not allowed to happen again. And that’s just the mission to which UNO has dedicated itself.

            As alumni, you have always had great reason to be proud of your alma mater. Despite our current difficulties, you have greater reason today than ever before. Like much of New Orleans, the UNO campus sustained extensive physical damage during Katrina, which we are still in the process of repairing. Our classroom buildings are operational, but our arena and much of our University Center remain closed, repairs caught up in the bureaucratic snarl that has delayed so much of New Orleans’ recovery. Like much of the population of New Orleans, our faculty, staff and students evacuated to all parts of the United States. Unlike the other institutions of higher education in New Orleans, UNO was determined, from the first hours after the storm, to come back, to come back soon, to come back strong and ultimately to refashion ourselves as stronger than ever. We reopened our doors at our Jefferson Campus on October 10, 2005 and taught approximately 7,000 in a fall term when all other New Orleans universities remained dark. That fall term enabled 766 of our students to graduate and take the next steps in their lives, into the work place or on to graduate school. Of all the many moments that I will cherish about my UNO career, none are more important than our graduation ceremonies at the end of the fall 2005 semester. We Privateers didn’t just endure; we prevailed.

            UNO was able to return to its lakefront campus for the Spring 2006 semester, and we have conducted regular semesters here since. Not everything is yet the way it was before the storm, but as our entire community will testify, things are getting better every day. Meanwhile, whatever the minor inconveniences, we are providing critical opportunities for our students to move forward with their educations.

As alumni, you may have heard that our diminished student enrollment, down to 11,700 in Fall 2006, required that we undertake a painful restructuring process, the direct result of lost revenues from student tuition, which makes up nearly 60% of our operating budget. This restructuring inevitably required lay offs for some of our faculty and staff, the consolidation of some of our academic programs and even the elimination of some programs with diminished student demand. But in the long run this restructuring will be positive, for UNO and for the community it serves. Nothing essential has been removed from our educational menu. At the undergraduate level UNO will continue to deliver the highest quality general education courses. At the graduate level we continue to concentrate on those programs that are most popular, most visible, most accomplished and most necessary as intellectual tools for rebuilding our city. In short, this restructuring enables us better to concentrate on that which we do best. It allows us to enhance our strongest programs and give to our students ever better preparation for the careers they will pursue and the lives they will lead after finishing their educations with us.

As UNO’s chief academic officer I can gush at greater length than you want to bear about the exciting things we are doing. I will restrict myself to highlighting the following. Our College of Business continues among the nation’s leaders in preparing students for the National CPA exam. It offers an excellent Master’s in Business Administration and superb training for the hospitality industry through the Kabacoff School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism. Our College of Education is nationally recognized for its counseling program and stands at the cutting edge of failing public school rescue. With New Orleans public schools in a state of crisis before Katrina and in disarray after the storm, UNO’s leadership is crucial to the future of public education in our city. Our College of Engineering, all the more important to the region after the closing of the engineering school at Tulane, is vitally involved in the engineering science of levee construction and maintenance. Our engineers are working closely with scientists at Michoud as NASA retools for the post-shuttle era. And our program in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering is one of the nation’s most prominent.

Our College of Liberal Arts continues to offer a full array of programs in arts, humanities and social sciences and to operate the Robert Nims Film Studios where our film students have served as hands-on interns on such important motion pictures as Runaway Jury, All the King’s Men, and the Oscar-winning Ray. They are at work as I write on the Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in the leading roles. Our programs in Jazz Studies, Creative Writing and Fine Arts attract students from around the world. Meanwhile, our College of Sciences is home to the Pontchartrain Institute, which is a leading research entity on the ever more important issue of coastal erosion, and the Advanced Materials Research Institute which has brought in more than $35 million in external funding for nanoscience projects. 

In sum, just as it always has been, UNO is full of faculty and administrators who are deeply committed to our university, its students and our community.  As many of you know, our chancellor, Tim Ryan is a native New Orleanian and has been a UNO faculty member now for three decades. I too am a native New Orleanian, educated in the public schools of Orleans Parish. And I too have spent my entire career in higher education at UNO.        My family moved away from New Orleans after my 9^th grade year, and my educational career path did not take me, as it did Chancellor Ryan, to the University of New Orleans, but though I am not a UNO alumnus in fact, I consider myself an alumnus by blood. My mother, Joeddie Barton Harris, was among those 1,500 freshmen who began her education at UNO on its first day of operation in 1958, a student like many among our alums who couldn’t have gone to college at all had there been no UNO available to her. And what a loss that would have been to the hundreds of second-grade school children she taught in her three-decade career as a public school teacher. Thus, when I got the opportunity to come to UNO as a faculty member at the end of my graduate education in the late 1970s, I felt a divine hand at work in my life. Tim Ryan felt that same divine hand when he returned here to his alma mater three years earlier.

As an institution, we have come a long way in this last half century. We have very much to be proud of. Along with our city, Hurricane Katrina has now faced us with a great challenge. But as we have shown over the last year and a half since the storm, we are equal to all the complications of that challenge. We administrators and faculty at UNO think together of Shakespeare’s Henry V, for Katrina was our St. Crispin’s Day for it has "gentled our condition," and we fiercely "stand a tip-toe when the day is named . . .  and strip our sleeves to show our wounds . . . we band of brothers" and sisters who shed together, if not our blood then our tears. UNO rose up from the water. We paid our people; and we taught our students when no one else was there. We were back in only six weeks, and we came back with unbending pride and unbowed determination.

We are very proud of you, our graduates, and you have very much to be proud of that you are our educational progeny. Thank you for supporting us with your presence, with your pride, with your advocacy, and, of course, whenever possible, with your dollars, which we need now more than ever. Thank you for standing with us.

With Sincere Best Wishes,

Fredrick Barton

Provost and Vice Chancellor

Academic and Student Affairs