Loyola New Orleans digging in for next semester

By JASON BERRY

Kevin Wildes, a Jesuit bioethicist with an avocation for boxing, began his second year as president of Loyola New Orleans by closing the university for the fall semester. Hurricane Katrina forced that decision, as faculty and students fled the worst storm
in American history. Huge swaths of the city flooded from the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain.

Wildes stayed on campus the night of the hurricane and by midmorning the next day was optimistic. "I inspected the campus
and walked the neighborhood," he told NCR in a lengthy telephone interview from Alexandria, a city in central Louisiana's Pentecostal Bible belt, where he has regrouped with a skeletal administrative staff. Then he watched the widespread flooding, with an auxiliary generator providing the current for TV reception, and realized he had to leave. The enormity of the crisis has put the 25 people working in Alexandria on a grueling schedule, dealing with survival issues.

Loyola's campus is in an affluent Uptown neighborhood, looking out on pastoral, oak-lined Audubon Park. Tulane University is
literally next door. Although the neighborhood was strewn with fallen tree limbs, and some damage to cars and homes, Wildes said that "on campus, overall, things look good." In terms of infrastructure, Loyola emerged in much better shape than
the other private universities in New Orleans. Tulane, which relies heavily on science research grants for its schools of medicine and public health, suffered substantial damage to its labs and medical infrastructure, according to The Wall Street
Journal.

The campus of historically black Xavier University, which lies behind a canal that cuts through mid-city, took extensive
flooding. The city's other African-American university, Dillard, sits in the Gentilly Woods neighborhood, which was hard hit by
wind and water damage.

The four private universities forged a plan that will allow students in good standing from Xavier and Dillard to attend
classes at Loyola and Tulane on a per-course basis, starting in January. Loyola escaped flooding and lost no buildings,
although the roof of the athletic complex was badly damaged. In a broken city, with TV coverage the first week showing looting, anarchy and abandoned people in the Superdome and Convention Center, the campus had no faculty, no students, no way to function.

"I thought it important to resume operations in Louisiana," said Wildes. "Baton Rouge was overflowing. Rhonda Cartwright, our vice president for finances, had family in [the Alexandria area]. We were able to secure space. I didn't want to move everything
to Houston." By midweek Wildes was unpacking in a garage apartment behind the home of Alexandria's Bishop Ronald Herzog. "You have to have a sense of serenity about living with the bishop," the president mused. "He has been a good friend."

As media coverage of the disaster deepened, the group working with Wildes confronted their own traumatic aftershocks,
hearing from friends and colleagues by e-mail and cell phones, while assessing their own losses. The university posted early messages on its Web site assuring faculty and staff that salary checks would be paid through the semester. Loyola has since announced that it will open for the second semester in January.

Sixty percent of the faculty lost homes or experienced major damage that will take months to repair, according to Julia
McSherry, the assistant vice president for marketing and communications. McSherry and her husband, Thomas Smith, the vice president for student affairs and a religious studies scholar, took eight feet of water in the basement of their raised home on a low-lying Uptown street. When Smith took a day off from work in Alexandria for the six-hour drive back to New Orleans, he found black mold covering the basement walls as he sifted through drenched research files.

Connie Rodriguez, a professor of classical studies, was rescued from the rooftop of her home in the Gentilly neighborhood.
Scores of faculty and staff joined the diaspora of Orleanians across the country. Sociologist Tony Ladd found office space at
the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he has begun research on the impact of the widespread displacement of people, many of whom, according to media reports, do not plan to return to the area.

Loyola has 3,500 undergraduates. Wildes praised the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities "for demonstrating
Ignatian values at their best. Boston College, Georgetown, and other Jesuit institutions accepted 1,300 of our students in a
matter of days. My message to students is that no one will pay twice. There have been extraordinary acts of generosity." Most of the colleges are not charging tuition for displaced students, thereby allowing Loyola to maintain some income stream. Full scholarships have been honored by reciprocity; some families have taken in students where dormitories were full.

Approximately 150 universities have accepted Loyola students for the semester. First-year law students are studying with
Loyola faculty in class space at the University of Houston. Upper-level law students are taking courses in a range of other schools.

Wildes has been traveling the country to drum up support for the university, with an accelerated schedule of speeches
and meeting with alumni groups and families with Loyola students (or those considering the university).

"There has been enormous frustration," Wildes told NCR. "I have experienced levels of anger at the slowness of public
officials [to respond] and the Army Corps of Engineers on the levee breakage and flooding -- a self-inflicted wound. I'm a New Jersey boy and I could have anticipated that. Why did the system fail? This is something we need to fully understand and truly repair."

Countless streets in New Orleans are lined with garbage, brown tree limbs and dead refrigerators. Loyola, Tulane, Xavier
and Dillard have attracted many more out-of-state undergraduates than local students in recent years. In a recent broadcast of the Boston public radio program, "On Point," Michael White, a professor of Spanish and jazz composer who holds an endowed chair at Xavier, and Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Tulane, repeatedly stressed that the government had to clean the city of residual pollution and ensure environmental safeguards before families could feel comfortable about sending their children as students to the universities.

With the city essentially bankrupt a month after President Bush's promise to rebuild the Gulf South, the future of New
Orleans is a question mark.

Loyola's major hurdle is helping faculty and students living off campus find housing in a squeezed real estate market.
Insurance coverage for lost or damaged homes may take months to sort out.

In an Oct. 5 posting on Loyola's Web site, Wildes stated: "We really do not know, at this time, how this event will impact
the financial health of the university in the long term. Preliminary estimated losses are in the range of $200 million to $300
million."

The university endowment is $300 million, much of which is allocated for specific uses such as scholarships or endowed
chairs. Shawn Donnelly of Chicago, a 1991 graduate and member of the board of trustees, issued a challenge to alumni, agreeing to match dollar for dollar every gift up to $250,000. Still, as the board met in Houston in early October, the long-range issues and strategic planning to secure the university's stability had only begun.

"The theme I keep stressing is resurrection," Wildes told NCR. "Loyola will look to our past, at our strengths, in
focusing on who we are and what we can do. Environmental studies is an important discipline here and will be even more in demand. We provide a solid arts and humanities education and we will build on that too. We are the only Jesuit college with a college of music. Music and culture are an important part of what we do, feeding into the city and cultural infrastructure. We have a music business program that trains people for that."

Wildes singled out the law school for its history of educating elected officials and Professor Bill Quigley, a prominent social
justice attorney who directs a law clinic for the poor.

"The hurricane was not good PR," Wildes continued. "But I am not one given to worry. It's useless. … I have my ongoing
conversation with God. I pray, trying to get my message every day, and to focus what I need to do and say. Loyola will get through this. All you can do is get out and work."

The administrative staff will return to Loyola at the end of this month. Jason Berry is a freelance writer based in New
Orleans.

National Catholic Reporter, October 28, 2005

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