CHICAGO
The choice for 18-year-old Bria Miller was an easy one. Once she heard that classes were resuming at Xavier University in New Orleans, she re-enrolled without hesitation.
“I made a home there so quickly, and I want to go back,” said Miller, a freshman, who transferred to the University of Illinois in Chicago when Xavier closed. “I was always thinking ‘When would the school be ready so I could go back?”’
Miller’s decision to move back to New Orleans is good news to Xavier President Norman Francis, who came to Chicago last week to encourage students to return to the nation’s only historically Black and Roman Catholic college. It reopens on Jan. 17.
“We’re rebuilding the university as an island in the city,” Francis said during a reception at Columbia College in Chicago. “People didn’t think we could do it, but we did.”
After Hurricane Katrina, colleges around the country took in an estimated 18,000 displaced New Orleans students. About 55 of Xavier’s 4,000 students came to Chicago. Most of them enrolled in local colleges and universities, Xavier officials said.
Now, New Orleans schools desperately need those students to return next semester and pay tuition.
