Tulane University Announces Cutbacks, Layoffs Due to Katrina
NEW ORLEANS
Students at Tulane University will return to a school with a gutted engineering department, eight fewer sports programs and student housing replaced by cruise ships.
The school is also laying off nearly 10 percent of its faculty — 230 positions — before students return Jan. 19 for the first classes since the city was swamped by Hurricane Katrina.
“I have thought long and hard to see if I could identify a comparable change at another university in the last century, and I can’t,” says Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education.
The campus, in the city’s Uptown section, has been closed since Katrina’s floodwaters devastated New Orleans and drove out most of its half-million inhabitants. About two-thirds of Tulane’s facilities flooded, including dormitories, and most of the students are now scattered at schools nationwide.
Tulane has so far put the cost of recovering from the storm at $200 million and said it expects a one-third drop in enrollment. Before Katrina, Tulane had 13,214 students — 7,976 undergraduate and 5,238 in graduate schools.
Other area schools also have scaled back faculty — including Dillard University, which laid off two-thirds of its faculty — but Tulane is the first to announce the elimination of academic programs.
