On Aug. 29, 2005, I was making my way by flashlight through a darkened, humid, powerless Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, unclogging toilets overwhelmed by the demands of nearly 200 college students.
The day before, I had led the evacuation of resident students from Loyola University in New Orleans. Over the next two days we would wait helplessly, eating MREs (military meals ready to eat) while listening for news of our city’s fate.
Two months later, in suffocating heat and stench, I was hauling the soggy detritus of my life and work from my flooded home, ripping out ruined walls and dumping hundreds of moldering books and photos, as well as 18 years of lecture and research notes, into huge mounds on the street.
On the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s tragic landfall, retrospectives abound, from Spike Lee’s powerful but flawed HBO film to a spate of articles and reports. We hear much about the incompetence of the Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the unfulfilled promise of federal rebuilding aid and the rapacity of insurers. We also hear of still-displaced victims, many of them poor and unable to make a change in their condition.
One of the less-publicized effects of the disaster is the New Orleans intellectual diaspora. From coast to coast, and certainly here in Colorado, colleges and universities have welcomed new faculty and administrators who have emigrated in the wake of the great storm. I am in that number, and unless things turn around soon, I suspect that the number will be growing over the next few years.
The opening of this school year finds me in Greeley, where I’ve had the great fortune of joining the University of Northern Colorado. I know of fellow New Orleans educators who have found new academic homes in Denver and Boulder.
Who knows what, if anything, this migration of university people might mean? Will we someday be able to look back and speak of a distinctive educational contribution by this diaspora? On the surface, one would think not. After all, Descartes, the Battle of Hastings, Boyle’s Law, and price elasticity of demand are pretty much the same whether taught below sea level or a mile high. It could be that the relocation of New Orleans scholars represents nothing more than folks finding new jobs elsewhere.
Or might there be something else? Speaking of Descartes, anyone who went through what we went through will be well acquainted with the merits of methodological doubt; having grown deeply skeptical about claims that the government, the insurance industry and a host of other institutions have our best interests at heart.
I suspect that university faculty tested in the crucible of Katrina will tend to have their customary critical and analytical capacities sharpened by a hard-won and deeply felt experience of the need to take authoritative pronouncements with a considerable grain of salt.
We in the academy value this as part of “critical thinking,” and post-Katrina scholars will be its teachers and practitioners.
But something more profound and personal is also true: my experiences amid the tragedy of Katrina have given me and others a renewed compassion, an appreciation of the preciousness of life and the normal, everyday, taken-for-granted aspects of existence. Giving welcoming remarks a few weeks ago to incoming students at a UNC orientation, I looked out onto a sea of fresh, hopeful faces. I saw, too, the happy but slightly apprehensive faces of parents as they contemplated entrusting their children to our care for the next four years. I told them the predictable things about the great challenges and experiences that awaited them at UNC.
But my eyes grew misty as I thought back to the faces I saw last August in that shelter. And more than anything else, I wanted to tell the parents: “Your children will be safe. Everything will be fine. We will take care of them.”
Assistant vice president, dean of undergraduate studies, University of Northern Colorado; former interim vice president for student affairs, Loyola University
