The Chronicle of Higher Education August 28, 2015 A Decade After Katrina, One Campus Still Struggles to Recover By Katherine Mangan Louis Blackmon was 11 when the floodwaters unleashed by Hurricane Katrina churned through his family's East New Orleans home, filling it with brackish water and plastering the ceiling with mud and mold. Few of his friends and relatives made it back to the poor, mostly black neighborhood where he grew up. Far fewer had found their way to college a decade later. It was fitting that he has enrolled at nearby Southern University at New Orleans, a public, historically black university whose 11 buildings were submerged in as much as 11 feet of water after the city's levees burst on August 29, 2005. Like Mr. Blackmon, SUNO is a survivor, though it has struggled more than any other college in the city in the decade since Katrina. As wealthier, uptown institutions like Tulane University and Loyola University New Orleans celebrated their recovery from the storm, SUNO has waited for a decade for the money to replace buildings damaged by mold and rot. The ground floors of some of its buildings are still uninhabitable, and faculty members working upstairs question whether the air might still be contaminated. "It's taken a lot of patience and resilience as we move from phase to phase," says the chancellor, Victor Ukpolo. "Everyone talks about the progress the city has made, but sometimes that's hard to see when we still don't have all of our buildings back." The university's recovery is further challenged by the changing demographics of a city that is whiter and more Hispanic than before the storm. Black residents, who made up two-thirds of the city's pre-Katrina population, account for less than 60 percent today. Many couldn't afford to return to the gentrifying neighborhoods where their families had lived for generations. Mr. Blackmon recalls being scared when he returned from his family's refuge, in Houston, to find their possessions strewn in the dark and gloomy mess that stunk of rotten food. His mother's co-worker made room for them in her home, and he switched to a new middle school, where he threw his energy into football. "Most of my relatives and friends never came back," he says. As the base of students it traditionally draws from has eroded, SUNO has also struggled to compete with two-year institutions, like the city's Delgado Community College, that are enjoying a surge of popularity. It's a problem shared<http://chronicle.com/article/RenovationRepair-in-New/35947/>, to a lesser extent, by the city's two private historically black colleges, Dillard University and Xavier University of Louisiana. While all of New Orleans's colleges were devastated by Katrina, its three HBCUs suffered disproportionately. Not only were they built on low ground, but their modest endowments left them with practically no cushion to absorb the blow as they waited years for funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to arrive. Dillard and Xavier, which draw students from a national pool, have rebounded partly through private gifts, which donors assumed a public institution wouldn't need, says Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents public HBCUs. "Donors assumed the state would take care of SUNO, and they were wrong," he says. Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written about Katrina's impact<http://www.education.umd.edu/Academics/Faculty/Bios/facData/CHSE/ndrezner/Gasman%20&%20Drezner%202007%20A%20Rising%20Tide.pdf> on the three colleges, says the disaster compounded image, management, and academic issues that existed at SUNO before Katrina. "I don't think the state is supportive of SUNO - and, in fact, there is evidence that it would like to eliminate it," Ms. Gasman, a leading authority on HBCUs, wrote in an email on Thursday. "It's hard to thrive in that environment." In 2011 the university fought back<http://chronicle.com/article/Proposed-Merger-of-2-New/127583/> an attempt by Gov. Bobby Jindal and his legislative supporters to merge it with the nearby University of New Orleans. But calls to close Southern University or combine it with UNO and Delgado Community College continue. Reaching Out SUNO has done its best to adjust to the challenges. In a city still plagued by crime but becoming a magnet for young techies, it created a program in forensic science and opened an incubator for business start-ups. It also expanded its online course offerings. Since 2012 it has reached out<http://honorecusa.sus.edu/about/> to students like Mr. Blackmon through the Honoré Center for Undergraduate Student Achievement, which recruits talented black men whose ACT scores were too low to qualify for entrance. Participants get an array of support in exchange for spending at least two years teaching in a local public school. "Most of the men in my family are dead or in jail," says Mr. Blackmon, a senior and honor student, who was 5 years old when his father was shot to death. Growing up, he says, "it was tough trying to find my way." Despite its efforts, SUNO continues to be dogged by criticism over its poor graduation rate, which has inched up from the single digits several years ago to 15 percent today. While Mr. Ukpolo agrees that the rate is far too low, he argues that the presence of so many working adults who attend part time skews it down. SUNO students, 90 percent of whom receive Pell Grants and many of whom juggle work and family obligations, take an average of eight years to graduate, according to the chancellor. As a result, many of those students don't show up in the federal government's six-year graduation rate, which also doesn't include transfers from community colleges. As state support for the university has eroded, its open-access mission was challenged by a 2014 state policy that prohibits public four-year colleges from accepting students who need remedial coursework. The policy was relaxed this year so that students needing one remedial course can be admitted. That helped account for an estimated 6-percent enrollment increase at SUNO this fall, after a double-digit decline last spring. Like some other historically black colleges struggling to fill their seats<http://chronicle.com/article/A-Wave-of-Hispanic-Students/230157/>, SUNO is courting more Hispanic students. The city's Hispanic population has grown significantly since Katrina, as workers flocked there to help it rebuild. But it isn't easy attracting students, as well as faculty members, to a campus where buildings are still flood-ravaged. In articles<http://blog.nola.com/education_impact/2015/07/suno_faculty_deaths_mold.html> published last month, New Orleans's The Times-Picayune suggested that the deaths of four SUNO professors during a three-month span from November 2013 to February 2014 might have been related to persistent mold and dust in the water-damaged building they worked in. There's no direct evidence that those conditions were directly related to the health problems they succumbed to, but some people have speculated that the air quality worsened their health. All of the professors who died worked on the second floor of the multipurpose classroom building that was the subject of the newspaper's reporting. The building has since been closed, and it is one of four slated for replacement with $83 million in FEMA money that is just now finding its way to the campus. Why it took so long for the funds to arrive is a matter of dispute. Some faculty members say the state sat on the money rather than turn it over to SUNO because it wanted the university to close. Others, including some Faculty Senate leaders, say Mr. Ukpolo is partly to blame for not taking their health concerns seriously enough and fighting to have the federal money distributed. In a letter<https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2185393/ukpolo-pdf.pdf> to The Times-Picayune, Mr. Ukpolo emphatically denied that the university had put anyone in harm's way. "Employees only occupied facilities that were deemed safe by the state," he wrote. Buildings were tested and remediated, and people who expressed concern about conditions were moved to other buildings, he added. Cynthia Ramirez, a professor of fine arts who says she suffered from asthma and other health problems after working in the multipurpose building for more than three years, is tired of waiting for the new buildings. "Everyone talks about progress, but for me, it feels like January 2006," she says. Warren A. Bell Jr., who directs the Honoré Center, says the chancellor deserves credit for battling bureaucracy and red tape to finally bring recovery money to the campus, which had to spend years<http://chronicle.com/article/Still-Without-a-Campus/27228/> operating out of hundreds of trailers. Mr. Ukpolo, a former administrator with the five-campus Southern University system, arrived in January 2006. "He was literally dropped into that campus in the water and told to figure out what to do," Mr. Bell says. "Without his dogged determination, we wouldn't be where we are today." Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan,<https://twitter.com/KatherineMangan> or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.<mailto:katherine.mangan@chronicle.com> SANDRA M. PHOENIX Executive Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 800-999-8558, ext. 4820 404-702-5854 Skype: sandra.phoenix1 1438 West Peachtree NW Suite 200 Atlanta,GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (LYRASIS) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.