Tulane Cutbacks Irk Displaced Students

Tulane University will reduce its faculty by nearly 10 percent and cut some academic and athletic programs to cope with a budget deficit after Hurricane Katrina, leaving some of the students who are spending the semester at Harvard with mixed feelings about moving to New Orleans in the spring.

Sarah M. Hattier, a New Orleans-born sophomore from Tulane, said she welcomes the changes, which come after recovery efforts that have cost the university about $200 million.

“Being in an environment of change and revival will contribute to my experience,” Hattier wrote in an e-mail.

But Adam P. Nikolich, a visiting Tulane freshman, was less optimistic.

“The school in general will have a very different atmosphere,” he said.

The budget cuts total about $100 million and Tulane will be reducing its faculty by about 230 positions before it reopens for the spring semester, the university announced on Dec. 8. Five undergraduate academic programs will be dropped, most of them in the engineering field.

“Even if most of us can keep our majors, the cuts affect all of us because many members of our community will be leaving,” Hattier wrote.

Tulane is also cutting eight athletic programs: men’s track, men and women’s tennis, men and women’s golf, women’s swimming, women’s soccer, and men’s cross-country.

“I was on the Tulane University track team as a shot putter,” William Y. Ke, a visiting Tulane freshman, wrote in an e-mail. “Unfortunately I won’t be able to compete after this school year.”

But he added that he is still excited about going to Tulane this spring.

Tulane’s president, Scott S. Cowen, wrote in a message on the university’s website that 86 percent of the students are expected to return when the school reopens in January.

Housing facilities devastated by the floods have forced the school to host some students in cruise ships on the Mississippi River next semester.

“It seems a little bit out of the water to me. I know I would definitely not want to be housed on a cruise ship. The motion sickness would hit me hard,” Amy C. McClendon, a visiting Tulane freshman, wrote in an e-mail.

But Hattier said that all students would be “making sacrifices” in the wake of the hurricane.“It’s easy to look at it as ludicrous, but the bottom line is that many students have lost housing around campus due to flood damage and housing on campus was in short supply in the first place,” she wrote.

Nikolich said that the budget cuts bolster the case for allowing the eight visiting Tulane freshmen to apply to transfer to Harvard, a cause that the Undergraduate Council has supported. The Harvard admissions office has told the freshmen that they must return to Tulane in the spring, but can apply to transfer to Harvard in the fall.

“Such changes are grounds for students to be allowed to apply as transfer students for the spring semester,” Nikolich said. “Tulane isn’t the same school we applied to.”

But McClendon said she thinks students will still thrive at Tulane.

“As difficult as this situation has been, there have been a few positive things that came out of it—one of those being that I could focus just about anywhere,” she wrote. “It’s just a matter of adjusting.”