An Interview with Felipe Smith

SMITH: Well, the consequences in some ways depended on where the institutions were located and from which populations they draw their student bodies. The reason this is important is that the locations of the institutions within the city reflect something of the social structure. You have in the Uptown area on the St. Charles corridor, near the river, Tulane and Loyola University, side-by-side, but further away from the river and closer to the lake, you have Xavier?also Uptown but in close proximity to the canal system con nected to and much closer to the lake, and which therefore had much more substantial structural damage than did Loyola and Tulane. The location of Tulane and Loyola near the river meant that they were on higher ground than that of the rest of the city, because over a long period of time the river has built up a natural levee. The areas that the other universities are located in, especially the public universities like The University of New Orleans, Delgado, and Southern University at New Orleans, is on land that was previously reclaimed from marshy uninhabitable ground nearer the lake as well, and therefore closer to the area that flooded more substantially. Since the flooding was mostly caused by levee breaches in the canals that feed into and out of the lake, the well-established private institutions closer to the river and the more historic part of the city had much less structural damage. And because Tulane's student population tends to be not as local as the other institutions, the core facilities of the University, the surrounding infrastructure, and the University's specific challenges in reopening meant a different manner of addressing post-Katrina issues from schools that drew from a more local working-class population and suffered proportionally more infrastructure damage. The public institutions have had a much more difficult path to restore sustainability, which involved many more stakeholders in the conversation because they have to go through the state legislature and other bureaucratic hurdles that private institutions did not have to do. I'm more familiar with the Tulane situation, but I think with all of the institutions the immediate response was a downsizing of faculty and of support employees, so that in the midst of this larger catastrophe, we had the loss of jobs in all of these institutions which

Archaeology · Art · Cartography · Geography · Levee · Population · Sociology · Demography · Disaster Management and Resilience · Geology