Starting Anew

Biding their time in out-of-state teaching positions, New Orleans faculty members are optimistic about a post-Katrina return to the ‘Big Easy’

By Lydia Lum  

Not a day goes by that Dr. Jeanine R. Burse doesn’t wonder what she would be doing if she hadn’t been laid off from her job at Xavier University of New Orleans. It was more than a job, and more than a return to her alma mater.

The former assistant professor of biology says the Xavier community was like family to her.

“Xavier was my life,” she says.

Was.

Burse is among the hundreds of higher education faculty who lost their jobs in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans’ colleges and universities were forced to cancel fall semester classes after the city’s levee system failed, submerging 80 percent of the city just weeks before the academic year began. Damage assessments began evenbefore the deadly storm’s floodwaters had receded, and it wasn’t until the full scope of the destruction was known that university officials could begin the Herculean task of recovery and repair. With most of

their students scattered across the country, tuition for the spring semester was a fraction of its normal amount. Add the enormous costs of repairing the damage from the hurricane, and most of the universities were left with little choice but to trim their faculty ranks.

The situation varies from institution to institution. Even some tenured, senior faculty are jobless, raising some questions over due process. Some have asked whether administrators are using Katrina as an excuse to cut payroll by retaining the least expensive — and generally least experienced — instructors. Officials of the American Association of University Professors have raised doubts over whether faculty were appropriately consulted as to who should stay and who should go, and whether administrators actually exhausted all
other budget-cutting alternatives before they slashed the faculty. University administrators, many of whom spent weeks or months working from remote sites after evacuating the city, have argued that they had neither the time nor the luxury to follow AAUP-recommended practices on such matters.