Tulanian Summer 2010

Tulanian T H E M AG A Z I N E O F

TULANE UNIVERSITY

SUMMER 2010

Katrina: Five Years Gone A look back at moments that define the recovery.

CHIC IN THE CITY PR maven Alison Brod takes Manhattan.

THE DAYKEEPER’S FRIEND Judith Maxwell treks Guatemala’s highlands in search of sacred sites.

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12 Katrina: Five Years Gone by Mary Ann Travis The storm devastated the university and the city, but amid the adversity there was the will to survive.

22 Chic in the City by David McKay Wilson Women run the show at the pretty-in-pink NYC public relations powerhouse owned by Alison Brod, NC ’91.

26 The Daykeeper’s Friend by Nick Marinello The study of language is not a cut-and-dried endeavor. Judith Maxwell, professor of anthropology and linguistics, forms bonds with Guatemalans as she helps preserve Mayan languages.

4 President’s Perspective Tulane researchers engage the oil spill, doing what they do best, which is all that we all can do, says Scott Cowen.

5 Inside Track • Spiffed up Newcomb Hall gives nod to the past • Time is ripe for implementation of coastal restoration plan • Oiled birds face uncertain future • Teaching awards • Medical school opens training campus in Baton Rouge • Harnessing hydrokinetic energy of Mississippi River • More students than ever apply to Tulane • Who’s using the new bike lanes?

• Students build health clinic in Honduras • Men’s basketball team welcomes new coach

10 Photo Riff

Workers lay boom to protect the coast from the oil spill.

Cooling off with sno-balls is a New Orleans summer custom.

31 The Classes Read about what your classmates and other Tulane alumni are doing.

40 Giving Back Thanks for support after the storm. The spirit of Bobby Boudreau remembered.

The field and track team of 1947 lays claim to a high percentage of Tulane Athletics Hall of Famers.

Front cover: That was then and this is now: the flooding and the revitalization of Freret Street and Brown Field adjacent to Aron and Willow Street residences on McAlister Extension. Photos of flood by Louis Meyer. Recovery photos by Paula Burch-Celentano.

Inside front cover: A view through the Broadway gate near Newcomb Hall. Photo by Tricia Travis (class of 2011).

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Tulanian Editor Mary Ann Travis mtravis@tulane.edu Features Editor Nick Marinello mr4@tulane.edu “The Classes” Editor Fran Simon fsimon@tulane.edu Contributors Catherine Freshley (’09) Alicia Duplessis Jasmin aduples@tulane.edu Maureen King mking2@tulane.edu Mike Strecker mstreck@tulane.edu Art Director Melinda Whatley Viles mviles@tulane.edu University Photographer Paula Burch-Celentano pburch@tulane.edu Production Coordinator and Graphic Designer Sharon Freeman sfree@tulane.edu

betweenThelines | backTalk Watershed in time Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina slammed onto the Gulf Coast, massively wrecking the city of New Orleans and Tulane University. Time, for us in the region, is forever divided into “before” and “after” the storm. In “Katrina: Five Years Gone,” we look at the storm from the perspective of those who lived through it and those who came here after the deluge. The university’s recovery would not have been possible without the resilience, determination and leadership of many people. By a gathering of wits and marshaling of intelligence, Tulane found a way forward.

If you’re in the neighborhood around the time of the Katrina anniversary in late August, early September, you might want to stop by to see a multimedia exhibit at the Lavin-Bernick Center on the uptown campus. The presentation, designed with help from Tulanian art director Melinda Viles, chronicles the storm and recovery with oral histories, video documentation and still photos. Also, there’s a website, “Katrina Remembered,” worth checking out at tulane.edu/k5.

Alison Brod is a 1991 Newcomb College graduate with the smarts and savvy to make a splash in the Manhattan public relations world. In “Chic in the City,” David McKay Wilson takes us behind the scenes of her fast-paced product-placement and celebrity-endorsement world.

Judith Maxwell, professor of anthropology and linguistics, knows better than most people about embracing different cultures and languages. In “The Daykeeper’s Friend,” Nick Marinello tells the story of Maxwell’s affinity for Guatemala, where she has traveled for 37 years, documenting and preserving the Kaqchikel language and forming lasting bonds with families there.

Enjoy! And keep your e-mails and letters coming.

Graphic Designer Tracey O’Donnell tbodonn@tulane.edu

Mary Ann Travis Editor, Tulanian

President of the University Scott S. Cowen Vice President of University Communications Deborah L. Grant (PHTM ’86) Executive Director of Publications Carol Schlueter (B ’99) cjs@tulane.edu

Tulanian (USPS 017-145) is a quarterly magazine pub lished by the Tulane Office of University Publications. Periodical postage at New Orleans, LA 70113 and additional mailing offices. Send editorial correspondence to: Tulanian, 31 McAlister Drive, Drawer 1, New Orleans, LA 70118-5624, or e-mail tulanian@tulane.edu.

Opinions expressed in Tulanian are not necessarily those of Tulane representatives and do not necessarily reflect university policies. Material may be reprinted only with permission.

Tulane University is an affirmative action/equal opportunity institution.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Tulanian, 31 McAlister Drive, Drawer 1, New Orleans, LA 70118-5624.

Summer 2010/ Vol. 82, No. 1

G-MEN EXPERIENCE I recognized the picture immediately [page 31, spring 2010 Tulanian, of Tulane students picking up garbage during a city collectors’ strike in 1946]—so will give you the details concerning the “G-Men” and our experience.

Early one morning a representative from the Mayor’s office visited the architectural school on the top floor of the Engineering Building at Tulane, and asked if any of the students would help the Mayor of New Orleans and work to pick up garbage for a day. That just about cleared out the architecture school! He also wanted some with military experience!

Three of us quickly gathered together and went to a major garbage site near downtown New Orleans: The guy leaning over [in the

photo]: Me: Roy Johns of Lake Charles, La.; the guy standing up [in the photo]: John I. “Jack” Neel of Monroe, La.; the third student: Albert “Moose” Olivier of Thibodaux, La. Jack had served in the Army in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, Moose had served as a fighter pilot in the Air Force, and I had served two years in the Pacific at sea as an Ensign and Lt. j.g. in the Navy.

The three of us were given a police officer, and walked through a jeering crowd of pickets surrounding the garbage site. We came out in a garbage truck with Moose driving and the police officer up front, and Jack and I hanging on, swinging on the rear.

We were assigned the French Quarter. It was a horrible stinking mess. Merchants at each

backTalk shop had placed their garbage on the sidewalk in front of their shop. We proceeded to fill up the truck. Each time we cleared a sidewalk area, we tapped on the truck and Moose moved on to the next pile. The truck had a swinging door up high on the side, which we used for loading some of the nearby garbage.

Near the end, after giving the usual tapping to tell Moose to move on, we had forgotten to shut the side swinging door. Before we could get Moose to stop, the door had decapitated three very decorative French Quarter light fixtures— leaving the poles still standing. The police officer said, “Keep on going!”

We delivered the truckload around noon, and called it a day. … Later, we each received a certificate from the City saying “Thanks” for the help.

Roy Johns, A ’48 Monroe, La. SON-IN-LAW’S ADMIRATION I noted with interest the 1946 photograph of the Tulane student standing next to the garbage truck (facing the camera): John I. Neel (A ’48).

At the time of this photograph Jack was dating Sophie Newcomb student Laurelle Fillmore. The Tulane Photo Service photograph was picked up by the AP wire service and seen by Ms. Fillmore’s parents in the Atlanta Constitution. I think their concern was that a “DKE garbage collector” wouldn’t amount to much as an architect!

Thankfully, Jack finished first in his class, and the courtship culminated in marriage. By all accounts, Jack became a pretty good architect.

They had a beautiful daughter, Laurelle Neel (NC ’73). Laurelle and I were married in ’78.

James I. M. Williams Monroe, La. Note: Jack Neel and Roy Johns established an architectural firm partnership (Johns and Neel) in Monroe, La., in 1952; Heuer, Johns, Neel, Rivers and Webb (1971, merger); and Architecture Plus (1983).

BOURBON STREET BEAT For the record, I was a student [who participated in collecting garbage in the French Quarter in 1946]. …

Each garbage truck had a policeman assigned to it. Our cop had Bourbon Street as his usual beat. Accordingly, he knew all the bartenders there. When our truck got to Bourbon Street the sidewalks were piled high with garbage. As we picked up the first pile, our “protector” suggested to the bartender in the adjoining establishment that “his boys” be taken care of. Beer was produced for the “boys” and something stronger for the driver and the cop. So it went as we moved down the street. Our truck was full (as were we!) by the time we were half way into the second block, so the driver took a side street en route to the collection depot. In those days cars were parked on both sides of the side streets. While the truck did not go as fast as one would at the Indy 500, it must have broken the speed limit for a narrow New Orleans street—and then some. I still recall the sound of smashed fenders along the way as we “boys” hung on to the rear of the truck.

When we arrived at the central garbage yard, the garbage in the back of our truck was ablaze, apparently caused by something smoldering in one of the boxes of garbage. A fire engine was called and, in due course, put out the fire.

However, that ended my Garbage Collecting 101 class.

I can also report that at no other time during my six years at Tulane was a libation offered as part of my work in class!

Jack Weinmann, A&S ’50, L ’52 New Orleans CRESCENT BOX CONNECTION Your article [page 40, spring 2010 Tulanian] on the Ford Meter Box Co. crescent box caught my eye. Edwin Ford was my great grandfather on my mother’s side and I have always identified strongly with this branch of my family tree. You also might like to know that Edwin Ford had five sons, born in Indiana, one of whom died in childhood. The company was eventually established in Wabash, Ind., and all of the Ford brothers, including Richard V. Ford, my grandfather, worked for the company, which continues to produce waterworks brass, meter boxes, repair clamps and numerous other products. Currently,

Ford Meter Box still has a Ford as company president, has sales in all fifty states and numerous foreign countries, and is among the largest producers of waterworks brass in the United States.

As a student at Tulane in the 1970s, it was a source of considerable pride to step over the crescent box in the streets and yards of New Orleans and remember that my grandfather had a hand in building this great city. Thank you for giving me a chance to recall this aspect of my college years.

Paul Aruffo, A&S ’80 Bellaire, Texas PHOTO APPRECIATION I just received my Spring 2010 Tulanian. The pictures on the back cover are beautiful. I am interested in the details of the photographs; who took them, what camera, what lens, etc.

James V. Reuter III, E ’78 Baton Rouge, La.

University photographer Paula Burch-Celentano photographed irises on the uptown campus with a Nikon D3 camera with a 70-200 mm lens at ISO 200 1/500 @ f/4. We’re happy to announce that Burch-Celentano has received grand gold and gold medals from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education for her photography, including the portrait of Tulane professor and “American Routes” radio show founder Nick Spitzer in the winter 2009 Tulanian.

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president’sPerspective Questions and answers It is nothing less than ironic that as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region come together to commemorate the landfall of Hurricane Katrina and the five years of recovery from its devastating impact, we now face another unprecedented calamity. The ceaseless flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico following last April’s explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig is an environmental disaster of unparalleled proportion, and among the most disturbing things about it is that we don’t yet know the scope of its impact.

When I talk to people about the oil spill, what I hear from them over and over again is their anxiety about the uncertainty of this tragic event.

How great was the flow of the oil from the seabed? What species of animals are most at risk?

To what extent will our coastlines be affected?

What does this mean for America’s energy future?

It is in asking difficult, troubling questions and diligently endeavoring to answer them that we will eventually meet the many challenges that are currently before us.

In the winter 2010 Tulanian, I wrote about the lessons learned in the wake of Katrina. Foremost among those lessons was the value of careful assessment of our situation, which was the critical first step that put us on the road to recovery.

And I can tell you that any such assessment begins with good information.

As an academic who has spent his life in the business of creating and purveying information, it is both humbling and fascinating to witness Tulane scholars and researchers engaging in myriad ways with this unfolding crisis to find answers to questions we never before had to ask.

Nearly every week since the spill began approaching the coastline, biologist Michael Blum and his team of postdoctoral fellows have been plying Barataria Bay waters in a skiff, tracking how microbes—the smallest of life forms along the barrier islands—are responding to the oil.

Another biologist, Caz Taylor, is sampling the larvae of blue crabs in the estuaries and offshore breeding shoals in order to assess the influence of oil on population size and migration.

Geographer Richard Campanella is working

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with the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center to study employment trends in coastal regions affected by the spill; and chemical engineers Vijay John and Kyriakos Papadopoulos, experts in dispersants and bioremediation, are consulting with the Louisiana Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

Ky Lu and the Tulane Disaster Leadership Resilience Academy are offering certificate training in disaster management and maintaining a website offering comprehensive, up-to-the-minute information about the oil spill and its ramifications.

Toxicologist LuAnn White is an adviser to the National Oil Spill Incident Command and to the Louisiana state health officer. She’s also advising the federal Centers of Disease Control and Prevention on health issues related to the spill.

John McLachlan and Matthew Burrow of the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research (CBR) are leading an evaluation of the toxicity to humans of chemicals in the oil and dispersants. The CBR also is coordinating the efforts of university departments to test water, soil and air for pollutants, as well as recommend ways to mitigate the impact on fish, birds and wildlife.

Believe me, these are only a few of the many in the Tulane community who are responding to this crisis, each following his or her academic interest and expertise. Individually and collectively, they seek to deepen our understanding of what is happening in the Gulf and along the coast.

In doing so, they embody another important lesson we learned in the aftermath of Katrina: when faced with a challenge or a crisis, each of us can only do what it is in our ability to do.

But within the boundary of our abilities we must do all that we can to meet the challenges and mitigate the crisis.

I think of the “Cajun navy,” a flotilla of barges strung together by the residents of Grand Isle to defend that barrier island from the oil slick, and I am inspired by their resourcefulness and their willingness to do whatever it takes.

I have no doubt that Hurricane Katrina made Tulane a stronger community, just as it strengthened communities along the entire Gulf Coast. We don’t wish for calamity to come our way, but when we join together to

engage these crises, each doing what we can, we are made better by them.

For more information on how Tulane is responding to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, go to the university’s website at http://oilspill.tulane.edu.

inside Track A walk through history Photos of events and people from the history of Newcomb College hang on the newly painted bright white and red walls of Newcomb Hall’s first floor. “The whole concept was that we would do something with the linear space of the walls,” says Jeremy Jernegan, professor of art and associate dean of the School of Liberal Arts, who helped design the new look. “Reflecting on the history of the institution seemed like the natural thing to do.”

newsNotes | insideTrack Oil turns coastal birds into sitting ducks

Crews clean up oil from the already fragile and stressed Louisiana wetlands.

Moment of truth The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig—killing 11 offshore workers and spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico—is an environmental and economic tragedy; it also constitutes a “moment of truth” in the decadeslong effort to implement effective policies for conserving and restoring coastal areas, says Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Institute of Water Resources Law and Policy.

Since the late 1980s, federal and state officials, with input from scientists and engineers, have gradually developed plans for coastal restoration and hurricane protection that culminated in a master plan that was approved by the Louisiana Legislature in 2007. Davis says that any efforts to remediate damage from the oil spill should “dovetail with the broader plans that have been on the drawing boards for so long.”

The broader plans to restore coastal wetlands comprise projects diverting freshwater and sediment from the Mississippi River, restoring barrier islands, and stabilizing naturally occurring ridges and shorelines.

In the weeks and months after the blowout, Davis says his institute has advocated that in the midst of this crisis state and federal officials should not lose sight of the larger picture.

“This spill adds to the peril [for coastal areas] but it is not the only threat these wetlands are facing,” says Davis.

“Our view is you don’t need a brand new plan.

What you need is a brand new commitment and

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to work within the frameworks that we’ve already begun to create.”

Davis notes that there are processes in place for cleanup and restoration in the wake of an oil spill, but those processes were not designed for a spill of the magnitude and scope of the one currently in the Gulf.

“It’s not going to be fixable by a handful of projects that BP undertakes or writes checks for,” says Davis. “The only way you are going to heal some of this is to do the things we already knew we had to do to heal the coast, and that takes you into a completely different sphere of thinking and acting than you would normally see with an oil spill cleanup.”

A holistic view is one that necessarily avoids polemics. “This isn’t a matter of nature good, oil bad,” says Davis, who acknowledges that oil exploration in the Gulf will not only continue but is likely expand in the years to come.

“If we are going to do it, we have to do it in a way that is more clear-eyed,” he says. “We should do it in a way that does not subsidize those energy choices with environmental risks as well as risks to other economies like fishing and tourism.

“I don’t demand the state of Louisiana, the oil and gas industry and everybody else have policies I agree with,” says Davis, “but they should at least be understandable, they should be rectifiable and they should be based on an honest assessment of risk and benefit. And that is not where we are.”

—Nick Marinello Nick Marinello is features editor of Tulanian.

Following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April, Louisiana’s coastal birds face an uncertain future because of the oil that has seeped into the marshes where they live. Tulane University ecologist and conservation biologist Thomas Sherry explains that the birds will endure long-term effects as a result of the oil arriving during their peak breeding season.

“When the adult birds get even a little oil on them, it gets onto their eggs,” says Sherry. “The tiny pores in the calcium eggshells allow carbon dioxide out and oxygen in. Since the oil is interfering with that gas exchange, the eggs will not survive.” Even small amounts of oil can kill the embryo inside the eggshell.

Birds indigenous to the marsh encounter oil not only when it washes ashore but also offshore, when they dive below the water’s surface to catch food. Once oil has coated a bird’s feathers, it is likely the bird will perish. Sherry offers the image of a human trying to swim wearing a bulky winter coat. “It can be done, but eventually you’re going to get really tired.”

While capturing and cleaning the birds is a humane endeavor that Sherry supports, he says the research on whether it really helps them survive after they are released is unclear.

“One of the scariest things is that the scientific community doesn’t have a clue how this is going to affect birds and other animals and for how long,” says Sherry. “The one thing we know for sure is that we’ll be dealing with this for decades to come.

—Alicia Duplessis Jasmin Alicia Duplessis Jasmin is a writer in the publications office.

A baby tern is gently cleaned.

CREW PHOTO FROM U.S. COAST GUARD. PHOTO OF BABY TERN BY JULIE DERMANSKY, NC ’87.

insideTrack | newsNotes Professors espouse confidence, critical thinking

recipients of the university’s highest honor for undergraduate teaching.

The 2010 Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellowships were announced in conjunction with the commencement ceremony held in May. Confidence and critical thinking—these are the “Confidence is not something you just have,” attributes and skills that Constance Balides and says Balides, director of film studies at Tulane.

Nghana Lewis say they aim to develop in their stuConfidence comes when you push yourself “past dents. Balides, associate professor of communicaa limit into an unknown zone, into the next level tion, and Lewis, associate professor of English and of sophistication in your thinking.”

African and African diaspora studies, are this year’s The challenges that she gives her students, Balides says, “help them develop confidence so that when they go out into the world, they’re equipped to pursue what they want to pursue because they’ve already had successes.”

Students usually come to film studies because they like to watch movies, but they quickly learn in Balides’ classes that film studies demands intensive reading and in-depth analysis.

Nghana Lewis, associate professor of English, and “Cinema matters,” says Balides, “because Constance Balides, associate professor of communication, are recipients of Weiss Fellowships. it is a way that culture talks about itself.

Mentors light fire of scholarship Don Gaver and Larry Powell are as different as their disciplines—biomedical engineering and history—but they are kindred spirits when it comes to a dedication to students. Tulane honored them with this year’s President’s Awards for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching.

With a combined 52 years at Tulane, Powell, a history professor, and Gaver, professor and chair of biomedical engineering, have sent hundreds of graduate students to successful academic and scientific careers.

Their colleagues, as well as current and former graduate students, wrote commendation letters for the university’s highest upper-level teaching award that provides to each one a medal and $5,000.

“Teaching is not the right way to describe it,” said Powell. “It’s shepherding young historians into being full-fledged members of our guild. You guide them and hope to light some fire within them.”

Gaver, who also holds the Alden J. “Doc” Laborde Chair in Biomedical Engineering, believes

What I feel that we’re doing in our classes is giving students a conceptual language to understand how film works.”

Critical thinking and writing are central to what Nghana Lewis teaches. Literary studies and critical race theory are her areas of expertise. She is the director of the African and African diaspora studies program at Tulane.

Lewis earned her bachelor of arts from Tulane in 1994. She attributes much of how she approaches teaching to observations of her professors, who in some cases are her colleagues now.

“I’m still learning from them. What I expect of my students is consistent with what was expected of me.”

Lewis’ goal is for her students to understand that “the university is a place where we generate ideas, and we’re encouraged to think broadly.”

But creativity and free-thinking in themselves are not the end destination in education, says Lewis. “The end is being able to practically take that knowledge and apply it to the world.”

—Mary Ann Travis Mary Ann Travis is editor of Tulanian.

support,” “insistence on sound scholarship” and in treating his students like colleagues. “I can’t being a “trusted mentor.” teach and not be connected with my students,” “I think of this as a community award,” he says, adding that his most lasting contribution says Gaver. “No given faculty member does it to graduate education “comes from direct menby himself.” torship of students in my laboratory.”

—Carol Schlueter How do they define success? “When stuCarol Schlueter is executive director of publications. dents are able to teach themselves,” says Gaver, who often engages his classrooms in collaborative learning, in which students complete group projects and teach their classmates.

For Powell, success comes “when you see the dissertation, that accomplished piece of work,” the result of many hours of guidance. “You’re preparing the people who will replace us.”

One student says Gaver is successful in encouraging new ideas and instilling “a curiosity for investigatDon Gaver, professor of biomedical engineering, and Larry Powell, ing.” Powell’s former stu- professor of history, are recognized for passing along their passion for dents praise his “unflagging scholarship to their graduate students.

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newsNotes | insideTrack Rouge General physicians serve as teachers, mentors and role models at the new campus. The program marks the first time in the Tulane medical school’s 175-year history that it has opened a training campus outside of the New Orleans area.

“This bold and progressive initiative provides unique opportunities for medical students in the state of Louisiana, and will define our state as The first cadre of Tulane medical students have begun their a national leader in medical education,” said Dr. Benjamin Sachs, dean clinical rotations at Baton Rouge General’s Mid City hospital. of the School of Medicine and senior vice president of Tulane University.

Dr. Floyd “Flip” Roberts, Baton Rouge General chief medical officer, serves as regional dean for the Tulane students in Baton Rouge. While the program is starting with 10 students, it will enroll an additional 20 during its second year. Plans call Tulane University School of Medicine and Baton for it to grow to 160 students during the next Rouge General Medical Center have entered into several years. a partnership to create a satellite training campus Baton Rouge General Medical Center is a fullin Baton Rouge, La. service, community hospital providing cardioloStarting in May, a select group of 10 Tulane gy, oncology, medical, emergency and surgical medical students began their third- and fourthservices for adult and pediatric patients, serving year clinical rotations in Baton Rouge General’s 175,000 people each year in the greater Baton Mid City hospital, serving required clerkships Rouge area. in internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics, pedi—Mike Strecker atrics, family medicine, neurology, psychiatry Mike Strecker is director of public relations. and other departments. Experienced Baton

Med school partners with Baton Rouge hospital

Riversphere to explore alternative energy sources The U.S. Economic Development Administration has awarded Tulane University a $3 million grant to help build RiverSphere, a research center, education facility and business incubator focused on water sustainability and renewable energy. The facility, located at the Robin Street Wharf in downtown New Orleans, will include floating barges on which private companies can test prototypes of power turbines capable of generating electricity using river currents.

The grant, which is funded through supplemental disaster appropriations from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, will be used to convert a 22,000-square-foot warehouse into the River Sphere campus.

“RiverSphere will focus initially on ‘in-stream’ hydrokinetic technologies that harness the power of the Mississippi River to generate carbon-free electricity,” said Douglas Meffert, RiverSphere executive director and deputy director for policy at the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research. “RiverSphere will be a place to explore the most cost-effective and environmentally safe energy solutions for New Orleans, Southeast Louisiana and similar geographies around the world.”

RiverSphere also will house laboratories for river-related research and exhibition space.

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Numbers game This year’s undergraduate application season was one for the record books. Tulane received 44,000 applications for full-time undergraduate admission for the 2010 academic year. That’s a record-breaking number for the university and appears to be a greater number of applications than were received by any private university in the nation.

The high number of applicants resulted in a highly qualified applicant pool from which to choose the incoming class, says Earl Retif, vice president for enrollment management.

Admission staff members deal with competing interests as they assemble an incoming class.

They look for students with high SAT and ACT scores and top rankings in their high schools.

Good grades count, of course. But so do extracurricular activities and diversity of all sorts— geographic, ethnic and academic.

In step with the university’s commitment to public service, students who show a dedication to community engagement have an edge on getting into Tulane.

“It’s like a puzzle,” says Retif. “You’re just trying to put the puzzle together.”

Tulane tries to meet the financial aid needs of all admitted students, says Retif. Even in the uncertain economy, Tulane is doing all it can, within reason, to help deserving, high-caliber students attend the university.

At Tulanian press time, more than 1,600 admitted students had sent in commitment deposits for the fall semester.

—Mary Ann Travis

Tulane broke records for applications for full-time undergraduate admission in 2010.

HOSPITAL PHOTO FROM BATON ROUGE GENERAL MEDICAL CENTER. ILLUSTRATION BY TRACEY O’DONNELL.

insideTrack | newsNotes Have lanes, will bike?

New Orleans is gradually becoming a more bike-friendly city. As new bike lanes are appearing on major corridors such as St. Charles and Carrollton avenues, the Tulane Prevention Research Center is evaluating their use to determine the extent of impact from such environmental improvements.

“We will be able to determine whether the number of people cycling increases, and if new bike lanes attract new riders or pedestrians to places where new lanes are present,” says Jeanette Gustat, principal investigator of the project.

A mission to the mountains

mountains where we’ve decided to build the clinic,” says Tim Rinaldi, a Tulane senior and a student leader for the 2010 mission. He has made four trips to Honduras.

There is a critical need for the mountaintop In the second of two spring trips this year to the medical clinic, Rinaldi says. northwestern corner of Honduras, students “One thing we’ve always noticed is that if involved in Mission Honduras put the finishing anyone ever needed medical attention, they touches on a new health clinic that will serve probably would not be able to make it down the villagers in the remote and mountainous area. mountain to get to a hospital.”

The mission, a student undertaking sponThere are approximately 40 families in each of sored by the Tulane Catholic Center, has sent the 13 villages situated in the El Merendon students to Honduras annually since 2002. This mountains, and most of the families do not have year, students first visited the country during motorized transportation to make the three-hour spring break and returned after classes ended drive into town, Rinaldi says. in May. While the clinic will not offer emergency “Every year we spend some time in the city services, it will be staffed with nurses and a docof San Pedro Sula and some time up in the tor who will visit once per week.

Staffing is the result of arrangements made with the Catholic parish in San Pedro Sula.

Typically, students on the annual mission take part in several community service projects, visiting individuals who are ill and orphanages, where they deliver supplies.

The 33 students participating this year raised more than $15,000 to build, staff and supply the clinic on Students with the Tulane Catholic Center Mission pause from an ongoing basis.

—Alicia Duplessis Jasmin their work on a health clinic in the mountains of Honduras.

HONDURAS GROUP PHOTO FROM TIM RINALDI. PHOTO OF COACH CONROY BY SALLY ASHER.

Ed Conroy is the new head coach of the Green Wave men’s basketball team.

New coach courtside Ed Conroy has been named the 23rd head coach in the 99-year history of the Tulane men’s basketball program.

Conroy comes to Tulane after a four-year stint as head coach at The Citadel. He was named 2008–09 Southern Conference Coach of the Year and earned NABC District 22 Coach of the Year honors after leading The Citadel to a 20-13 record that included a school record 15 conference victories.

“Ed, with his experience and history of turning around programs, is the perfect coach to teach and inspire our studentathletes and return Tulane basketball to being a highly successful program,” said Rick Dickson, athletics director.

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Sno-ball, anyone? These icy confections are for sale at a stand not far from the uptown campus—and they’re “plum” delicious.

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BY MARY ANN TRAVIS

The cataclysmic storm that five years ago shook the university and the city of New Orleans to their foundations proves to be a catalyst for change.

PHOTOS: CENTER: PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO; TOP RIGHT AND BOTTOM LEFT: LOUIS MAYER; NEWSPAPER FRONT PAGES: THE TIMES-PICAYUNE.

Ceramic artist and professor Jeremy Jernegan (left) works in his home studio before Katrina. After the storm (center), a tangle of debris fills the studio. In his art, Jernegan has long used water imagery. In Prescience (right) (2008), a 50-by-70-by-9-inch ceramic and stainless steel wall sculpture, he explores the conflicting fascination with and fear of water that humans have.

JEREMY JERNEGAN took a chance two and a half weeks after the storm, driving past National Guard checkpoints to get into the closed city and back to his house.

Jernegan, professor of art and now associate dean for finance and planning in the School of Liberal Arts, lives in the Venetian Isles neighborhood in eastern New Orleans. His house is on a lovely spot on the water in an area outside levee protection and, on Aug. 29, 2005, in the direct path of the eye of Hurricane Katrina.

“It was astonishing,” says Jernegan of his first view of the neighborhood and his house into which the storm surge had pushed 16 and a half feet of water.

“Boats were everywhere. Debris was everywhere. The surge came in with great violence.

But the house was still standing. That was the good news,” he says.

Waves of water, as if churned by a demonic washing machine, had sloshed and tumbled everything everywhere, making an unbelievable tangle of stuff.

The transformation was dramatic, says Jernegan. “You knew things could and would

HOW TIME FLIES

happen but you didn’t expect all the things that did happen. It was horrifying. It was fascinating.”

Katrina was and is a vast collective event, experienced by thousands of people whose lives were upended. It means different things to different people. And Katrina stories with common themes of the good and the bad, the lost and the gained, will continue to fan out, reverberating through the years.

Jernegan, a ceramics artist, lost most of his sculptures that were stored in his home studio and books, files and tools stored in his office/studio at the Newcomb Art Department.

But he, like thousands of others, set to work immediately cleaning up and clearing out.

During fall 2005, before moving into a FEMA trailer on their property in March 2006, Jernegan and his wife, Vicki, lived in an uptown neighborhood house lent to them by art professor Elizabeth Boone, who stayed in Washington, D.C., for the semester.

Jernegan would anxiously travel back and forth from the uptown “sliver by the river,” where lights were on, through dark, devastated swaths of the city to work on his house in

8.27.07 EVACUATION ORDER New student orientation is shortened because a major hurricane named Katrina is threatening the New Orleans area. Tulane President Scott Cowen welcomes students to Tulane and then tells them they will be evacuated.

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF JEREMY JERNEGAN.

its eerily quiet surroundings.

Jernegan says that early during that dark fall, he pondered the viability of New Orleans and Tulane University.

“Even as you couldn’t believe that they could fail, you weren’t exactly sure they would not,” he says. The fragility of the city and the university in the aftermath of the storm was sobering, says Jernegan. It seemed that one would not survive without the other.

Tulane President Scott Cowen and the Tulane Board deserve credit for taking decisive action to renovate and reopen the university as quickly as possible, says Jernegan, echoing what many others have said. The swift and emphatic decisions to hire Belfor, a disaster mitigation company that zealously cleaned up the Tulane campuses in time for the reopening of the university in January 2006, along with the December 2005 Renewal Plan that outlined a major reorganization and downsizing of the university, “were bold and important decisions to make,” says Jernegan.

8.29.05 KATRINA MAKES LANDFALL Katrina comes ashore just 30 miles east of the city. President Cowen and emergency personnel ride out the storm on the uptown campus.

8.30.05 LEVEES FAIL Breaks in the levee system allow floodwaters to inundate 80 percent of the city. “Then all hell broke loose,” says President Cowen.

“We lost power, water pressure and all communications.”

The Wilson Athletics Center (left) and tennis courts on the uptown campus sit in Katrina floodwaters. National Guard soldiers (center) occupy Gibson Hall, where they camped out in September 2005 during their deployment in the city. Trash collected during the cleanup (right) piles up in front of Newcomb Hall in fall 2005. The EcoPavilion in City Park (below) is a Tulane City Center project built after the storm and next to a Works Progress Administration structure (in the background) built in the 1930s, both symbols of overcoming hard times.

FIRST-YEAR, FIRST-TIME, FULL-TIME UNDERGRADUATE ENROLLMENT,

BY YEAR FALL 2004 1,596 SPRING 2006* 1342 FALL 2006 882 FALL 2007 1,324 FALL 2008 1,560 FALL 2009 1,502 FALL 2010 (ESTIMATED) 1,620 * Spring 2006 was the semester the university reopened after it was closed due to Hurricane Katrina damages for the entire fall 2005 semester.

Tulane students attended more than 600 universities during fall 2005.

Remarkably, of first-year undergraduate students who had been enrolled pre-Katrina in fall 2005 returned to Tulane for the spring 2006 semester.

86 PERCENT

8.31.05 STUDENTS DISPERSE TO OTHER SCHOOLS The American Council on Education encourages the higher education community to house and enroll students from storm-damaged institutions. Eventually, 13,000 Tulane students enroll in more than 600 colleges and universities across the country.

some estimates put the population at 350,000.

When accurate population figures are available from the 2010 census, Campanella is anticipating a slightly lower number than the current estimates.

TRAUMATIC BLOW The city of New Orleans has suffered many other disasters in its 300-year history. But Katrina is different, says geographer Richard Campanella, author of Bienville’s Dilemma and Geographies of New Orleans. He is associate director of the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research and research assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences.

Despite the traumas caused by other serious floods, hurricanes, yellow fever and cholera epidemics and one war, the population of New Orleans continued to rise until 1960, when due to white flight and middle class exodus, the population slowly declined from its peak of 627,000.

“Katrina stands alone as the city’s the first major catastrophe that was coupled with and causative of a dramatic population loss,” says Campanella.

In 2005, before the storm, the population of New Orleans was estimated at 452,170. Today,

9.07.05 ATHLETICS TEAMS REGROUP Green Wave baseball team and women’s basketball team arrive in Lubbock, Texas, to attend Texas Tech University during the Katrina semester-in-exile. Other athletics teams stay together and enroll in other institutions.

That the population is three-quarters its preKatrina size is the result of not only natives returning but also newcomers moving in. Drawn to New Orleans by a fascination with its culture and a desire to participate in the recovery, these nonnatives are helping the city rebuild. “Their presence here represents a creaming effect. They’re self-selected; they really want to be here and become New Orleanians,” says Campanella. “That’s why so many post-Katrina students are extraordinary, and the brain gain is something to be optimistic about. Self-selection is a powerful force.”

9.14.05 FREE CLINICS OPEN Tulane physicians provide free medical care for New Orleans citizens. Clinic locations include Harrah’s Casino, Covenant House in the French Quarter, Ida Hymel Health Center in Algiers and the University Square parking lot.

11.14.05 TULANE CITY CENTER OPENS The School of Architecture creates Tulane City Center—an urban outreach and research program in which students and faculty envision, design and construct projects to help in the rebuilding of New Orleans, especially the nonprofit sector.

PHOTOS: TOP LEFT: AP IMAGES; TOP CENTER AND RIGHT: PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO; BELOW: EMILIE TAYLOR.

Mold (left) grows profusely in French professor Elizabeth Poe’s living room in the weeks after the storm. During the lagniappe semester in summer 2006, Poe challenged her students’ French vocabulary prowess by giving them the assignment to describe the moldy scene in French. A FEMA trailer (center) parked in their yard is where Poe and her husband, classics professor Joe Poe, lived for 18 months while their house was repaired. Poe (right) says her Katrina experience confirmed that New Orleans is home. Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis (below) welcomes students “home.”

Elizabeth Poe, a French professor, vouches for the quality of students. “We’ve always had good students,” she says. “But I think that Tulane is attracting better and better students.

That is our future.”

PHD programs LINGUISTICS and AGING STUDIES have been initiated since 2009.

The FRENCH DOCTORAL program along with a CITIES, CULTURES AND COMMUNITIES SOCIOLOGY PHD program and an ECONOMICS PHD program also have New in

disaster unfold on television on CNN International. Their one-story house on State Street Drive flooded and they lost everything, which for them was primarily books and antique furniture.

The kindness and generosity of family, friends and strangers were extraordinary after the storm, says Poe. Her undergraduate mentor at Mount Holyoke College, when she learned of Poe’s loss of French literature books collected over decades, gave Poe her own personal library.

The Poes returned to New Orleans in December 2005 and lived in a FEMA trailer for 18 months while their house was raised and renovated.

The French doctoral program had been suspended in the Renewal Plan, which left the French department with no teaching assistants.

been reinstated after their suspension after the storm.

Poe has taught at Tulane for 33 years. She and her husband, Joe Poe, professor of classics, were in Germany, preparing for a sabbatical year in France, when Katrina hit. They watched the

12.08.05 RENEWAL PLAN ANNOUNCED President Scott Cowen and the Tulane Board present the Renewal Plan, a series of broad changes that reorganize the university into a smaller, more focused institution.

12.19.05 WTUL RETURNS WTUL-FM, the student-run alternative music station, returns to the airwaves by broadcasting from a local coffee house.

Senior professors like Poe had to step up to the plate and teach more courses and different courses than they had before the storm. During the spring 2006 semester, Poe taught three courses, including intermediate French 203, a class that she had not taught in 20 years.

Surprisingly, Poe says, she found the experience gratifying. “Coming back like that was absolutely the best thing for me, psychologically and otherwise.”

First-year students, who had only spent a few hours on campus before the storm, surprised Poe the most. “The students were so happy to be here,” says Poe. “They were upbeat and supportive. They buoyed me and made it one of the best semesters ever.”

The whole Katrina ordeal “confirmed that New Orleans is our home,” says Poe. “And then the Saints winning the Super Bowl [in January 2010]. That was icing on the cake.”

A new French studies PhD program began in 2009, which also gives the French department “a renewed sense of purpose,” says Poe.

1.16.06 WYNTON MARSALIS SPEAKS Celebrating the reopening of local universities, New Orleans native, composer and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis plays the trumpet and delivers a powerful speech about the city’s cultural rebirth in McAlister auditorium.

PHOTOS: TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF ELIZABETH POE; OTHER PHOTOS: PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO.

1.17.06 TULANE REOPENS A renewed Tulane University opens its doors for the spring semester. “We have always taught history at Tulane; now we are going to make it,” says President Cowen.

The flooded track and football practice field (left) is a lake of destruction after the levees break. By the end of September 2005, the grounds (center) are drained and designated a staging area for campus rebuilding equipment. Two and a half years later, the brand new Greer Baseball Field at Turchin Stadium (right) on the same site opens as a symbol of recovery.

$650 MILLION

is the total amount of estimated financial losses suffered

by Tulane University due to damages from Hurricane Katrina.

NEW NORMAL Before Katrina, in summer 2005, the Green Wave baseball team had been ranked No. 1 in the nation and made a good showing at the College World Series.

But 10 days after the storm, Rick Jones, head baseball coach, and his entire team of 37 players and assistant coaches found themselves in Lubbock, Texas, where the student-athletes enrolled in Texas Tech University for the fall 2005 semester.

Today, Tulane has a new baseball stadium, opened in February 2008. Jones, who has been at Tulane for 17 years, says that he never considered leaving Tulane and New Orleans, even at the darkest moments. “This place gets its claws in you. I love this city. Seeing it come back every day, a little something coming back, you feel a

2.14.06 TULANE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL & CLINIC REOPENS Hundreds of people gather outside the emergency department entrance to celebrate the reopening of Tulane University Hospital & Clinic—the first hospital to reopen in downtown New Orleans since Katrina.

part of that and, I think, take some pride in it.”

He’s looking forward to the future. “I’m just glad to be back and trying as hard as we can to get this thing back to where it used to be.”

Carolyn Barber-Pierre, assistant vice president for intercultural life in the Division of Student Affairs, spent the fall 2005 semester working out of her sister-in-law’s bedroom in Hahnville, La., using her cell phone and laptop computer. She worked with other staff to reconnect with first-year students and helped in placing them and other Tulane students in the more than 500 universities that they attended that fall.

She also had a role in establishing the consortium of private institutions, including Tulane, Loyola, Dillard and Xavier universities, to develop support services such as housing, libraries, recreation and transportation for the reopening of the schools in January 2006.

After the storm, Barber-Pierre says, “We came together out of some of the darkest realities and have moved on a positive path for the future.”

Brian Mitchell, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and associate provost for graduate studies and research, says that the

2.28.06 CARNIVAL ROLLS ON SCHEDULE The first post-Katrina Mardi Gras celebration takes place, smaller than usual but a success in raising the spirits of citizens.

“Not having it would be like not having Christmas,” says Carnival expert Arthur Hardy.

new Tulane is more integrated into the community. “I think there’s more of a focus on the individual’s place in the community, and not just professionally, but personally, too.”

Researchers have shifted their view of their work, says Mitchell. “We consider our place in the local community much more seriously than before.”

Scientists and engineers are easily collaborating in the new School of Science and Engineering, says Mitchell. He has been working on the development of new interdisciplinary PhD programs in linguistics, aging studies, economics, French studies, and cities, cultures and community.

Tulane School of Architecture has its number of students in its graduate programs since 2008.

DOUBLED

Tulane is a more nimble organization since Katrina, says Mitchell. “We can implement new programs and steer our own ship more easily than other institutions.”

4.25.06 RESEARCH ENHANCEMENT FUND Tulane commits $20 million to establish a Research Enhancement Fund to help researchers advance projects that were interrupted as a result of the storm and to support new initiatives.

5.02.06 QATAR KATRINA FUND Tulane receives a $10 million grant from the people of Qatar via the Qatar Katrina Fund, providing scholarships for students from Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

PHOTOS: LEFT TO RIGHT: LOUIS MAYER, PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO, PARKER WATERS.

In the URBANbuild program of the School of Architecture, students design and construct houses, starting from an empty lot (left) in neighborhoods such as Treme.

They learn carpentry and framing (center) and all the steps involved to complete a finished house (right), which is then sold to low-income New Orleanians.

Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush (below) address Tulane graduates in the first post-Katrina commencement ceremony.

Scott Bernhard, the Jean and Saul A. Mintz Associate Professor in the School of Architectture and director of its Tulane City Center, which came into existence in November 2005, says that the school’s applied research and outreach program was created to rise to the

rebuilding challenges of Katrina. A common ingredient of City Center projects is that “Tulane architecture faculty and students are working together to produce design and construction work for the benefit of the larger community, especially the nonprofit area,” says Bernhard.

Tulane architecture students have designed and built six houses since the storm and completed 50 other community-oriented projects.

5.13.06 FIRST POSTKATRINA COMMENCEMENT Former presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton address graduates at the 2006 commencement ceremony. The floodwaters “couldn’t break the spirit of the people that call this remarkable and improbable city home,” Bush tells them.

“The volume of things coming at us, especially at the beginning, and the lack of any guide, was overwhelming at first,” says Bernhard. “But it was an opportunity to find out what can really be done when needs are urgent.”

Now, five years after the storm, it’s time to take a deep breath, says Bernhard, and focus on the next, longer phase of reconstruction.

Kenneth Schwartz became dean of the School of Architecture in 2008. He came to Tulane from the University of Virginia and says that the role that Tulane plays in the community was a central consideration when he and wife, Judith Kinnard, also a professor of architecture and a designer of multifamily dwellings, made the decision to move to New Orleans.

“There is no place like New Orleans postKatrina in the way in which a major research university is playing such a central role in rebuilding and repositioning the city for its future,” says Schwartz.

But the problems of New Orleans are not all unique. “New Orleans is a good laboratory to address issues of national importance,” says Schwartz.

7.01.06 NEWCOMB COLLEGE INSTITUTE OPENS The H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College Institute opens as an interdisciplinary academic center designed to enrich women’s education at Tulane and continue the legacy of Newcomb College.

He is making sure that the work that the School of Architecture is doing in the community “connects in important ways to our curriculum within the normative enterprise of educating young women and men to become architects.”

On a personal level, Schwartz says, “I feel a sense of privilege to be here. And that’s not just rhetoric. I felt it tangibly, palpably when I first came and still do.”

Students in the Tulane School of Architecture program have designed and fully built in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

URBANBUILD 6 HOUSES

He says that he’s on a remarkable journey at Tulane, working closely with resilient and dedicated faculty and students.

“We have many heroes here at Tulane and in the city of New Orleans today,” says Schwartz.

“I think it’s inspiring to see what this place has been through in ways that are not just accommodating the challenges but using the challenges as springboards for excellence.”

8.22.06 CENTER FOR PUBLIC SERVICE OPENS The Center for Public Service begins operations, serving as a liaison between faculty, students and community organizations involved in service learning and as a facilitator for the new public-service graduation requirement.

PHOTOS: TOP ROW: EMILIE TAYLOR OF URBANBUILD; BELOW: PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO.

12.6.06 LAVIN-BERNICK CENTER DEDICATION A dedication is held for the renovated and expanded Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life, often described as the “heart of the uptown campus.”

Tulane medical personnel operate a free clinic (left) at Harrah’s Casino in downtown New Orleans after the storm. Dr. Karen DeSalvo (center photo, left), emerges as a leader in community health care, commandeering Covenant House as a clinic site. DeSalvo is joined by Dr. Eboni Price and Leah Berger in running the Tulane Community Health Center. A mobile unit (right) now travels to neighborhoods offering medical services to underserved populations.

$425 MILLION is the total amount of RECOVERY DOLLARS from all

sources to date received by Tulane University to recover from Katrina losses. These funds include insurance proceeds, federal grants, FEMA, Bush/Clinton Fund, block grants, foreign contributions, etc.

MEDICAL REVOLUTION On Sept. 12, 2005, a few days before art professor Jeremy Jernegan surveyed the staggering storm damage at his home, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, professor of medicine, drove back to New Orleans.

Communication was chaotic after the storm.

1.26.07 TULANE NATIONAL PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER EXPANDS Work begins on a $68 million project to expand the Tulane National Primate Research Center in Covington, La. The new facilities generate jobs and increase the development of treatments, vaccines and therapies for a variety of infections and diseases.

Cell phone lines were down. Landlines were out.

Military helicopters whirred overhead. But, somehow, medical school residents Ben Springgate and Anjali Niyogi reached DeSalvo on her cell phone. They had been running urgent care sites on the sidewalks of New Orleans, and they asked her to come help them.

“I thought they had lost their minds,” says DeSalvo, who had planned only to get some clothes from her unflooded home and return to Houston, where Tulane School of Medicine was setting up shop for the year.

But once DeSalvo fully understood the medical needs of the devastated city, she never left.

She says that she realized, “We have this chance to do this remarkable thing.”

The vision came to her that there is a practical, cost-efficient way to provide high-quality, compassionate health care, she says.

Within a couple of days, and after impromptu meetings on the ramp outside shuttered Charity Hospital, DeSalvo and others commandeered Covenant House—a community center on Rampart Street on the edge of the French Quarter. With the help of the police and the

3.15.07 COWEN INSTITUTE OPENS DOORS The Scott S. Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives opens.

The center is focused on improving the New Orleans public education system.

COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS patients have received high-quality, cost-effective primary care and mental health services from Tulane Community Health Centers neighborhood-based sites, including mobile units and school-based site. The Tulane Community Health Centers grew out of the Tulane Covenant House Community Health Clinic organized by Tulane medical school residents on the sidewalk in downtown New Orleans two weeks after Hurricane Katrina.

90,000

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permission of the Covenant House director, they broke into the building and set up a clinic.

Now patients and doctors could get out of the sun during the day and have a place to store supplies at night. DeSalvo and other doctors also opened temporary clinics at other locations.

“We saw rashes, cuts, abrasions and tons of people with chronic diseases who needed their meds for high blood pressure, diabetes and TB,” says DeSalvo. Also, cancer patients showed

5.18.07 BRIAN WILLIAMS ADDRESSES GRADUATES “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams speaks to graduates at Tulane’s 2007 commencement ceremony, saying, “There would not be a Tulane without New Orleans, but I am absolutely convinced that there would not be a New Orleans without Tulane.”

5.23.07 FUNDS FOR NEIGHBORHOOD HEALTH CARE A $100 million federal grant goes to the Louisiana Public Health Institute, which supports Tulane Community Health Centers in establishing neighborhood health care without reliance on hospital emergency room visits.

PHOTOS: PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO.

A Tulane nurse (left) readies a patient for evacuation from Tulane Hospital in downtown New Orleans days after the storm, when airlifting was the only way out.

A Chinook rescue helicopter (center) approaches the hospital garage rooftop. Doctors and nurses gather (right) for the hospital reopening almost six months later.

up. And people wandered in with mental health issues brought on by severe distress.

“That was the foundation for my thinking about how important it is to have not just medical services at community health centers,” says DeSalvo. That the mental and social health needs of people are as important as their physical health needs became obvious to DeSalvo.

In those frantic few months after the storm, DeSalvo put a stake in the ground for Tulane’s lead in establishing community health centers.

She raised money, including a grant from Johnson & Johnson, to keep Tulane Community Health Center at Covenant House operating.

And with a grant from the Qatar Katrina Fund, Tulane supported a mobile medical unit and the expansion of services.

In 2007, DeSalvo testified before the U.S. Congress, requesting $100 million for Tulane and other healthcare providers in New Orleans to keep the community health centers going and expand services.

DeSalvo, who had never worked on policy, run a health center or raised money, discovered that she could move a city. She is now vice

8.6.07 RECORD MEDICAL CLASS The largest incoming medical class in the history of Tulane University School of Medicine—175 students— participates in the school’s White Coat Ceremony, a symbolic first step for the students on their path to becoming physicians.

dean for community affairs and healthcare policy and remains chief of the section of general internal medicine and geriatrics at Tulane School of Medicine.

She continues to fight for healthcare reform, connecting the dots between local communities, government and private foundations to bring health care to people who need it.

“Let’s do new think,” she says, “not old think.”

DeSalvo’s work is “a revolution,” says Ben Sachs, senior vice president and dean of the School of Medicine and James R. Doty Professor.

$131 MILLION is the total SPONSORED RESEARCH FUNDING received by Tulane faculty members for their scholarly work in 2008–09.

The funding for specific research projects comes from extramural sources such as government agencies, nonprofit foundations and industry partners.

8.20.07 HOT SCHOOL Tulane is named one of the 25 “Hottest Schools in America” in the 2008 Kaplan/Newsweek “How to get into College” guide.

Tulane is recognized as the university that is the “Hottest on the Rebound” for its recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

Sachs is a newcomer to Tulane, taking his position in November 2007, after 29 years at Harvard Medical School.

As he looks back on the last two and a half years, Sachs says that he’s never seen so much change occur so quickly for the better, anywhere. The changes at the medical school include stabilizing its economics, which had been operating at a deficit; rebuilding research, which had been hard hit by the storm; and on the clinical side, improving the quality of health care. He’s also introduced innovative medical school teaching approaches, including team learning and simulation labs.

“People are open to change in this environment,” says Sachs. “The men and women who came back after the storm—the physicians and the PhDs and the nurses—are some of the most courageous people I’ve ever met,” says Sachs. “And they are some of the most gutsy and most determined people. All that they needed was, ‘let’s go.’ ” Everybody encounters adversity, says Sachs.

But Tulane Medical School has developed “the ability to turn adversity into opportunity.”

11.8.07 CLOSING MRGO The Water Resources Development Act is passed by Congress, authorizing the Army Corps of Engineers to close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the cause of much flooding during Katrina.

11.11.07 STREETCARS RETURN New Orleans streetcars once again rumble past Gibson Hall with their return to the St. Charles Avenue route.

PHOTOS: TOP LEFT AND CENTER: COURTESY OF DR. LEE HAMM, TULANE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE; TOP RIGHT: PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO.

At the Tulane vs. SMU football game (left) in Dallas on Sept. 24, 2005, a student displays a sign of the times. The football team played in 11 different stadiums during the fall 2005 season. A brass band (center) leads a parade of administrators into McAlister Auditorium at the convocation welcoming students back in January 2006. Student volunteers (right) pitch in to help out in the spirit of public service at a community food bank in fall 2005.

1 in 4

people in the nation applying to medical school in 2010 applied to Tulane Medical School.

RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES Michael Bernstein, professor of history and economics, senior vice president of academic affairs and provost, assumed the highest academic position at Tulane in July 2007. He came here from the University of California–San Diego.

“All the hardship that hit Tulane, the city and the region was still on display,” says Bernstein.

“When I came, everybody I met was in some sort of pain. You could see it in people’s faces.”

But Bernstein came anyway. “Good opportunities don’t come without risks,” he says.

Bernstein’s task was to implement the Renewal Plan. And in June 2010, Bernstein points to the plan’s major accomplishments—financial stabilization and the redefinition of Tulane.

Tulane is very lean, says Bernstein. The reconfiguring of the institution gives it greater strength going forward.

2.23.08 FIRST GAME IN NEW BALLPARK After a two-year absence, Tulane baseball is back on campus at the newly renovated Greer Field at Turchin Stadium.

“Katrina was our economic slump,” says Bernstein. As other institutions of higher education are struggling with the financial storm of the current economic recession, academic officers at other universities ask Bernstein, “How did Tulane do it?”

Tulane’s coming back, in many ways even better than it was before the storm, is “testimony to the vision of Scott Cowen, the university trustees, and the university faculty,” says Bernstein. It’s also the result of the extraordinary commitment of Tulane students and the resilience of the community.

44,000 high school

students applied for undergraduate admission to Tulane for .

Tulane had more applicants than any private university in the nation.

FALL 2010

Simply draining floodwaters from buildings and repairing roofs would not have been

5.17.08 COMMENCEMENT RETURNS TO THE SUPERDOME The University Commencement ceremony returns to the Louisiana Superdome. James Carville and Mary Matalin address the graduates. “It is completely and totally appropriate that this class graduate in this building,” says Carville.

enough to bring students back to the university, says Bernstein. Tulane’s rebirth is tied to its commitment to service learning and social entrepreneurship.

That commitment “has enabled Tulane to present something to a new generation of undergraduate students that is powerful,” says Bernstein.

“It’s an historic time to be in this city, but it’s not an easy time. It takes a particular kind of student and faculty member to be here,” he says.

The issues that challenge New Orleans— including the Gulf oil spill and other environmental issues, infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt, public schools that are in turmoil, city finances that are compromised, healthcare delivery problems, socioeconomic inequality, public health issues—“all these are national problems,” says Bernstein. These problems are not unique to this city.

“And to the extent we make progress here on these things, we’re the national leaders because we’re showing the way to their resolution.”

Mary Ann Travis is editor of Tulanian.

1.27.09 SIM CENTER OPENS The School of Medicine opens the Tulane Center for Advanced Medical Simulation and Team Training, a $3 million facility dedicated to improving patient safety and preventing medical errors through comprehensive training for healthcare professionals.

5.16.09 KATRINA CLASS COMMENCEMENT Commencement 2009 honors the courageous Katrina class.

“In the hours and days after the storm, I often wondered whether I would ever see you again,” President Cowen tells the graduates.

PHOTOS: TOP LEFT: MARY MOUTON; TOP CENTER AND RIGHT: PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO.

FIVE YEARS. Each year bringing Tulane University closer to full recovery and farther away from near extinction. For President Scott Cowen, the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina brings time for reflection.

Cowen recalls riding out the storm on the uptown campus and watching the water rise when the levees broke. Five days after the storm, he left the flooded, powerless campus and went to Houston, where he led Tulanein-exile for four months.

He remembers that Houston hotel room, where for the first time he saw televised images of the flooding and mayhem.

“I broke down and cried,” he says. “It was a combination of going through a very intense week and then the reality setting in of what had happened, and what it would mean to us.”

He pauses, reaching for a handkerchief to clean his glasses. It is one of the kerchiefs given to 2010 graduates, fleur-de-lis decorated, emblazoned with “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?”

“It seemed so overwhelming that I didn’t know what I should do and what order I should do things,” he says. “You feel this unbelievably awesome responsibility knowing there is no silver bullet to make things right.

You have responsibility for thousands of people, you have more than 170 of years of legacy and you’re shaking your head wondering if

BY CAROL you can lead the university through this unprecedented crisis.”

But that night, he took the path that has always worked for him. He faced the mammoth task and broke it down to its smallest steps for an action plan.

It was a decisive moment. Cowen’s one-day-at-time approach, marking successes, listing each day’s new challenges on large flip charts stuck to the walls of the Houston war room, was the means to motivate the team of administrators, all carrying their own Katrina losses, who joined him in Houston.

“Don’t tell me what you can’t do, just tell me what you can do”—that was Cowen’s Houston mantra.

With the university closed for fall 2005, the team worked toward reopening in January. But while Tulane would be ready, the rest of New Orleans would not be. “Despite our efforts, it could be that things out of our control would really control our destiny,” Cowen recalls.

10.1.09 SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP OFFICE OPENS Tulane launches the Office of Social Entrepreneurship Initiatives to foster development of creative solutions to pressing social challenges.

PHOTO: PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO.

12.11.09 WEATHERHEAD GRANT SUPPORTS FACULTY The Weatherhead Foundation pledges $50 million to establish several University Professorships for outstanding faculty members.

To survive, Tulane had to “build a village,” making sure schools, retail establishments, housing and health care would all be in place.

The to-do lists on the hotel ballroom walls got longer and more complicated.

With everything Tulane was facing, how could it be the same institution, academically and financially?

“Finances were so shaky,” says Cowen. “It was unclear whether we could survive in the long term. And that’s when we began to work on a Renewal Plan, to help us think about what Tulane ought to look like, post-Katrina.”

The Renewal Plan took shape, focusing on two things: advancing the university’s academic reputation and quality, and ensuring its financial viability.

The reorganized Tulane has thrived, especially as the public-service graduation requirement has drawn new students like a magnet.

As January 2006 arrived, students already were drawn to the recovery efforts. Eightysix percent of full-time undergraduates returned that semester, bringing tears of joy to Cowen on opening day and making quite an impact on struggling New Orleans.

Fall 2006 brought a decline in the freshman count, “a harsh reminder that what happened to us would take years to overcome,” but by 2010, undergraduate appliJ. SCHLUETER cations zoomed to a record 44,000. Cowen expects “a stellar incoming class of undergraduates” this fall.

Financially, things are looking up. “We are certainly doing better than we thought we would, but we’re still not where we need to be. We continue to have an operating deficit in the budget, but it’s getting smaller every year,” says Cowen.

Katrina profoundly changed him, Cowen says. He is more focused than ever on the importance of community. The experience strengthened his love and commitment to Tulane and New Orleans.

Cowen is full of gratitude for the support from the Tulane community.

“The fact is, it takes an army to do what we did, and we have a terrific army.

We wouldn’t be here today, in the position we are, if it weren’t for them.”

CAN DO

Carol Schlueter is executive director of the Office of Publications.

2.7.10 WHO DAT VICTORY The Tulane community joins fans everywhere as the New Orleans Saints win the Super Bowl, defeating the Indianapolis Colts, 31-17. The team’s victory brings euphoria to the city and is a symbol of recovery from Katrina. The Tulane University Marching Band participates in the victory parade.

5.14.10 CLASS OF 2010 GRADUATES Anderson Cooper salutes the class of 2010 for helping New Orleans “rebuild, renew and restart.” They are the first students to complete the university’s public-service graduation requirement.

PAGE 22 | TULANIAN SUMMER 2010

ALISON BROD IN HER OFFICE OVERLOOKING PARK AVENUE.

FROM HER OFFICES ON PARK AVENUE, PR DIVA ALISON BROD PRESIDES OVER A FASHIONABLE EMPIRE BUILT BY GOOD INSTINCTS, GOOD LUCK AND THE DRIVE TO SUCCEED.

BY DAVID MCKAY WILSON

AT the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, more than 200 reporters and photographers are crammed in a makeshift press room at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, waiting for the stars to emerge. Alison Friedman Brod, NC ’91, owner of Alison Brod Public Relations, stops to check on her staff, which has set up the room, ordered platters of sandwiches for the hungry press corps, and is in charge of the much-desired one-on-one interviews.

Brod, who comes to work this March evening dressed in knee-high black suede boots and a strapless black minidress with studs and a bustle, has just arrived from an event she ran for the cosmetics giant, L’Oréal. She acknowledges her biggest challenge tonight will be doling out that prized time alone with the likes of rock icon Phil Collins, reggae legend Jimmy Cliff and music impresario David Geffen, who are shielded from the press in the adjacent ballroom.

“We have such a good relationship with the press, we have so many requests for interviews, and we just don’t want to disappoint anyone,” says Brod.

For Brod, the $1,000-a-plate gala at the Waldorf is another high-profile event for her public relations firm that thrives at the nexus of celebrity, fashion, philanthropy and pop culture. Brod, 40, who majored in communication at Tulane and came to Manhattan shortly after graduation, now employs 50 women at her 10,000-square-foot Park Avenue office, which doubles as a fashion showroom and function hall.

It’s a business that can bring Brod to two or three events each night in Manhattan. And that comes after she has stopped home for dinner with her two young children—Spencer, 4, and Austin,

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL JURICK, A&S ’90

2. In the digital age, she’s in constant demand on her phone and e-mail—from both clients and friends, including several from Tulane whom she sees in New York and reconnects with every two years at the Jazz Fest in New Orleans.

“I’ll e-mail her and within seconds there will be an answer,” says Terri Ostrow Pitts, NC ’91, who owns Ostrow Alliances and has partnered with Brod on marketing events. “She takes care of her clients, and she takes care of her friends.”

Her employees like working there. In 2008, Alison Brod Public Relations was named the second-best place to work in New York City, based on the results of a survey of 25,000 workers at more than 300 companies. The perks at ABPR are sweet—confections from Godiva and Dylan’s Candy Bar, clothing and accessory discounts of up to 70 percent, and freebie samples from Estee Lauder and Laura Mercier.

C E LEBR IT Y DR I V E BY Brod has built her business by developing public relations strategies and promoting close to 150 events a year, in venues from California to New York.

One day there’s an intimate breakfast with 20 editors from top fashion magazines and actress Uma Thurman to get a sneak peek at the season’s newest lines. Another day she’s promoting a concert for Victoria’s Secret that attracts 15,000 fans to hear pop singer Fergie. She has recreated the set of Oprah Winfrey’s television show in Godiva chocolate to showcase her client’s sweet-tasting confections.

This winter, she brought actress Brooke Shields to skate in Central Park for an Old Navy event that raised money for charity.

Her promotions are geared to multiple platforms—in print, on television,

and throughout the online blogosphere, where word can spread quickly. Using social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook, she’ll also create sweepstakes or prize-giveaways to drive traffic and attract those much-wanted clicks.

“We create buzz to help sell products,” says Brod.

“Public relations

today is much more than getting placement in a print publication. It used to be good enough to be in Vogue. That’s still important, but it’s only one component of what we do. We help engage consumers. Our campaigns help drive sales.”

In fact, Brod says some of her fashion clients don’t advertise at all and rely on press placement to promote their products.

“There’s a Catch-22 you have to be aware of,” she warns. “If too many companies pull their ads, there won’t be as many magazine pages to mention the products in articles.”

Fueling her buzz-generating campaigns are Hollywood celebrities who Brod woos to her events, at times adorned with her clients’ wares —be it the latest spring fashion or the newest leather handbag. Brod’s company has a division that deals exclusively with celebrities, maintaining good relationships, in part, through her “celebrity drive-by service,” which allows television and movie stars to stop by to sample the latest clothes and accessories hanging on racks at the Park Avenue office.

Janice Min, former editor of US Weekly, the popular newsstand publication that focuses on celebrity culture, says she would often receive calls from Brod, seeking placement of a photo or news item about one of her clients. She says Brod understands celebrity culture, the media that feeds off it and the impact of a photo of a starlet wearing one of Brod’s brands in a magazine with a circulation of close to two million.

“She knows who has heat at the moment and understands what it takes to get something in the magazine,” says Min. “She has a healthy respect for the media landscape, she hustles, and she seems to know everyone. “ Min says Brod wouldn’t pout if she rejected a pitch.

“If someone told her no, she wouldn’t seem to care,” says Min. “Some publicists get belligerent. My instinct is not to like those people. I like Alison. She’s serious about her business, and she gets the whole thing.”

A walk around Brod’s office provides a glimpse into her high-flying world. The latest

PAGE 24 | TULANIAN SUMMER 2010

colorful fashions hang on racks along one wall while young associates, dressed in high heels and the latest fashion, work the phones in desks lined up in two rows. Seventeen canisters with pink candy stand along one bookcase, not far from displays for Omega watches and Kooba handbags.

In Brod’s office, her BlackBerry vibrates on her desk with the steady stream of incoming messages. Softpink and orange prints of Emilio Pucci scarf designs from the 1960s hang from the walls. Atop one display case are several bottles of the latest fragrances by Pucci, one of her newest clients.

“I was so glad when Pucci finally called,” says Brod, who walks about the office on chunky five-inch platform shoes. “I’ve always loved Pucci.”

She eyed a job at Conde Nast, which publishes Vogue, Vanity Fair and Glamour. But the entry-level positions demanded top typing skills, and Brod knew she lacked the dexterity to pass the typing test. At a top fashion advertising agency, Brod was told she

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST PLACES TO WORK IN NEW YORK CITY, ALISON BROD PUBLIC RELATIONS PROVIDES ITS ALLWOMAN STAFF WITH A VIBRANT WORKPLACE THAT BUZZES WITH STYLE AND YOUTHFUL ENERGY.

A G R EAT DAT E Born on Long Island, Alison Friedman moved with her parents to Boca Raton, Fla. She attended Spanish River High and learned about Tulane from counselors at Camp Blue Star in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, who encouraged her to apply.

Once in New Orleans, she majored in communication while enjoying the city’s nightlife with friends, often heading to Tipitina’s uptown to hear the Neville Brothers or The Radiators. She had her heart set on working in the fashion advertising industry. During the summer between her junior and senior year, she landed an internship in New York with an advertising agency whose clients included Revlon and Victoria’s Secret.

She loved the city’s energy and lifestyle. But following graduation in 1991, the economy was slumping and jobs in the advertising industry were scarce. Nevertheless, she headed north, giving herself a month to find an apartment and a job.

first needed to develop contacts in the fashion world before she would be hired.

Then she met a good-looking guy named Andy Brod, who had found a toehold working on Wall Street. On their third date, he took her to a fashion-industry gala where his financial firm had bought a table. There, she tracked down one of the ad agency

executives who had earlier rejected her because she lacked contacts. The executive from Loving & Weintraub Public Relations was impressed, and hired her.

“It was a great date,” she recalls. “And I worked at that agency for a year.”

She’d beat her one-month deadline and settled in Manhattan. She and Andy were married two years later, and the Brod family now lives on Manhattan’s upper East Side. They also have a summer home in Bridgehampton on the South Fork of Long Island, where they travel on summer weekends.

She left Loving & Weintraub to become

director of public relations for a firm that owned several landmark New York restaurants, which also had the food concessions at the U.S. Tennis Open and the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center. But after three years, she yearned to return to the fashion world, perhaps with her own company. In the elevator one day, she overheard a man talking about how his company, Burberry, Van Cleef & Arpels was about to relaunch its fragrance line. Her ears perked up.

They exchanged cards. They met for drinks at the Four Seasons.

He offered her an office, an assistant, and a $25,000 clothes allowance as part of an agreement that made his company the first client for Alison Brod Public Relations. It was just four years since graduating from Tulane.

“She has always been very ambitious, and very focused,” says Terri Osprow Pitts. “She knows what’s hot in the marketplace and is very tapped in.”

Brod built her business as she fought her way into the highly competitive Manhattan public relations world, bidding for work against huge, established firms. Soon she had attracted other fragrance brands, as well as companies selling beauty products and luxury goods from such companies as LVMH, which carries the Louis Vuitton line of handbags and luggage. Before long, she had six employees. Then LVMH’s president moved to The Gap, and Brod landed that growing apparel company as a client.

Brod established her own office, and her business began to prosper, with help from old and new friends from Tulane. Photographer Michael Jurick, A&S ’90, who recalls sitting by Brod in a class on the history of rock ’n’ roll, now shoots some events for her. Brod has a college internship program that welcomes as many as five Tulane undergraduates each

summer. Twenty Tulane alumni have worked for her agency, including three currently on staff: Julie Dim Farber, NC ’99, Jayme Felson, ’07, and Courtney Routt, NC ’04.

KING TUT IS COMING It’s Friday afternoon in mid-April, and Brod has assigned Routt the task of finding celebrities to attend the VIP opening of the King Tut exhibit, which had returned to New York City after more than 30 years. The opening for “King Tut and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” is a week away, and not one celebrity has agreed to attend.

Routt works the phones assiduously the following week, with the celeb appearances not secured until Thursday and Friday.

“I’m young, so I didn’t have a heart attack,” says Routt. “Alison has high standards, and I work hard to meet them.”

By the time the doors opened, actresses Brooke Shields, Kristin Davis, Vanessa Williams and Edie Falco have shown up. Williams arrives from Westchester County with her daughter’s friends to celebrate her birthday.

The celebrity press is on hand to create buzz about Davis, and her new Sex in the City movie, and Falco, and her hit television show, “Nurse Jackie.”

Routt says she relies on charm and cheerful persistence to get through to the stars. Brod’s track record of taking good care of celebrities helps seal the deal.

“We invite the press, give them four questions, and tell them not to encroach upon the privacy of celebrities,” says Routt, who has worked at Brod’s firm since 2006. “My job is to make the celebrities happy. Alison keeps the press happy, and together we keep our clients happy.”

David McKay Wilson is a freelance journalist based in New York.

Michael Jurick, A&S ’90, is a New York-based photographer. www.jurick.net.

TULANIAN SUMMER 2010 | PAGE 25

Caught in silhouette, Judith Maxwell stands at the opening of the Nimajay cave site that is nestled in the mountains above Lake Atitlan.

PAGE 26 | TULANIAN SUMMER 2010

The

friend In the highlands of Guatemala, the rocks and caves are alive.

So, too, are the indigenous languages of the Maya.

by nick marinello photography by javier escobar paniagua

TULANIAN SUMMER 2010 | PAGE 27

Poor Judith Maxwell.

Linguist by trade. Confined to the ivory tower of academia, passing her days amid clouds of archival dust, parsing the idiosyncrasies of Mayan languages, dissecting etymologies, pairing acrolects with basilects, and whatever else it is that linguists do.

Ho hum. Such is the life of a scholar.

In her spare time, Maxwell apparently finds some respite from the tedium of such inquiry by tapping out a few notes for an ongoing blog that she’s writing from Guatemala about her ongoing research: no doubt riveting stuff about phonology and phonetics, syntax and semantics, morphology and whatnot. The blog can be found on the home page of the Tulane School of Liberal Arts. Let’s take a peek at what she’s up to: This morning we got up and out early to get to a new-to-me altar called Pa Xilon. This altar is located in a lovely wooded glen/valley/ravine. The surrounding area is clean and there were fresh offerings of flowers and fruit (apples and pineapples). The area in front of the fire circle was strewn with fresh pine needles. As we were preparing our offering, a hummingbird buzzed us, circled the altar and then zoomed off to suckle at the red flame shrubs that lined the ravine. We made our offering. Ajpub’ elaborated the parts of the day count that deal with travel and pilgrimage. We circled our feet, 13 times through the flames; then we took off our shoes and circled them in the blessing heat. I suspect he was prophylaxing for our trip to tomorrow’s altar, which he tells me is at the foot of a STEEP slope, but we needed all the help we could get for this afternoon.

Oh. Well, that doesn’t sound so… dusty. What’s up with the altars and flames and pineapples?

Students encircle a fire at a ceremony performed to bless the class and give thanks for their dedication to learning Kaqchikel.

In the foreground burns a fire for another ritual that is taking place.

PAGE 28 | TULANIAN SUMMER 2010

The “trail” was littered with pine needles and equally slippery oak leaves. Occasionally we could line ourselves up with big trees and let ourselves, slide, slip, fall down to the solid backstop.

At other times, there was nothing to stop an uncontrolled slide. Again, I clutched at shrubs, bushes and grasses. At times the only plants available for handholds were stinging nettles.

Ouch. They probably don’t mention stinging nettles in graduate school.

As it turns out, Maxwell is down in Guatemala this summer on a Fulbright Scholarship, continuing a project begun six years ago documenting Mayan sacred sites, a job that often has her scrambling across the country’s diverse and rugged landscape. In addition, she’s helping the country’s educational system develop methodologies to revitalize Mayan languages. She also each summer teaches an intensive summer course in Kaqchikel language and culture.

By the time I establish a Skype connection with Maxwell to have a conversation with her, I’ve begun reconsidering my narrow view of her line of work. The fact is, far from being “bookish,” Maxwell seems to have developed her scholarly pursuits into a vibrant, even loving, relationship with an entire culture and its people.

If ever there was an ivory tower, it has long since receded into the green and growing sweep of the Guatemalan countryside.

Anthropologizing’

Head of the Interdisciplinary Linguistics Program at Tulane, Maxwell also is a professor of anthropology, which goes a long way toward explaining her Indiana Jones–like treks through the jungle. Her scholarship at Tulane has largely focused on the indigenous languages of Central America, particularly the Maya, and she sees linguistics and anthropology as disciplines that go nicely handin-hand.

“I never quit being a linguist while I am ‘anthropologizing’,” says Maxwell, her Skyped words slightly out of sync with her Skyped image.

The interrelationship between linguistics and anthropology perhaps may be best exampled in Maxwell’s work on the Kaqchikel Chronicles, a project on which she collaborated with Tulane anthropology professor Robert Hill to produce a translation and analysis of a rare and diverse collection of Mayan texts.

The Chronicles comprise two sets of documents, one historically known as the Annals of the Kaqchikels and the other as the Xpantzay Cartulary. Translated for first time in their entirety, the documents present a detailed look at the day-to-day life of pre-contact and early colonial Kaqchikel Maya who live in the highlands of Guatemala.

The children are (left to right) María Camila Azurdia Contreras, José Paul Figueroa Contreras, Saúl Andrés Figueroa Contreras, Rosa Jimena Abigail Bobadilla Contreras, Francisco Gabriel Figueroa Contreras.

The Figueroa Contreras children are the sons of Maxwell’s oldest godchild in this family. The others are the daughters of two other sisters.

Maxwell says she became interested in the project in the early 1990s because she felt the need to resolve the linguistic and cultural inaccuracies present in an earlier translation.

“Part of the problem is that there is 500 years of language change going on that makes it difficult to interpret,” says Maxwell. “It’s like trying to read Shakespeare without the CliffsNotes or footnotes.”

A large portion of the narrative follows the Kaqchikel migration into the highland areas that they currently occupy. The stories are rife with accounts of the groups they met, battles they fought and settlements they founded, says Maxwell.

“All this history, replete with place names.”

At the suggestion of Hill, Maxwell began searching out these places, photographing the sites and documenting their locations. When she can, she’ll talk to locals to gain a sense of the site’s history.

“The problem is that most of the sites that are known to be linked to major historical events are sacred sites,” says Maxwell. “You can’t just walk in, take a picture and walk out.”

Maxwell’s companion and co-investigator

on these outings is Ajpub’ Garcia Ixmata’, a researcher at Universidad Rafael Landívaras who also happens to be a daykeeper, a Mayan ritual specialist. Before entering a site, the two ask permission from the immanent spirits to enter.

Unlike the world experienced in mainstream Western culture, the universe inhabited by the Maya is entirely alive. Sticks, stones, rocks, caves —even time itself—are animated and imbued with spiritual energy and the spark of the Divine.

Ask Maxwell if she accepts the Mayan cosmology, and she’ll tell you that her experiences at the sacred sites are spiritual and mystical— except for the last five minutes when she’s taking pictures and GPS readings.

“If I were not able to make the spiritual connections,” says Maxwell, “I would not be allowed in these places, either by the local daykeepers or the local practitioners, and I wouldn’t be able to work successfully with Ajpub’. In a way, the reason why I’m trusted with this sacred knowledge is because I can make the spiritual connection.”

Madrina

promoting the country’s indigenous languages.

She has returned every year since then, spending summers, winter breaks and sabbatical leaves in Guatemala, living with the same family each time, moving with them twice, and becoming godmother to several generations of children.

My godchild, Gabriela, was over last evening, with her three boys. The youngest, Saúl Andrés, is just about a month old. He was fussy, and holding, bouncing, and soothing him was wearing out successive kinfolk. Gabriela noted that Saúl would tense up every few minutes, grunt, then relax or cry. Ana, the proud grandmother, observed that babies do this for the first three months of life. But the fussiness continued and Cira, an aunt, declared that the child was ojeado—“eyed.” Everyone agreed and then began discussing who should cure him, and which remedy to use. The cures getting the most votes were the egg and black peppercorns.

One of the first children with whom Maxwell established a compadrazgo relationship is Ana Luisa, granddaughter of the couple who originally took Maxwell in nearly 40 years ago. Ana Luisa now has five children of her own, all of whom are Maxwell’s godchildren. Well, all but one.

“I think Paulino feels discriminated against because when he introduces me to people he sometimes introduces me as his godmother, even

Maxwell first came to Guatemala in 1973. Still in graduate school, she was hired by a nonprofit organization to work as a linguist training Mayan scholars to develop materials Red candles and incense made of balls of copal resin and aromatic wood chips are among the gifts presented as ceremonial offerings.

TULANIAN SUMMER 2010 | PAGE 29

though I am not,” says Maxwell. “Maybe when he gets married I can be his madrina de matrimonia so I can be his godmother then, too.”

If the personal relationships she has nurtured during the last 37 years are one thread of continuity weaving through Maxwell’s work in Guatemala, another thread would be comprised of words, particularly those of the strange and beautiful languages of the Maya. These days, much of Maxwell’s work in-country is really a continuation of the mission she began as a graduate student: helping the Maya reclaim and reinvigorate their languages.

Maxwell’s initial invitation to Guatemala in the early 1970s was a result of a burgeoning proMaya movement intended to reaffirm the indigenous languages and culture that been exploited and discriminated against since colonial times.

“If you look at the social and political relationships in Guatemala,” says Maxwell, “the country’s nonindigenous people have in the past—and to some extent still today—treated the Maya not even as second-class citizens.

They treat them as non-citizens.

They characterize the Mayan languages as animal sounds.”

Political oppression turned genocidal against the Maya during the late 1970s and early ’80s when an ongoing civil war moved into the Mayan highlands and the Guatemalan army targeted Mayan communities as allies of the leftist insurgency.

“The military believed that the indigenous population was the sea in which the guerilla army swam,” says Maxwell, who at the time was training linguists in the Chuj community. Five of her seven trainees were killed by the army.

“By virtue of them training with me they became targets,” says Maxwell, who still mourns the personal loss, A quiet moment in Antigua’s central park.

PAGE 30 | TULANIAN SUMMER 2010

as well as the loss to the Chuj community.

“If they are willing to put everything on the line,” she says, “the very least you can do is give them training.”

Following the end of hostilities in 1996, the government redoubled its efforts to ensure that Guatemala remains linguistically and culturally diverse.

“The Ministry of Education has finally gotten on board with the idea that every Guatemalan ought to be able to, if not speak a Mayan language, then at least know something about them,” says Maxwell, whose current work involves developing second-language teacher methodology so that Mayan speakers can carry out the initiative.

“Learning another language will give you an understanding of not only the language but the culture,” she says. “We really need to be building a kind of shared-culture platform here.”

Too tall

So Super Bowl Sunday… I’m at home in Antigua, being very productive, working on revising a book chapter and outlining a solicited journal article, but the clock ticks toward 5 and concentration goes out the window. I start digging through my drawer of gringo clothes. Surely I have some piece of New Orleaniana with me, a Fleur de Lis t-shirt, a Tulane t-shirt, even something that says Carnival New Orleans. But, apparently, I brought nothing like that with me.

But! I do have a stash of Mardi Gras beads.

To say that Maxwell has “gone native” would be imprecise because it would suggest that she has abandoned her own native identity, which is not the case. It would be safe to say, however, that she and the Maya have over the years adopted each other.

There’s always, however, a “moment of adjustment” when she meets new people. Wearing traditional Mayan garments, Maxwell initially presents as something of a confoundable figure.

“I’m obviously not a Maya,” Maxwell quips.

“I’m way too tall and all the wrong colors. But as soon as they understand that I speak the language and it’s not just a costume that I am putting on but an actual commitment to a way of life, then there is a ready acceptance.”

After talking to Maxwell and reading through her blog, I get the feeling that for her the scholarly stuff and the living day-to-day stuff are of one cloth. Maybe that’s why Maxwell’s views on cultural hegemony can manifest in an anecdote about her godson’s baptism, or why a blog about a public health conference can read like a travelogue worthy of The Lonely Planet. Perhaps that’s why a scholar and scientist can noncynically embrace the strange, complex cosmos of the Maya.

Or maybe, when it comes down to it, Judith Maxwell simply does her own thing in her own way, and some of that constitutes research.

Some of it is education. Some of it is community service. And the rest of it—well, seems like a life well lived.

In any case, it’s good to be Judith Maxwell.

Nick Marinello is the features editor of Tulanian.

s e s s a l C e th

Thinclads of ’47 The 1947 Green Wave track and field team boasts having seven members in the Tulane Athletics Hall of Fame, says BOB WILLIAMS (B ’48), who shared this photo. Williams identified these “thinclads” (lingo for track athletes): (standing, back row) (far left) coach FRITZ OAKES (M ’18), (from left, fifth through eighth) FRANK BURGE (A&S ’47, L ’51), HUGH LILES (E ’48), WARREN PERKINS (A&S ’49) and GREEK ATHAS (A&S ’48), and (far right) coach JOHNNY OELKERS (A&S ’34); (middle row, fourth from left) PAUL BIENZ (A&S ’50); and (sitting, front row) (far left) SPENCER JOHNSON (A&S ’46, ’50); (from left, third and fourth) Williams and BILL HUNTER (B ’47); (from right, second) RALPH SLOVENKO (E ’46, L ’53, G ’65). The Hall of Famers are Athas, Bienz, Burge, Johnson, Oakes, Oelkers and Perkins.

classNotes | theClasses

Medical lifetime achievement awards

Newcomb Alumnae Association awards

Medical alumni Raoul Rodriguez (M ’60), left, and Alfred W. Brann Jr. (M ’60) accept lifetime achievement awards from the Tulane Medical Alumni Association at the Roosevelt Blue Room on May 14, 2010. Rodriguez is professor and chair of the Tulane Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. Brann is professor of pediatrics and gynecology/obstetrics at Emory University School of Medicine, with specialties in neonatal and perinatal medicine and child neurology.

Brann also is professor of global health at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center in Reproductive Health in Atlanta.

At the Newcomb College Institute Under the Oaks ceremony on May 14, 2010, in Dixon Hall, the Newcomb Alumnae Association presents its awards. Berthe Lathrop Marks Amoss (NC ’46, G ’86), center, is recognized as the Outstanding Alumna. Amoss is the author/illustrator of 24 picture books, including Cajun Gingerbread Boy, and four young adult novels. Amoss has taught at Tulane, and the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library houses the Amoss Collection of Children’s Literature. Adele Redditt Williamson (NC ’45), left, is honored with the 2010 Community Service Award. And Theresa A. Schieber (NC ’95), right, receives the Young Alumna Award.

1940s

1960s

The Quest by SAM A. THREEFOOT (A&S ’43, M ’45) has been published by Xlibris.

CHARLES P. O’BRIEN (A&S ’61, M ’64, G ’66)

MILDRED LUBRITZ COVERT (NC ’47) played the role of an abused, elderly woman in the June premiere of TNT’s “Memphis Beat.”

1950s JOAN SEIDENBACH BERENSON (NC ’53) has been selected to receive the 2010 KipnisWilson/Friedland Award for her dedicated service to the greater New Orleans Jewish community. Presented by the Jewish Federations of North America, the award recognizes one woman from each of its member federations who has set a high standard for philanthropy through volunteerism and financial commitment. Berenson will receive the award at the International Lion of Judah Conference in New Orleans in November.

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received the 2010 College on Problems of Drug Dependence Mentorship Award this spring. The College on Problems of Drug Dependence is the largest and oldest organization for the scientific study of drug dependence and addiction and the award recognizes a person who is particularly influential in the development of careers of young addictionresearch scientists. He also received the Gold Medal Research Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry this year. O’Brien is the Kenneth Appel Professor at the University of Pennsylvania/VA Medical Center, vice chair of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, vice director of the Institute of Neurological Science and director of the Center for Studies in Addiction. He was previously the chief of psychiatry at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center. O’Brien has published more

than 500 academic pieces about addiction disorders and treatments for them.

WILLIAM McINTOSH III (A&S ’61) announces publication of his book Indians’ Revenge: Including a History of the Yemassee Indian War 1715–1728 in November 2009. It is the story of how 20,000 Southeast Indians nearly destroyed the province of South Carolina.

McIntosh and his wife, Suzanne, live in Charleston, S.C. JANE WILENSKY RAVID (NC ’61) continues to teach English as a second language to adult immigrants in Boston. She was delighted to see professor of Italian Linda Carroll this spring in Venice at the American Renaissance Society meeting, as well as to celebrate the 70th birthday of ROBERTA (BOBBIE) GORDON (NC ’61) in Cambridge, Mass., in June. Ravid is enjoying being a grandmother to Ethan, 1.

PHOTOS: LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS BY PAT GARIN. NEWCOMB AWARDS BY CHERYL GERBER.

theClasses | classNotes H. KENT BEASLEY (M ’62) is a clinical professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas. He teaches clinical cardiology to graduate engineering students in the developing field of cardiovascular engineering and continues his private practice in preventive and noninvasive cardiology in Austin, Texas.

BRENDA SEABROOKE (NC ’63) announces the publication of her latest book, Wolf Pie, by Clarion. The book takes readers, ages 6 to 9 years, through the hilarious adventures of several pig brothers after the house-blowingdown attempt by the big bad wolf. The pigs befriend some wolves and take turns saving each other. The book is on NewsTribune’s recommended summer reading list for 2010.

JIM KERWIN (A&S ’64), two-time All American in 1962 and ’63, was inducted into the Oklahoma Coaches Hall of Fame in June. This induction marks his sixth hall of fame as a player and a coach. He was formerly inducted into the Tulane Athletics Hall of Fame, Tulane Student Body Hall of Fame, Sugar Bowl Hall of Fame, Louisiana Basketball Hall of Fame and New Jersey Shore Hall of Fame. He is retired and lives in Norman, Okla.

JOSEPH A.WALLACE (L ’65) received the state of West Virginia’s highest civilian award and the West Virginia State Bar’s highest award.

Wallace was selected Volunteer Economic Developer of the Year by the West Virginia Economic Development Council and the Southern Industrial Development Council.

Additionally, he was named West Virginia Entrepreneur of the Year and was a finalist for National Entrepreneur of the Year. Wallace cofounded mediation in the U.S. District Courts in West Virginia, which was adopted in federal courts throughout the country. Wallace and his son practice law throughout the state.

EDWARD G. GINGOLD (A&S ’66) attended the National Energy and Utility Affordability Conference in San Antonio this year, where he conducted a workshop on organizing successful fund-raising campaigns for nonprofit organizations. Gingold is an attorney with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C.

DONALD BOESCH (A&S ’67) was appointed by President Barack Obama as a member of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Boesch is president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, where he teaches marine science. He also is vice chancellor for environmental sustainability for the University System of Maryland. Boesch, a native of Louisiana and a biological oceanographer, has conducted research on coastal ecosystems throughout the world and is a pioneer in the study of the environmental effects of offshore energy development. Additionally, he has served as a science adviser to many state and federal agencies and regional, national and international programs. Boesch also chairs the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council and is a member of the National Academies Committee on America’s Climate Choices. From 1980 to 1990, he was a professor of marine science

Monty Krieger (A&S ’71) (pictured with his mother, Mildred Levitan Krieger, NC ’44) was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, an organization of scholars engaged in science and engineering research. Krieger is Whitehead Professor of Molecular Genetics in the biology department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I am truly honored and delighted by this recognition of the outstanding efforts of a wonderful group of students and collaborators at MIT and elsewhere,” says Krieger.

Krieger’s research group studies cell surface receptor biology. “We continue to study how the HDL receptor SR-BI works and what it does, its physiological role and how manipulation of this receptor might provide approaches for the treatment or prevention of related diseases,” he says.

Krieger is a member of the Tulane School of Science and Engineering Board of Advisers and, in 2010, received the school’s Outstanding Alumnus award. Since his induction into NAS, Krieger has participated in editing its flagship journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

—Catherine Freshley Catherine Freshley (’09) is a freelance writer living in New Orleans.

at Louisiana State University and served as the first executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

1970s STEPHEN T. MORRIS (A&S ’70) retired after 36 years of dental practice, 20 of which he spent working with his father. Morris and his wife, Nancy, divide their time between Fort Worth, Texas, and Alto, N.M. Morris now spends much of his time as a U.S. Golf Association rules official.

RANDOLPH HOWES (M ’71) lectured at the Johns Hopkins Biennial Surgery Meeting on “Anti-Aging and Oxygen Radical Mythology,” at the University of Kansas Medical Center on “The Fall of the Free Radical Theory,” and at Creighton University Medical School on “Antioxidant Vitamins A, C and E and Oxygen Free Radical Mythology.” His latest book, Antioxidant Vitamins A, C & E in the 21st

MONTY KRIEGER SCIENCE DYNAMO TULANE DEGREE: BS, chemistry

RESIDENCE: Needham, Mass.

PROFESSION: Molecular geneticist

QUOTABLE: “Science is a multigenerational team sport.”

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classNotes | theClasses Century: Death in Small Doses, which is being published by Trafford, is an epic compilation of 181 scientific studies, spanning three decades and including more than 8 million participants. The studies show either no effect or harmful effects of these common antioxidant vitamins. He has placed more than 3,000 pages of his referenced, free e-books online at www.iwillfindthecure.org.

TAD BOGDAN (A&S ’75) was promoted to president and CEO of Ecrio, the leading supplier of rich communications smart phone technology. Customers include Verizon Wireless, Visa and DOCOMO.

BRUCE SPIZER (A&S ’76, B ’77, L ’80) received the Young Family Award for Professional Excellence from the Professional Advisory Committee of the Jewish Endowment Foundation of Louisiana. The award recognizes legal, financial and estate planning professionals from the New Orleans Jewish community who demonstrate extraordinary concern for their clients, the future of Judaism and the Jewish community by encouraging planned giving to the foundation. A New Orleans estate-planning lawyer, Spizer is also the author of seven books about the Beatles.

PATRICIA “PATSIE” MILLER UCHELLO (NC ’76) showed more than 30 oils on canvas in March at ArtSquare, the largest art facility in Leesburg, Va. Her work was reviewed favorably by both the Washington Post and Loudouni.com.

In June, she participated in a two-woman show at A Show of Hands Art Gallery in Del Ray, the art district in Alexandria, Va. LOUIS BRITT (L ’77) is a partner in the Memphis, Tenn., office of Ford & Harrison and was

G! HOMECOMIN Oct. 8–10

ion Party All Alumni Reun , Athletics ombone Shorty with music by Tr ll Game ba ot tion and Fo Fund-raising Auc y) rm A .

(Green Wave vs out it go to: To find out all ab

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elected a fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. His induction later this year coincides with the American Bar Association’s annual Labor and Employment Law Section conference.

EDWARD “NED” HALLOWELL (M ’78) taught a course called “Unwrapping the Gifts: A Strength-Based Approach to ADHD Across the Lifespan” this summer at the Cape Cod Institute.

Date: An Insider’s Guide to Dating After Divorce. Bremer is a private practice psychotherapist in Orange County, Calif., where she spends much of her time working with military personnel and their families. Bremer also specializes in depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual disorders and counseling for singles, couples and families. Her book is available at www.JodyBremer.com and at www.publishamerica.net.

STEVEN M. ELROD (A&S ’79) is a partner in the Chicago office of Holland and Knight law firm. He was elected to the board of managers of the Chicago Bar Association and was installed this spring.

BRUCE A. GINGRAS (PHTM ’79, G ’87) was elected to a two-year term as president of the Illinois Society for Microbiology in 2009.

He is a senior microbiologist at IIT Research Institute in Chicago.

1980s HANNAH GOULD (SW ’80) is working as a nephrology social worker at DaVita Dialysis in Oxon Hill, Md. Gould retired from the state of Maryland after a career in social services and public safety and started her own business, Growth Centered Therapy, which offers assessments and short-term counseling for criminal, juvenile and guardianship courts.

MICHAEL HOGG (A&S ’80, B ’84, L ’84) has been named vice president for student affairs and dean of students at Tulane. He previously was the associate provost for student affairs. Hogg has served as a clinical professor of business administration in the A. B. Freeman School of Business, where he teaches courses on insurance and risk management, business ethics, business law and the business legal environment. He has received more than 25 teaching awards, including the Howard W. Wissner Award (one of the Freeman School’s highest teaching honors) eight times. In 2007, Hogg was named a “Go-to Professor” by Business Week magazine.

JODY SALSITZ BREMER (NC ’84) published her first book, Looking for That Last First

LEE SMITHSON (A&S ’84) is commander of Task Force Vigilant Horizon, overseeing the Mississippi National Guard response to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in coastal Mississippi. Smithson is a colonel in the U.S. Army.

JOHN VANSANDT (A&S ’85) is a Rule of Law adviser with the U.S. Agency for Development in Washington, D.C. He currently is on a oneyear assignment at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. He has been married for 17 years to Regan Tagawa, and the couple has two children, ages 10 and 6.

IAN BREMMER (A&S ’89) is president of the global political risk consultancy Eurasia Group and has spoken at Tulane University’s Political Science Week twice in recent years. Portfolio published his book, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

KEITH O. WASHINGTON (SW ’89, PHTM ’93), a major in the U.S. Army, has been a military clinical social worker for nearly 16 years and has been deployed to Kirkuk, Iraq, and Tallafar, Iraq, in the past four years.

PHOTO BY CASEY WARE.

theClasses | classNotes 1990s STEPHAN LEVY (A&S ’91) is a director at Navigant Economics in Washington, D.C. DARREN STEELE (A&S ’91) was appointed by the governor of Florida to serve as a county court judge for Martin County. Steele and his wife, Nereida, have two children, Lucas and Katie.

‘shimmer and tar’ and ends in the ‘soot and orange dolor’ of the California desert,” she writes. Black has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and a writer-inresidence at the Cité des Arts in Paris. With the Fulbright award, she will explore the use and disavowal of history in contemporary Northern Irish poetry.

world June 16, 2010. He is the youngest of four children. Vann is a freelance health and medical writer based in southeast Louisiana.

NATHAN ZEZULA (TC ’98) and TIFFANY EISBERG ZEZULA (NC ’00) announce the birth of their second daughter, Lily Jacqueline, on March 26, 2010.

SHANA BERG (NC ’99) married Ross Felix in ANDREW MAKK (B ’92) and CATHERINE NEWSTADT MAKK (N ’93) announce the birth

CHRISTOPHER B. HOPKINS (L ’97) moved his

Hein announce the birth of Gabriel Rhys on Jan. 22, 2010. Warren-Hein has retired from her position as a senior database developer at JusticeTrax to be a full-time mother. The Hein family lives in Gilbert, Ariz.

law practice to Akerman Senterfitt, which is the largest law firm in Florida, with more than 500 lawyers nationwide. Hopkins is a shareholder at Akerman and a member of the Florida litigation group. He continues to handle civil litigation and trial matters, including professional liability, construction, healthcare, probate and major injury cases.

He is a civil circuit certified mediator and a qualified arbitrator.

SEAN ESKER (A&S ’96) and his wife, Sabrina,

MADELINE ROBERTS VANN (PHTM ’98) and

welcomed Brennan Patrick on May 17, 2010.

Esker recently won his 300th career high school soccer game as a girls’ head coach.

His Mandeville High School team, from Mandeville, La., finished the year 31-3-1, and Esker was honored as the Division I state Coach of the Year. He also coaches the girls’ tennis team, which won the 2010 Division I district and regional championships on the way to a runner-up finish at state. Players from his team won the state championship for doubles and another player was the runner-up for singles.

family welcomed Erik Carmichael into the

of Hannah Carolyn on Jan. 30, 2010. The Makk family lives in New York.

TRACEY WARREN-HEIN (NC ’95) and Denis

CHRISTOPHER CROWLEY (TC ’96) won a Mentor of the Year award from the SANS Institute. Crowley trains security professionals in the areas of IT security, network penetration testing and ethical hacking. He lives in Gaithersburg, Md. REBECCA BLACK (NC ’97) is a 2010 Fulbright Scholar in creative writing at Queen’s University Belfast. Black is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro. Her first book of poems, Cottonlandia, won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press.

The book “begins in the American South’s

PHOTO COURTESY OF AUSTIN INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT.

Meria Joel Carstarphen (NC ’92) has just completed her first year as superintendent of Austin Independent School District in Austin, Texas. A guiding principle for her is that “there is no higher calling than being an educator and ensuring that all children receive a quality education.”

Carstarphen learned “the value of education in uplifting people” while growing up in Selma, Ala., the site of historic civil rights struggles.

Now, Carstarphen is working to ensure that all students in Austin have access to the highest quality education programs. Already in her brief tenure, more than one-third of the district’s schools have moved up one or two levels in the state accountability rankings.

Even while overseeing the improvements in Austin schools, Carstarphen has found time to tutor a middle school student once a week, and she says that is her “best accomplishment” during the past year.

Carstarphen received a master of education degree from Auburn University and a master’s and doctorate of education from Harvard University.

—Catherine Freshley

Santa Monica, Calif., on May 30, 2010.

Guests at the wedding included LISA GREENBAUM (NC ’99), CHRISTINE NGUYEN NESSEN (B ’99), JUSTIN NICHOMOFF (E ’99), SARAH HEFFRON NICHOMOFF (E ’99), RACHEL SISKIND (NC ’99, L ’02), LESLIE SCHWARTZ KRUNTCHEV (NC ’98) and GENEVIEVE POPE (NC ’99). Shana Felix is a planning manager in the corporate offices of Barneys New York for the outlet and warehouse sales divisions.

Ross Felix is the founder and CEO of www.thedatingrevolution.com and a project manager at SONY Music. The couple lives in New York City.

MERIA JOEL CARSTARPHEN DEDICATED EDUCATOR TULANE DEGREE: BA, political science and Spanish

RESIDENCE: Austin, Texas

PROFESSION: School superintendent

QUOTABLE: “Education is the great equalizer.”

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RYAN GATCHELL (A&S ’97) was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps upon his graduation from Tulane.

After eight years of active service, he left the Marines as a captain to pursue a career in private contracting. He recently returned from the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia. Gatchell led a small team of former U.S. military special forces personnel to the region to fulfill the requirements of a security contract. A logistics company hired Gatchell and his team to secure the shipping lanes for the safe passage of their crew and cargo. Gatchell reports that everything went well and all crew and cargo reached their destination safely.

Gatchell currently splits time between Laurel, Miss., and New Orleans, where he is working to renovate a number of historic homes that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

SARAH BLOOMENTHAL (NC ’00) married Sam Kaplan on June 5, 2010, in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Guests at the wedding included VICTORIA FAIN AIKMAN (NC ’00), LAURALEE THORNTON GUNBY (NC ’00), JULIE PAYNE (NC ’00), FELICIA RICHARDSON KEANY (NC ’01), JENNIFER GATZ FOWLER (NC ’01), SAMANTHA BERG (NC ’00) and ALISON HERBERT DEJARNETTE (E ’00). Bloomenthal is an account executive at the Washington Business Journal.

Kaplan is a lawyer with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The couple lives in Washington, D.C. JEREMY GOLDSTEIN (B ’00) and his wife, Darcy Pulitzer Goldstein, have relocated to London where Jeremy Goldstein is an executive director in the securities division of Goldman Sachs.

DEREK D. BARDELL (G ’01, ’02) was named a 2010 Beat the Odds Champion for Children by the Children’s Defense Fund–Louisiana.

CESAR GONZALEZ (L ’01) is chief of staff to congressman Mario Diaz-Balart (Florida’s 25th Congressional District). Gonzalez previously served as minority staff director of the legislative and budget process subcommittee and legislative director and counsel to Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart.

Wallis-Mendez welcomed their first child, Edward Blaine, on June 3, 2010. The family resides in Midland, Texas, with 11 rescued feral cats.

WALTER W. BILLSON (E ’02) and his wife, Laurie, announce the birth of twins, Hannah Grace and Walter William III, on May 21, 2010.

2000s JEFF BARON (B ’00) is operating several New Orleans–area restaurants: The Dough Bowl; Huevos, a breakfast café that he operates with partner chef Bart Bell; and Crescent Pie and Sausage Co., which is also operated with Bell. Baron plans to open a new pizza restaurant in the fall. New Orleans Magazine recently named Crescent Pie and Sausage Co. one of the best new restaurants in the city.

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LANDON CLARK (E ’03) and MARISSA ROSLYN (NC ’04) were married on May 22, 2010, in New Orleans. JONATHAN HOBBS (E ’03) and JONATHAN HIJUELOS (E ’03) were in the wedding party. Guests included JENNIFER PALUMBO (B ’03), DARLEEN ABADCO (NC ’03) and KIRK SOODHALTER (TC ’04). The couple lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Roslyn is a nurse practitioner and Clark is a patent attorney.

MICHELLE HEWLETT (E ’04, G ’05) and AARON SANCHEZ (UC ’06) were married on April 17, 2010, in New Orleans. Members of the wedding par ty included PATRICK HEWLETT (E ’06), KERRY GEAR (B ’05) and TREY BETHEA (E ’04). The couple resides in northern California where Hewlett is pursuing her PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University, and Sanchez is an IT systems analyst for Pricewaterhouse Coopers in San Jose, Calif.

KATHRYN SPRUILL (NC ’04, B ’07) and James EDWARD BLAKE MENDEZ (B ’01) and Kelly E.

MARK OZERKIS (TC ’99) and his wife, Alexandra, welcomed Clara Avery on March 18, 2010. The baby joins brother Davis. The family lives in Princeton, N.J.

1, 2010, in Dallas. The couple met the first day of Siegel’s freshman year and reconnected later in Dallas. “The rest is history,” they say. The couple lives in Dallas where Samantha Armstrong is a licensed professional counselor working with children and families in private practice and Shae Armstrong is an attorney.

HALEY BORUSZAK (NC ’02) married Shawn Borisoff on May 30, 2010, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Haley Borisoff is a 2010 graduate of New York University’s Stern School of Business. She works as a marketing manager for American Express in London.

SHAE ARMSTRONG (B ’02) and SAMANTHA SIEGEL (NC ’03, G ’04) were married on May

Roman were married in the bride’s hometown of Carlisle, Pa., on Oct. 24, 2009. Guests included KATIE DOCHEN (NC ’05), MONICA BERKETT (NC ’05), JESSICA EDWARDS (B ’05), JOSH FIELMAN (B ’06), SHANE GLASS (B ’06), ANUSHKA JOHNPULLE ( B ’ 0 5 ) , CASEY McGAUGHEY (UC ’04), MAGGIE McFARLIN McGAUGHEY (NC ’05), CHRISTOPHER OTTEN (B ’05), KIMBERLYN OWENS-HUGHES (NC ’04), NICOLE ROBERTS (NC ’05), JEFF SCHIFFMAN (B ’05), LIZ SEELY (NC ’04), ALEXIS LIGHT SHAPIRO (NC ’01), PETER SHAPIRO (B ’00, ’07), BILL VANDIVORT (TC ’00), LAUREN WAGNER (NC ’05) and ANDREA WEINBERG (B ’06).

Kathryn Roman, who was previously a Tulane undergraduate admission counselor, celebrated with former and current admission officers. The couple resides in Atlanta, where she is co-president of the Tulane Alumni Club of Atlanta.

PHOTO COURTESY OF RYAN GATCHELL.

theClasses | classNotes BRIAN J. ROBINSON (TC ’05) announces the publication of mADD man, a book about ADHD written from a first-person lens. He says the book “is a manifesto for change in the educational system, specifically with regard to the gifted children that are wired with alternative brain chemistries and stigmatized with such labels as ‘ADHD’ or ‘learning disabled.’” mADD man chronicles one young man’s journey from his childhood suspensions and traumatic experiences, to his party animal antics in college, through his almost fatal decline into existential depression, to ultimately hitting bottom. Robinson has now resurfaced as a pioneering entrepreneur/ writer in New York City and continues to speak passionately to anyone about the ills of the educational system.

ALEX SOMERS (B ’05) and his wife, Marilyn, announce the birth of Alexander Hayes III on Feb. 7, 2010. Somers graduated from Harvard Business School this spring and has returned to Houston where he is an investment banker with Simmons and Co. International.

JESSICA LEVY (NC ’06) and MATTHEW BUSH (B ’06) welcomed Jameson Thomas on July 15, 2009. The baby’s godparents are ELIZABETH THRELKELD (E ’06) and JAMES SCOTT HESTER JR. (’07). Levy and Bush were married in Napa Valley, Calif., on Oct. 7, 2007. In addition to Threlkeld and Hester, the wedding party included SALLY REY (NC ’06), NIKKI CATANIA (NC ’06), HAYLEY MANIN (B ’04), ANN DONOGHUE (B ’06) and THOMAS O’DONNELL (TC ’06). Levy received a master of arts in organizational leadership from Gonzaga University in 2008. Bush is a captain in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Irwin, Calif.

QUICKSON NDLOVU (SW ’07) is working on completing his PhD in human services while working with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services in Austin, Texas.

TED KLEIN (’08) and MEGAN KILLION (’08, G ’10) were married on June 19, 2010, in her hometown of Mobile, Ala. Klein is a member of the Tulane University School of Medicine class of 2012 and Killion received

PHOTO BY JACINTA LEGG.

a master of science in biomedical sciences from Tulane in May.

MAX RASCHE (’09) is a marketing and communications intern at the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans. He plans to pursue a career in graphic design, visual communication and digital art.

BENJAMIN VARADI (L ’09) is the coordinator of the J-Grad Student Retention Program. This innovative initiative helps Jewish students preparing to receive their terminal degrees find employment and join the greater New Orleans Jewish community. Tulane University and the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans are working with New Orleans Hillel and Chabad of Louisiana to encourage Jewish students attending area universities to begin their professional careers in New Orleans and help rebuild this unique community.

Varadi, who had a yearlong research fellowship at the Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law and Culture, has served as a consultant and adviser to numerous advocacy nonprofit organizations around the country, including Common Ground Relief and the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations.

2010s JANE E. ROVINS (PHTM ’01, L ’09) was

DOMINIK KNOLL (B ’10) is chief executive offi-

appointed executive director of the new Integrated Research on Disaster Risk Program, which is sponsored by the International Council for Science, the International Social Science Council and the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. One of her first tasks will be to establish the international program office for IRDR in Beijing, China. Rovins was previously a senior planner with a private-sector company providing hazards mitigation and emergency management training. She has worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency on mitigation and responses to events such as hurricanes Katrina and Ivan.

Additionally, she has lived and worked in West Africa, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region, and developed a work plan for the ASEAN Regional Forum on disaster preparedness and relief, adopted last year. Rovins also has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on risk analysis, mitigation and disaster management as an associate professor at the American Military University.

cer of the World Trade Center, a nonprofit information and advocacy group with more than 1,600 corporate and individual members that aims to increase international trade in New Orleans. Knoll was previously an assistant and then project manager to the CEO of Kronberg International Holdings, a European real estate company, and a joint venture partner of Pirelli Real Estate in Italy.

KIRSTEN LYERLY (PHTM ’10) is pursuing a graduate degree in the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine through the four-plus-one program. During the spring 2011 semester, Lyerly will travel to the International Centre for Migration and Health in Geneva, Switzerland. While there, she will complete a practicum with MANUEL CARBALLO (G ’70, M ’73, PHTM ’90). The center, which Carballo established and has run for more than 15 years, is a World Health Organization Collaborating Center and nonprofit. Lyerly has worked as a volunteer with Humanitarian International Services Group at the organization’s Global Information Center in Texas on ongoing Haiti relief operations. She also served a summer internship in Japan at the U.S. Army’s Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine–Pacific.

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JEAN DANIELSON Associate professor of political science and director of honors program

of New Orleans on July 5, 2010 Rosalie Palter Cohen (A&S ’30) of Cincinnati on April 7, 2010.

Elizabeth J. Dobbie (NC ’34) of Daytona Beach, Fla., on Jan. 23, 2010.

Ellen Sinclair Hillyer (A&S ’35) of Pass Christian, Miss., on April 12, 2010.

E. Spencer Lazarus Jr. (B ’35) of New Orleans on April 7, 2010.

Jacques L. Fortier (E ’38) of Houma, La., on May 9, 2010.

Rhett R. McMahon (A&S ’39) of Baton Rouge, La., on June 11, 2009.

Frances Rollins Whitty (NC ’39, B ’75) of Slidell, La., on May 8, 2010.

Elizabeth Bowen Lewis (NC ’40) of Spanish Fort, Ala., on Jan. 22, 2010.

Naomi Hicks Paule (NC ’40) of Metairie, La., on May 27, 2009.

Lois Walton Townsend (NC ’40) of Palatka, Fla., on Aug. 8, 2009.

Rodney A. Black (E ’41) of Port Charlotte, Fla., on March 27, 2010.

Leonard J. Peters (A&S ’41, G ’42, ’53) of Kittery Point, Maine, on March 13, 2008.

William J. Tally (A&S ’41, M ’44) of Greensboro, N.C., on April 27, 2009.

Ethelyn Cousin Park (NC ’42) of Hermosa Beach, Calif., on April 3, 2010.

Wilton K. Duckworth (B ’43) of

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Kemah, Texas, on Oct. 10, 2008.

Thomas B. Parkerson Jr. (E ’43) of Captain Cook, Hawaii, on Sept.

24, 2008.

Aldenlee Spell (G ’43) of Doylestown, Pa., on May 2, 2010.

Robert C. Woolley (B ’43) of Anacortes, Wash., on April 8, 2010.

Charles W. Creger (A&S ’44) of Cincinnati on April 2, 2010.

W. Lyall Howell Jr. (A&S ’44, M ’46) of Northridge, Calif., on Feb. 10, 2009.

Robert M. Montgomery (A&S ’44, G ’48) of New Orleans on April 26, 2010.

Betty Finnegan Vath (NC ’44) of New Orleans on May 6, 2010.

Shirley Pic Wells (NC ’44) of Alexandria, La., on Oct. 23, 2009.

Lenore Williamson Burgess (NC ’45) of Lacombe, La., on May 15, 2010.

Elizabeth Vallas Jensen (NC ’45, G ’48) of New Berlin, Wis., on April 26, 2008.

Raymond C. Tremont (A&S ’45) of Metairie, La., on April 13, 2010.

Preston N. Comeaux Jr. (B ’46) of Cypress, Texas, on Nov. 3, 2008.

Cecil K. Edmonds (B ’46) of Swartz Creek, Mich., on May 4, 2009.

Jocelyn Nyland Fromherz (NC ’46) of

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Jeanne Gaudet Garvey (NC ’46) of Metairie, La., on May 6, 2010.

Warren H. Higginbotham (M ’46) of Houston on April 10, 2009.

Mark R. McQuinn (B ’46) of Chicago on June 2, 2008.

Lloyd G. Pence (B ’46) of Baton Rouge, La., of Jan. 1, 2008.

Consuelo Faust Walk (NC ’46) of New Orleans on April 18, 2010.

Richard A. Barnes Jr. (A&S ’47) of Phoenix on July 24, 2008.

Milton S. Holland Jr. (A&S ’47) of Shreveport, La., on Dec. 6, 2009.

Sarah Grace Hudspeth (SW ’47) of Montgomery, Ala., on March 26, 2010.

Richard Choon B. Ko (M ’47) of Muncie, Ind., on June 13, 2008.

Nathan V. O’Neal (A&S ’47, G ’50) of Port Angeles, Wash., on July 1, 2009.

Gustav A. Schmidt Jr. (A&S ’47, G ’48, ’51) of South Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 17, 2010.

Joy A. Toney-Chilton (UC ’47) of New Orleans on Jan. 2, 2009.

Joseph L. Utley (B ’47) of Cleveland on Nov. 15, 2008.

Robert J. Adams (L ’48) of Lafayette, La., on April 14, 2010.

Jack Stanley Brown Sr. (A&S ’48) of Florence, Ala., on March 20, 2010.

Mona Glasston Hirschberg (NC ’48) of Elizabeth, N.J., on April 1, 2010.

Adrian K. McInnis Jr. (M ’48) of Baton Rouge, La., on Jan. 23, 2009.

Harry G. Popkin (SW ’48) of Atlanta on March 23, 2010.

Frederick B. Berry (M ’49) of Roland, Ark., on July 20, 2009.

Francis Emmett (A&S ’49, L ’51) of New Orleans on April 17, 2010.

John U. Hidalgo (A&S ’49, G ’51) of Metairie, La., on May 12, 2010.

Richard G. Jones Jr. (B ’49) of St. Petersburg, Fla., on April 22, 2010.

William O. Lavin (B ’49) of Roanoke, Va., on Feb. 4, 2010.

Richard P. Mansfield (B ’49) of Carriere, Miss., on Oct. 29, 2010.

Robert G. Marchelos (B ’49) of

Pensacola, Fla, on April 27, 2009.

Richard F. Maxwell Jr. (E ’49) of Catonsville, Md., on May 2, 2008.

John F. Monroe (M ’49) of Peoria, Ill., on Jan. 1, 2009.

George H. Tinker III (L ’49) of Genoa, Ill., on April 6, 2010.

Keene A. Watson (PHTM ’49) of Lexington, Ky., on Dec. 27, 2009.

Nelson C. Boudreaux Jr. (M ’50) of Jeanerette, La., on Feb. 8, 2010.

Leo A. Labourdette Sr. (A&S ’50) of Mandeville, La., on April 17, 2010.

Herbert Arthur Otto (SW ’50) of Alpharetta, Ga., on June 20, 2009.

Elmore F. Ruck (E ’50) of Metairie, La., on April 8, 2010.

H. Herschel Saucier (SW ’50) of Coffeeville, Miss., on Dec. 28, 2009.

Richard P. Sheffield (A&S ’50) of Jacksonville, Texas, on March 17, 2009.

Ballard W. Tebo (A&S ’50) of Metairie, La., on May 15, 2009.

Virginia Nash Weatherhead (M ’50) of Tallulah, La., on Nov. 17, 2009.

Willis P. Butler (M ’51) of Kailua, Hawaii, on Jan. 14, 2008.

Ernest G. Catlett (L ’51) of Houston on April 12, 2010.

Joseph W. Huttner Jr. (B ’51) of New Orleans on April 9, 2010.

Clarence S. Long Jr. (A&S ’51) of Carrolton, Ga., on March 10, 2010.

Michael M. Samalin (A&S ’51) of Palm Springs, Calif., on July 12, 2009.

James C. Atkinson (M ’52) of Baton Rouge, La., on Aug. 21, 2008.

Harvey E. Austin (SW ’52) of Celo, N.C., on April 5, 2010.

George V. Baus Sr. (A&S ’52, L ’57) of New Orleans on April 1, 2010.

Jacob C. Fritz Jr. (E ’52) of Falls Church, Va., on March 29, 2010.

Richard F. Hattier (A&S ’52, UC ’54) of Boynton Beach, Fla., on Aug. 23, 2009.

Bernard T. Hickman (M ’52) of Jackson, Miss., on Dec. 28, 2009.

Maxine Kidd Jackson (NC ’52) of Alexandria, La., on April 9, 2010.

theClasses | Deaths Kenneth N. Miller (A&S ’52) of Memphis, Tenn., on Sept. 19, 2008.

George W. Renaudin (L ’52) of Houston on April 8, 2010.

Peter J. San Roman (UC ’52) of New York City on Nov. 9, 2009.

Ralph L. Sheppard Sr. (SW ’52) of High Point, N.C., on April 3, 2010.

James P. Stewart (E ’52) of Venice, Fla., on March 31, 2009.

V. William Wood (M ’52) of Tulsa, Okla., on April 30, 2010.

J. Edwin Morriss Jr. (M ’53) of Headland, Ala., on Sept. 8, 2009.

Joe F. Robberson (M ’53) of Amarillo, Texas, on April 1, 2010.

Winnifred Seegers (M ’53) of Littleton, Colo., on April 22, 2010.

James D. Stokes Jr. (E ’53) of Sarasota, Fla., on March 22, 2010.

Clinton E. Wallace (M ’53) of Madison, Miss., on March 6, 2010.

Jerome F. Wenzel Sr. (A&S ’53) of New Orleans on April 4, 2010.

Arthur E. Wood Jr. (M ’53) of Jackson, Miss., on Feb. 14, 2010.

Kenneth D. Bourgeois (UC ’54) of Slidell, La., on April 19, 2010.

Donald D. Chapman (A ’54) of Bainbridge Island, Wash., on March 23, 2010.

Winifred F. Wilkerson Desmond (UC ’54) of Naples, Fla., on Nov. 7, 2008.

William H. Fuhr (E ’54, ’57) of Edina, Minn., on March 17, 2010.

Rose A. Harris (SW ’54) of Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 18, 2009.

Ernest C. Miller (M ’54) of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 8, 2010.

William S. Seamen (B ’54) of Urbandale, Iowa, on Aug. 7, 2008.

Albert H. Silverman (G ’54) of Chicago on Nov. 17, 2008.

Frederick W. Fischer (A&S ’55) of New Orleans on April 12, 2010.

Ellery C. Gay Jr. (M ’55) of Little Rock, Ark., on March 14, 2010.

Guy A. Guillot (E ’56) of Metairie, La., on April 30, 2010.

William Sonnier Jr. (M ’56) of Lafayette, La., on Aug. 21, 2009.

Ulrich Toggweiler (G ’56) of Redwood

City, Calif., on Sept. 21, 2008.

Wim F. Van Muyden (M ’57) of Woodland, Calif., on Nov. 2, 2009.

John E. Wallin (B ’57) of Baton Rouge, La., on Sept. 14, 2008.

William C. Chamblee (M ’58) of Medina, Texas, on May 17, 2008.

Demain Donley Whitesides (G ’58) of Arlington, Va., on Aug. 24, 2008.

Haywood H. Hillyer III (A&S ’59, L ’63) of New Orleans on April 28, 2010.

George C. Schlottman (M ’59) of Macon, Ga., on June 8, 2009.

R. Faser Triplett (M ’59) of Jackson, Miss., on Jan. 28, 2010.

Robert B. Friedman (A&S ’60) of Atlanta on April 15, 2010.

Hugh M. Glenn Jr. (L ’60) of Metairie, La., on May 15, 2010.

Dean Malbon Lindholm (B ’60) of Naples, Fla., on March 8, 2010.

Jane K. Roe (SW ’60) of Lexington, Ky., on Dec. 9, 2008.

John T. Seale (L ’61) of Monroe, La., on Dec. 17, 2008.

Patricia Murphy Woody (NC ’61) of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., on May 8, 2010.

Samuel W. Murdoch (L ’62) of Cathedral City, Calif., on Feb. 13, 2009.

David P. Richerson (PHTM ’62) of Ocean Springs, Miss., on Jan. 9, 2010.

George B. Vaughan (A&S ’62) of Danville, Va., on Jan. 4, 2009.

William G. Akins Jr. (M ’63) of Edina, Minn., on July 14, 2009.

Fernando M. Andrade (G ’63) of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Feb. 15, 2009.

James W. Bortner Jr. (A&S ’63) of Everett, Wash., on Sept. 28, 2009.

W. C h a r l e s B r o w n ( L ’ 6 3 ) o f Shreveport, La., on Jan. 29, 2008.

John D. Jackson Jr. (B ’63) of El Cajon, Calif., on Nov. 24, 2009.

Michael K. Tarver (A&S ’63, L ’66) of New Orleans on May 19, 2009.

William R. Wenneker (B ’63) of Lexington, Ky., on April 21, 2010.

Thomas J. Baker Jr. (A&S ’64) of New Orleans on April 3, 2010.

Edward De La Garza (L ’64) of Miami on Dec. 6, 2009.

Emily Feinstein Mansfield (NC ’64) of White Plains, N.Y., on Nov. 5, 2009.

Gary D. Ketron (M ’65) of Santa Ana, Calif., on Dec. 22, 2008.

Velma G. Schlorff (PHTM ’65) of Atlanta on May 6, 2010.

Don M. Sierra (UC ’65) of Sterling Heights, Mich., on May 10, 2010.

Alma Barrera Siporin (SW ’65) of McAllen, Texas, on March 9, 2010.

W. G r ay S m i t h J r. ( A ’ 6 5 ) o f Philadelphia on April 29, 2010.

Richard A. Strauss (A&S ’65) of Butler, Pa., on Feb. 18, 2008.

Susan B. Wise (NC ’65) of Fletcher, N.C., on July 22, 2009.

Eunice Pellissier Bianco (PHTM ’67) of Young Harris, Ga., on April 25, 2009.

Nancy E. Blume (NC ’67) of Pinellas Park, Fla., on Jan. 26, 2010.

A. Donald Pyatt (SW ’67) of Sarasota, Fla., on April 27, 2009.

Edward A. Sexsmith (PHTM ’67) of Nampa, Idaho, on Nov. 21, 2008.

Joseph F. Toms (G ’67) of Spartanburg, S.C., on Nov. 20, 2009.

Theodore Grant (B ’69) of Rancho Mirage, Calif., on April 25, 2008.

Jacqueline McIntyre Hahn (SW ’69) of Oklahoma City on May 14, 2010.

Eva Black Dillard (SW ’70) of Corsicana, Texas, on April 7, 2010.

Joseph Guinta Sr. (UC ’70) of New Orleans on April 24, 2010.

Beverly Ann Weeks (G ’70) of Honolulu on March 7, 2009.

Kathleen T. Hopkins (G ’71) of Cleveland on April 1, 2009.

Jay Mines (SW ’71) of St. Petersburg, Fla., on April 23, 2010.

Donald G. Paxton (G ’72) of Manassas, Va., on July 20, 2009.

James A. Ayers (M ’73) of Corpus Christi, Texas, on May 2, 2008.

Thomas W. Mather (E ’73) of Houston on April 15, 2010.

David E. Golia Paladin (L ’73) of Chapel Hill, N.C., on Feb. 23, 2010.

Nancy Johnson Bowers (G ’75) of Baltimore on Aug. 10, 2009.

Phillip C. Sokolsky (A&S ’76) of

T U L A N I A N

Redondo Beach, Calif., on March 22, 2009.

Gloria Shedrick Calhoun (SW ’78) of New Orleans on March 26, 2010.

Ashton J. Fischer Jr. (A&S ’78) of Baton Rouge, La., on May 10, 2010.

Rober t K. Miller (A&S ’80) of Maumelle, Ark., on Sept. 7, 2009.

Joseph S. Smyth (E ’80) of Satellite Beach, Fla., on Nov. 1, 2009.

Kathryne L. Creamer (NC ’81) of Dallas on April 21, 2009.

Kelvin P. McDaniel (E ’82, M ’86) of Covington, La., on March 29, 2010.

Donna Lee Van Cott (NC ’82) of Wayland, Mass., on Jan. 17, 2009.

Brett D. Lafving (A ’83, A&S ’83) of Norfolk, Va., on Nov. 17, 2008.

Ronald J. Ballestas (A&S ’84) of New Orleans on April 11, 2010.

Samuel T. Emory III (A&S ’84) of Fredericksburg, Va., on April 8, 2010.

Ibrahim A. Ibrahim (PHTM ’84) of Troy, Mich., on Aug. 2, 2008.

Ellsworth P. Scales III (L ’84) of Mobile, Ala., on May 15, 2008.

R. Monica Moncarz Honowitz (NC ’87) of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., on Oct. 1, 2009.

Melanie Saltzman Mendelson (NC ’87) of Weston, Conn., on April 2, 2010.

Joe L. Caldwell (G ’89) of Ruston, La., on March 29, 2010.

Jon R. Galinson (A&S ’93, PHTM ’96) of Berkeley, Calif., on Feb. 23, 2010.

Susan Larsen Boerwinkle (G ’94) of El Dorado, Ark., on Oct. 29, 2008.

Edward P. Cosgriff (TC ’97) of New Orleans on March 26, 2010.

John N. Miller Jr. (B ’98) of Russellville, Ark. on Jan. 1, 2009.

Antonio C. Phillips (B ’99) of Columbus, Ga., on March 11, 2010.

Manish Jain (M ’03) of Las Vegas on April 23, 2010.

William J. McKeown (E ’03) of Rhame, N.D., on March 28, 2008.

Fredric T. Morriss (G ’05) of Ponca City, Okla., on Feb. 28, 2010.

Jessica R. Liever (’07) of Walnut Creek, Calif., on March 17, 2010.

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givingBack Thank you Five years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Tulane University and the city of New Orleans were facing a future that was, at best, uncertain. The calendar was thrown out and classes were cancelled for the fall semester while plans were set in motion to begin rebuilding the university.

In the wake of nature’s fury and man’s folly, the Tulane community rose to the occasion and redefined itself with a remarkable response to tremendous challenges and adversity. Alumni, friends, administrators, board members, faculty, staff, parents and students rolled up their sleeves and gave in ways they had never given before.

Their hard work and valiant efforts secured the future of Tulane and marked the beginning of a new era of cooperation between the university and the city that is its home.

“Not for one’s self, but for one’s own”—the university’s motto—took on a broader meaning and context as Tulane instituted its undergraduate public-service graduation requirement. The rest, as they say, is history.

At commencement ceremonies in 2007, “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams told graduates, “There would not be a Tulane without New Orleans, but I am absolutely convinced that there would not be a New Orleans without Tulane.”

Indeed, without the generosity of countless members of the Tulane community, there might not be either. We can’t thank you enough!

SPIRIT OF BOBBY BOUDREAU The late Robert J. Boudreau (B ’51, L ’53) of Lake Charles, La., gained recognition, unofficially, as the No. 1 cheerleader for Tulane. His quick wit and contagious passion for the Green Wave boosted the morale of all who were fortunate enough to cross his path.

Boudreau’s fervor for Tulane knew no offseason, and his support for the university was not limited to athletics. As members of the The late Bobby Boudreau, Green Wave No. 1 fan, poses with Tulane cheerleaders. Boudreau’s friends have established a spirit award in his memory.

PAGE 40 | TULANIAN SUMMER 2010

Strawberry People Reunion, Boudreau and other alumni and their spouses met annually for more than 50 years, and they established the Strawberry People Reunion Scholarship specifically for students from Louisiana.

The Strawberry People and other friends of Boudreau are behind the Bobby Boudreau Memorial Initiative, an endowment created to establish the annual Bobby Boudreau Spirit Award for the alumnus who best exemplifies his “roll Wave” spirit. As part of the initiative, a new tradition will be established and an old tradition resurrected.

For decades, the Victory Bell rang out after Green Wave victories, but the clapper disappeared years ago, rendering the bell silent. In time, the Victory Bell will ring again to celebrate the spirit of Bobby Boudreau.

The Boudreau Memorial Initiative will provide for the design, construction, relocation and dedication of the Victory Bell. Recipients of the Bobby Boudreau Spirit Award will receive a replica of the Victory Bell. Any gifts to the initiative that exceed the cost of establishing the award will be dedicated to the Strawberry People scholarship fund.

The bell was originally cast in 1825 by Atelier de Thiac Maignan Durand for Valsin Marmillion, and was acquired by the family of Richard W. Leche, who later donated it to Tulane. Leche

graduated from Tulane Law School in 1920 and served as governor of Louisiana in 1936–1939.

The Tulane Office of Alumni Affairs is appointing a committee to receive recommendations and to select Bobby Boudreau Spirit Award winners.

—Maureen King Maureen King is a writer in the Tulane Office of Development.

AUCTION AND ALL ALUMNI PARTY The Helluva Hullabaloo auction will benefit Tulane student-athletes for the ninth year. The event on Oct. 8 from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. in the Lavin-Bernick Center features Lee Zurik, WVUETV anchor/chief investigative reporter, as auctioneer for a live auction. The fund-raiser also will include a silent auction, and CharityBuzz hosts an online auction Oct. 5–25. For more information, go to http://tulane.edu/homecoming/hullabaloo. Also on Oct. 8, a pep rally, fireworks and music by Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue will be part of the festivities for the Wave ’10 All Alumni Reunion Party. The classes of 1960, 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010 also have special reunions scheduled that weekend.

Go to http://tulane.edu/homecoming/reunions/ challenges.cfm to make your class gift.

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