Changing Schools 9/15/05

Well, I'm pleased to report that my oldest son and his adopted home town in eastern North Carolina have weathered Ophelia, relatively unscathed. His University will be open tomorrow for classes, so after a two-day hurricane holiday, he's (hopefully) studying for a test. His younger brother isn't quite as fortunate, and his University is closed for the semester, regrouping, trying to find ways to maintain the community, spread across the country.<

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It is hard to describe the generosity this country's academic community has extended to students "Katrinad" out of their colleges and universities. My personal thanks go out to Georgia State University for not only taking my displaced Loyola University New Orleans student, but for making it so amazingly easy for him to enroll, without transcripts, without aid documentation, with nothing but his Loyno student ID. It was the solution that made the most sense for us, but it would be unfair if I didn't mention the generous and immediate response made by the rest of the Jesuit Colleges and Universities, opening their doors, and in some cases their residence halls, to displaced students from their member institution. That didn't work for us because of where we live (no Jesuit Us nearby). He didn't want to go "away" to another school, because it is his intention to return to his college in his chosen city, New Orleans. For now, he will have his big-city downtown U experience, riding the commuter train. He has traded Loyola's cozy green campus on St. Charles, which was surrounded by beautiful Victorian mansions and Audubon Park, sitting senically east, west and north of the Mississippi River, for concrete and high rises and the hustle of this city, his birthplace, grown way too big and way too crowded, if you ask me. It will be a bit of an adventure, a vacation, a new experience, a sabbatical with classes included.

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I do have to say that my personal award for the greatest extension of generosity by any academic institution that I have seen happen as a result of this catastrophe has to go to the University of Houston. They didn't just open their doors, they opened them fast, setting their plan into place the Tuesday morning after the storm, when the rest of the world was only beginning to come to grips with the meaning of the levee breaches, and they kept on opening them, welcoming first students, then the Loyola administration and ultimately the entire Loyola Law School into their home to conduct business and classes this semester. I have a sister who is a faculty member at their downtown campus and she emailed me a statement that I felt spoke to the heart of Houston's response. I don't know if these were her words or ones she had heard, but what she wrote to me, perfectly descriptive of both the negative and positive aspects of the impact, was, "Houston is forever changed. We will never have to eat bad crawfish gumbo again."