Tulane’s Katrina Generation

As dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law in August 2005, Michael A. Fitts watched the horror of Hurricane Katrina — the levee failures, the flooding, the rooftop rescues — from afar. New Orleans was brought to its knees in what was one of the deadliest and costliest disasters in the nation’s history.

“Those of us in higher education watched as our peers at New Orleans-area institutions confronted unprecedented challenges,” Fitts shared at a recent Presidential Speaker Series Aug. 28, the eve of Katrina’s 20th anniversary.

Tulane closed its doors for the fall semester and students were taken in by schools all over the country. Meanwhile, staff, faculty and administrators — many displaced from their own homes — worked tirelessly to preserve the university. They enacted a renewal plan to guide what was arguably the most dramatic reorganization of a major American university in more than a century.

Tulane’s nearly 14,000 undergraduate and graduate students, scattered across the country by the storm, could have chosen the simpler route: stay away, finish their studies elsewhere and place Tulane and New Orleans firmly in the past. Some did.

But much to the delight of Tulane leaders at the time, nearly 90% of students — including most of the newly arrived Class of 2009 — returned, many expressing their desire to help both Tulane and the city of New Orleans recover from the storm. And while recruiting for the following year was a bit more challenging, Tulane was thrilled to welcome nearly 900 first-year students to the Class of 2010.

“I would put Tulane coming back to campus in January 2006 right up there with the Saints coming back to the Superdome,” said Jeff Schiffman, Tulane’s former director of admissions. “When Tulane and other schools opened that January, it was an amazing and transformational moment for our city’s recovery.”

Guiding students through uncertainty

Schiffman graduated from Tulane in May 2005 and immediately went to work as a counselor in the university’s Admissions Office. His gregarious personality and love for all things Green Wave made him a natural fit.

He spent the summer after his graduation at Gibson Hall, learning his recruitment territory, reviewing the incoming class and preparing to hit the road to meet with prospective members of the Class of 2010.

But just after new and returning students began moving into their residence halls in late Aug. 2005, they had to pack up and return home. Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 storm with winds topping 175 mph, was headed straight to New Orleans. It eventually made landfall as a powerful Category 3, devastating New Orleans and vanquishing the levees that protected the city from catastrophic flooding.

Schiffman ended up in Richmond, Virginia, where he and 11 others on the admissions team found a home with EAB (formerly Royall & Company), a higher education consulting firm.

“Word got out that we had a way for people to contact us, and that’s when we started hearing from parents and students,” Schiffman said.

Would Tulane reopen, they asked. And if so, when?

Schiffman, who holds a bachelor’s degree from the A. B. Freeman School of Business and a master’s degree from the Tulane School of Professional Advancement, assured them that campus would reopen but not until January. More than 450 colleges and universities had offered to take in Tulane students, tuition free, for the fall semester. He urged them to take advantage of that generosity and be ready to return.

“This truly was a pinnacle moment in higher education, schools opening their doors, cost-free, to thousands of New Orleans college students,” said Schiffman, who now works for EAB but still lives in New Orleans. “It brought out the best in our industry.”

Finding a calling in public health

Courtney Werpy recalls the excitement of arriving in New Orleans on Aug. 26, 2005, after a two-day drive from Michigan with her mother. The next day she moved into her dorm. Hours later she was evacuating. That fall, she attended the University of Toledo.

Initially a pre-med student, Werpy shifted course after learning about Tulane’s new undergraduate program in public health. “I took an intro class and was hooked,” she said. “I was fascinated to learn more about public health and the impact that small actions can have.” She graduated in 2009 with a degree in public health and joined Teach For America in order to contribute to the region. She later earned a master’s in disaster management at Tulane and spent six years with the City of New Orleans, leading projects from hurricane preparedness to the city’s COVID-19 response.

Werpy is now vice president of government initiatives for Undue Medical Debt, a national nonprofit. “Almost every path I’ve taken ties back to Katrina and my time at Tulane.”

From neuroscience to environmental advocacy

Like Werpy, Nichole Saunders had it all planned out. A first-year student at Tulane in Aug. 2005, she intended to major in neuroscience and eventually attend medical school.

But Hurricane Katrina — and a class taught that spring by ecologist Jeffrey Chambers in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the School of Science and Engineering — changed her path. Chambers had been researching the number of trees killed or damaged by Katrina and the climate implications. “I was hooked.”

Saunders enrolled in ecology courses and interned with the non-profit Global Green USA, which was creating resilient, energy-efficient homes and communities.

“I realized I was facing a significant shift in passion,” she said. Five years later, she graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in environmental biology, her graduate studies coinciding with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.

“I tell people often that my time at Tulane was bookended by two disasters that permanently changed Louisiana but also completely shifted my future,” she said.

Saunders later attended law school and now works at the Environmental Defense Fund. “I feel pretty lucky to have this story,” Saunders said, “and to have been shaped so significantly by my time at Tulane and in New Orleans.”

Choosing to return, choosing resilience

Keegan O’Brien of Chicago spent the fall semester at Miami University in Ohio, where his brother was beginning his senior year. But he was anxious to return to Tulane, even with questions about what awaited him.

When he returned, he said he was overjoyed to find a level of energy he had not anticipated.

“The usual questions of ‘what’s your name’ and ‘where are you from’ pivoted to ‘what did you do last semester’ and ‘why did you come back.’ What I loved was everyone made an active decision to come back.”

As a Green Wave Ambassador, O’Brien led tours for prospective students, eager to share Tulane’s spirit. A finance major in the A. B. Freeman School of Business, he earned a coveted internship with Lehman Brothers in 2008, crediting his Katrina experience for setting him apart from other applicants.

After graduating in 2009, O’Brien spent a decade in New York finance before returning to Chicago, where he is now a managing director at an investment firm. A loyal alumnus, he visits campus often.

“Going to Tulane was the best decision I made — twice,” he said. “First to go, but second to return. Tulane taught me not to give up, that community is real, culture matters and the road less traveled is scary but rewarding.”

Lessons in service and humanity

Barrett Robin was just applying to Tulane when Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of New Orleans. He wasn’t discouraged. In fact, he was more determined than ever to be part of Tulane’s Class of 2010.

“Attending Tulane in the years following Katrina exposed me to some critical lessons in humanity,” Robin said. “I recall the optimism and hospitality that outshined the despair people felt after losing just about everything.”

Over the next four years, he took on volunteer roles in neighborhood rebuilding. After graduating with a degree in legal studies from Freeman, he moved to Texas and eventually found his calling as a trial lawyer fighting on behalf of victims in catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases.

“Some truths became clear to me,” he said of Katrina. “Unexpected tragedy is part of the human experience. The life lessons in loss and resilience help frame the work that I do every day.”

Building back through architecture

As a member of Tulane’s Class of 2010, Lexi Wirthlin Tengco enrolled in the School of Architecture and Built Environment (then known as the School of Architecture) because of the opportunity to help New Orleans.

“Tulane’s renewed mission to engage architecture as a force for social and environmental repair deeply resonated with me,” Tengco said.

Tengco immersed herself in UrbanBuild, a design/build program in which teams of students take on the design and construction of prototypical homes in struggling New Orleans neighborhoods. She was part of a team that built a duplex in the decimated Lower 9th Ward.

“I had the opportunity to contribute directly to the rebuilding of local neighborhoods, which gave me experience in community-centered design and construction,” said Tengco, now vice president of Multistudio, a New Orleans-based firm where she leads education design and community-based projects. “That immersive, purpose-driven education continues to shape my career today.”

A scholar shaped by Katrina

Tanya Goldman had been counting down the days to when she would begin her first year at Tulane in 2005. So, when she arrived on campus, only to have Hurricane Katrina force her to turn around and head back home to New York, her heart sank.

The months that followed, as she commuted to Columbia University from Long Island a couple of days a week were a lackluster time that made her more determined to get back to Tulane.

“We knew swaths of the city were destroyed, and streets away from campus were dark and empty,” Goldman said. “But on campus, the feeling was euphoric. You had the sense that everyone who returned really wanted to be there.”

Goldman spent the next five years pursuing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the School of Liberal Arts. She later earned a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and is now an assistant professor of film at Missouri State University.

She credits her years at Tulane with giving her the confidence to seek a PhD — something that might never have happened had she not returned to Tulane after Katrina.

For Goldman, Tengco and other members of Tulane’s Katrina Generation, returning to campus — or even applying the following year — was one of the most consequential decisions of their lives.

“I was impressed by Tulane’s resilience and dedication to rebuilding the city,” Tengco said. “They reinforced their commitment to New Orleans and emphasized the role of architecture and community in the city’s recovery. This resonated with my aspirations to make a meaningful difference through my work.”