Southern University at New Orleans is gradually recreating itself.
Nearly five years after the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina washed over the sloping 22-acre campus of this historically black university, there are still many unsettled questions about how—and even where—it will be fully rebuilt.
Louisiana’s difficult financial picture and a series of bureaucratic, political, and educational disagreements over the university’s future have complicated the rebuilding.
An end to that uncertainty, however, may be in sight: The university has built a striking new student-housing complex and has two other major buildings under construction—developments that the chancellor, Victor Ukpolo, calls “the silver lining in a disaster.” State officials soon expect to have hired a team of architects and planners to lay out a comprehensive master plan that will guide the university’s physical future.
Known as SUNO, the 51-year-old institution is the New Orleans branch of the Southern University system, Louisiana’s historically black land-grant university. Located about eight miles north of the French Quarter and the Lower Ninth Ward area that became well-known on national television after the storm, the campus was inundated after the levees of three nearby canals cracked the day after Katrina slammed into the city. Overflow from Lake Ponchartrain, just to the north, also poured onto the campus.
It would be about a month before state and federal officials declared the campus safe enough for SUNO officials to return and begin assessing the impact. By then the water level had fallen, but the wreckage was staggering.
Flooding damaged all 11 buildings on its main Park Campus. Several are still unusable, including the three-story library, at the center of the campus, and the education building, which sits at its lowest-lying edge and at one point held 10 feet of water. The library, whose entire 300,000-volume collection was rotted beyond repair by the flooding and the months of standing water that followed, has been gutted and cleansed of mold and biohazards. Mr. Ukpolo says he expects it will soon be refurbished. The education building is among five likely to be demolished.
Other buildings, where flooding was not as extensive, have been partially renovated, with the ground floors remaining gutted and empty, and upper floors now housing gleaming new classrooms and science laboratories. (Fetid water sat in the pipes for so long that when it came time to reopen the New Science Building, all of the equipment had to be replaced.)
Parts of the Multipurpose Building have been restored for classroom and office use, but its 1,000-seat theater, now stripped of chairs, stage curtain, and sound and lighting systems—everything that could mildew and mold—sits dark and unused. Like the science building, which was also authorized by the state to reopen temporarily in the fall of 2008, it, too, has been slated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for eventual demolition—although that may be subject to change.
Except for the Physical Education Building and cafeteria, which have been renovated and fully reopened, every building on the campus now sports an unusual exterior adornment—industrial-looking aluminum venting that encircles the outside and ties into 10-foot-tall dehumidifier units that prevent the return of mold. On a campus where much of the canopy of live oaks was swept away by the flood, the machinery and the aluminum are stark reminders of the lingering impact of the August 2005 breaches in the nearby canals.
All of that is not to minimize the significant progress that has been made.
This semester the university opened the first section of its first-ever residence hall, a plush, apartment-style complex. Some units offer views of the downtown skyline and of adjacent Lake Ponchartrain. The 698-bed complex should be fully available for occupancy by fall, fulfilling a decades-old dream for the institution, which now hopes to attract more students from beyond New Orleans.
“We talked about having dormitories for 35 years,” says Wesley T. Bishop, who attended Southern in the mid-1980s as an undergraduate and is now associate vice chancellor for academic affairs and an assistant professor of criminal justice.
A $2.4-million, 10,000-square-foot Information Technology building is also under construction, and in March the university broke ground for a two-story, brick-and-glass home for its School of Business and Public Administration.
All of the new building has taken place on a 38-acre site on higher ground just north and across a highway from the original campus. SUNO bought the additional land in the early 1990s.
It was on this higher ground, now known as the Lake Campus, that SUNO initially reopened for the spring 2006 semester. It operated out of a complex of 45 temporary buildings that look, as Woodie White, vice chancellor for administration and finance describes them, “like a little Army camp.” Ukpolo, the chancellor, says California State University at Northridge used a similar approach to reopen quickly after the 1994 earthquake.
Some classes and other operations returned to the Park Campus in the fall of 2008, thanks to some $25-million in state and federal renovation funds. But with enrollment now back up to about 3,200—93 percent of its pre-Katrina level—and with less than half of the 380,000 square feet of space on that main campus reopened, SUNO is still depending heavily on makeshift facilities that were designed to be used for 18 months to two years.
In August 2009, the Obama administration pledged an additional $32-million to rebuild four buildings on the Park Campus.
“We’re now able to spread our wings,” says Ukpolo, whose vision for the university includes a pedestrian bridge linking the two campuses, a day-care center for students and faculty members with children, and additional facilities to foster a residential environment for students. (SUNO will switch from open to selective admissions next fall, so attracting students has become an especially high priority.)
He also hopes to construct facilities for academic programs in the sciences, in the humanities and social sciences, for the College of Social Work, and for the College of Education and Human Development.
But questions remain about whether to invest in rebuilding the low-lying Park Campus, and engineers say that before any further construction can be undertaken on the Lake Campus, the water lines and other infrastructure will need to be upgraded.
The chancellor, an economist by training, says he has learned a thing or two about architecture in the past four years. As he sees it, those are hurdles, but not necessarily obstacles.
Throughout New Orleans, “everybody’s re-engineering what they’re doing,” Ukpolo says. And now SUNO has assurances that it won’t be left out. “We have an opportunity to fix everything right now.” The flooding was disastrous, but “Katrina gave us a whole lot of opportunities.”
