Tulane Cutting Jobs, Programs for Reopening

Staggered by Hurricane Katrina, Tulane University announced Thursday that it was cutting about 230 faculty positions, dropping some sports and eliminating five undergraduate programs, including electrical engineering and computer science.

“This is the most significant reinvention of a university in the United States in over a century,” Tulane President Scott S. Cowen said.

The campus, in the city’s Uptown section, has been closed since Katrina’s floodwaters devastated New Orleans and drove out most of the city’s half a million inhabitants. About two-thirds of Tulane’s facilities flooded, including dormitories, and most students are now scattered at schools around the country.

The private university plans to resume classes Jan. 17, though it expects a costly drop in enrollment. Tuition accounts for 35% of Tulane’s revenue.

Before the Aug. 29 storm, Tulane had about 2,500 faculty members and 13,200 students and an annual budget of $593 million. The university said storm recovery would cost at least $200 million this year.

Tulane said it would eliminate about 180 faculty positions at its medical school and about 50 at discontinued graduate and undergraduate programs. The medical school bore the brunt because of New Orleans’ “changing population and healthcare environment,” a Tulane statement said.

“I deeply regret that employee reductions were necessary to secure the university’s future,” Cowen said. “We have tried to make the reductions as strategically and humanely as possible, recognizing the hardship it places on those whose positions have been terminated.”

An official with the American Council on Education, a higher-education advocacy group to which 1,600 colleges and universities belong, said Tulane’s plan was unprecedented in its scope and speed. “I have thought long and hard to see if I could identify a comparable change at another university in the last century, and I can’t,” said Terry W. Hartle, council senior vice president.

The university eliminated tennis, golf, men’s track and cross country, women’s swimming and women’s soccer. It will continue to participate in NCAA Division I football, baseball, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball, and women’s indoor and outdoor track and cross country.

The university, which said it was concentrating on areas where it could excel, is also eliminating undergraduate programs in civil and environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, and exercise and sports science.

Incoming students will be housed on a cruise ship on the Mississippi River.

Under the plan, the university will establish a new undergraduate college through which all incoming students, regardless of field of interest, will enter. And beginning next fall, new students will be required to participate in community service to rebuild New Orleans.