In a flat-bottom skiff that his faculty colleagues use to chart the effect of coastal development on bayous, Chris Parkinson found himself navigating the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans—his own neighborhood—the day after Hurricane Katrina struck. As he and the firefighters in his boat rescued people from rooftops, the silence was overwhelming.
“We were boating over traffic lights, and it was so quiet,” Parkinson remembers. “We knew there were dead bodies in some of the houses.”
Parkinson also knew his own home was “a goner.” He and his wife, emergency-room physician Paulette Gori, had decided to ride out the storm on the campus of the University of New Orleans, where Parkinson is associate chair of the geology and geophysics department. As the floodwaters rose, they joined others to set up a commissary, triage unit, outdoor latrines and mortuary. For three days, Parkinson crisscrossed his devastated hometown, along with Navy and Coast Guard helicopters, plucking people from the toxic waters and helping deliver some 5,000 residents to a business administration building that stood on the highest point of land—six feet above sea level.
But by Thursday, three days after the hurricane, the mood in the UNO building had turned ugly. New Orleans firefighters took off pieces of their storm gear, dressed Parkinson and Gori in official-looking outfits, and put them and their 5-month-old baby, Jade, in a vehicle headed for the safety of the Federal Emergency Management Agency staging ground in Kenner, La. “We got out with nothing but our lives,” Parkinson says. The next day he and his family were in Baton Rouge, La., and by the following day they’d found a flight to the Bay Area, where they have family and friends.
Sitting in his new surroundings in Stanford’s Green Earth Sciences Building, where friends in the department of geological and environmental sciences have given him clothes, office space, a computer, library privileges and other necessities, Parkinson is uncertain how to describe his status. “Evacuee?” he tries. “Refugee?” Professor emeritus Gary Ernst, who has known Parkinson for eight years, has an answer: “He’s a pretty brave guy.”
Like other universities that are taking in faculty displaced from more than 30 Gulf Coast schools, Stanford has given Parkinson a refuge from the storm. Here he has a temporary place to regroup and figure out how to teach his graduate students, who are scattered all across the country, by remote means. The University also has admitted 27 undergraduate students and five third-year law students for the fall term, plus a handful of other advanced-degree students. They are among an estimated 100,000 college and university students displaced by Katrina.
“We have a very special circumstance and we should be as responsive as we can,” says dean of admission and financial aid Rick Shaw. For Shaw, that meant starting his new job a week early and crafting a program for “guest” students who would attend Stanford for one quarter, then return to their home institutions. The students will pay tuition to their own schools, to keep those staffs and structures afloat financially, and pay room and board fees to Stanford. “The purpose is to serve the needs of the moment,” Shaw says.
When Hurricane Katrina struck, sophomore Meagan Minor had been back at historically black Xavier University of Louisiana for two weeks, leading freshman orientation as a “peer dean.” Minor left her dorm just hours ahead of the storm, driving home to Baton Rouge on back roads with only two days’ worth of clothes with her.
Two weeks later, at the urging of her mother and her boyfriend, Cardinal running back Anthony Kimble, ’08, Minor went online and read about the Stanford guest-student program. She applied on September 14, was accepted on the 15th, and boarded a plane to the Bay Area on the 16th. Now settled in Toyon Hall and taking courses in economics, religious studies, African-American history and hip-hop, Minor says she is “truly, truly blessed to be here.” The local Red Cross chapter has provided support, and she says the University is going to “pretty much take care of” additional expenses.
But Minor carries in her purse a pink card that identifies her as a “guest,” and it reminds her of the distance from home and friends. “This is just great,” she says, “but it’s not my school.” Many of the students displaced by Katrina share the sentiment, including junior Liana Elliott. She recently ordered a T-shirt from a classmate who’s temporarily attending college in New York. It reads: “I Still Go to Tulane.”
In addition to enrolling displaced students, institutions of higher education across the nation have responded to Katrina in several creative ways. Johns Hopkins University has sent teams of counselors and therapists to New Orleans, Cornell has contributed veterinary specialists, and Virginia Tech is providing tree cutters from its forest ecology faculty.
Although Katrina hit a month before most undergraduates had returned to Stanford, the response on the Farm was immediate. As she watched the first news broadcasts from New Orleans, Louisiana native Jan Barker-Alexander, director of the Black Community Services Center (BCSC), got on the phone to Sally Dickson, associate vice provost for faculty development. The two longtime friends cried together, then set about organizing relief drives. Denise Flowers, a grant administrator in the biological sciences department, did the same. Within a few days, 21 donation sites were established around campus.
By September 7, the BCSC had become the de facto hub of the campus relief effort. More than 40 staff, students and faculty turned out for a meeting that day to set up committees to deal with the immediate needs of victims of the hurricane, to help relocate evacuees who’d been sent to the Bay Area and to focus on rebuilding efforts and communication. At a follow-up meeting on September 14, members of Stanford Students for Relief, which raised tens of thousands of dollars for tsunami relief, joined the conversations about how students might coordinate with Habitat for Humanity to build homes during Thanksgiving break and on alternative spring breaks.
On September 15, the Stanford community gathered at Memorial Church for an hourlong service to remember the 1,100 who died as a result of the storm. Scotty McLennan, dean for religious life, said the tragedy was “deeply intertwined with economic injustice and racism, with 27 percent of New Orleans residents living below the poverty line.” The national government’s response, he charged, had been “unconscionably slow.”
Barker-Alexander delivered the “call to action” in a service that included African-American preachers and strong choruses of the anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing. “This is not something that will be over tomorrow, next week or next year,” she said. After Hurricane Katrina is no longer in the headlines, a tearful Barker-Alexander said, “I ask you to take it up a notch and figure out what your final story will be about what you have done for the victims of this devastating tragedy.”
Among those responding to the challenge across campus:
• More than 100 physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and other specialists at Stanford and Lucile Packard Children’s hospitals signed up to help staff mobile 250-cot triage shelters that were being set up in the Southeast.
• The University gave up to five days of additional paid time off to employees volunteering for hurricane relief. At press time, four had made plans to go.
• The Alumni Association created an online clearinghouse where graduates could offer or ask for support.
• The department of athletics collected cash donations at football, men’s and women’s soccer, and women’s volleyball games. Players in the women’s golf program raised $4,000, the men’s swimming team visited and donated to a Red Cross evacuation center in Baton Rouge, the lacrosse staff donated clothing, and the Stanford Golf Course raised $30,000. Men’s head basketball coach Trent Johnson teamed up with AllCoachNetwork.com to raise money in an online sports auction.
• Disaster Relief at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) hosted a Cajun lunch that raised $25,000.
• Professors rewrote syllabi to include the aftermath of the hurricane, including philosophy associate professor Debra Satz (Introduction to the Humanities), historian Al Camarillo (Race and Ethnicity in 20th-Century America) and English associate professor Paula Moya (Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity). Several faculty affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity organized a one-time, one-unit course titled Confronting Katrina to address “the issues of race and class inequality that made the vast majority of storm victims vulnerable in every sense of the word.”
