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WILDES Dec-18-2006 (670 words) With photos. xxxn
President of New Orleans' Loyola University reflects on past year
By Carol Zimmermann
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Jesuit Father Kevin Wildes, president of Loyola University New Orleans, knows all about one-two punches. The avid amateur boxer has seen his fair share of double blows since Hurricane Katrina and the floodwaters that followed it.
The school, requiring about $5 million in repairs after Katrina, was relatively spared from wind and water damage since the floodwaters stopped at the edge of the campus. But that's not to say one of the worst storms in recent U.S. history did not have an impact on the university.
More than a year later, the 95-year-old school continues to experience a financial fallout from Katrina since it was closed for one semester but continued to pay salaries. It also currently faces an enrollment decline particularly in the freshmen class.
Father Wildes refers to the recovery process in terms of phases. In the hurricane's immediate aftermath, school officials dealt with student safety and coordinated their placement in other schools. Once Loyola reopened last January, about 94 percent of students returned, but normalcy did not.
About 60 percent of the university's faculty and staff members lost their homes or their homes experienced major damage. Many lived in the top floors of their houses while repairing the damaged lower levels. Others lived in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on university property just outside the city.
Another setback for the university was a $9 million deficit. To trim this, Father Wildes proposed cutting 13 graduate and undergraduate degree programs and reducing 17 tenured and tenure-track faculty positions. In May, the university's board adopted the restructuring plan, despite student and faculty opposition and a vote of no confidence by a group of faculty members against Father Wildes and the university's provost, Walter Harris Jr.
"I truly underestimated how difficult this would be," the university president said in a Dec. 14 interview with Catholic News Service in Washington. The priest said he has not had time to fully reflect on the challenges of the past year as he rapidly shifted from crisis management to long-term recovery.
As he was preparing for the university's winter break, he said he felt akin to the description in a line from the W.B. Yeats poem "The Second Coming" about someone slouching "towards Bethlehem to be born."
"I've been doing a lot of slouching these days," he said, while between visits to Loyola's alumni clubs. He also said he has been able to begin to put the year in perspective with the help of the book "Perseverance in Trials: Reflections on Job" by Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the retired archbishop of Milan.
The book has reminded him, as has personal experience, that "so much is out of our control and there is only so much I can do," he said.
The priest also likes to quote his colleague, Norman Francis, president of Xavier University in New Orleans and chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which determines how to spend federal hurricane-relief funds.
Francis has likened the city's recovery to the first act of a long play and also has pointed out that even if the recovery's been slow there is really nothing to compare it to, since a disaster of this scale hasn't previously occurred.
Like Francis, Father Wildes wants to see New Orleans restored and hopes his university community can play a part in that recovery.
Currently, students and faculty members in the colleges of business, music, law and humanities are involved in community projects with legal clinics, mentoring, promoting businesses and the arts as part of an overall effort to restore the city.
The priest also might have some personal reasons to get New Orleans back on its feet. He knows the city's reputation has suffered since Katrina and many families are now unwilling to send their children there to school. He said his job is no longer just to recruit students but to recruit their parents as well.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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