The Storm After the Storm

Cowen with students (92% of undergrads returned to Tulane): "I wouldn't wish this on anybody. But we might as well take the opportunity to reinvent ourselves."

Not content merely to rebuild, Cowen is seizing on the emergency as an opportunity to remake Tulane as a truly elite school.

In 2004, for example, Cowen single-handedly took on the national established collegiate athletic interests, declaring the system by which schools got lucrative invitations to football bowl games unfair and even monopolistic. His efforts resulted in rule changes that angered a lot of people. "We always thought [that] would be my legacy," chuckles Cowen, "and I didn't want that."

Katrina granted that wish--violently. And while the immediate problem was the millions of gallons of water that flooded Tulane's uptown campus and fully inundated its downtown location, the school's woes went far beyond water damage. A university exists in large part because it is expected to exist in the future. It is a dynamic organization that requires a constant influx of new ideas--and a crew of rich alumni who want to attach their names and fortunes to an institution that will outlive them. In short, it assumes perpetuity. And suddenly, that assumption was no longer valid.

This became obvious to Cowen even before he escaped his drowning campus (an escape that required, in order, a commandeered boat, a hot-wired golf cart, a "borrowed" dump truck, and a helicopter donated by a rich alum). Once he set up shop in a Houston hotel along with his executive team and their families and pets, the scope of the task began to overwhelm him. Where do you begin when everything is gone? "I went to the first meeting," says Marjorie Cowen, Scott's wife, "and just walked out of there crying. I just thought, This is so huge."

Most crises that affect an organization affect only one part. A computer virus might cripple a company's intranet but not its phone lines. A train derailment might delay one component of a product, but there should be alternative sources. Katrina was an assault on all fronts at once. Tulane had no functioning IT infrastructure, no way to communicate with its 12,500 students and 6,000 employees, no news on federal funding, no way even to assess the damage. Some of the staff had no homes, clothes, or news of relatives. But Cowen and his team plunged in, fueled by little more than adrenaline. "Why wait for the government?" he says. "If we did, we'd be out of business." Yvette Jones, Tulane's chief operating officer, puts it even more succinctly. "You start at the corner and you just go," she says.

Cowen put in place a triage system centered on a daily 9 a.m. meeting. "Scott would say, 'We have 1 million things on our plate, but what are the top-five things that need to get done today?' " says Luann Dozier, VP for development, who lost her home. "You go and come back with the recommendations and move on. So you could see progress every day." The first order of business was to retrieve the school's IT files from the 14th floor of a downtown New Orleans building with massive flooding, no working elevators, and chaotic surroundings. A posse of Tulane employees, escorted in SUVs by police officers, spent hours lugging the disks down the darkened stairways. They needed the records to find students as well as to figure out how to pay staffers and faculty, many of whom had been displaced and presumably needed the money right away. "If we didn't make payroll, everyone would have thought we were gone," says Cowen.

Yet some 15% of the employees were not on direct deposit, and there was still no central Web site for students seeking information about whether and when the school would reopen. Cowen reached out to alumnus David Filo, cofounder of Yahoo, for help. Filo donated some manpower and Web-hosting resources, and soon a makeshift Web site came to life, along with a relentlessly cheery blog from Cowen. Privately, however, he had doubts. Why would freshmen, about to be dispersed to hundreds of different colleges, feel loyalty to a school they'd attended for just a few hours? Who would want to come back to a campus with absent professors, few services, limited pizza joints, and, possibly, no Mardi Gras? To make it easier to come back (actually, harder to leave), national university organizations asked other schools to accept students affected by Katrina, but only for one semester. The school also took out a $150 million loan to hire a disaster-relief firm to fix the damaged campus.

With off-campus housing in drastically short supply, Tulane leased a cruise ship to use as a dormitory.

After about three weeks of 24-7 crisis management, Tulane-in-Texas shifted from the ICU to the recovery room. And as soon as it became clear that Tulane actually had a future, Cowen began to think more strategically about what kind of a future it should be. Fund-raising began in earnest, with the goal of raising $25 million for rebuilding by June 30 (the number stood at $31.5 million in mid-February). To meet the housing shortage, Cowen leased an Israeli-based cruise ship to use as a dorm. Says senior Danielle Scher, whose family lost everything: "I'm just happy to have a roof over my head." Realizing that professors wouldn't come back if they didn't have schools for their own kids, Cowen budgeted $1.5 million to charter a local school for the kids of the faculties of Tulane as well as those of other struggling universities.