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A little more than three months after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, forcing administrators to cancel the fall semester at Tulane University, the storm has dealt another blow to the institution.
Last week university officials announced a sweeping restructuring that will slice $60-million from the annual budget and will result in the layoffs of 233 faculty members, the elimination of 14 doctoral programs and 5 undergraduate majors, and the suspension of 8 athletic teams.
Tulane's president, Scott S. Cowen, revealed those plans for remaking the 13,000-student institution after concluding two days of meetings with the university's Board of Administrators in New Orleans. The plan is based in part on the expectation that 86 percent of Tulane's students will return in the spring.
Since the storm hit, Tulane -- the largest remaining employer in the city -- has continued to pay most of its full-time workers, and Mr. Cowen has trumpeted the university's planned reopening on January 17 in visits to cities around the country, talking about how the institution would reposition itself in a Peace Corps environment and help New Orleans rebuild.
That repositioning began in earnest with the cutbacks announced last week. In an interview, Mr. Cowen said the idea behind the changes was to make the institution more "campus- and student- centric."
"We have acknowledged that the undergraduate program will be the center of a new Tulane, with fewer graduate programs," he said. "We will focus on and invest more heavily in what remains. We will get stronger by subtraction."
The changes are wide-ranging:
* The university will go from 45 doctoral programs to 18. Fourteen will be totally eliminated: economics, English, French, historical preservation, law, political science, sociology, water resources planning management, social work, and five in engineering. Other Ph.D. programs may be combined.
* At the undergraduate level, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering will be reorganized into two new schools --...