<p>I’m a little sad to hear this after meeting him at Destination Tulane. </p>
<p>[Tulane</a> University - The Next Journey](<a href=“http://tulane.edu/administration/president/tulane_talk/tt_053113.cfm]Tulane”>http://tulane.edu/administration/president/tulane_talk/tt_053113.cfm)</p>
<p>He might have led Tulane through Katrina, but athletics got the shaft there as well as engineering.</p>
<p>I have to say, Catria, you have no idea what you are talking about in this regard. Athletics haven’t been Tulane’s strong point in many years with an occasional outlier year like 1998 for football. And given the enormous uncertainty right after Katrina, including serious doubts about the financial viability of the school at all, your move would have been to pour money into athletics at that time??? Because what, the main purpose of Tulane to exist is to have a great football and/or basketball team?</p>
<p>Along those same lines, the disciplines of EE, CE, and ME are expensive to run AND were not especially popular majors at Tulane at that time. The two stronger engineering majors, BME and ChemE, were maintained and strengthened by getting greater focus.</p>
<p>I just love the way people armchair quarterback a situation that was so enormously complex and frighteningly fragile, not having access to any of the information or input from what had to be dozens of meetings and many reports from all sources. President Cowen not only led Tulane through Katrina, anyone that has been associated with Tulane for decades, as some of us have, know that overall the school is far better now than it was even a decade ago. Sure there are areas that have suffered or been eliminated, but there are more that are stronger and there are many new, innovative programs as well. The school is increasingly “hot” among highly capable students, and this is reflected by the much stronger classes academically than pre-Katrina, as well as far higher retention and 6 year graduation rates, the latter which are only now starting to be seen since Katrina was just over 6 years ago.</p>
<p>What a shame Pres. Cowen is retiring! He seems to be most impressive. Catria: from my perspective (and that of my son), athletics was the least reason for him to attend Tulane. FC: I know it’s getting harder to get into Tulane, and its reputation is decent, but it is puzzling to me why US News rates it lower than academically comparable schools. Any idea why?</p>
<p>Yes, there are several reasons. The main ones are that their formula heavily weights two factors: Peer assessment and graduation rates. A lot of it is Katrina related, but not all of it.</p>
<p>On the first, being a deep south school relatively isolated in the world of big-time universities hurts to some degree. Think about schools in the Cal system, for example. They all rate each other highly, they have a built in advantage. No disrespect to UC Davis, for example, but there is no way it should be ranked more highly than Tulane based on any objective look at the criteria used by USNWR. A couple of years ago their 25th percentile CR SAT was something like 520!! Think about that, 25% of the students scored below 520 on the CR portion of the SAT. Tulane’s comparable number was 630 at that same time, yet UC Davis was ranked something like 10 spots ahead of Tulane. Also, think about what a academician in Boston perceives about Tulane compared to schools that they hear about much more often. This really got exacerbated from Katrina when the main thing people heard was that the school was closed.</p>
<p>Then there was the ensuing coverage, when many of them A) thought Tulane was underwater and/or still closed long after it had reopened, and B) all that was highlighted was the closing of some departments like the 3 engineering disciplines mentioned above. You can imagine that got a lot of talk in academic circles. Like so many things of that nature, those negative facts got a lot more attention and stuck in people’s minds more than the positive things that have happened since. Not the minds of high school students looking at Tulane now, but profs, administrators, etc. It will change, but slowly.</p>
<p>Also, Tulane is really hurt by the approx. 25% emphasis on 6 year graduation rates. Tulane could not report this number last year because it was meaningless due to it being the 6 year anniversary of Katrina, and of course other graduating classes were affected by students not coming back after Katrina, not just the one that started in 2005. And USNWR doesn’t just use the one year’s number, but averages the results of the last few years, so it will still affect Tulane for a couple more years.</p>
<p>That’s the short version. I really do believe that rankings are meaningless because there is no credible rationale for the criteria and weightings they use. In a world where everything is equal I can see the logic of using retention as a factor, but how can you compare an expensive school like Tulane with ones that are much less so, and the fact that the students that come to Tulane are, on average, further from home than any other university. Couple that with the fact that flying in and out of NOLA is more time consuming in terms of connecting flights and the like than places like Boston, New York, Philly, Chicago, etc., and you have an impact on the retention number but that has nothing to do with the quality of the school. Yet USNWR uses retention as a proxy for quality. There are numerous factors like that, the whole thing is a fraud, quite frankly. But I understand the reality of how it is used by many families out there, not to mention the innate desire to be highly ranked even when you intellectually know it is a completely flawed premise to begin with. The BEST university? What does that even mean?</p>
<p>Now that I understand the post-Katrina context better, I retract my earlier comments. However, lack of information can greatly affect one’s view on a subject. </p>
<p>What I can say, though, is that the next hire can change Tulane forever.</p>
<p>OK, we will pretend you never did post #2, lol. Your last statement is 1,000% correct. University presidents have a lot of say in what directions their school takes. We can only hope Tulane hits a(nother) home run with the selection. It’s a really plum job, so one would think there will be some excellent candidates to choose from.</p>
<p>I have always been impressed with Scott Cowan. He is not only a great leader, but embodies the spirit of Tulane and New Orleans. He will be missed.</p>
<h1>2 post is accurate, and I assure you that I’m not an “armchair quarterback.”</h1>
<p>I should have at least spelled his name correctly! My apologies. I doubt if athletics will ever be Tulane’s big draw. A stadium would help, oh yeah, Cowen has done that…</p>
<p>Additionally, the very impressive baseball stadium was built during President Cowen’s tenure at Tulane. In order to build an athletics program, you need to have the necessary facilities. It seems they are at least heading in the right direction.</p>
<p>kreative - don’t forget the new Hertz Center as well, which significantly upgraded training and practice facilities.</p>
<p>I would also take this opportunity to point out that the post-Katrina plan, while certainly led by President Cowen, was the result of many minds, including the following:</p>
<p>William G. Bowen, President, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, president emeritus, Princeton</p>
<p>William R. Brody, President, The Johns Hopkins University</p>
<p>James J. Duderstadt, President emeritus, University of Michigan</p>
<p>Harvey Fineberg, President, The Institute of Medicine, The National Academies</p>
<p>Malcolm Gillis, President emeritus, Rice University</p>
<p>Eamon Kelly, President emeritus, Tulane University</p>
<p>Farris W. Womack, Chief Financial Officer emeritus, University of Michigan</p>
<p>That list obviously doesn’t include all the input from the various senior administrators at Tulane along with, no doubt, many other highly knowledgeable individuals from the alumni base and elsewhere. So until someone can demonstrate to me that they had similar access to and knowledge of all the facts regarding financial projections, infrastructure assessments, faculty retention, student retention, and the dozens of other factors that had to be considered, forgive me for taking anyone’s “assurance” with a high degree of skepticism. Anyone that thinks that strong measures were not required and that some oxen were not going to be inevitably gored is just kidding themselves. They are also kidding themselves if they think it was almost as possible that Tulane wouldn’t come back at all.</p>
<p>It seems ridiculous to think that now, but if only 60% of the students had returned instead of the much higher percentage that did (and that was extremely possible), and/or if students/parents had been even more afraid to consider Tulane than they were (and the 2006 recruiting was way off the normal numbers), or any of a dozen other factors had tipped the wrong way, Tulane could easily be a shell of what it was pre-Katrina as opposed to the even stronger university it became instead. And just as the person at the top gets all the blame when things go badly, Scott Cowen deserves the lions share of the credit for how it all turned out instead.</p>
<p>
Sorry about the dropped word. What I meant, as I am sure you all knew, was “They are also kidding themselves if they don’t think it was almost as possible that Tulane wouldn’t come back at all.”</p>
<p>Are there candidates announced for Cowen’s job?</p>
<p>Oh, way too soon for that. He just announced on Friday. There will be a search committee, and since he isn’t leaving for 13 months, I imagine it will be right after New Year when they start interviewing. Before that they will sift through candidates and narrow down the list.</p>
<p>But the way these things usually work, there won’t be a public list of names, especially with a private school. Probably we won’t hear anything until they announce the selection, and my guess is that will be sometime in the spring of 2014.</p>
<p>“athletics got the shaft”</p>
<p>As a proud alum I was sad to hear that President Cowen will be leaving Tulane but I wish him well with his retirement plans! I deeply appreciate all that he has done for the place that I love - Tulane and the City of New Orleans.</p>
<p>IMO - As far as the athletic programs at Tulane I do not feel that all falls on Cowen’s shoulders. Cowen did not inherit an athletic power house. Cowen took over the leadership from Eamon Kelly who was all about a culture of academic integrity vs. an athletic culture. In 1985 Kelly banished Men’s Basketball after the point shaving scandal and NCAA violations. I was there and I remember Kelly taking the position that Tulane is an academic institution NOT an athletic institution. While the point shaving scandal happen many years ago Kelly was president until 1998. Cowen took over from a man who believed that athletics should contribute, with integrity, to the quality of life of the campus while providing an educational experience for the athlete AND that Tulane was a place of academic excellence first and foremost.</p>
<p>Nice article in the Gambit. Note the $600 million number.</p>
<p>[A</a> transformational leader | Clancy DuBos | Gambit - New Orleans News and Entertainment](<a href=“http://www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/a-transformational-leader/Content?oid=2207803]A”>http://www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/a-transformational-leader/Content?oid=2207803)</p>
<p>Apparently they are going to move on the hiring process a bit faster than I speculated.</p>
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<p>So sorry to hear that Pres. Cowen will be retiring, but happy for him and his family. He has steered Tulane through a lot of challenging transitions, including not only the gargantuan challenges of Katrina and other “hurrications” , as they are affectionately known, but the merging of Newcomb with Tulane into Newcomb-Tulane College and the rebuilding of the programs and athletics. Tulane has been through a lot, and it has come out stronger for it.</p>
<p>Article in today’s CHE. Doesn’t say much we didn’t already know, but you gotta love the picture. I think those are the steps to Reilly Center, but hard to be sure.</p>
<p>[In</a> the Calm After the Storm, Tulane’s President Plans to Retire - People - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“In the Calm After the Storm, Tulane’s President Plans to Retire”>In the Calm After the Storm, Tulane’s President Plans to Retire)</p>