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Gambit Cover Story on Changes at Tulane

 
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Was this a good story, or "fair and balanced"?
Yes - good journalism
0%
 0%  [ 0 ]
No - bias toward Tulane administration
100%
 100%  [ 1 ]
No - bias against Tulane administration
0%
 0%  [ 0 ]
Total Votes : 1

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lob



Joined: 10 Dec 2005
Posts: 17
Location: New Orleans, LA

PostPosted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 6:00 pm    Post subject: Gambit Cover Story on Changes at Tulane Reply with quote

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/current/cover_story.php
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W. Stuart Lob
BSME 1982, MSME 1984
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perturbed



Joined: 01 Jan 2006
Posts: 8
Location: Maryland

PostPosted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 8:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

How the university fares against it closest competitors post BuRP should be the yardstick both Cowen and this wishy-washy Board should be judged be judged by. If we continue to fall in the rankings those who make the bold decisions should just as boldly take responsibility for the results.
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wckirby



Joined: 10 Dec 2005
Posts: 355
Location: New Orleans

PostPosted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 7:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/current/letters.php

Dr. Watts wrote in a letter for a clarification on his interview.
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Clay Kirby
11th generation New Orleanian
4th generation Tulanian
Mechanical Engineering Class of '06
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lob



Joined: 10 Dec 2005
Posts: 17
Location: New Orleans, LA

PostPosted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 2:01 pm    Post subject: Letter published two weeks after story Reply with quote

Gambit published another letter, this one from an alumnus, in response to their article on local universities' response to Katrina. It's the lead letter in the second issue published since the story appeared.

I happen to have the unedited original text of the letter as it was submitted:

In claiming continuing "financial exigency" for Tulane, Scott Cowen gets his priorities exactly right, in the same way the United States Corps of Engineers had theirs before Hurricane Katrina.

Both institutions knew long before Katrina that good engineering is an expensive proposition. But as with the Corps and its floodwalls, Tulane under Scott Cowen appears to value simple and cosmetic fixes over addressing the true needs of our area. I knew something was not right several weeks before Cowen's "Renewal Plan" was announced in December 2005.

One of the first communications out of post-Katrina Tulane was a recruiting video that assured prospective students that plenty of seats would be waiting at the cafes and bars (despite being legally off-limits to most undergraduates), explained that Mardi Gras would be an "unforgettable love fest," and even that the National Guardsmen had "the whitest teeth I've ever seen." It was a perfect recruiting tool for the kind of student looking to enroll in what students in the School of Engineering used to deride as "Arts and Parties". Nowhere in that video was any hint of the academic rigor that returning and prospective students might expect from an "unparalleled undergraduate experience".

Scott Cowen has chosen to focus on narrowing a great university down to one college (but one with a new baseball stadium!) while sitting atop ground zero for the greatest and most costly engineering disaster in American history. It is comically ironic that Louisiana's guild of professional engineering firms, many of which were founded and are led by Tulane Engineering graduates, now must ignore Tulane as they recruit engineering talent to meet the challenges put before us by the storms of 2005.

As bad as things were in September 2005, I knew even then that what happened in New Orleans would provide fertile ground for the academe of professional engineering, Tulane included. After all, Tulane's engineers already had a century long legacy of achievement ranging from the famous pumps of A. Baldwin Wood to the longest bridge in the world to designing the machines that lofted man to the moon.

Cowen's Tulane has abandoned this legacy, even the sending Wood's beloved sailboat Nydia, bequeathed to the University's care by Wood himself, to the scrap heap. Many of Tulane's alumni now await the true Renewal Plan, the one that we'll embark upon once Scott Cowen is similarly relegated.

W. Stuart Lob
B.S., Mechanical Engineering, Tulane University, 1982
M.S., Mechanical Engineering, Tulane University, 1984


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