A Small Miracle from Katrina
Two stories on technology’s hand in helping New Orleans’ law
students
On
August 29 I woke up worrying about Loyola Law School in New Orleans. It’s
a Jesuit school like Boston College, and it lay smack in the path of Hurricane
Katrina. The storm hit Louisiana that day. It was a category 4 hurricane, as
violent as the one that hit Galveston in 1900, and it caused more damage than
one person can comprehend. Maybe that was why I focused on a small but familiar
piece of the disaster. There are actually two law schools in New Orleans, Loyola
and Tulane. You might be interested to hear how they are getting out of this
mess.
The most interesting part of the story is what happened first. Within a day
of Katrina’s landfall I had eight emails from my counterparts across the
country. Within two days I had 100. The American Bar Association (ABA) runs
a deans’ listserv, and it functioned like a national town meeting on how
to address the law schools’ problems. People spoke in turn; their remarks
were coherent and thoughtful; and as the emails piled up, the participants gradually
contributed the parts of a solution. We had eyewitness accounts from New Orleans.
Deans from Houston and New York who had recent experience with disasters counseled
against impulsive offers of help that the schools might not want. There was
a rapid debate about taking on the 1,000 or so displaced students, and on what
terms. A consensus quickly developed that we would ask New Orleans students
to pay tuition to their home schools and not the assisting schools.
Then it got complicated. First- and third-year students presented different
problems. There were ABA rules about required class hours. Many schools around
the country had already started classes and the drop-add date was approaching.
Visiting students would need library access, email, student IDs, and health
care. How could the New Orleans students even prove they were attending school?
You couldn’t check with Loyola or Tulane. And how would the students know
what options were available to them?
My contribution to the disaster relief was a good Rolodex. I instigated a conference
call with the president of the Association of American Law Schools, the ABA’s
Consultant on Legal Education, and the two affected deans to bring some order
to the help effort. By September 1 we had posted on the AALS website a list
of schools willing to help (there were eventually 177 in all), and the terms
under which they would take in students. News of the website was communicated
to schools through the deans’ listserv. Within hours everyone in legal
education knew the broad outline of the workout. The major law publishers provided
books free of charge. Sorting out financial aid was tricky, but Access Group
(a child of the Law School Admission Council) offered help to both students
and financial aid offices.
That’s one story. I have been reflecting on it this past month as I read
Tom Friedman’s book The World Is Flat, because it is a good example of
how changes in technology have altered our decisionmaking processes. The combination
of email, Netscape, high-speed internet access, and cell phones has made possible
a horizontal, collaborative method of problem-solving that would have been unthinkable
ten or even five years ago. Almost immediately after Katrina hit, we were able
to hold a discussion among the 190 people most familiar with the administration
of legal education, identify the problems, propose solutions, debate them, and
reach a consensus. (I must confess that there was a shadow discussion on the
associate deans’ listserv among people who really know what they are talking
about, and that the deans were counseled about what to say.) We could then post
the solution in the electronic town square so everyone could see it. We did
all this in three days. In old-fashioned hierarchical structures, achieving
that kind of speed is the stuff of legend. (Think of George Patton moving the
Third Army 100 miles in three days to attack Bastogne.)
The other story is a more familiar one. It’s about how the staff at Boston
College Law School invited, received, and settled a group of new students in
the blink of an eye. On September 1—the day we posted the solution on
the AALS website—I met with the Law School’s deans and directors
to plan our part. By the end of that day, we had received more than 100 inquiries.
On September 2 we admitted 23 students. That was Friday of Labor Day weekend.
When school opened the following Tuesday, we registered seven students (six
from Tulane and one from Loyola), and they began their classes. Let me say that
again, in case you are not sufficiently impressed. In two working days we designed
a system for visitors from New Orleans, took applications, admitted students,
enrolled them, registered them in classes, and put them to work.
The staff made this look easier than it was. And they had help from everyone
in the community. All the students had some connection with Massachusetts (siblings,
family, a fiancée), but only two were natives. Alumni offered places
to live. Parents and faculty made contributions to the Law School Fund to pay
for clothing, school supplies, and household necessities. The Law Student Association
collected donations from more than 150 students, ranging from housing to clothing
to computers to books. As one of the visiting students said, “Everyone
here has been really great. The welcoming atmosphere at BC has really helped
make the transition easier.”
