New Orleans’ new life

DR. SCOTT Cowen, President Emeritus of Tulane University in New Orleans, likes Denver for several reasons, only one of which is Peyton Manning.

Beyond the Denver Broncos star quarterback (who, like Cowen, calls New Orleans home), Cowen was impressed by the reception he received during his author’s presentation Oct. 27 at Denver’s JAAMM Fest at the Loup JCC.

“The audience asked fabulous questions,” Cowen said in his authoritative baritone during an interview with the Intermountain Jewish News. “I learned more from the audience than I think they ever got from me.”

Another factor prejudicing Cowen in Denver’s favor is the way the city is striving to tackle problems in elementary education which he considers one of the cornerstones of a successful city.

Education — alongside employment, race relations, housing, crime prevention and a host of other urban dynamics — constitute much of what Cowen discussed at JAAMM Fest and which form the heart of his recently published book, The Inevitable City: The Resurgence of New Orleans and the Future of Urban America.

In the book, Cowen details his unlikely role as a leading force in the rebuilding of New Orleans — and much of Tulane’s sprawling campus — in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Cowen also writes about how he navigated a complex (and often phenomenally corrupt or inept) labyrinth of local, state and national politics to ensure that Tulane played a central role in rebuilding the shattered city it has long called home.

In doing so, he brought an unusually broad range of expertise to bear. Although Cowen has long been a leader in the academic world, he has also worked extensively in the corporate realm, in collegiate sports, the military and community and non-profit sectors.

His book and lectures, not surprisingly, have a lot to say about New Orleans, but Cowen’s observations about that city’s reaction to natural disaster have applicability to many other cities facing their own sets of challenges.

Following are excerpts of the IJN’s interview with an individual who has become something of an urban futurist, an astute and hopeful observer of the 21st-century American city.

Please explain the use of the word “inevitable” in the title of your book.

Everybody asks me that question. There is a wonderful geographer who has since retired from Penn State University, Pierce Lewis. He is an exquisite writer about New Orleans and other urban areas. He once wrote a phrase that said, ‘New Orleans is the inevitable city on the impossible site.’

That is, New Orleans is a city that was born to be because of its location on the Mississippi River and its proximity to the Gulf. That’s where the inevitable city comes from. And it’s the “impossible city” because it’s under sea level.

Was there also an implication that Hurricane Katrina was inevitable, that sooner or later this was going to happen to New Orleans?

I don’t think that was the intent, but the fact is you’re correct. As I was telling the group last night in Denver, I remember before Katrina reading a column in some national newspaper, virtually every spring, about the vulnerability of New Orleans; that someday there’s going to be a big storm that’s going to do an immense amount of damage.

In many ways, that was the perfect storm. It showed the vulnerabilities we had. People knew that the levee and flood protection system was not where it should have been, that it had deteriorated over years and years.

In the book you’ll notice that I always refer to the storm as a manmade storm, not a natural disaster, because if in fact the wetlands and barrier islands still existed, and if the Corps of Engineers had continued the upkeep of the fortification of the levee system, Katrina would never have done the amount of damage it did.

It was ultimately inevitable that something like that would happen.

Perhaps there’s a parallel with San Francisco and the earthquake.

Absolutely, because after Katrina, when people were saying, “Let’s not rebuild New Orleans because it’s going to happen again,” the example used was just what you said — San Francisco. In testimony I gave to Congress after Katrina, I used the same example.

I said, “Well, is it our standard now in America that if you’re in a city that’s prone to some natural disaster, like San Francisco, will we never rebuild San Francisco again?”

In retrospect, after all the involvement you had with the recovery effort, can you say that there was a good or positive outcome to Hurricane Katrina? Did it force a painful but necessary rebirth?

Clearly there were silver linings. None of us would have ever wished Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans or anything like that, but inevitably we recognized that we had an obligation — not an opportunity but an obligation — to improve the city such that it would never be as vulnerable again to such an incident. And therein we found silver linings.

We’ve seen improvements in the public education system, in ethics reform. We have constructed a new levee system.

And out of a great catastrophe you’ve got to look for those silver linings.

Otherwise, the cumulative effect of decades of work is for naught and I don’t believe that. I believe that these cities come about because they were meant to be there to a certain degree and therefore it’s our obligation to sustain them for the future but to build them stronger and better so they’re not as vulnerable as they were in the past.

The evidence suggests that you played a leading role in the recovery and one would make the assumption that university presidents usually don’t do that kind of thing, so how and why did you become active in that?

A couple of reasons. I was asked by the mayor to get involved because of my role as president of the university, given our stature and presence in New Orleans. Tulane is the largest private employer in New Orleans Parish and we are the second largest landowner. We have a large footprint, literally and figuratively, in New Orleans. I felt it was part of my obligation as president of the university to get involved.

And I have a different background than most university presidents. I’ve always had one foot in the corporate world and one foot in the academy. I have been the corporate director of many companies and a consultant to CEOs so there is a very practical side of me about getting things done.

It also suggests that you have a philosophy that a university is not an ivory tower; it’s an active, integrated part of the community.

I’m a firm believer in that. I spent many years, before I came to Tulane, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and was also very involved in revitalization efforts in Cleveland over some 30 years, from the mid-1970s all the way to the 90s.

I’ve always believed that one of the roles of a university is that you have a responsibility to your community. We’re very much into civic engagement and getting students and faculty and staff involved in the city in which they live.

And then taking those lessons and applying them to other places around the world. I believe a lot of solutions are local and those solutions can also be made global. I believed in that very strongly when I was in Cleveland and obviously in New Orleans.

In looking at the way you describe New Orleans pre-Katrina, with deficits in education, employment, business and housing, how can the lessons that New Orleans learned after Katrina be applied to other American cities? The first one that comes to mind is Detroit.

There are three or four major lessons. The first one is having very, very clear priorities for your community. In all of our communities we don’t have enough resources to do everything that needs to be done. Therefore we have to be very clear about what are the most important three or four priorities and allocate whatever resources we have to those priorities. I think a lot of American cities have a difficult time doing that. They’re trying to do too much with too little.

There’s nothing like a crisis to focus your attention on fewer, but I think you can also focus on fewer priorities in a non-crisis situation.

Second, you can’t just treat the symptoms of what’s going on in your city. You have to treat the causes. For example, let’s deal with the blight in our city, or let’s deal with crime, or let’s deal with bad health outcomes. Those are what I call symptoms. The real causes tend to be high levels of poverty or a lack of good public education systems.

One of the big takeaways for me, especially from my days in Cleveland, is that you have to spend as much attention on the causes as you do the symptoms. If you only focus on the symptoms, you’ll get results but sooner or later the basic causes will undermine all the successes you’ve had and you’ll get back into a downward spiral.

The third takeaway for me, quite strongly in New Orleans but applicable in other cities, is that the private sector has to be engaged in the change agenda. We can’t rely simply on our public officials to do it. I’m a great believer in citizen involvement and engagement. I believe in collective impact, where organizations working together can make magnificent things happen.

A few weeks ago I did a piece in the Wall Street Journal about how ethics reform in New Orleans is being driven by the public-private sector. I’m a great believer in empowering the private sector to get involved, not just relying on public officials to do it.

Are you asking corporations to do what many people would view as the impossible, that is, to sacrifice profit for long-term communal success?

I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I know that’s the traditional argument, but the fact is that corporations have an obligation to develop shared value, not just for shareholders but for their employees and their communities.

Part of this notion of shared value as a corporation, which is in their self-interest, is to make sure that the communities in which their people work and live are good. Otherwise, the workforce is going to be depleted over time.

Most corporations resonate to that, quite honestly. I saw that in Cleveland, where the turnaround was driven by the corporations which saw it in their self-interest to rebuild Cleveland.

In New Orleans, it was a different situation because we don’t have a lot of large corporations, but we saw mid-size and other corporations get involved.

I believe that most corporations have a wider view of their roles and responsibilities and see an alignment between community-building and the need to satisfy the needs of shareholders as being compatible.

There is a belief that the cultural and business epicenter of America is shifting toward the West, to cities like Denver, Seattle, Portland, Austin, etc., and that the East is a 19th- or early 20th-century anachronism. Do you have any views of whether this is actually happening?

I think these things shift over time. Maybe the East was the center of economic development for the country. And then let’s go all the way to the West Coast, to Silicon Valley and Seattle. All of a sudden they emerge. That begins to inspire other cities to follow the model. Then you have an Austin that comes around or a Raleigh-Durham or a New Orleans that’s doing that. There’s an emerging high-tech industry now in New Orleans that we’re very excited about and we see that growing.

There is a shifting of the winds but the winds don’t always stay in one direction. They crisscross across the country and over a long period of time.

So yes, I do think when you look at the West Coast and the Southwest you’re seeing that happen, but I think those will serve as models for other cities to begin to rethink and reimagine themselves.

It’s people learning from one another and the more cities share learning with one another the better off they are. What we’ll see are efforts to lift all boats, not just one.

Any observations of Colorado based on your presence here?

There’s something called the opportunity index . . . that evaluates every city or state on three dimensions: education, economy and civic health.

In preparation for my talk I was looking at the data for Denver and it’s gotten a C, out of the A-B-C-D grades. It’s clear that Denver is investing in public education but needs to continue to invest. It also appears that in Denver the rate of poverty is higher than you would see in the rest of the state and nationally.

Those are areas that really need to be attended to. Those are some of the causes of violent crime and that’s an issue in Denver.

Having said that, I also looked at what they call the Denver Plan 2020. There are a lot of good ideas for public education. Time will tell whether it works but it seems like you have an enlightened superintendent.

I’m bullish in general on Colorado and bullish that Denver has a lot of potential and they’re focusing on some of the right issues.

On a personal level, your resume has this incredible range — academia, business, community, sports. It sounds like you’re a Renaissance man.

I wouldn’t call myself a Renaissance man. I always think that’s a person who’s literate in literature, poetry and art and those are not my strong suits. I have wide interests. I describe myself as a principled pragmatist. That’s how I read my life.

Others tell me that no matter what the issue is, I never have a unified position to the left or to the right. I always seem to be looking for a practical solution based on the information I have. That’s always what drives me. That comes from the breadth and depth of experience I have in the corporate world and in the academy. I come from hard social sciences. In that regard I think I have a unique skill set.

What is Jewish, or is affected by Jewish thinking, about your work and your world view?

It’s an important part of it. I’m driven a lot by my basic precepts and understanding of Judaism.

My parents had a mixed marriage, Jewish and Catholic. We experienced both. I went the Jewish route; my sister went the Catholic route.

As I got deeper and deeper into Judaism, I found that it helped me an awful lot in my core principles. The one that I’ve always resonated with is tikkun olam, repairing the world. This has been a mantra in my life — helping others who otherwise can’t be helped, paying it forward.

I think it really comes from being dyslexic when I was a kid. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was much older. I really struggled as a youngster, in school and life in general, but there were a few teachers who really helped me and who helped parents understand that there was something wrong with me and gave me the tools to be successful.

There’s always been a part of me that said, you’ve got to give back, you’ve got to do something for someone else, and as I got more into my Jewish identity it just resonated.

One of the things that really influenced me after Katrina was this notion of repairing the world. We do it in small ways all the time but here was a way to do it in a very profound way, to dedicate your life to something for a period of time.

It seems that in tikkun olam and perhaps in Judaism in general there’s a strong current of optimism. Clearly you don’t believe in a dystopian future.

No I do not. But there’s also a strong degree of cynicism and inquiry so I tend to learn solutions by constantly asking questions and trying to understand things, to help guide me through the maze of difficult decision making.

In other words, how can you find the best imperfect solution for a complex situation? I think with healthy cynicism, a balanced view toward life and inquiry you can do it.

Chris Leppek may be reached via denvjewnew@aol.com.

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