Университет Тулейн взял на себя реконструкцию закрытого после урагана «Катрина» госпиталя Чарити

With the research and scholarship emanating from its Uptown campus, Tulane University has been a cornerstone of the state’s economy for decades. But with the recent announcement that it is taking over the redevelopment of Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans, which has been closed since Hurricane Katrina, the university has launched one of the most ambitious projects in its 192-year history. Managing Editor Arnessa Garrett sat down recently with Tulane University President Michael Fitts to talk about the project and how he’s envisioning the future. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. GARRETT: We know Tulane has been doing a lot lately, so we wanted to just catch up with you. And the first big thing is the Charity Hospital transformation. Tell us why Tulane wanted to take that on and what it's going to mean. FITTS: Absolutely. This is the biggest initiative of my tenure. But if we do it the way we want to do it and do it right, it could well be the biggest initiative in the last 50 years in New Orleans. The important thing to note is how Tulane got to the point where it could do Charity. The university has had, I think, more momentum than any university in the country over the last decade. And what that has meant is you look at our Uptown campus -- we built 11 buildings. We've really leveraged being in New Orleans, the culture, the academic program, the cross-disciplinary programs, so we've become very attractive at the undergraduate level. Our research funding has doubled over this period, and it's research that makes a difference in terms of clinical outcomes in medicine, engineering. We brought back engineering as a school. We've grown the business school, architecture and the built environment. Now, I think great universities build great cities. And we're now at the point where our research enterprise has really taken off. We're much more of an international research university. We've run out of space on our Uptown campus, and we're looking at downtown where we can continue to grow the research enterprise and build a research community and a startup community that will help build the economic base of New Orleans. Coalition of support GARRETT: It's primarily around health sciences, but are there going to be other innovative industries there? FITTS: It's bioengineering, it's engineering, it's public health. It's all of the above. Over the last decade, we've added 1,200 jobs. But downtown, we're looking to grow in Charity a large research portfolio with 700 researchers. We're looking overall to add over 2,000 more jobs as part of this. It's research, but it's research that integrates medicine and public health, bioengineering, exactly where the world is going. GARRETT: Tell me what you think it's going to mean for downtown New Orleans itself. FITTS: When we actually stepped back and looked at this, it's amazing. We're projecting that once we develop Charity, we'll have more employees downtown than Uptown. We'll have more square footage downtown than Uptown. The NASDAQ Foundation did a study of cities and found that New Orleans was 14th in the country in growth of startups. And they cited Tulane as helping grow that. That's over the last three years. There's one case that I just think beautifully exemplifies this. And it's of a student, Dylan Murray, who came to Tulane, actually transferred from the University of Chicago, and developed this technology where you can tell whether or not a tick has transmitted Lyme disease in real time. She worked with Monica Embers, who's one of the world's great experts on Lyme disease, to effect this. And it's now a technology that can be used for infectious diseases generally, so a really pathbreaking potential technology. She started a company. They got over a couple million in external investment to start it. She graduated several months ago, and this company was originally going to go to Boston, but now it's going to stay in New Orleans because of Tulane’s Innovation Institute. GARRETT: The Charity project is going to have state funding. How's the funding structure going to work? FITTS: This is truly a public-private partnership. You could not develop Charity without that. And what has been extraordinary is the political leadership in the state — and I'm saying in Baton Rouge, in New Orleans — and the federal officials have all recognized what a difference this will make for the economic base of New Orleans. I really have to tip my hat to all of the political leaders because we do live in a time where there are differences among the political leadership over a variety of different issues. GARRETT: What's going on at the Uptown campus, and how are you trying to accommodate the student population that seems to be growing every year? FITTS: The Uptown campus is a gem. The undergraduate experience at Tulane, I think, is second to none. And it draws on the culture of New Orleans. And the best thing about Tulane is it's in New Orleans. I also think it's great for New Orleans that Tulane is here. We have really leveraged the culture. We attract students from all over the world. We retain students here. We built The Village, which is residential learning communities. Before Charity, that was the largest capital investment in the history of the university. And on the Uptown campus, we are running out of space. We can't build in Audubon Park. GARRETT: Enrollment at Tulane is increasingly selective. How do you make sure that you have opportunities for Louisiana residents? FITTS: Great universities are about great research and great students and great opportunities. And we want to attract the best and brightest from everywhere. That led us to launch Louisiana Promise, where every resident of Louisiana whose family makes under $100,000 can come to Tulane with no loan. They'll be supported by scholarships. And the result of launching that program has been extraordinary. Louisiana is now the number one state of admission, along with New York and California. Focusing on impact GARRETT: There has been a lot of pressure on universities to roll back DEI programs, and Tulane faced scrutiny over that. It seems to have calmed down a bit, or do you feel like it's a different environment? FITTS: It's obviously a challenging national political environment. We have to date, I think, navigated it — this community and university — as well as anybody. Part of it is way back when we announced a position of institutional neutrality. The board of Tulane agreed that we didn't want to intervene in political issues unless they impacted us. That isn't to say our students and faculty aren't going to speak out on a thousand issues. The whole point of institutional neutrality is to let them do that. But as an institution, we don't. And I think that has helped us. We obviously are following the Supreme Court opinions and decisions, but we've taken this opportunity to really focus on expanding academic support and social support for everybody at Tulane. And I think we're in as good a place as any university at this point. GARRETT: What about graduate education? The medical school is one of your most important draws. What are the plans for it? FITTS: We've focused since I came here on supporting the medical school and the health footprint. And you can just look at the results. We have a new partner. We moved away from HCA, which was a for-profit medical system, to LCMC, which is a nonprofit, which creates a much more collaborative situation for us. We have a new flagship hospital, East Jeff, which doubled the size of our medical footprint. We've really focused on making Tulane a classic, recognized national academic destination medical center. Louisiana has not had that, and we think it's critical in terms of health outcomes to have that. And you can see the results literally over the last eight months. We're number one in the region in treating heart failure. We had the first sickle cell treatment, the first hemophilia treatment. I could go through the firsts that we've been able to initiate because of this partnership and because we're a classic academic center. Over half the NIH research funding in the state comes to Tulane University. So we are a medical research juggernaut. The other thing I should mention about Charity is we're bringing together the School of Public Health and the School of Medicine. That's the future of health care. The Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health is the oldest school of public health in the United States. It will be right next to the School of Medicine. And it's that sort of outreach to Louisiana that I think will impact health outcomes. Athletics rising GARRETT: And then I guess we can talk about something fun. The athletic program has seen a remarkable resurgence. FITTS: Tulane's athletic program has probably done better given our size and resources than any other program in the country. If you look at football, which everybody does, we've been ranked in the top 25 each of the last four years, won the conference two of those years, made it to the national playoffs. If you look around the country, the only private institutions that can make claims like that are Notre Dame, USC and maybe the University of Miami. So we have been fighting way above our weight class. The challenge for us is the great football schools are large state schools generally, and they're part of very lucrative conferences. The amount of money that you get from media contracts in the SEC is in a different world than what we get. With the transfer portal, you have our players who are great getting, in some cases, multi-millions of dollars to go to other schools. So it has been challenging. We have navigated it as well as anybody. We are hoping for some type of government regulation of the system. GARRETT: How does Tulane compete if it's just the Wild West? FITTS: We've recruited and developed some great players, and I don't begrudge them at all to take advantage of their financial position. We've actually done better than almost any school in keeping our players because they want to get the Tulane degree. GARRETT: Cool football uniforms have helped too. FITTS: We have a cool factor, right? And everybody wants to play us because they want to come to New Orleans. Yulman Stadium was ranked in the top 25 stadiums in the country, even though it's the smallest of that top 25, because it's such an intimate space. GARRETT: Every college president has their list of things that they want to tackle to make their mark. What do you want your presidency to be known for? FITTS: I go back to the statement: Great universities build great cities. New Orleans is a wonderful place. Hospitality is great, but I think our downtown creates the ability for New Orleans to grow in this biomedical space, which could be huge. Looking to the future GARRETT: When you look at a lot of the stuff going around the state now, the big Meta project and the SpaceX project, would you put this downtown campus in that category? FITTS: First of all, our engineering school is very much involved in the space industry. So we will hopefully benefit from what's going on with SpaceX. And we're researching energy, so that's a huge part of it as well. Those projects, I understand the value that they have for the state. But we've grown 1,200 jobs at Tulane over the last decade. We believe the downtown, just in terms of our own jobs, will grow another 2,400, not including the startups. Data centers can be wonderful in a lot of different ways. They don't grow jobs like that. SpaceX will, and others like Hyundai may, but this is really growing jobs. It's also growing a community. I think that will leverage other places. I know (Saints owner) Mrs. (Gayle) Benson is very much looking to expand the area around the Superdome and making large investments. We're building a downtown neighborhood. GARRETT: Tulane relies on philanthropy and community support. How do you go about building that support? FITTS: People give to initiatives that they think will make the world a better place. And a lot of our initiatives — especially in the undergraduate experience, scholarships for students and research into medical breakthroughs — resonate with the alumni and friends of the university. There's a lot written these days about the value of higher education. What you can see for Tulane is that we have tremendous impact on the future of New Orleans and the state. And Charity is a visible demonstration.