SIVACRACY.NET

By JEFFREY SELINGO

Houston

The president of Tulane University said on Tuesday that he had little choice but to get his campus up and running by the spring if it is to survive as a national research institution, and he urged other colleges that are enrolling Tulane students in the wake of Hurricane Katrina not to encourage them to stay permanently.

Working temporarily out of a hotel suite here with a staff of a few dozen, the Tulane president, Scott S. Cowen, said that his plan, as of now, was to remain closed only for the fall semester. Asked if it was optimistic to think about reopening in the spring, given the current conditions in New Orleans, Mr. Cowen said that the spring semester could be pushed back, if necessary. "It doesn't have to be January 1," he said. But he added that the closure "only could be one semester."

"I don't see how any university can be essentially out of business for one year and hope to recover from it in any shape or form of what they looked like before," he said. "We will be back in the spring. We've got to be ready. If not, we might as well close all the doors and walk away. I mean, How long can New Orleans be closed?"

More than a week after the storm struck, the vastness of the task ahead has seemed not to overwhelm Mr. Cowen. Dressed casually in a yellow Tulane golf shirt, khakis, and in stocking feet, he walked around the hotel suite here on Tuesday, joking with staff members in between a never-ending series of meetings with senior administrators, nearly all of whom have relocated to Houston, 350 miles from New Orleans, with their families.

"What differentiates this tragedy from any other event in the history of the United States is that the city is totally dysfunctional and not providing services," Mr. Cowen said. "On 9/11, New York was still functioning."

"We've never had an incident that I know of in the history of the United States when an entire city was closed down and people were uncertain when it would reopen," he said. "There is no script for this. There is no road map for this. We're writing it as we go along."

Mr. Cowen, who was on Tulane's campus until he was evacuated, on Thursday, said the university's facilities were in good shape. A few buildings were flooded, but for the most part the damage was limited to downed trees and a few broken windows. "If we had sewer service, I could bring in water and power, and we could be running," said Mr. Cowen, who noted that opening the university was important to the state because, with 6,000 employees, Tulane is the third-largest employer in Louisiana.

Mr. Cowen said that Tulane administrators planned to meet today with officials of the Association of American Universities to discuss opening up space on the association's member campuses for Tulane faculty members and researchers.

As staff members worked around him, sitting on the floor answering ringing cellphones and checking their e-mail on laptops through Yahoo accounts, Mr. Cowen said he appreciated all of the offers of help from other higher-education institutions. With a small staff and limited communications, however, he said he was unable to review them all and respond.

But Mr. Cowen said he expected that the colleges accepting Tulane students would abide by the guidelines established by the American Council on Education and other higher-education associations on Friday. Those guidelines urge colleges to admit students only on a provisional basis, so that they remain students of their home institutions. The guidelines also suggest that the colleges not charge the students' tuition if they had already paid their home institutions and, if the students had not, to collect tuition and pass it on to the home institutions.

Tulane plans to keep tuition revenue that it has already received from its students for the fall. "That allows us to have some source of revenue this fall, while we are closed," he said.

Realizing that some Tulane students may end up staying where they are attending classes, particularly freshmen and sophomores, Mr. Cowen said he hoped that other colleges would not actively push the students to transfer.

"I would strongly encourage them not to allow them to transfer to their institution until such point, if it ever came, where it was deemed impossible for them to come back to Tulane," Mr. Cowen said. "They have to give us a chance to get back on our feet."