When Alex Tellers heard about hurricane preparedness during his freshman orientation last week at Loyola University of New Orleans, the 18-year-old from Pasadena didn't pay much attention.
"I was aware there was a tropical storm in Florida, but I guess I was too excited about my first year in college, Tellers said. A disaster "was completely off my radar."
It's on his radar now, of course -- along with the rest of the nation's.
Safely home in Pasadena, Tellers fears that the Jesuit university and its home city will need years to recover from Hurricane Katrina and the floods that followed.
For Tellers, as for thousands of others in colleges and universities in New Orleans, their campuses are now associated with tragedy as well as learning.
Almost all the students escaped serious injury, but many are left wondering whether recovery is possible at their flooded colleges, how much it will cost and how long it will take.
"Most of the campuses are under water, and the students, faculty and staff are scattered all over Louisiana or wherever," said Edward R. Jackson, president of the Southern University system, in Baton Rouge.
Southern University at New Orleans is the second-largest of the five schools in the system, the only primarily African American university system to have multiple campuses, according to administrators.
The 3,500 students in New Orleans were in the middle of registration when Katrina struck. Most are commuter students, and the 22-acre campus is on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
"There's upwards of 15 feet of water in that area," Jackson said.
He said the university was doing whatever it could to ease the burden of those affected by the storm and its aftermath. About 500 storm refugees were given shelter in the fieldhouse on the Baton Rouge campus.
And the school opened its dormitories in Baton Rouge to several dozen families, all relatives of students, who fled New Orleans.
"Our first mission is to help the people," Jackson said. "We've relaxed our rules."
By Wednesday night, the school hoped to have a hotline in place for worried parents and others.
Students from New Orleans will be able to transfer to Baton Rouge or Shreveport.
Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs with the American Council on Education, an umbrella organization representing the nation's colleges and universities, said no assessment was available yet of Katrina's damage to Gulf Coast schools.
