- Hurricane Katrina wrought billions of dollars’ worth of damage in Lousiana and Mississippi late last summer. New Orleanian Charles Hadley ‘70G was lucky; his house was relatively unscathed. Still, driving daily by the rubble that was once his beautiful home city prompted him to retire early and relocate to Massachusetts.
In New Orleans, springtime brings magnolia blossoms and rising temperatures. For Charles Hadley ’70G, this past spring brought thoughts about his future. He was planning to leave the city, this time for good.
New Orleans has been Hadley’s home for 36 years. A native of Westfield, Massachusetts, he arrived as a newly minted PhD and went on to build a life in the Big Easy. At the University of New Orleans (UNO), he worked his way up from assistant professor to chairman of the political science department. He joined a church and a Mardi Gras krewe. He raised his son on jazz and crawfish. Home was in a historic melting-pot district, known as the Irish Channel, close to the Mississippi River.
But after Katrina, everything changed. In early April, seven months after the storm, uncertainty and devastation were the new normal. UNO, faced with decreased enrollment and revenue, was talking about layoffs of tenured faculty. Three young talented professors in his department had already decided to quit. “What we did,” Hadley says, “is lose our future.”
What’s more, he says, racial, political, and economic divisions had only grown starker in the months after Katrina. He wondered: Should he stay and watch New Orleans struggle for years to come? Or was he too old to wait? Would the city ever be the same?
Hadley joined the University of New Orleans, which is part of the state’s public university system, in 1970, just after he finished his studies at UMass Amherst. He taught courses on American politics and published a number of books on Southern and Louisiana politics.
And every year without exception, he rode out hurricane season at home. Until Katrina. On Sunday, August 28, 2005, amid warnings that one of the most powerful storms in recorded history was poised to make a direct hit, Hadley boarded up his windows and packed his address book. With a friend, Hubert Vahrenhost, he drove 40 miles north, across Lake Pontchartrain, to Vahrenhost’s second home in Covington, Louisiana. There Hadley watched the wind pick up and the rain arrive. Then the power went out. Before Hadley’s eyes, massive trees snapped in two; one sliced straight through a house nearby.
When it was all over, the woods were practically bare. Landlines and cell phones were dead. With credit card machines out of order, the economy became cash only. “Life,” Hadley recalled later in a Christmas letter to friends, “seemed suspended.” FEMA and the Red Cross quickly provided bottled water, ice, and self-heating meals. And thanks to a generator, Hadley was able to shower, brew coffee, and watch the news. “While considered a refugee by some,” Hadley wrote in the Christmas letter, “I felt like a nomad.”
About a week after Katrina, Hadley and Vahrenhost drove back to New Orleans, armed with a shotgun to ward off looters. Because the city was officially closed, they had to sneak in. When they arrived, Hadley was relieved to see no sign of wind or water damage to his house. He cleaned out the refrigerator and retrieved his car from a nearby garage. To prevent looting, he screwed two sheets of plywood across the front door. Then he began a long drive north.
When he arrived at his brother’s house in Westfield, he began to reconstruct his political-science department long distance. He used the free Internet access at the local pubic library to track down faculty members and teaching assistants and put together online courses for the fall semester.
He also wondered where to go next. A friend and colleague at the University of Maryland offered Hadley a visiting appointment at the Center for American Politics and Citizenship. With so much unpredictability in New Orleans, Hadley decided to accept.
In Maryland, Hadley spent the fall semester conducting a field test of new voting machines. “Being there,” he wrote in his Christmas letter, “with an office and colleagues . . . gave me the feeling of being a faculty member again, something for which I always will remain grateful.”
By Thanksgiving, UNO had laid off its part-time faculty and staff members and was at risk of falling short of its enrollment goal for the spring. One by one, Hadley’s young professors called to say they would quit at the end of the academic year. The last call came around Christmas. “That was,” Hadley says, “the final straw.” He didn’t want to oversee a sinking ship. He decided to make plans to retire.
Still, Hadley moved home shortly after Christmas, in large part out of devotion to a school that was struggling to survive. After Katrina, breaches in the levee system had left half of New Orleans households under more than four feet of water. By the end of January only 181,000 people had returned, according to a city government survey, down from a pre-Katrina population of 470,000. Fortunately, Hadley’s house, which sits on relatively high ground eight feet above sea level, had been spared. To make his house inhabitable, he needed only to remove the plywood, mow the lawn, and turn on the gas and electricity.
In early January, the windows were still broken in Hadley’s office. Looters had targeted the university; among the items stolen was a pocket watch that a student and her parents had given Hadley as a gift.
Before Katrina, the University of New Orleans enrolled 17,000 students, making it the largest university in the city. The student body consisted mostly of commuters. Around 12,000 enrolled for the spring semester. In April the university asked its governing board to declare a state of financial emergency that would allow layoffs of tenured professors for the first time in the school’s history. To Hadley, the news was heartbreaking.
In June, a small group of colleagues gathered in the office of the UNO chancellor to toast Hadley. For many years he’d planned to retire at the end of the 2006-07 academic year, when he’d be 65. Departing a year early wasn’t the sad part; it was knowing the university was in decline. Only five professors remain in the political science department post-Katrina, down from 14. Hadley has always thought of the young faculty as his legacy. His legacy was lost in the storm.
Hadley had imagined enjoying retirement with his friends in New Orleans, but many of them have moved on. He understands why: It’s wearing to drive past the rubble every day, even though he almost doesn’t notice it anymore. Before Katrina, he’d plan his route to work to avoid school zones; now he chooses the few streets with working traffic lights. “I can’t even get an oil change,” he says. “You have to make an appointment and wait a month. That’s not a way to live. I’m just too old to wait for the city to be viable again.”
The future? “That becomes an open book,” Hadley says. He plans to maintain an office this fall to train a new chairperson and says he won’t leave his house until he builds shutters that can be closed and locked in advance of a future hurricane. “It’s kind of like finishing something I started,” he says. After that, he hopes to move to Northampton to be closer to his family. His dream is to work on a house that his son, who is an architect, designs for him.
He opposes those who argue that the city, because of its geography, should simply fade to black. “I’m more of a preservationist,” he says. He’ll miss the food and music the most, but he expects to make regular visits, especially at Mardi Gras. No matter where he ends up, it’s a safe bet that Hadley will never get New Orleans out of his system.
He wouldn’t want it any other way.
