TULANE TALK

January 8, 2010

Good Morning:

I hope you had a joyous and restful holiday and that you and your families will enjoy a prosperous and fulfilling 2010. Our law school and graduate social work students, who began classes this week, will be joined by their fellow students on Monday and our campuses will once again come to life with the hope and promise of a new semester.

In fact, the excitement has already begun, as we recently learned that Anderson Cooper, the Emmy-award winning anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, will serve as the keynote speaker for Commencement 2010. You can learn more about this by visiting the http website. Anderson Cooper is a favorite of New Orleanians and many Tulanians. A well-respected journalist, who has covered nearly all major world events including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Anderson has always seemed to have a special affinity for New Orleans. He spent more than a month covering Katrina and returned more than 20 times to follow our reconstruction. He also wrote movingly about this experience in his book Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival.

His address will no doubt be one of the highlights of this semester. But Commencement is still a long way off. By then we will have had a whole semester’s worth of challenges, triumphs and memories. I look forward to sharing them all with you.

Have a great weekend,