TULANE TALK

September 7, 2007

Good Morning:

Maintaining and often exceeding our funding goals is one of the many remarkable accomplishments Tulane University has been able to realize in the two years following Hurricane Katrina.

If this week is any indication, it appears that this trend will continue. Yesterday, the Louisiana Commissioner of Higher Education presented Tulane with more than $1.6 million in matching funds for two endowed chairs and 11 endowed professorships. The money is part of $15.9 million in matching funds the Board of Regents is distributing to public and private colleges and universities across the state. These gifts are essential to our efforts to recruit and retain outstanding faculty.

We also learned this week that the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine will receive $14 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to continue its efforts to fight HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia, Haiti, Brazil, South Africa, Zambia, Angola, Zanzibar and Rwanda. This grant is another sign of our continuing research strength in areas of strategic importance.

There is also a lot of excitement this week over the beginning of the Bob Toledo era and the kickoff of our new football season against Mississippi State this Saturday evening in the Superdome. Besides being eager for the start of a new chapter in Green Wave football, I am most heartened by the latest Academic Performance Rates released by the NCAA, which show that Tulane student-athletes are performing well above their peers in the classroom. Now that’s really being a champion!

Green Wave football will be broadcast on television five times this year. We thought this would serve as the perfect opportunity to showcase, in a fun, lighthearted way, all the great things happening at Tulane. So we picked local freshman Sam Barton to make a commercial which you can view at the link below. I hope you enjoy this spot, which will run during all our televised games this season http://tinyurl.com/28q2v9

Have a great weekend and Roll Wave,