(Photo courtesy of Phyllis M. Taylor Center. This photo was taken before social distancing measures.)
After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, New Orleans experienced unprecedented devastation, and Tulane University was forced to close for a semester. In the months and years following this “human-induced disaster”—as it is called in New Orleans, due to the failure of the federal levees—we committed to reopening only by re-connecting the institution to the City of New Orleans and making social and environmental values paramount. Of course, Tulane has been engaged with the community since being founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana, with a focus on Yellow Fever and other tropical diseases. But in the years since Katrina, we’ve embedded social innovation and community engagement at the very core of our work. And as a significant anchor institution in this mid-sized city, and as the largest private employer, investments to accelerate the positive social impact produced by students and faculty have already made demonstrable effects.
Given the world-wide shock to our systems—including higher education—represented by COVID-19, Tulane’s example of a pivot, rather than a simple return to the pre-crisis status quo, presents a useful example for other institutions. After the shock of the moment, a culture of collaboration and social responsibility has emerged at Tulane: For example, along with broadly shifting teaching and research toward the imperative to rebuild—physically, socially, financially, and institutionally—we have embedded a tangible commitment to engage the community by requiring two semesters of service-learning for every student in every discipline and major at Tulane. Across the board, faculty, students, deans and other university leaders have contributed to diverse approaches that connect traditional academic ambitions with a deep sense of responsibility toward social and environmental justice.
Over the past 15 years, Tulane University has received national and international attention for its pivot in this way, but, more importantly, it has enhanced Tulane’s direct value to New Orleans and the surrounding region. Most importantly of all, we’ve learned that education combining rigorous academic training with meaning and social impact resonates with many students, and we’ve seen significant improvement in all the traditional metrics of educational quality: application numbers, selectivity, rankings, retention and graduation rates, diversity among the student population, and the enhanced career paths of students who have engaged with a new model of connected college education. Undergraduate applications have risen from around 20,000 each year—before 2005—to nearly 45,000 for 1,800 freshman positions, and international students and students of color have each more than doubled.
How can a nearly two-century-old university pivot toward impact?
1. Leadership Support and Discretionary Seed Funding
The importance of presidential interest, advocacy, and commitment cannot be overstated, and Presidents Scott Cowen and Mike Fitts set an ambitious course at the start with investments of time, money, and moral suasion. The service-learning component, for example, required significant university funds to support the Center for Public Service as the placement entity for students and faculty in their community-based teaching. Seed funding launched a Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching as a resource that has enriched teaching, providing individual faculty with grants that support training in service-learning and innovative cross-disciplinary teaching.
President Fitts and the new provost have been equally committed to the success of this initiative over the past five years. One of the key pillars of President Fitts’ agenda involves “Crossing Boundaries” as a strategy of breaking down the proverbial silos in the academy to produce new and expanded impacts in research and teaching, a role the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking clearly fits into.
2. Fixed-Term, Rotating Endowed Professorships
Incentives have been a key lever in encouraging faculty to connect their teaching and research with an outward focus on the community, so the president initially secured five individual endowments to fund “Social Entrepreneurship Professors.” After a call for nominations, the first group of named professors, combined with funding, have demonstrated to other faculty the impact that they could make in the community. Over time, the number of professorships grew to 10, and virtually all of the schools at Tulane have had faculty holding these positions. Each is assigned a five-year term with the rotation allowing for an increasing number of faculty over time who are operating with the Taylor Center in a cross-disciplinary mode focusing on social change. A growing number of faculty members have been exposed to the value and impact associated with the Social Entrepreneurship professorships.
3. Innovations in Co-Curricular Programming
Co-curricular programming involving social innovation emerged with extensive support and inspiration from the Ashoka U Changemaker campus initiative. Tulane was recognized in 2009 as one of the first Ashoka U Changemaker Campuses, bringing new opportunities for Tulane to fund students and innovate, including named awards for pitch competitions funded by individual donor endowment gifts, financial support for student proposals involving social innovation organizations or conferences, and investments in a Changemaker Institute student project incubator where small student groups develop their ideas for ways to tackle specific social or environmental challenges. The inspiration and mentorship provided by the Ashoka U team has been tremendously influential in the way that Tulane strategically charted its unique course over the subsequent years, and Tulane University’s “Change Leaders” have become mentors and advisors to other universities in an early stage of development around equity and positive social impact.
4. Building Design Thinking
In 2012, early in the process of building out our portfolio of social innovation opportunities at Tulane, the School of Architecture launched a university-wide minor in Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship, with “Design Thinking for Collective Impact” as one of the five required courses. The minor quickly became popular with students from all five of the undergraduate schools, who learn design thinking in combination with their major to enhance their understanding of ways to achieve positive social change. Design thinking has been effective in bringing diverse voices and perspectives together in a collaborative and empathetic environment, and has proven to be an essential tool in promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration at Tulane.
The Taylor Center provides extensive design thinking services, without charge, to both academic and administrative units at the university, and there have been additional long-standing collaborations with Xavier University of Louisiana and many community organizations. The mindset tied to design thinking has been fundamental to the conception of the Phyllis Taylor Center from its founding even before Mrs. Taylor’s gift.
In the fall of 2019, the center opened “Taylor Warehouse” as a satellite space located in a renovated 100-year-old structure within the New Orleans Warehouse District, the locus of much of the city’s entrepreneurial and arts community. This nearly 2,000-square-foot multi-use workspace is positioned in close proximity to Tulane’s three downtown schools: Medicine, Public Health, and Social Work. Two other units are nearby as well—a downtown location of the Freeman School of Business and the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, the community outreach arm of the Tulane School of Architecture, in Central City. We took on this added set of costs out of our core funds as a speculative venture that should attract additional donors as well as funding through fee for service arrangements with commercial and nonprofit clients.
5. Finances
While Tulane has sufficient funds to support its core mission, establishing social innovation as a priority had to involve strategies to piece together the necessary funds. The early seed funding has led to a variety of support streams, with the early theory that launching some highly visible and impactful programs could attract individual and foundation support. This kind of hybrid funding is typical of many other cross-disciplinary centers throughout the United States.
The strategy of building capacity involved initial investments from discretionary funds out of the President’s Office and strong advocacy of the social innovation initiative from President Cowen. He and a special assistant for social innovation initiatives were instrumental in identifying a series of individual and foundation donors who launched each stage of the development over the past 15 years. The post-Katrina environment brought added attention to the serious inequities in New Orleans. Individuals and foundations responded to the urgency of the situation as well as the potential for Tulane to make a major impact in the city. One of the early examples of major philanthropic support came from a seven-figure endowment gift to establish the Michael Sacks Chair in Civic Engagement and Social Entrepreneurship. This appointment is held by the Phyllis Taylor Center director, and the proceeds support the director and the center as a whole.
Phyllis Taylor’s gift of $15 million in 2014 (paid over five years) established the financial foundation of this university-wide enterprise. As a member of Tulane’s board of trustees, she identified the potential of advancing cross-disciplinary work focusing on social change. She recognized that there were pockets of strength across all 10 schools at Tulane University, yet they were largely disconnected. The center was launched with Kenneth Schwartz as the founding director while he also served as dean of the Tulane School of Architecture. He and others worked to build on Mrs. Taylor’s initial vision for the center.
This gift has inspired other donors to contribute to the mission of advancing positive social change, including alumni and parents of Tulane students, entrepreneurs, and foundations. At this point the Phyllis Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking has its own operating funds with less than 10 percent coming from the central administration at this point. The university provides space for the center on campus, and extensive administrative support through its Human Resources Office, Office of General Counsel and the Development Office. The latter also works with the center in the continual process of identifying new partners who can support the impactful work of students and faculty who operate in concert with the Taylor Center.
The Water Is Rising Everywhere
Hurricane Katrina was unique: Along with nearly 2,000 people losing their lives in the Gulf South—and well over half of those losses in New Orleans alone—there was also major property damage across the city, with Tulane itself sustaining extensive damages.
However, the culture of collaboration and social responsibility that has emerged, and the imperative to re-think as we rebuild, is an attitude many colleges and universities could benefit from, especially now. Environmental threats from global climate change and social crises tied to economic disparity—and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic—are already leading many institutions to focus teaching and research energy on directly responding to these challenges. While institutions of higher education in the US vary widely based on many factors including college or university type, cultural and traditional forces, local and regional setting, size, financial situation, faculty and student profile and more, Tulane’s response to its challenge from 15 years ago, and the way the institution has evolved during this period, serves as a useful illustration.
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