Homecoming 2009
Check out the video
Tulane University celebrated its 175th anniversary at homecoming, with classmates and friends reconnecting as they attended some of the 75-or-so events during the week of festivities. At the Annual Town Hall meeting on Friday (Oct. 9) in Dixon Hall Auditorium, President Scott Cowen touted Tulane as “the model university for the 21st century” and “a university with unlimited potential.”
Rain didn’t dampen the spirits of the estimated 600 attendees at the All-Alumni Reunion Party in the Lavin-Bernick Center on Friday evening as the university extended special congratulations to alumni in the classes ending in “4” and “9” and to the golden-year graduates of the class of 1959.
Dr. Gary Morchower, a member of the golden-year class who also received his medical degree from Tulane, thrilled Cowen by presenting the president with a check for $2,513,288 raised by the reunion classes.
A special part of the celebration was the Hullabaloo Homecoming on Friday, a party and auction of more than 240 items that should raise more than $200,000 to benefit Tulane student-athletes.
The hottest bidding was for a dinner prepared by chef Tory McPhail of Commander’s Palace and shared with James Carville and Mary Matalin at the Cowens’ home, No. 2 Audubon St., which topped off at a bid of $35,000.
The Board of Tulane gave the top bid of $45,000 to honor Cowen and thank him for his work on behalf of Tulane and New Orleans in the four years after Hurricane Katrina. A book by best-selling author James Patterson will be dedicated to him and one of the book’s characters will be named for him. Half of the $45,000 bid is designated for student-athletes and the other half goes to the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives. Bidding for two dozen more items continues until Oct. 21 online.
Festivities continued on Saturday (Oct. 10) as Green Wave fans tailgated outside the Louisiana Superdome before cheering Tulane on the field in the contest against Marshall University.
