Tulane University: General Information
2008-2009 Academic Year
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in 1866. In the early l880s, Paul Tulane provided a permanent solution by
donating more than $1 million "for the promotion and encouragement of
intellectual, moral, and industrial education." Tulane had made his fortune in New
Orleans before returning to his native Princeton, New Jersey; his gift expressed
his appreciation to the city.
The 17-member board authorized to administer the Tulane Educational Fund
decided to revitalize the struggling University of Louisiana instead of founding a
new institution. Paul Tulane concurred, and in 1884, the Louisiana legislature
gave the University of Louisiana to the administrators of the Tulane Educational
Fund. Tulane University of Louisiana, a private, non-sectarian institution, was
born.
As a result of its new strength, the University was able to create the Department
of Philosophy and Science, which later became the Graduate School, and initiate
courses in architecture and engineering. In 1886, Josephine Louise Newcomb
founded Newcomb College as a memorial to her daughter, Harriott Sophie.
Newcomb was the first degree-granting women's college in the nation to be
established as a coordinate division of a men's university. It became the model for
other coordinate women's colleges, including Barnard and Radcliffe
Newcomb's founding is linked with the World's Industrial and Cotton Exposition
which opened in Audubon Park in 1884. Several artisans who came to the New
Orleans Exposition to exhibit their own work and see the works of others stayed
to establish the arts program, which was at the heart of Newcomb's early
curriculum. By the early 1900s, Newcomb pottery had won a bronze medal at the
Paris Exposition, its fame had spread across the nation, and young women were
engaged in the unusual task of earning an independent living.
In 1894, Tulane moved to its present campus on St. Charles Avenue, five miles by
streetcar from its former site in downtown New Orleans. At about the same time,
the Richardson Memorial Building was built on Canal Street to house the medical
school. Some medical classes were moved to the uptown campus, but clinical
teaching remained downtown. The medical school was split between campuses
until a major reorganization in the 1960s.
For a quarter of a century, Newcomb College had been on Washington Avenue in
the Garden District. In 1918 it, too, moved uptown to join other divisions of the
university.
Around the turn of the century, Tulane's curriculum grew as several new
professional schools were established, including the Deep South's first schools of
architecture, business, and social work. City officials frequently consulted the
College of Technology, which became the School of Engineering, on construction
techniques and soil conditions. Engineering alumnus A. Baldwin Wood designed
the famous Wood screw pump that helps drain New Orleans in times of torrential
rains and flooding. The first student yearbook, Jambalaya, and the first Tulanian,