Former presidents send off post-Katrina Tulane grads

NEW ORLEANS – In a ceremony filled with jazz music and images of Hurricane Katrina, former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton urged graduating students at Tulane University to remember the anguish of the last year and make time to serve others.

The joint commencement addresses were delivered during an often-emotional event where students wore Mardi Gras beads and waved handkerchiefs imprinted with the words “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?”

“Floodwaters couldn’t break the spirit of the people who call this remarkable, improbable city home,” Bush said.

He urged students to “get off the sidelines” and “find a way to be of service to others.” Bush said that one of his most rewarding projects was a 1952 push to get a Midland, Texas, YMCA off the ground. “We didn’t change the world, just a tiny, small corner of it,” Bush said.

Clinton asked students to fight acts of terror and the “dramatic change in climate which has given us a decade of Katrinas and tsunamis.”

He likened life to a jazz funeral, where slow, mournful music is followed by a joyful celebration. “Life is always about new beginnings. I wish you new beginnings,” he said.

The former presidents, who teamed to raise money for victims of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, received honorary Doctorate of Laws degrees from the university. More than $100 million has been contributed to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, $30 million of which has been earmarked for 33 higher educational institutions.

Saturday’s ceremony was Tulane’s first university-wide graduation since last August’s storm flooded the school and forced it to close for the fall semester. Students scattered to 593 universities around the country, but 93 percent of full-time students returned for the spring semester, school officials said.

In what Tulane University president Scott S. Cowen called a Louisiana lagniappe – a little something extra – New Orleans native Ellen DeGeneres made a surprise appearance to congratulate the nearly 2,200 graduates. Wearing a white bathrobe – “I was told everybody would be wearing robes” – the comedian commended the students for getting through the last year.

“You’re amazing people, you’re a very famous graduating class to go through what you’ve gone through,” she said. DeGeneres told the graduates that she never went to college. “This is the closest I’ll come to graduating,” she said.

A personal visit to New Orleans coincided with Tulane’s commencement, but beyond that “whenever I get a chance to speak after presidents, I say ‘get me in there,’ ” she said.