US News: Xavier's President One of America's Best Leaders
Source: US News & World Report
US News has a profile of their choice of a couple of dozen of "America's Best Leaders" which is an eclectic group including everyone from Senator Orrin Hatch to choreographer Twyla Tharp. Xavier President Norman Francis also made the cut:
As New Orleans's governmental services collapsed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Norman Francis, president of Xavier University of Louisiana—the "Black Notre Dame of the South"—organized an armada of boats and a convoy of buses to evacuate students and staffers stranded at the flooded campus.
Even more remarkable: Within weeks, Francis ordered up his own storm—of repairs, fundraising, and morale-boosting for the 4,000-student campus. By January 2006, the nation's most successful training ground for African-American physicians, scientists, and pharmacists was back.
In 2007, Xavier graduated 165 African-American math and science majors. Ohio State, high and dry with more than 50,000 students, graduated 27; MIT, 12. But Xavier is no degree mill. It places a disproportionate number of its grads into medical and dental schools. Among the alumni: Alexis Herman, secretary of labor under President Clinton, and Regina Benjamin, winner of a "MacArthur genius grant," President Obama's nominee to be surgeon general, and an America's Best Leaders pick in 2008.
Reopening so quickly "was quite a feat. It was dangerous just trying to get back into New Orleans through October [2005]," recalls Leonard Weather, a Louisiana physician, former Xavier lecturer, and president-elect of the National Medical Association, a group of African-American doctors. Francis "has done an incredible job," Weather says.
The profile makes it clear that not everything is perfect and the school, like the city, continues to struggle but it's awfully nice to see someone who has poured his heart and soul into a college be recognized.
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