On Thursday evening (June 25), the stories came first.
Less than a week before the University of New Orleans officially returns to the LSU System on July 1, alumni, former faculty, staff and friends gathered inside the Earl K. Long Library's Midlo Center for something that felt unmistakably New Orleans: a repast.
To be clear, the university — once part of the LSU system — isn’t dying. But the mood in the room that evening was, like any New Orleans repast, indicative of the passing of time and changes that come naturally in life.
There was food. There was laughter. There were stories told for the hundredth time and memories shared with people hearing them for the first time. They also vented about their hurt and displeasure with the coming change.
If the UNO many of them knew, was nearing the end of one chapter, they seemed determined that its history would not quietly disappear with it.
The gathering was part of the ongoing UNO Memory Project, a series led by doctoral student Amanda Mester-Brown, who has spent months collecting oral histories from the people who built, studied at and loved the university.
Mester-Brown, a justice studies researcher, came to the project through a contradiction she couldn't shake: the university describes itself on its own website as the first integrated public university in the South, yet, she said, "the cafeteria remained segregated for years after the school opened."
That gap between official narrative and lived experience became the seed of everything that followed.
"Things are not necessarily nefarious," she told WWNO's Bob Pavlovich. "But there's still a production of memory process that's happening that I find to be really interesting."
At the event, participants worked through memory prompts in a workbook, reflecting on everything from their first days on campus to what they hope survives after the transition.
Graduates from the 1970s traded stories with alumni from the early 2000s. An English major sat beside an accountant. A scientist, artist, and journalist sat alongside Black and white attendees, parents, children, siblings and cousins, discovering that, despite decades separating them, many had experienced the same campus in remarkably similar ways.
The conversation drifted effortlessly across generations.
One table remembered the old computer punch cards that students once carried from class to class. Another laughed about the infamous 1975 issue of “Driftwood," the student-run newspaper, featuring a streaker on its cover. Someone recalled nights at internationally known music group Maze’s concerts, when nitrous oxide floated through the crowd. Others reminisced about Luigi's Pizza on Elysian Fields, long walks across campus, course catalogs, student bulletins and the peculiar quiet that settled over UNO after Hurricane Katrina, leaving parts of campus feeling almost haunted.
Nearly every story seemed to begin with one memory before leading to another: a former university president grilling hamburgers for students during one of the institution's many financial crises, or Dr. Harwood, a beloved professor, quietly loaning students money when they needed help, his ashes eventually scattered beneath a mimosa tree near the Liberal Arts Building.
For many, these weren't simply nostalgic anecdotes. They were evidence of a university culture built on improvisation and resilience.
Pierre Champagne, '76, described UNO as a university "born in resistance," and one that had always existed in resistance. That sentiment echoed throughout the evening and throughout Mester-Brown's 31 oral history interviews with alumni, former staff, administrators and faculty stretching back to the university's founding generation.
"A lot of those people who were there in those formative years talk about how it was the level of access and practicality of the institution that changed their lives," Mester-Brown said.
This metropolitan region, despite being a cultural epicenter for the whole state, didn't have an urban public university before 1958.
"Everyone I've spoken to wants the university to survive," she said. "Some folks see this transition as a great idea because we are an institution in duress, and we need support of some kind." But others, she said, "are literally moved to tears in their interviews because they're so afraid of losing — getting sucked up into purple and gold to such an extent that people are gonna forget about how hard UNO fought for its own identity."
'It was an easy place to be'
Among the voices the project has recorded is Jolie Monteverde, formerly Sloane, who arrived at UNO in the summer of 1972, just two weeks after graduating high school, and earned her bachelor's degree in elementary education in December 1975. She later returned for a graduate degree in special education and went on to teach deaf children.
When asked how she felt about UNO's name change and return to the LSU system, Monteverde didn't hesitate: "I am extremely disappointed that it has come to this."
She described a university that had always lived in the shadow of New Orleans' older, more prestigious institutions. “They certainly deserve their due," she said, "but so does UNO" — pointing to the research awards the university won and the long list of alumni who went on to shape the city in business and politics.
Her fondest memories were small ones: an 8 a.m. science class that left her with hours to kill on a rare snow day, watching students build little snowmen across campus while she sheltered from the wind in the Cove, the on-campus dining facility; standing outside the Liberal Arts Building, back when the campus was mostly open space, watching a wall of torrential rain roll toward her.
"I had never seen anything like that before, weather-wise," she said.
What stayed with her most, though, was how accessible the help was for anyone willing to ask for it. Junior-division counselors, tutors, advisers — "as long as you were willing to seek it out, you could get help.”
"It was an easy place to be," she said. "A comfortable place to be."
A culture defined by doing more with less
The university's identity, attendees argued, was never defined by wealth — it was defined by doing more with less.
Tulane University may have national prestige, they said, but UNO has produced generations of civic leaders, educators, scientists, artists and public servants while cultivating a uniquely accessible academic community.
Mester-Brown has heard complicated feelings, too, particularly about what it means to be absorbed into purple and gold.
As the evening progressed, the room became less an oral history workshop than an act of preservation. People passed photographs across tables. They compared decades-old traditions. They filled in one another's forgotten details.
There were stories of MFA Prom, the graduate lounge's legendary annual celebration; of professors who changed lives; of walking everywhere because everyone walked; of a campus that often felt misunderstood by outsiders but fiercely beloved by those who called it home.
They weren't only remembering buildings or classrooms. They were remembering a way of being.
Mester-Brown, for her part, has found herself surprised by what keeps surfacing — not the milestones that appear in institutional histories, but the textures. The parking circles. The packed University Center. Luigi's Pizza, which she said has become "this kind of spiritual character in this story," represents to so many the feeling of being away at college, of socializing with professors over pizza and beer.
"The things about an institution that so many people remember," she said, "are not things that are mentioned in the official story of the university."
That gap is what she's after.
"Who gets to write that story?" she asked. "It's a public institution. Should the public define what it is based on how they've experienced it?"
On July 1, the University of New Orleans will return to the LSU System from which it originates, under a new name: LSU New Orleans. But this late June gathering proved that institutions survive not only through charters and governing boards, but through the people who continue telling their stories.
For UNO, there will be no white carnations. There will be no bleeding-heart floral arrangement. Instead, the community is sending UNO "home" the way New Orleans sends anyone home: with love, with laughter and with a determination to keep the memory alive.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
