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A nice piece from Lawrence Biemiller at The Chronicle. He points out that all the campus damage donw by Katrina added up to just over $1B, but the damage to the University of Iowa from flooding was estimated at $734M - but we don't hear nearly as much about U Iowa. He finds that the disaster has given the university an opportunity to rethink its overall campus plan:

There's a silver lining, though: The flood has given the university the chance to rethink some poor decisions made decades ago. The School of Music, which was relocated from the riverbank to temporary quarters in a down-on-its-luck downtown mall, liked the location so much that it will move to a new facility bridging a major downtown street. City and university officials hope that will make the downtown livelier and attract new audiences for music-school performances. Part of the School of Art will move into a new building designed to encourage collaboration among artists in different media, who say that sharing temporary digs in a former big-box store has been unexpectedly energizing. As it has in New Orleans, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will eventually pick up much of the tab for repairs here, covering 90 percent of costs that are judged as eligible for reimbursement. Related Content Slide Show: U. of Iowa Buildings Affected by the 2008 Flood Enlarge ImageLiz Martin for The ChronicleTwo years after floods destroyed arts and music buildings at the U. of Iowa, a university band rehearses in an Iowa City church hall. Enlarge ImageLiz Martin for The ChroniclePresident Sally K. Mason walks near the U. of Iowa's 2006 Art Building West, which FEMA designated as architecturally significant, allowing money for its restoration. Enlarge ImageLiz Martin for The ChronicleCharles Swanson is executive director of Hancher Auditorium, a performing-arts center that was ruined by the floods. The replacement building will seek platinum-level LEED certification.

"There are great opportunities that have come from the disaster," President Mason says. "You grow from these things." She was told when she was hired, she says, not to expect to do a lot of building. Instead, she'll oversee high-profile construction projects—a music school, an arts building, a major auditorium, and possibly a museum—with architects who have international reputations.

While nearly every university overbooks each year, relying on sophisticated algorithms that predict just how many admitted students will probably go elsewhere, Iowa officials were stunned to learn this spring how far off they were in their math. This fall’s freshman class is likely to have more than 400 more students than last year’s, an unintended increase of about 10 percent, for a total of just over 4,500.

Though the university considers this a happy accident — much of the growth has come from outside Iowa, including from schools as far away as China and India, whose graduates typically pay triple the tuition of state residents — the looming flood of new students has left the university scrambling to figure out where they will sleep, and how to fit them into some of the most popular courses.