The class of honorees chosen by PRNews last month represent women trailblazers in the field who think outside the box and who demonstrated significant passion for their work.

Bob Howe, assistant vice president for communications and special adviser to the president who has worked with Vergel since she started at Fordham in 2007, said the honor was extremely well deserved.

“She’s just stellar,” he said. “She sets the kind of tone that I like for collegiality and for inclusiveness in the department. And I trust her implicitly. Any boss would be lucky to have somebody like Gina as their right hand.”

Vergel oversees a shop of eight people, including the Fordham News team and the University’s social media director. She started at Fordham as a staff writer; around 2010, she began her work in media relations, pitching Fordham’s stories and faculty expertise to local and national outlets.

Under her direction, the University averages more than 10,000 global media mentions per quarter, with faculty appearing in national and local publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and CNN.com, and on television and radio stations including NY1, MSNBC, and WNYC.

Vergel credits her time as a staff writer with helping her develop relationships with professors whom she would later pitch to the media.

“That is the best way to get to know faculty, administrators, and even some students,” she said, noting that she’s grateful she covered so many topics and departments as a News staffer. “One day, you could be interviewing a mathematics professor, the next day, a biology professor. That’s how you build connections.”

Many of the faculty members are just as grateful to her—both for the media placements and her guidance.

“I think she’s fabulous. First of all, she’s an incredible powerhouse with making connections,” said Paul Levinson, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies. “I really consider myself lucky that Fordham has someone with Gina’s level of commitment and professionalism, because it’s helped me a lot.”

Mark Conrad, an associate professor of law and ethics, said that Vergel’s success with media placements has improved Fordham’s profile.

“She added a degree of urgency, pizzazz, and I think, a really good working strategy with faculty who want to get to be noticed in the media,” he said. “[Fordham is] in the same city as Columbia and NYU, and chances are most media tended to go to them, because of the name recognition.” But thanks to Vergel’s know-how and connections, he said, reporters regularly seek out Fordham experts.

Vergel attributes her success, in part, to finding the right angles and the right reporters.

“With the media landscape, reporters are so overworked right now, having to be on 24/7,” she said. “So trying to get their attention can be difficult, and so I try to be very mindful of that, because I was a reporter. So I’m not sending blanket pitches to just a huge list.”

Before Fordham, Vergel was an award-winning reporter for Home News Tribune and Ridgewood News in New Jersey, her home state, where she also reported for radio stations WRNJ and WGHT. She earned a B.A. from William Patterson University and a master’s in organizational leadership from Fordham’s Graduate School of Education.

Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, said that Vergel brings both an easygoing attitude and a professional skillset to the job.

“She’s fun. I’ve got 1,000 different things going on, and so to work with someone who has an easygoing temperament is great but also, she knows her job really well,” said Greer, who regularly appears on stations such as MSNBC and WNYC. “All of our interactions have just been clear communication, positive energy, high energy.”

Greer said that Vergel’s work not only benefits the University community, it also brings academic expertise to people who might not have gone to college.

“It’s great for alumni because they like to see their university represented in national and international outlets,” Greer said. “It’s great for recruiting because I get lots of people on Twitter who say, ‘I can’t wait to apply to Fordham because if I can get you as a professor, this is awesome.’ And also, not everyone is fortunate enough to go to college …. So whenever I do outward facing stuff, I view it as regular people getting to spend five or 10 minutes with a professor.”

While Vergel still does a lot of pitching in her current role, she’s also very involved with communications strategy decisions.

“For a lot of the news, even a lot of marketing-type decisions, I’m brought in to consult on different strategies that we’ll take, how we put word out there via social media,” she said. “You have your hands in everything that has to do with telling Fordham’s story.”

Howe said Vergel’s a natural storyteller who is gifted in finding stories that appeal to different populations. She’s also been essential, he said, to the University’s efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“She has been good at helping me and [the Department of Alumni and University Relations], in thinking through how we approach issues of race, especially from a Latina perspective,” he said.

Vergel said she’s incredibly grateful for the recognition from PRNews as she’s used to being “behind the scenes.” And as the daughter of immigrants, she’s especially proud of what she’s achieved.

“I feel it was in my parents’ wildest dreams. When they came to this country from Colombia in 1970, they had to do menial labor. My father was a custodian and my mother worked in a factory. They wanted to have their children here for us to have opportunities. They’ve just been incredibly proud of us,” she said.

But on a Tuesday afternoon in April, Parker’s lab students used their own bodies–and voices–to bring their anatomy lesson to life.

“Those are your judges. Everyone, ready? Who is going to go first?” Parker asks.

“This is so awkward,” says Nicole Margiotta, FCRH ‘21 biology and theology major, as she stands at the front of the room.

Then the beat drops. Her classmates, many of them biology majors, start bobbing their heads to Margiotta’s original lines from her number Bones on my Brain.

Yo, Let me rattle your incus, your malleus, and your stapes

As we learn all the bones God gave to you and to me.

I’ll spit this knowledge straight from my cranium into yours,

So hang tight like a hyoid for this anatomy tour…

The live music competition put on by the students was part of an assignment Parker gave to engage them deeper in the material.

“I incorporate music in the classroom because, while I was learning, I felt something was missing. There is a disconnect in the way students receive information in academic settings,” said Parker.

Many of his students had never done anything like this in a classroom before.

“Never before have I had a music component for a college course, let alone a science class, so it was unique and refreshing.”said Nataliya Makhdumi, FCRH ’19, psychology major.

In the one hour of performances, the students found new horizons for themselves. Senior Noelle Chaney, rapped about her metatarsal to “Epic Trap Beat Dope Hard Hip Hop Rap Instrumental,” while sophomore neuroscience major Tess Durham, went for a full-on dance performance to a Kodak Black instrumental.

Junior Emily Haraden, a biology major, said that the competition was nerve wracking but worthwhile. “Making a song that made sense made us actually focus on something and figure out what systems and parts connect.”

Parker has been working with Christopher Emdin, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Teachers College on ways to make STEM courses more interactive and student centered. The focus for these courses has been on middle to high schoolers, but Parker felt college students could also benefit from a more interactive approach.

His students agree.

“It’s cool because it’s not structured like a normal lab would be,” said Aiden O’Keefe, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill. “You have a lot more freedom with what you’re doing so you can go at your own pace.”

Music helps students learn to express themselves to others, Parker said. Because of technology, students have access to a lot of content, but lose key social skills that are essential for networking.  

And, he said, the competition component is key. It requires the student to direct their words towards someone else. This help with composure and confidence.

“It also helps them direct their love, joy, or pain to someone else in an effort to be heard and understood,” said Parker. “Sometimes people don’t have anyone to listen to them, and my goal is to let them know we hear you, and so do your classmates.” 

Parker said he hopes these activities encourage students to think, as opposed to just regurgitating information. “My students are brilliant. I want them to have opportunities to be both creative and challenged in an academic setting.”                     

Guardado is teaching “Christian Mystical Texts” at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and will be teaching a doctoral seminar in the fall. He is also developing a course for next year on migration and theology that will include a visit to the border.

He doesn’t mince words when it comes to his thoughts about the humanitarian crisis at the border. He knows all too well the pain families suffer when making the dangerous and painful decision to leave their home countries and migrate to the U.S. He made the nearly 3,000-mile trek when he was just 10 years old.

“Every year we have hundreds of remains that are recovered from there and so I have problems with the indifference of the church on this issue,” he said. “And by church, I mean the people of God, I mean the institutional church, but I also mean more than just Catholics. I mean the body of Christ in history that we claim to be—all of it.”

As the federal government sits in a stalemate about the fate of the border, each side claiming humanitarian concerns, Guardado views the crisis as a theological issue, not a political abstraction. He has spent years returning to help migrants in an area he knows all too well from his childhood. It’s a journey that propelled him from Los Angeles to the cloisters of a Trappist monastery, and now, to the halls of academia. But, in the end, he’s never really left the border.

“There are just so many forces coalescing at the border and such a rawness of the human experience that those are some of those questions I ended up taking to the monastery, and I think in the monastery those questions perhaps pressed themselves more fully upon me,” said Guardado, who started at Fordham last spring. “And that indirectly led me back to consider that maybe I have a lot more learning to do about deep questions of how the mystery of God, church, and faith intersect and can shine light upon of some of the ills of our world.”

The Journey

Guardado was born in El Salvador in the midst of the country’s civil war. As he approached the age of 10, his mother knew full well that he could be conscripted by either the army or the guerrillas. She was determined to move him from harm’s way. He said his grandfather probably sold what little cattle they had to pay for the journey, along with other monies lent by family in the U.S. He remembers his grandfather crying as they said their goodbyes, both knowing they might never see each other again. They never did; his grandfather died in the years that followed.

“We got on a bus and I counted palm trees, said goodbye to family, a lot of tears,” he said. “I knew two phrases that my mom knew: Thank you. I’m sorry. How to be grateful and how to ask for forgiveness. These were the only two phrases that I had in my English vocabulary leaving El Salvador.”

He said he thinks he counted palm trees as a way of remembering his country. By the time he got into the hundreds, he fell asleep and woke in Guatemala. From there his memory skips through a series of glimpses, built mostly of walking: “A lot. Many days. Under the moonlight.” The group of about 15 migrants followed a paid guide known as a “coyote,” or “coyota” in their case, as she was a woman. She stayed with them for the length of the journey. It’s a model of migration that no longer exists, he said. Today’s migrants are passed from one person to another, a series of small transactions on a journey through the hemisphere.

“It’s much more dangerous in that sense [today]and on many other levels,” he said. “That lady was with us, even if she would leave for a day or so, she would be back the next day and arrange the next stage of the journey.”

The group crammed into false compartments of trailers packed together “like sardines” for five hours at a time “hoping that thing doesn’t turn over because if it does you’re probably not going to make it out alive.” They spent a night in jail and were bailed out by the coyota.

“You paid people along the way, as needed. The federal officers, the police. They understand that you’re leaving and why you’re leaving,” he said.

In Tijuana, they crossed beneath barbed wired patrolled by jeeps. At 2 a.m. they jammed into a small taxi like a “clown car.” They traveled through backroads to a white van. Finally, Guardado got to sit up front and ride shotgun because “no one will think anything of it, he’s just like a U.S. boy.” Soon he saw Los Angeles.

“My closest neighbor in our Salvadoran village was a quarter mile away and in between were hundreds of trees and wilderness. So, arriving in L.A., where every so often there’s a street light and each house has the same amount of space between it, it just felt so artificial. It just felt like, ‘Wow. Where’s the beauty of the chaos?’”

The Calling to Monastic Life

Guardado was educated by De La Salle Christian Brothers in L.A. and then moved on to St. Mary’s College of California. The college was not far from the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux, a Trappist monastery whose abbot at the time was formed by Thomas Merton, the prolific writer and Catholic theologian. The abbot, Thomas Davis, O.C.S.O., had structured the monastery around the teachings of Merton.

“He [Merton] had this cultural and artistic sensitivity, intellectual sensitivity, and curiosity that he passed on to someone like Father Thomas Davis, so I fell in love with that vision of the monastery,” he said.

Guardado began to view the abbey as a way to question the commodified society surrounding him. To this day he cannot explain his calling. “It was a mystery,” he said. But he added that the simplicity of monastic life was “a form of resistance to U.S. values that emphasize upward mobility.”

“It’s less about being in charge of the reflection, but just allowing for a deconstruction of the self, and what emerges is something else,” he said of the prayerful silence.

After an initial year at the monastery, he began a journey that took him to the University of Notre Dame to get a master’s degree in theology and then back to his alma mater, St. Mary’s, where he served as assistant director of justice education. He returned to the borderlands as director of social justice ministry at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church, a progressive parish in Tucson, Arizona. Back at the border, in many Catholic churches he witnessed a “vast indifference” to the suffering he saw. After two years, he went back to the monastery for what he thought would be the rest of his life. But there, in isolation, ideas began to “percolate.”

His mentor knew more was in store for him.

“This place is too small for you, Leo,’” he said Davis told him. “I think you need to be open to the possibility that God may be calling you to a new place.”

He soon applied and was accepted back at Notre Dame for his doctorate.

“I didn’t want to live life wondering, ‘Should I have gone?’” he said, so he left the monastery.

Theological Reflection and Supporting Sanctuary

At Notre Dame, he began studying patristics—early church studies that reflected the readings that he immersed himself in at the abbey. But his focus changed after he took a course with Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the father of liberation theology, which encourages the study of theology from the perspective of the poor. Guardado would go on to become an assistant to Father Gutiérrez.

“For a boy from Chalatenango, a village of El Salvador, I’ve found myself in pretty amazing circles,” he said.

With Gutiérrez, he took a doctoral seminar on Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th-century Dominican friar who stood up to the Spanish government and the church in defense of the indigenous peoples.

“In this class, for the first time really, I would say, I got vocabulary about my own history growing up poor in a village in the mountains, without electricity, without running water, in the middle of a civil war in the midst of violence,” he said.

He began to examine the distinction between the early patristic church he had come to understand at the monastery and the 16th-century church of empire, war, and “commodification of bodies”—a church that even questioned the humanity of indigenous people. The class helped him question what theology is and what it could be.

“I began to crack open the possibility that my own experience, my community’s experience, and the historical reality of Latin America—poverty, oppression, war, violence—that all of this was raw material out of which I could do theological reflection.”

His dissertation, which informs a chapter he wrote for a forthcoming book, An Ethic of Just Peace (Georgetown University Press, 2019), examines the concept of sanctuary alongside theories of nonviolence. His primary focus is on the root of the sanctuary movement in the 1980s when hundreds of Catholic churches provided sanctuary to Salvadorian refugees. Today, he said, only a handful of churches in the U.S. are willing to take the risk. He said that bishops will often say providing sanctuary is illegal or too political.

Guardado said that his research attempts to provide theological justification for “sanctuary as an ecclesial practice.”

“The term sanctuary often mistakenly gets reduced to politics,” he said. “In light of human displacement worldwide and 11 million undocumented here in the U.S., if we’re to be a church of and for the poor, then you can’t just say, ‘No.’ You have to engage with the question theologically. Otherwise, one can argue that it’s an ecclesial sin of omission.”

But even here, Guardado taps the patristic period to back his arguments for sanctuary. He noted that the earliest mention of bishops providing sanctuary goes back to 343 at the Council of Serdica. Later that century in 399 the archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, gave shelter to a man named Eutropius who, ironically, had been a critic of sanctuary. The archbishop gave a sermon that took a jab at Eutropius and argued for sanctuary.

“You never know when you’re going to be the one who needs sanctuary,” Guardado said, knowingly.

“I understand this from my experience as a boy in El Salvador, but also my experience as a product of Latin America and its relationship to the U.S. and the world now.”

Those relationships are as fraught today as when he arrived, he said. And he acknowledges that it’s as impossible as ever to speak of the Latin American poor theologically without speaking about them politically.

“It is politics that creates the very structures that keep people down and that keep them dying out of injustice and other means, like lack of food,” he said. “You cannot deal, genuinely with the poor if you don’t deal with politics.”

Guardado said that the kind of theological work he does and wants to teach his students at Fordham is the kind of that deals with contemporary issues head-on.

“I want my students to ask: How does theological thinking change the world? How does it change history? How does it leave an impact so that it’s not just thinking about God, but actually aims to transform the world?”

He said that is the point of liberation theology, as well as a Jesuit education.

Echoing Gutiérrez’s words, Guardado says, “‘The point is not to do religious metaphysics. It is to figure out and to really reflect out of lived accompaniment with the poor, with the margins. How does our faith connect with that and how does it transform that reality?’”.

Brando was not alone in his embrace of method acting, which was popularized at the time by Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, said Keri Walsh, Ph.D., associate professor of English. But his performance in the film had the effect of making it synonymous in the popular imagination with explosive, masculine, working-class characters. Women, it was thought, did not embrace it.

“In fact, the method is a way of constructing and preparing for a performance, and it’s a way of working where you bring your personal life to the role, and you aim for a very naturalistic physicality through exercises,” she said, noting that physicality need not be of the blustery sort perfected by Brando.

“Those things could lead to any kinds of performances, so there were always women at the Actor’s Studio who went to Hollywood and had varying degrees of success.”

Walsh had explored method acting previously, in her latest book Mickey Rourke, (British Film Institute 2014), and was working on a follow up that would explore gender and sexuality and method acting. That lead her to realize that female method actors deserved their own story.

Support from Hollywood

This earned the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which recently named Walsh a 2018 Academy Film Scholar. The award includes a $25,000 grant to conduct research for a monograph be published by Routledge that is tentatively titled Stella’s Claim: Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film.

It’s a big jump for Walsh, who is the founder of Fordham’s annual Irish Women Writers Symposium and editor of the modern editions of James Joyce’s Dubliners (Broadview Press, 2016) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (Columbia University Press, 2010).

“There are fellowships that people know to apply for every year, like the National Endowment for the Humanities, but this one, I just found on my own. I thought I would throw in my hat, and actually was very stunned to receive the award,” she said.

Method acting, which is based on the teachings of the Russian theorist and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, places emphasis on bringing emotional truths and natural physical behavior to roles. Strasberg built on this, Walsh said, by guiding actors through exercises where they revisited a powerful memory from their own past.

“That helps you theoretically connect to some kind of powerful emotion. Then you have to find a way to bring that to the character,” she said.

“It’s this complex thing where you’re creating a relationship between your own emotional experience and the emotional experiences that you read about in the dramatic text that are those of your character.”

The Connection to Feminism

Because the process has some similarities to therapy, it occasionally gets a bad rap as mere navel-gazing. Walsh said these critiques miss the fact its popularity coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism and that actors such as Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, Shelley Winters, Kim Hunter, and Joanne Woodward found it to be extremely valuable to their work.

“When Ellen Burstyn talks about the experiences she had in her family as a woman, in her first marriage, an unexpected pregnancy, and all the experiences of her life that led her to become a feminist, those were experiences that she used in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” said Walsh.

“I argue that the personal basis of method acting was actually a way for women actors to say ‘I’m bringing my personal experiences of injustice and what I’ve noticed in society about being a woman to the role. Method acting invites me to do that and says, even if the script doesn’t currently contain that, you can bring it. You have a right as the actor to show what you know.”

One need only to look at Brando’s Streetcar co-star Kim Hunter, who won an Academy Award for her role as Stella Kowalski, said Walsh. As part of her research, Walsh examined notes that Hunter made to her copy of the film’s screenplay, and compared reviews of the 1947 Broadway production, which she also starred in, to the 1951 film to trace what she calls a “feminist evolution” of Hunter’s performance.

“Even though Elia Kazan, who directed both the Broadway and the film version, did not see her character as having much feminist potential or didn’t care much about her character, Hunter molded her character to be a very informed kind of treatment of domestic violence in the context of men coming home from the second World War,” Walsh said.

“We’ve really written that one performance off as just ‘Oh she’s just the abused wife, so the method must not be good for women.’ But if you actually look at how she approaches the role and changes it from Broadway to Hollywood, it actually is quite a feminist story of trying to take seriously what a woman is going through in that situation.”

A Career Focused on the Performing Arts

Although film is a relatively new area of research for Walsh, she has long explored performance art and theater. In 2016, she organized the New York gathering of Waking the Feminists, a movement that calls attention to the wealth of women’s voices that are excluded from Irish theater.

She said she’s fascinated by the self-transformation that actors undertake for their craft.

“I think of myself as a feminist cultural historian who is trying to listen to the voices of women who have been in the industry, whether it’s in Irish theater or in Hollywood. I try to do the archival work that reminds people that their stories really challenge the dominant paradigms,” she said.

Their stories are especially resonant in the #MeToo era, she said, because actresses who might have kept personal stories involving abuse sequestered to their acting classes have now taken their stories public instead.

“Was it fair to just say ‘We’re going to talk about this in acting class, and then you put it away and use it to fuel your performance?’ Female actors are saying ‘no,’” Walsh said.

“I think Hollywood is ready in some quarters to listen to this. The fact that my project got this award from the Motion Picture Academy; I think they are saying, ‘We want to hear the stories and tell the history now.’”

“I’m very much into this idea of identity performance and construction,” he said.

“What are the things we pull from to become who we are? What are the things we learn through heritage, embodied experience, or education that make us?”

A Chronicler of Hip-Hop Royalty

Poulson-Bryant earned his doctorate in American Studies from Harvard University in 2016, but he’s been exploring the issue of identity for the better part of two decades as a journalist. In 1993, Quincy Jones tapped him to co-found Vibe magazine, where he profiled artists such as Will Smith, Bobby Brown, Boyz II Men, and Dennis Rodman. His 1993 profile of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Journalism.

He later branched out into nonfiction with Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday, 2005) and fiction, The V.I.P.s (Broadway, 2011).

Returning to Academia

In 2008, he returned to Brown University to finish the bachelor’s degree he’d walked away from when he was 20. He was so taken with the experience that he applied for, and was accepted to, Harvard, where he completed his doctorate dissertation on, “Everybody is a Star: Uplift, Citizen, and the Cross-Racial Politics of 1970’s U.S. Popular Culture.”

“I left Brown for a year and ended up staying in New York for 15 years. I left New York for a year to go back to Brown, and ended up teaching at Fordham 10 years later, so I clearly can’t leave things,” he said. laughing.

Transitioning to academia was relatively easy, he said.

“I’d interviewed everybody I wanted to interview, I traveled the world, I’d gone to see U2 at Yankee Stadium with Quincy, I’d done the things I felt like being a journalist commanded me to do. In writing books, I also found a different voice that I’d built on as a journalist,” he said.

Echoes of that voice live on at Fordham. In his creative writing class, Flawless/Freedom/Formation: Writing about Race and Popular Culture (Yes, that’s a nod to Beyoncé), Poulson-Bryant, a native of Rockville Center, New York, has students read his Puff Daddy profile.

“Students don’t have to just read theory or the vaunted history texts. They should read journalism, they should read memoirs, and they should read essays,” he said.

“I figured, why not give them one that I wrote and kill two birds with one stone by introducing them to a history that I’m a part of, and also contribute to their education?”

Examining a Tumultuous Time in Black History

When it comes to future research, Paulson-Bryant is editing “Everybody is a Star,” with the goal of submitting it in September for publication. It was inspired in part by “The Soiling of Old Glory,” the 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Joseph Rakes, a white teenager, assaulting Ted Landsmark, a black man, with a flagpole bearing the American flag.

He said the image, which was taken in Boston during school busing protests, is a visual representation of the tensions that existed between white ethnics and African-Americans at the time.

“As a kid, I remember hearing about the busing crisis and Irish kids throwing rocks at black kids in Boston,” he said.

“And I was curious that that tension was happening at the same time when, say, disco is happening, when black people and white people are creating culture together.”

Poulson-Bryant argues that, historically, African Americans existed as both central to American culture and also marginal to it, particularly in interactions with what historians dubbed white ethnics: the Italians, Irish, and Jewish. At the same time that the series Roots was playing on television, and Blaxploitation films were playing in theaters, young generations of white ethnics were returning to narratives of heritage and the “Old Country” via films like The Godfather.

“There was all this cross-racial exchange going on in a lot of these spaces. Saturday Night Fever, I argue, is as much about blackness as it is Italian-ness, if you really think about what’s going on. A text like The Wiz is as much about classic Americana literature,” he said.

The title “Everybody is a Star,” refers to the hierarchies of power that can be found in these pockets of ethnicities, particularly in New York City, said Poulson-Bryant. He plans to take the summer off to finish the book. But for now, he’s enjoying his second career act as a professor.

“I loved teaching, running discussion sessions in graduate school, and being in the room with students,” he said. “Without sounding too new age-y or too spiritual about it, I have always trusted my gut. It just felt right.”

In situations like this, Miguel Alzola, Ph.D., associate professor of ethics at the Gabelli School of Business, said the decision-maker’s choices aren’t necessarily a matter of right or wrong.

“There can be conflicts between right and right, from conflicts in time management to conflicting shareholder values,” he said.

“The answers are not that clear, and that is what creates opportunity for students to engage in a conversation.”

A ‘Win-Win’ Mindset

Alzola teaches courses in corporate social responsibility and business ethics. “Our best students have a win-win mindset,” he said. “They recognize that it’s in the best interest of the shareholders to protect employees and treat customers well.”

His research focuses on character-based ethical theories in business. Alzola found that people make distinctions between the virtues that they attach to being a good human being, and the character traits that they need be successful in their professional roles.

One key question that he is exploring is whether one’s character can be corrupted by participating in improper business practices.

“It’s undeniable that you have a social role that you play in every group in which you belong,” he said. “These groups can have an impact on the way you perceive whether your actions are a problem or not.”

Examining the Underlying Principles

Prior to joining Fordham in 2008, Alzola worked in the oil industry during the ‘90s in his home country of Argentina. Corruption, bribery, and favoritism were widespread in the industry at the time. The experience inspired his interest in virtue ethics and moral psychology.

Alzola reviewed case studies in leadership and business in which individuals strayed from their values. He also explored the different ways people frame a problem, in order to choose an alternative course of action in tricky business dealings.

In many of these situations, the decision-maker is faced with disparate interests: Employees want higher salaries. The shareholders of a company demand hire revenue. Meanwhile, customers want better service.

“We try to provide a platform to initiate a conversation among the students, which is not only connected with the case studies, but also with their own values,” said Alzola. “It allows them to look at their convictions critically. “

Mainstream business ethics tend to evaluate different choices based on the consequences of the decision-maker’s actions or the means they use to achieve their desired outcome.

Since there is a greater emphasis on whether the decision-maker’s action is permitted or prohibited, Alzola said the character of the decision-maker is often overlooked.

“Ethics is not only about what you do, but how what you do reflects on who you are, and who you will be as a result of performing the action,” he said.

Making a Better Choice

In his courses, Alzola has advocated an integration of business, legal, and ethical outlooks to help students effectively dissect contemporary business dilemmas, from pay equity and privacy protection to conflicts of interests and corporate espionage.

“Psychology has found that the more sophisticated you get in framing a problem, the more likely you’re going to behave ethically,” said Alzola. “Framing is a key part of good decision-making.”

“It’s about finding long-term solutions to short-term conflicts,” said Alzola. “You have to think about the company, 10, 20, and 30 years from now.”

He said the onus is also on business leaders to develop organizational structures and systems that help people to choose better.

“Part of it is recruitment, and the other part is internal development,” he said. “Leaders have a responsibility to create systems that are aligned with what people want to do and what they ought to do in order to be better at what they do.”

To many, the threat to cybersecurity brings to mind a computer system breach, but it’s more than that.

According to Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science, modern-day algorithms have made it next to impossible to hack into computers, so most hacks today result from social engineering geared toward convincing unwitting users to give away their passwords. That is one reason the field is moving toward interdisciplinary expansion.

“Eighty percent of cybersecurity experts in the market right now come from fields as varied as management, business, law, or music, and they just jumped into cybersecurity,” he said. “This is something the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security are pushing toward, because right now, we don’t have enough experts.”

Hayajneh, the new director of Fordham’s Center for Cybersecurity and MS Programs in Cybersecurity and Data Analytics, is spearheading several initiatives to help fill that gap. Last year, Fordham was designated a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The designation came in part because the University is home to a wealth of cybersecurity experts in interdisciplinary fields—within the computer science department, in the Gabelli School of Business’ Center for Digital Transformation, and in Fordham Law’s Center on Law and Information Policy.

Hayajneh hopes to leverage all of that expertise toward education, research, and outreach. In addition to a Master’s Program in Cybersecurity, the department plans to offer an undergraduate cybersecurity major and minor. Professional certificates, which can be earned through five courses, are also in the works.

To further broaden its reach, the center is also pursuing grants, such as the National Science Foundation Scholarship for Service grants, which cover full tuition and a stipend for students who commit to work for the Federal government upon graduation.

To illustrate cybersecurity’s interdisciplinary needs, Hayajneh pointed out that trying to predict terrorism by analyzing web sites requires experts in psychology and data analytics.

“If I give you a website, it would take you 10 to 15 minutes to look at it and determine whether the authors have bad intentions. But we are looking at hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of websites,” Hayajneh said.

“You can’t do this manually. Federal agents don’t have an automated technique to do it, so we are working with data analytics to develop techniques that can make this a more efficient process.”

Hayajneh’s own background lies in applied cryptography, cryptocurrency, blockchain, and authentication protocols for wireless networks. His current research is on algorithms used to secure devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps. Security is paramount for them, he said, but so is efficiency and energy consumption.

Being wary of Barbie

The “Internet of Things,” as such devices have come to be known, is also of interest to Hayajneh’s students, he said. Refrigerators, baby monitors, and even Bluetooth-enabled Barbie dolls are vulnerable to a determined hacker if a person’s cable router is not secure. As with medical devices, there is a tradeoff—manufacturers can either install the strongest possible security protocols in their products or they can sell them cheaply, but they can’t do both.

“The Barbie is connected via Bluetooth to a web app, and the [dolls]can easily be hacked. They have a camera. They have a mic. So hacking them means that you can listen to everything in the house, and view everything in the vicinity of the camera,” he said.

Century-old technologies can also be pressed into service by unscrupulous actors, he said. One of Hayajneh’s students participated in a “white hat” exercise, where he called an unsuspecting worker and pretended to be a member of the IT department. Since the call showed up on caller ID as “IT,” and the student knew some basic technical information about the worker’s computer, the worker clicked on a web link that the student had e-mailed to him.

“He did it in real time in front of us, and then said ‘You know what, I’m going run to the restroom. You can do what you have to,’” said Hayajneh.

“My student had full access to his machine.”

Because psychology is so integral to tackling the problem, the center is reaching out to local schools, and undertook a recent collaboration with Lehman High School. Members of the center have also conducted awareness sessions and provided cybersecurity modules to community colleges for use in their curriculum.

Education is more important than ever, he said, because even though security algorithms are stronger than ever, people are using technology more widely than ever.

“Invasion of privacy is going to happen with more extensive use. Adults don’t care much that their coffee machine is connected through their other things to their router. That’s what’s really scary,” he said.

“I’m not worried about large institutions, because they invest in education. I’m worried about people who are just enjoying technology, and don’t understand the consequences of the privacy theft that could happen.”

Father Anderson believes himself to be a member of the last category.

“Within my family, I’m convinced that my maternal great-grandfather was a person of color,” he said, adding that two years ago he found out that his descendants owned slaves.

“That’s the story of the South. Black families know it and can see it, but white families pretend it never touched them.”

A Revelation Back Home

Father Anderson’s revelation occurred during a trip to his native New Orleans in 2015, when he took his parents to visit the nearby Whitney Plantation Museum. Unlike many plantation museums, the Whitney doesn’t celebrate the “genteel South,” but focuses on the history and experience of slavery, he said. While reading about the plantation’s founding family, he came across a familiar name: Haydel. It is the same name as his mother’s descendants. And the family members, it turned out, are his direct ancestors.

John Cummings, the museum’s owner, took Father Anderson and his family on a tour of the grounds, where the two began a discussion about the Catholic Church’s social justice values and its history with slavery. The discussion eventually evolved into a challenge via a question from Cummings to Anderson: What are the Jesuits and the Catholic Church doing to help right the past wrongs of slavery?

“Because I was the descendent of a slave-owning family, and because John Cummings challenged me and asked ‘What are you doing?’ I wanted to do an academic project that raised the questions he asked. I can’t change the world, but I can, in my own small way, raise the consciousness of Catholics regarding race relations.”

Father Anderson organized a symposium, Slavery on the Cross, held this past April at Fordham. He said that the speakers at the conference addressed the questions directly, but also took the issues of slavery, segregation, and bigotry beyond the local level and examined them as a national and international issue as well.

With the conference fresh in his mind, this past June Father Anderson went to South Africa to continue his research on the Catholic Church’s response to the nation’s apartheid in the post-World-War-II years. (He’s been doing research in South Africa every year since 2004.) There, Catholicism is a minority religion in what is primarily a Protestant country, a dynamic that Father Anderson could relate to, having grown up as a Catholic in the mostly Protestant city of Atlanta, Georgia.

South African Parallels 

He examined how South Africa’s governing National Party attempted to control the education of the black population through the Bantu Education Act of 1953. After the act was passed, black South Africans’ educational opportunities were restricted, he said. The government, in effect, only allowed blacks to receive an education that was comparable to, say, what would be the 4th or 5th-grade level in the United States. Very few black South Africans continued on to secondary or tertiary levels.

“The government did not want the Native peoples to get the idea that they would follow the same educational track as the Europeans, a track that prepared them for college,” he said. “There was no way they were going to be allowed to be equals.”

The ban was a seminal event for the Catholic Church because its mission in South Africa was anchored in “evangelization through education,” he said. The government forced missionaries operating schools (both Protestants and Catholics) to take a stand: Either give up control of their educational institutions or assume full financial responsibility for them. Up to this point in time, the faith-based schools had received government subsidies.

The Catholic Church would not relinquish control of its mission-based schools, said Father Anderson. It continued to support educating the black population until it became financially unsustainable in the mid-1960s.

The result of those educational restrictions, said Father Anderson, was the creation of a “permanent underclass” that will take several generations to undo.

Navigating Faith as a Minority

“What drew me to South Africa is that Catholics were a minority in a Protestant world. I’m interested in questions of how believers navigate in that world. What do you do when you know you’re not really welcome?” Furthermore, “how does a religious body practice what it preaches in an inhospitable environment? Does it follow its precepts and teachings, or does it compromise? And if it compromises, how does it justify doing so?”

He said his love of the Catholic Church, his Jesuit foundation, his experience living as a Catholic among Protestants in Atlanta,, and his recent discoveries about his own ancestry have allowed him to look more deeply at the race question and what it means to be an outsider. He continues to probe difficult questions as they relate to places and institutions he cares most about, particularly the Church and its role in matters of slavery, segregation, and apartheid.

“Racial identity is a construct, so regardless of one’s racial background, the one unifying factor is Catholicism,” he said. “One of the precepts of the Church is the unity of the human race, because we’re all children of God. If you accept that, then there’s no room for separation or segregation. That is the antithesis of Catholic thought.”

This, she said, was despite advances in medications, and major campaigns that reduced the stigma of seeking help for mental illness.

“We’ve had no effect on the rate of suicide; in fact it’s higher than it ever was,” said Alonzo, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Service and director of Fordham’s Suicide Prevention Research Program.

She attributes the rise in part to the main focus of suicide prevention research over the years, which has centered more on desperate patients in the emergency room and less on those initially seeking outpatient services. Also, in much of the mental health research, patients’ sociocultural backgrounds are not taken into account.

“What differentiates social work from other mental health professions, like psychiatry or psychology, is that we look at more than just the individual person sitting in front of us. We look at their ecosystem,” she said. “We need to know the populations if we are hoping to help.”

Alonzo said that, up until recently, psychological research groups were largely made up of white males—and then the findings were generalized to everyone. It was a great advance when women and minorities were included, but much nuance is still lost on large groups. For example, Hispanics—although minorities—have a relatively low suicide rate when considered as a single group.

Even then, she said, looking at Hispanics as one whole group can lead to misinformation.

“When we break it down by Hispanic subgroups, we find that Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans have among the lowest rate of suicide of any ethnic group, but Puerto Ricans have a higher rate of suicide by ninefold,” she said.

Assuming risk for an entire group can also have a profound effect on communities, Alonzo said. Limited resources may be diverted to areas where they are not needed.

“A lot of evidence-based practices are largely based on quantitative research, which uses large randomized control trials and less of an emphasis on understanding the population,” she said. “We’re doing a disservice . . . assuming risk for populations that don’t have as much risk, and underestimating risk for populations who are at great risk.”

For example, Alonzo recalled an ad campaign for suicide prevention that appeared on buses running through a Washington Heights neighborhood, where the majority of the population is Dominican. That campaign might have been better placed in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, had research been available, she said.

Alonzo’s own research into suicide prevention found that the point of contact at which the research was conducted didn’t necessarily tell the whole story, because the majority of people who are at risk don’t go for treatment.

“This is a hard population to treat and study,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how great your evidence-based intervention may be if the at-risk individuals are not going to treatment to receive it.”

After finding that most people who came to the ER had already attempted outpatient treatment, Alonzo focused her research on outpatient centers with substantial caseloads.

“Somehow we had missed an opportunity to get them engaged with treatment,” she said. “Once someone goes to an emergency room saying that they’re thinking about suicide, then they’re going to the hospital—which is psychologically and financially burdensome.”

There, she works with patients who are coming in for a first appointment. She implements an onboarding procedure at the moment of intake, where suicide intervention can be initiated “in a way that’s realistic for overworked intake departments with large caseloads.”

“We need to make an impact early on, so that people who go in for an intake [will]experience an immediate benefit to treatment. [This will] limit the likelihood that they will then drop out and end up in the emergency room,” she said.

Alonzo’s intake procedure combines risk assessment and “engagement-focused intervention” alongside standard intake procedures. She said the intervention doesn’t require extensive clinical training. It can be used across personnel, and can be delivered quickly.

“It’s a brief motivational interview that involves personalized feedback on a risk assessment, and then follow-up contact,” she said.

She said most of the research that’s done on suicide focuses on the high-risk behavior, but not on engagement or adherence to treatment.

“We know very little about what keeps them in treatment,” she said. “What we do know is that those who are at the highest risk aren’t going to treatment to begin with, or they drop out very quickly and are not taking advantage of the evidence-based practices that exist to help mitigate their risk.”

She said her intake assessment tool provides personalized feedback that debriefs patients on their condition in everyday language—and with an awareness of their cultural background.

“We’ve learned that at-risk individuals experienced the standard risk assessment and treatment as impersonal and routine,” she said.

“By individualizing our feedback, the feedback itself can become the start of an intervention.”

“This was the book that made me excited to study political science,” said Dayal, Ph.D., an assistant professor of political science who began teaching at Fordham in 2015. “It examines one of multiple ways to think about power, which is really what animates the study of political science.”

Dayal hopes her own research, which focuses on international organizations, peace processes, and peacekeeping, will also contribute to new ways of thinking about power.

“We live in a world that has been shaped by big international institutions like the United Nations, European Union, and NATO, which emerged out of the end of World War II,” said Dayal. “These are institutions that were designed to help countries cooperate and work together to secure mutual benefits.”

As the United States’ role in global affairs begins to change—for example, with the country’s recent withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement—political scientists are weighing the short- and long-term effects of the country’s political moves, she said.

“When the United States backs away from international organizations and agreements, we worry it could delegitimize a lot of these institutions,” said Dayal. “If the U.S. says, for example, that it doesn’t need to be a part of an institution like the United Nations, other countries may say, ‘Well, the United States doesn’t think it’s important so why is it important for us?’”

The bargaining models of war

This summer, Dayal is set to complete a manuscript examining the U. N.’s peacekeeping operations. She hopes her analysis of how U.N. peace operations play a role in peace processes might help scholars and policymakers as they reconsider how the United Nations contributes to the way wars around the world end.

“There’s a popular perception that all peace operations don’t work very well, and that’s an understandable reaction because of the way that news is reported,” said Dayal.

Failing U.N. peacekeeping missions in countries and regions such as Rwanda and the Balkans, she said, are more “vivid” in the public eye than more successful peacekeeping missions like those in El Salvador, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, and Liberia—which were not quick fixes.

“What we know from existing academic research is that if combatants have decided to stop fighting, negotiate an agreement, and lay down their arms, then peacekeepers are good at keeping them from picking up their arms again,” said Dayal. “But when we send peacekeepers into active war situations, research tells us statistically it can be the same as not sending them at all.”

Globally, the United Nations is the largest deployer of troops in high conflict regions. Because of this, Dayal said it is important to consider how combatants, who are involved in ongoing peace processes, view the United Nations.

“The United Nations thinks of itself as bringing peace, but the combatants’ view of the United Nations can be very different,” said Dayal. “Combatants think of U.N. involvement as bringing a range of things. It’s possible that it will help bring peace, but even if it doesn’t bring peace, it can bring material and financial benefits, or help create the conditions for humanitarian actors to work on things like refugee resettlement, as well. It can also bring tactical and symbolic benefits, like helping rebels forces recraft themselves as political parties.”

Investigating force in peacekeeping

Dayal said U.N. peacekeeping operations have undergone several changes after some prominent peacekeeping failures in the 1990s. Most recently, she and her co-author Lise Morjé Howard have been researching the U.N. Security Council’s decision to give U.N. peacekeepers authorization to use force in defense of civilians.

In their article, “The Use of Force in U.N. Peacekeeping,” to be published in International Organization journal this fall, they note that the authorization of force doesn’t always fit the peacekeeping mission. She cites the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti as an example.

“The problem in that case is that Haiti is not at war,” she said. “Who are we protecting civilians from? What’s the peacekeeper’s job there? It’s not clear because the language is identical to the language of giving peacekeepers the authorization to protect civilians in war-stricken places like Darfur or in South Sudan. We think the answer to why the mission mandates all look so similar lies in Security Council politics, not in the conditions on the ground.”

Dayal said her goal in investigating international organizations is to spark conversations among scholars, policymakers and citizens of the world about effective governance and conflict management, so that they can work together to build a better world.

The risks of inaction

One thing that Dayal emphasizes to her students and other young people is that there are risks to inaction on both a national and global level.

Earlier this summer, she was asked to deliver a speech to young women graduating from her old high school in Troy, New York. She encouraged the graduates to be active participants in politics even in moments of despair.  An adaptation of that speech was published on Ms. Magazine’s blog.

“It’s important for people to understand that democracy isn’t the kind of thing that you set up once, and it just runs on its own,” she said. “It requires investments from citizens to make sure that their values are expressed in their systems of government.”

Batisti, associate dean and executive director at the Center for Educational Partnerships, has been spearheading coordination between the GSE and the New York City schools since 2006, when she was tapped by Dean Emeritus James Hennessy to create a center that would be a bridge between academia and working teachers.

For her efforts, Batisti was awarded this past academic year with the Fordham President’s Meritorious Service award. Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. issued a proclamation recognizing her work, and also declared Nov. 16 to be “The Center of Educational Partnerships Day.”

Although the New York City educational landscape has changed much in the past 10 years, Batisti said the center’s core goal—to deliver applied research to schools—has never wavered. The center does this by training teachers in literacy, math and science, and social studies; supervising a regional bilingual education resource network; and helping implement educational reforms.

That last charge of educational reform has been very important, she said, as New York City schools experienced a shift when Bill de Blasio succeeded Michael Bloomberg as mayor, and Carmen Farina took over for Dennis Walcott as chancellor. Under Bloomberg, school principals were encouraged to identify with CEOs and contract  to help schools secure individual services, many of which Batisti’s center offered. Under the current system, that Partnership Support Organization model has been replaced by more comprehensive partnerships with low performing schools, focusing on the whole child. The center is currently partnered with three schools in the Bronx.

“The mandate that Dean Emeritus Hennessy gave me was, create a center to go into schools and do more than what we’re doing now,” she said. “We wanted GSE much more involved at all levels of school life in schools throughout the city and throughout the metropolitan area. I think we’ve done that with the initiatives we’ve implemented, and the services we’ve provided.”

The center has brokered agreements with groups like Mentoring in Medicine at Montefiore Hospital, which sends pre-med students into Fordham community schools to conduct science workshops, and Footprintz, which recruits former college basketball players to teach basketball at the schools. Footprintz has been successful in boosting attendance at schools by scheduling “zero period” sessions at 7:30 a.m., before school officially opens.

“I never thought I’d be negotiating a memorandum of understanding with an almost-NBA player. We’ve really broadened our circle, and that’s been quite an undertaking with the community concept, because the focus is on the whole child, which includes mental health,” she said.

“I’m very proud of who we’ve brought into the schools because we all worked as a team, and our goal is the same.”

Closing the gap between schools that are resource rich and those that are not is a big priority for the center. For the last three years, Batisti has recruited Fordham undergraduates to tutor elementary, middle, and high students in STEM subjects on Saturday mornings. The center also alerts schools when opportunities arise; for example, when New York Botanical Garden is giving away 150 tickets to its annual holiday train show. When the center was partnered with schools under the Bloomberg administration, it was instrumental in helping its network of all 35 schools procure white boards, as well as obtain several grants.

The intense focus on nitty-gritty, on-the-ground details is key, as is the ability to obtain outside funding, Batisti said. Over the past 10 years, the center has raised over $91 million in both grants and earned income.

Batisti, a native New Yorker who still at the elementary school she attended (PS 183 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side), would like to expand the center’s efforts nationally and internationally.  In July, she will travel to Soria, Spain for the III International Colloquium on Languages, Cultures, Identity in School and Society. There, she and Center for Educational Partnership Assistant Director Nancy Rosario Rodriguez will present “Developing Leadership for the Changing Demographics: The Multicultural Education Teacher Leadership Academy Model (METLA).”

As schools in the United States and Europe cope with increases in student populations that have different language needs, and different socioeconomic statuses, Batisti said that working in New York City has taught the center’s staff how to thrive in a fast-paced environment where resources are scarce.

“It’s not impossible but it’s become even more challenging, and you have to keep thinking  differently,” she said. “You can’t just keep doing the same thing if it doesn’t work.”