That was the call made by Ryan Ruocco as a thrilling, historic WNBA season ended on Sunday night, when the Liberty toppled the Minnesota Lynx in Game 5 of the Finals at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center—the first title for one of the league’s original franchises.

Ruocco, a 2008 Fordham graduate, is a lead play-by-play announcer for WNBA, NBA, and women’s college basketball games on ESPN, and he and color commentator Rebecca Lobo have called all the WNBA Finals games for the network since 2013.

“This was our 12th Finals together,” Ruocco said, “and to get a chance to be the soundtrack of this moment in women’s basketball, it feels like a dream come true.”

The moment he references is one of great growth for the league, with the past season seeing increases in TV ratings and game attendance thanks to veteran stars like Breanna Stewart and A’ja Wilson and rookie phenoms like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. To cap it off, fans were treated to a dramatic Finals series that included an overtime final game and a stunning game-winner from Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu in Game 3—a contest that had Ruocco “practically losing his voice thanks to all the huge shots” but earning praise from fans and critics.

“I was so elated and stunned that this game has given us even more excitement, even more drama,” Ruocco said about calling Ionescu’s game-winner. “Because it felt like the Finals just kept outdoing itself.”

A Legacy of Sports Broadcasting Excellence

Ruocco got his start in broadcasting at WFUV—part of a long list of Fordham alumni who learned the ropes at the University’s public media station and have gone on to great success in the business, from Vin Scully to Mike Breen.

In 2019, Ruocco told Fordham Magazine that working under the mentorship of former WFUV executive sports producer Bob Ahrens made his career possible.

“It’s this simple,” Ruocco said. “If I did not go to Fordham and work at WFUV, I would not be here doing what I’m doing today. Period.”

Looking ahead, he sees only continued growth for the WNBA. And he put in a huge endorsement for checking out a New York Liberty game in person.

“I think the atmosphere at Barclays Center for Liberty games is as good as or better than any atmosphere for basketball in the country,” he said. “There’s a sense of community and jubilation and fun, in addition to the passion. It feels like a party where everybody’s invited and everybody’s welcome.”

As the Mets take on the Los Angeles Dodgers and look to move ahead to the World Series, Majkowski, who launched his sports broadcasting career at Fordham’s public media station, WFUV, looks back at five of his most memorable moments working in the booth.

5. The 2015 NLCS Sweep of the Chicago Cubs | October 2015

When did Citi Field become home? Maybe the loudest I’ve heard it before these last couple games [against the Philadelphia Phillies in this year’s National League Division Series] was when they played the Cubs in that 2015 NLCS. And then we went to Chicago and they clinched there.

4. Regular-Season Series vs. the Washington Nationals | July 31 – August 2, 2015

It was right after the [Yoenis] Céspedes trade. The Nationals came in and the Mets beat them at Citi Field—the Sunday night game, they hit three home runs in five pitches.

And then we went back down to Washington [in September]. Maybe the Nationals had a chance to make a last stand. They had a lead, I think, every game. And the Mets came back on, putting the nail in the coffin, so to speak, for Washington.

3. Game 5 of the 2000 World Series vs. the New York Yankees | October 26, 2000

Even though the Mets lost, Game 5 of the 2000 World Series against the Yankees [is very memorable]. I had Mike Francesa sitting next to me in the booth, and when the ball first came off of Piazza’s bat against Mariano [Rivera in the ninth inning], you thought, “Oh, maybe it’s going to go,” and even Mike—he probably wouldn’t admit it, but he even had a little start.

From a producing standpoint, we had to do a postgame show. And because it was on FAN, they wanted us to incorporate both sides of the story, with Suzyn Waldman down on the Yankee side and Eddie Coleman in the Mets’ clubhouse, which was obviously, after losing the World Series, not an easy task.

That’s something I’ve always been proud of, because we balanced both sides of that story very well, I believe.

2. First Game at Shea Stadium After 9/11 | September 21, 2001

After 9/11, we were in Pittsburgh, and we ended up busing back to New York, and we came over the George Washington Bridge and you could just see [the World Trade Center site] in the distance. Coming back to Shea for that first game back … that was something.

1. Robin Ventura’s “Grand Slam Single,” Game 5 of the NLCS | October 17, 1999

I’ve always had my greatest affinity for that team, that 1999 and 2000 bunch—Robin and Johnny Franco and Al Leiter and all the guys there. I got to know them a bit more than some of the other teams along the way. Just so many players on those teams have always been my favorites.

RELATED STORY: Meet the New York Mets Radio Engineer Who Hasn’t Missed a Game in 30+ Years

Chris Majkowski engineers and produces the Mets’ radio broadcasts on WFAN. It’s a job he landed in 1993, four years after graduating from Fordham, where he was sports director at WFUV. And he hasn’t missed a day of work for the Mets since his sister’s wedding the year he started.

What does your average Mets game day look like?
If it’s a night game, I’ll get to the ballpark around 3 p.m., about four hours before first pitch, and just set up the booth—do all the cabling, check all the connections, check the studio.

And then it’s, “Okay, what are we doing on the pregame show today?” Then we have other segments during the game: “This Date in Mets’ History” and the “Electrifying Play of the Game.” The sound needs to be edited for that and I will do research for “This Date.”

Then the broadcasters and I go through the news and the notes from the day, not just for our game but for the rest of the league. We make sure we go through the commercial log. And then I’ll get something to eat and it’s “play ball.”

And then what are you doing during the game?
If something comes up during the game, like [play-by-play announcer] Howie Rose, says, “Hey, I remember back in … ” or whatever, I’ll look into that. And the whole time, I’m also mixing the show. If something’s happening and the announcers are yelling and the crowd is loud, you have to balance that.

I also do the posts for the Mets Radio Booth X account to keep the masses informed and say, “Hey, something’s happening. Maybe you want to tune in.” Don’t ever say that there’s a no-hitter going, though, because then the fans tell you that you jinxed it all if it doesn’t happen.

Next year, you’ll potentially work your 5,000th consecutive game. Do you get sick of hearing or thinking about that streak?
So, the funny thing is, I recently worked an event for Bloomberg Radio, and Cal Ripken Jr., who of course has the streak of 2,632 straight games that he played, was there as a guest. I’m not one to ever ask for a picture or anything, [but] I wish I had because I think that that would’ve been pretty neat.

Back in August, I worked my 5,000th game overall. The 5,000th straight game will happen sometime next year. Well, 5,000 is a nice round number, so maybe I’ll take the next day off.

Do you have any favorite road cities or ballparks?
San Francisco, Chicago, San Diego for the city. Boston as well. That’s not an every-year stop, but Fenway is great, and Boston as a city is great. We had a couple games against the Phillies in London back in June, and we went to Tokyo in 2000.

Maybe I’ll start cutting back so I can go back for a trip to London or maybe a trip to Tokyo where I don’t have any responsibilities and can just be a tourist.

Was there a moment you realized this year’s team might have something special?
Maybe you look back and you say, “That was the moment,” but that’s only looking back. Earlier in the season, we were thinking, “Oh, this is one of those years,” and it’s all down and out. And then suddenly, we’re flying to California for a League Championship Series and hopefully beyond. So yeah, it has been remarkable.

We’ve had a couple of years—2015, now this year—where you have the moments when the stadium becomes more of a home. This is our place now. It’s not just another ballpark, not just another booth, but this is home.

RELATED STORY: New York Mets Radio Engineer Shares 5 Most Memorable Moments

How did you decide to go to Fordham and get involved with WFUV?
At Herricks High School [on Long Island], there was an English teacher who was a Fordham alum, and he always tried to steer one or two of us a year to Fordham. Around that same time I had started listening to One on One, FUV’s sports call-in show on the weekend. So, through Mr. Desmond at Herricks High School, and then listening to FUV, I was introduced to Fordham, and I applied and got in.

When I got to Fordham, I thought I would go more toward writing and just never made it to the newspaper. A bunch of friends and I were all commuter students and instead of hanging out in the commuter lounge, we hung out in the hallway at FUV.

I started doing some stuff on air. By the time senior year rolled around, I was the sports director. We were doing the play-by-play for football and basketball and even some baseball. There’s a group of us from the radio station who still are close, and we get the whole gang together when we can.

And you still do public address work at Fordham too?
Yep. I was still in school, and I started doing the public address for some of the women’s basketball games. I’ve continued to do that to this day. Joe DiBari and the folks over in the athletic department are very accommodating. They’ll say, “Hey man, whenever your schedule allows, we’d love to have you up to still do the game.”

So I still do a couple of football games a year and about 20 basketball games between the men and the women. In a way, it’s like I never left because I’m still up there all the time. Once Fordham gets in your blood, it’s tough to get it out.

Interview conducted, condensed, and edited by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

This story was updated on October 25.

On Sunday evening, the show won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Scripted Variety Series—its ninth win in a row—and as senior writer on the show, Vali took home his eighth Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series, a dynastic run of critical success that he calls “humbling.” The show, which each week takes an irreverent deep dive into a broad range of issues like net neutrality, televangelism, and predatory lending, also earned Vali a prestigious Peabody Award in 2018. Fordham Magazine spoke with the 2010 Fordham College at Rose Hill grad about the role comedy plays in tackling big issues, why Oliver is so good at what he does, and, naturally, the thrills of ice climbing.     

What are some of the big differences you encountered going from a print/digital publication to working on a weekly TV show?
I think the biggest thing is that here, there’s such a heavy research element to the show. Obviously we did research at The Onion, and we wanted things to be accurate in the world of the stories, but we weren’t really consulting experts from Harvard about anything.

To give you a rundown of how we make a story, a topic is pitched and the research team will compile a document that can be 100 pages, like “I’ve talked to people at Boeing, I’ve talked to people who are experts in aviation at various universities.” And meanwhile, the footage department will compile documentaries and news reports, all sorts of footage, as well as funny clips that we could potentially use. Most stories here are a four- or five- or six-week process.

Another element I’m really interested in is that you’re writing for a specific person—a specific voice—in John Oliver. How did you get used to writing things for his particular delivery?
It was its own bit of a learning curve. But then once you know where the boundaries are and what works and what doesn’t, you can just have fun.

To John’s credit, I think he does a great job of adopting elements of our comedic voices as writers. So there are definitely jokes where he’s obviously speaking as himself, but I am injecting my comedic sensibility in there as well, and he is manifesting that. It’s a cool two-way street where we’re writing for his voice, but he is also giving us the freedom to write in our own voices and he will find his own way to perform it.

How would you describe what makes something funny coming from him?
He has a humongous comedic range, which is why I think he’s able to manifest different writers’ voices. I always write long runs with him being obsessive over weird things, where he’ll zero in on some weird esoteric thing that is only tangentially related to the topic of the show and talk about it for six minutes—where he’ll be really into weightlifting or really into horses or really into aquatic life. Those are always really fun for me. I feel like it gives us the opportunity as writers to obsess over those topics.

While it’s not necessarily focused on electoral politics, Last Week Tonight is certainly a political comedy show in some ways. What do you see as the societal role of that style of comedy?
I think everyone falls on a different spot on that map of making people laugh versus taking a more activist approach towards what you’re writing. The kind of comedy and satire that I find to be the most effective is when you’re talking about something that’s a really difficult issue, but you’re finding a moment of catharsis that everyone can collectively feel.

I don’t know if we’re going to change anyone’s mind on anything. I’m guessing that most of the people who watch this show are probably more politically aligned with us than not. But I do think if you can make them think about something in a way that they hadn’t before, that’s a success. And if you can do that while making them laugh and entertaining them—that’s what I strive to do.

One thing that I think is smart about the show is that there are often built-in calls to action—and some of those are really funny calls to action that speak to the absurdity of a situation.
Totally. And I think we like highlighting things that are maybe on the more boring side or technical side of politics—something as technical as gerrymandering or zoning. It’s cool to put a magnifying glass on things that can go under the radar but that are actually really important.

Between seasons, I’m sure there’s a lot of work being done, but presumably you have at least a little bit of a break there. How do you spend that time?
Yeah, we usually get about seven or eight weeks between seasons. It’s really nice to have a break to decompress and work on my own personal writing. And I also really like ice climbing, so I go to western Colorado and ice climb for a few weeks, which is always fun.

Oh wow, ice climbing?!
Yeah, I started getting into it around 2019. I tried it for the first time and I started getting super into it. There’s a place in southwestern Colorado called Ouray that actually has an ice climbing park. It’s a gorge that they water and they actually make ice on it. I’ve been going there for a few weeks every year for the last few years. Just getting to play in this ice wonderland for a few weeks is a nice way to decompress after the season, and then I feel like I’m rebalanced and ready to go for the new one.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

They step in unison, arms pumping down in front of them like pistons. They kick a leg out and, exactly on the six-count, spin 90 degrees to repeat their march. Then again, another 90 degrees, before launching off the ground for a spin. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame their movements with views of West 55th Street and Ninth Avenue, where cars, buses, and pedestrians are engaged in their own choreography, sometimes slowing to take in the studio scene. There’s no music inside—only footsteps, hard breathing, and shouted notes of correction and encouragement.

The dancers are seniors in the Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program, which is celebrating its 25th year. They’re in the Joan Weill Center for Dance in Manhattan—home of the Ailey School, five blocks from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus—rehearsing teacher and choreographer Earl Mosley’s Running Spirits (Revival and Restaging) for the program’s annual benefit concert in mid-April.

In another ground-floor studio about a month before the concert, first-year students take West African Dance with Imani Faye. As a drummer slaps out a beat on a djembe, Faye guides the students through their own performance piece, Den-Kouly (Celebration), with its traditional Tiriba and Mané dance styles from Guinea.

As the students work to nail the choreography, they’re also grappling with bigger, more complex movements. For the first-years, it’s the culmination of nine months spent testing themselves, body and mind. Are they able to balance a rigorous dance training program and a rigorous academic curriculum? And for the seniors, it’s a time of final exams and frequent auditions. Are they ready to secure their place in the professional dance world?

Carrying on the Legacy of an American Dance Pioneer

The idea for a best-of-both worlds BFA program—top dance training and top academics in New York City—came several years before the first class arrived in the fall of 1998. Edward Bristow, then dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, struck up a conversation with Ailey School director Denise Jefferson in line at the West 60th Street post office. He believed Fordham could do more to make its presence felt “at the center of the arts world,” and Jefferson was interested in building a college degree program for Ailey dancers. “We knew that given our strengths, we could pull off something special,” he recalled.

Today, the program is led by Melanie Person, co-director of the Ailey School, and Andrew Clark, a Fordham professor of French and comparative literature who had served as an advisor to many BFA students before succeeding Bristow as co-director in 2023. Through their leadership, the Ailey/Fordham students are staying true to the vision set forth by Bristow and Jefferson, who died in 2010. They’re also upholding the legacy of Alvin Ailey himself, a towering figure in modern dance.

Ailey founded his namesake dance company in 1958, when he was 27 years old. His story and the story of the company he founded are inextricable from the histories of Black art in America and the Civil Rights Movement. At a time when Black dancers found it next to impossible to make a career through their craft, Ailey created a home for them. Since its inception, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has become not only one of the most successful Black-founded arts institutions in the United States but also one of the premier modern dance companies in the world, described in a 2008 congressional resolution as “a vital American cultural ambassador to the world.”

Texas native Antuan Byers, FCLC ’17, is one of many BFA students and alumni who say they were drawn to the program after seeing the company perform during their formative years. “I attended my first Alvin Ailey performance my senior year of high school, in that moment of still being on the fence about where I wanted to go to school,” said Byers, who was a member of Ailey II, the company’s junior ensemble, and now dances most frequently with the Metropolitan Opera. “After seeing the Ailey company, it all became clear.”

For many Black students in the BFA program, Alvin Ailey’s legacy serves both as an inspiration and a reminder of the challenges that dancers of color have faced. It’s hard to miss that legacy when you’re inside the Weill Center, with its walls lined with photos and ephemera spanning seven decades.

“Every day I try to use the weight of his legacy to further encourage me and push me in my craft,” said Naia Neal, a rising senior from Santa Cruz, California, who earned the program’s Denise Jefferson Memorial Scholarship and is pursuing a minor in math. “Alvin Ailey loved to dance, but he also understood that dance should be for everyone. He made it known that everybody deserved to be there.”

The dance landscape looks a good deal different today than it did in 1958. Black choreographers like Kyle Abraham and Camille Brown have had their work performed by New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera; Black dancers are members of most major companies in the United States; and Black administrators are artistic directors at places like Pacific Northwest Ballet and Philadanco. But on many stages, Black dancers are still underrepresented, and for many students of color, a place like the Ailey School still functions as a home where they can chart a professional path.

“Something about being here has opened up a completely different relationship with me and what I add to different spaces and what it means to be a Black dancer,” said Carley Brooks, a rising Ailey/Fordham senior from Chicago pursuing a minor in communication and media studies. “The [Ailey] building allows me to feel so comfortable and confident in my body and what I have to present.”

Developing the Whole Dancer

If one thing defines the Ailey/Fordham experience, it’s the need to find balance within a hectic schedule. All students take ballet every semester, a way to keep them grounded in classical technique, and in their first year, they also take West African Dance and begin training in either the Horton technique or Graham-based modern dance. They also have foundational classes like Improvisation, Body Conditioning, and Anatomy and Kinesiology. And they take two Fordham core curriculum classes each semester, including first-year staples like English Composition and Rhetoric and Faith and Critical Reasoning.

In their sophomore year, students decide if they want to pursue a second major or a minor. It’s a decision they don’t make lightly, as it comes with extra coursework, but for many students, it’s a way to help them plan for careers beyond performing—and to infuse their dance practice with outside influences. That year, they also take Composition, and for many of them, it’s the first time they formally work on their own choreography—a complex process, with varying notation systems and a good deal of trial and error.

As juniors, the students continue to branch out intellectually. In the Ailey academic class Black Traditions in Modern Dance, they engage with history while also thinking about the artistic choices involved in a performance. Meanwhile, in Fordham classrooms, many begin fulfilling the requirements for a second major.

They also have a chance to become mentors to their first-year counterparts. Jaron Givens, a rising senior originally from Prince George’s County, Maryland, who is majoring in both dance and environmental studies, has relished the opportunity to pay forward the mentorship he received during his first year. He took part in the Ailey Students Ailey Professionals mentorship program, which pairs students with Ailey company members. Givens met with Courtney Celeste Spears, FCLC ’16, who he said “facilitated a space where I was able to be vulnerable … and showed me how much Ailey cared.”

The Ailey School has been working with Minding the Gap, an organization that offers mental health services to dancers. The hope is to give students as much access to mental health support as they have to things like on-site physical therapists at the Weill Center. On the Fordham side, faculty describe a similar focus on students’ well-being. “I try to … get a sense of what their concerns are, what they’re enjoying, and what they’re struggling with,” Clark said. “That’s where you really get a sense of the whole person and you have the ability to help out.”

There’s also a natural level of camaraderie that comes from spending so much time with fellow BFA students, both in dance classes and often in academic ones. “For us, it’s not a competition,” said Sarah Hladky, a rising junior who is majoring in English as well as dance. “Ailey very much emphasizes the fact that there is a space for everyone. And so even if people come in feeling like they need to prove themselves, at the end of the day you leave being like, ‘No, I am the dancer that I am, and you are the dancer that you are. And we can coexist and really make a great environment for each other.’”

While a sense of community is integral to the Ailey/Fordham experience, students are well aware that they’re training for a highly competitive profession. The postgrad goal for many of them is to join a dance company full time—with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II often at the top of the list. Many alumni earn a spot in those companies and others such as Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Radio City Rockettes. Others regularly appear on Broadway stages and in film and TV productions. But a benefit of their Fordham studies is that they graduate prepared for any number of career paths.

“My education at Fordham was instrumental in my formation as an artist and businesswoman, providing me with a depth of knowledge, curiosity, and appreciation for many subjects that gave me a foundation to build on,” said Katherine Horrigan, a 2002 graduate who went on to dance with Ailey II, Elisa Monte Dance Company, and a number of other companies around the world before launching a dance academy in Virginia.

Spears encourages Ailey/Fordham students to “build your academic resume as much as you build your dance resume.” She said the program expanded her ideas of what she could do as an artist and a leader. She began dancing with Ailey II in 2015, her senior year, and moved up to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater before deciding in 2023 to focus full time on ArtSea, her arts organization in the Bahamas. “I think if you focus on having viable options and stretching how many different places you are able to impact, you then have the mountaintop,” she said.

[RELATED STORY: “Bridging Art and Entrepreneurship”]

For Samar Haddad King, a 2005 Ailey/Fordham graduate, a composition class with Kazuko Hirabayashi was so transformative that she decided to focus on choreography. For her class’s senior concert, she premiered an original piece, and the following year, with her BFA classmate Zoe Rabinowitz, she co-founded the company Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre, based in both New York City and the West Bank. Nearly 20 years later, they have brought their work to 17 countries around the world.

Rabinowitz has carved out her own unique path since graduating in 2005. While she still dances in Yaa Samar! and elsewhere, her role as the company’s executive director builds upon several post-college jobs in arts administration, and she has also taught yoga and Pilates throughout her career. Acknowledging the finite amount of time most people can dance professionally, she said it’s important for young dancers not only to develop academic interests but also to take an expansive view of the dance world.

“Finding the things that you enjoy doing—the passions and the strengths that you have cultivated inside and outside of your dance training—and finding ways that you can do those things to implement jobs and create sources of income is going to be critical for most people,” Rabinowitz said, adding that dancers are known as great team members across industries. “Recognize that you come with a really strong skill set and work ethic, and that you have the capacity to do a lot of things.”

Person, the Ailey School co-director, echoed that sentiment. “The skills that they acquire as dancers are going to be transferable in any aspect of their lives. With the Fordham degree and their strong academics, they’re well situated to exist in the world.”

Whatever part of the dance or professional world they end up in, Ailey/Fordham alumni often maintain the close bonds they shared as undergraduates, and now there’s an additional way for them to stay connected. Ahead of the program’s 25th anniversary, Byers and Maya Addie, a 2021 graduate who is a member of the Radio City Rockettes, learned about Fordham’s affinity chapters—alumni communities formed around shared interests, past student involvement, or professional goals. They decided to start one for Ailey/Fordham BFA graduates.

“It’s a personal goal of ours to bring together our alumni because we have such a wealth of knowledge in that group,” Byers said. “In dance but also in our incredible business owners, or folks working in politics, folks working in finance, people teaching, people with kids. We see this 25th anniversary as an opportunity for us to really build an alumni program with all that excitement and energy.”

A Performance to Mark Endings and New Beginnings

On the evening of the spring benefit concert, after a cocktail reception on the sixth floor of the Weill Center, family, friends, and fans of the BFA program made their way to the Ailey Citigroup Theater on the building’s lower level. Following a brief video highlighting the history and mission of the program, Neal kicked off the evening’s performances with The Serpent, a solo piece choreographed by Jonathan Lee. To the pulsing beat of Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been,” she gave a high-energy performance that incorporated styles ranging from modern and hip-hop to voguing. Unlike the more restrained audience traditions one might see up the street at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the audience cheered throughout the piece.

That energy level, both onstage and in the crowd, continued with the first-year students’ West African piece, Den-Kouly (Celebration), featuring vibrant costumes and jubilant movement. The sophomores performed an excerpt from the more ballet-centric For They Are Rivers, choreographed by Becky Brown, and the juniors danced an excerpt from Darshan Singh Bhuller’s athletic, abstract Mapping. Three Ailey/Fordham alumni—Mikaela Brandon, FCLC ’19; Naya Hutchinson, FCLC ’21; and Shaina McGregor, FCLC ’18—came back to dance alongside Neal in Four Women, choreographed by senior student Baili Goer.

The final performance of the night, appropriately, belonged to the seniors. Since that March rehearsal of Running Spirits, Mosley had revealed to the students the meaning behind the piece, which he first choreographed for a group of preteen boys at a summer program in Connecticut in the late 1990s. At the time, he explained, he was dealing with a group of rambunctious kids who loved to run around—and whose parents thought of them as “little angels.” It made him imagine a scene in which a group of angels, who get around via running instead of flying, are all gathering in the morning to plan out their work agenda for the day.

“When I tell dancers that’s what it’s about,” Mosley said, “they always laugh because they’re like, ‘Really? That’s all? So we’re just literally getting ready to go to work?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, you’re just getting ready to go to work.’”

It’s a playful piece, but the version Mosley created for these graduating dancers is one that requires strong technique and collaboration, and features impressive jumps, lifts, and, as the title suggests, speed. There was a sense of mischief onstage, an almost conspiratorial glee to the movements. That tone felt appropriate considering all the students had been through in their nearly four years together, from beginning the program at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to trying to wrap up their final semesters while planning for the future.

“This past year has probably been the most challenging in terms of juggling my schedule,” said Meredith Brown, a dance and economics double major from Asheville, North Carolina. “Because I’m also auditioning and making sure that I’m taking care of myself and enjoying the city and taking advantage of all these wonderful things.”

Brown and her fellow 2024 graduates are in a better place to manage those competing demands than they were four years ago—not only more experienced but also more confident.

“When I think about my first year, there was a lot of imposter syndrome,” said Abby Nguyen, a 2024 grad from the Bay Area who double majored in dance and psychology. “There was this constant feeling like I needed to prove myself, that I needed to prove that I was good enough to be here. But ultimately, you are here, and you are good enough to be here—or else you wouldn’t be in the building.”

The dancers’ growth has also been visible to Person, who recalled the challenges the Class of 2024 faced starting college during the pandemic. “I was watching them rehearse the other day, and I think they really came together as a class,” she said. “I think they relied on each other to push through this, honestly. … I think it gave them this inner strength that they might not have even recognized that they have.”

And while challenges certainly lie ahead—auditions, demanding dance jobs, the threat of injuries, and more—Mosley believes this group of graduates is ready to face them.

“They give me the energy like, ‘Oh, I know I’m going to do something,’” he said. “‘There’s
no doubt, I’m going to do something.’ This group as a whole is all about it.”

“Artists are entrepreneurs. We are our own business.” That’s what Fordham Theatre grad Marjuan Canady, FCLC ’08, says when she teaches creative entrepreneurship at places like Georgetown University and NYU. Her words ring true for many Fordham alumni who have cut a professional path with their arts and business acumen.

“There’s creativity in everything that is going on in the room, whether it’s the business side or the actual creative side,” said Canady, who founded Sepia Works, a multimedia production company, and Canady Foundation for the Arts, a nonprofit that creates educational and career opportunities for youth of color by connecting them with professional artists. “That’s what makes it fun.”

SaVonne Anderson, FCLC ’17

Founder and Creative Director, Aya Paper Co.

After graduating from Fordham in 2017 with a degree in new media and digital design, SaVonne Anderson worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she had interned as a student. Being around inspiring art got her gears turning, and she decided to start her own greeting card and stationery business, Aya Paper Co., in 2019. The following year, she decided to focus on Aya full time. Since then, her work has been featured in Time, Allure, and Forbes magazines, and carried in stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Whole Foods. And while it can be difficult to balance her design and illustration work with the demands of running a business and the challenges of parenting a toddler, Anderson feels it’s all worth it.

Martha Clippinger, FCRH ’05

Artist and Designer

Like many textile artists, Martha Clippinger, FCRH ’05, was greatly influenced by the Gee’s Bend collective, a group of African American quilters whose work she first saw at the Whitney Museum as a Fordham student. “It ignited a desire to explore color and shape and rhythm,” she says. More than 20 years later, Clippinger has made a career out of that artistic exploration, displaying her work in museums, galleries, and corporate collections, and selling bags, rugs, and tablet covers on her website. Some of those items are woven by her professional partners in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she spent time on a Fulbright-Garcia Robles grant in 2013.

Katte Geneta, FCLC ’06

Founder, Narra Studio

Katte Geneta grew up thinking she was going to become a doctor. But when she arrived at Fordham and took a fine arts class, she discovered a talent for drawing. After graduating in 2006, she exhibited her paintings and later pursued a master’s degree in museum studies at Harvard. Soon, she took up weaving—the smell of oil paint made her nauseous while she was pregnant. Motivated by a conversation with a weaver in the Philippines who was hoping to find broader exposure, she started Narra Studio. The studio sometimes designs goods and sometimes just works on distribution. It partners with upward of 15 weaving communities in the Philippines and sells the pieces—from jewelry and blankets to jackets and traditional barong tops—through its website and at markets.

Bryan Master, FCRH ’99

Composer; Founder and Executive Producer, Sound + Fission and Partner in Crime Entertainment

Bryan Master has been writing and playing music for as long as he can remember—he apologizes to any Fordham neighbors who may have heard his frequent drumming at Rose Hill. But when he graduated in 1999 with a degree in communications, his passion took a backseat to his job in advertising—until 2022. That’s when his side hustle—a music, production, and creative services company called Sound + Fission—became a sustainable, full-time endeavor, thanks, he says, to a boom in audio storytelling listenership. Along with his other company, Partner in Crime, which focuses on creating and developing series, Sound + Fission was behind Can You Dig It?, an original Audible series about the birth of hip-hop that featured narration from Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

Courtney Celeste Spears, FCLC ’16

Co-Founder and Director, ArtSea

Courtney Celeste Spears had achieved many of her dreams as a dancer: She began dancing with Ailey II—Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s second company—while she was still a student in the Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program, and she joined the main company in 2018, two years after graduating. Last summer, though, she made the leap to devote herself full time to ArtSea, a Bahamas-based arts organization she founded with her brother, Asa Carey, in 2017. Now living on the island, where she spent time visiting family as a child, Spears works to bring high-level dance education and entertainment to the Caribbean and expose young artists to the wider dance world.

Since the 1970s, Fordham students have been studying and contributing to the spirit of innovation and community renewal that has come to define what it means to be a Bronxite.

Fifty years ago, a new art form burst forth on the streets of the Bronx, born from rich musical traditions and a spirit of innovation in neighborhoods of color ravaged by deindustrialization and written off by most of the country. In the ensuing decades, the Fordham community has not only studied and celebrated hip-hop as a revolutionary cultural force but also helped preserve its Bronx legacy—through efforts to recognize the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as the genre’s birthplace, and through oral-history interviews with some of hip-hop’s seminal figures.

“I think the lesson is, let’s explore, interrogate, and embrace the cultural creativity of our surrounding areas because it’s unparalleled,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of African and African American studies and founding director of Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project.

Naison teaches a popular class, From Rock and Roll to Hip-Hop, that draws on artists like Cardi B, Nas, and Run-DMC to understand the music and its part in U.S. history—and to explore issues he’s spent his career teaching. “I’m not a hip-hop scholar,” he said. “Rather, I’m someone who works to have community voices heard.”

And just as the music has evolved over the past 50 years, so have efforts to revitalize the borough and tell the stories of its residents.

Challenging ‘Deeply Entrenched Stereotypes’

Amplifying community voices is at the heart of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Fordham launched the project in 2002, at the request of the Bronx County Historical Society, to document and preserve the history of Black people in New York City’s northernmost borough. Naison and his team of Fordham students, faculty, and community historians have spoken with hip-hop pioneers like Pete DJ Jones and Kurtis Blow, but the project is much broader: The archive contains verbatim transcripts of interviews with educators, politicians, social workers, businesspeople, clergy members, athletes, and leaders of community-based organizations who have lived and worked in the Bronx since the 1930s. The archive, which also includes scholarly essays about the Bronx, was digitized in 2015, making the interviews fully accessible to the public.

“Starting by interviewing a small number of people I already knew,” Naison wrote in Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s (Fordham University Press, 2016), “I stumbled upon a large, passionate, and knowledgeable group of people who had been waiting for years to tell stories of communities long forgotten, communities whose very history challenged deeply entrenched stereotypes about Black and Latino settlement of the Bronx.”

For Naison, the project highlights how the borough, defying the odds, rebuilt neighborhoods following the arson of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. The neighborhoods, with lower crime rates, saw community life flourish again, and in recent decades, the Bronx became a location of choice for new immigrants to New York. BAAHP research includes interviews with Bronxites from Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, among other nations. It gives voice to growing, diverse immigrant communities that have enlivened Bronx neighborhoods where Jewish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican people lived before them. “The Bronx is this site where people mix their cultures and they create something new,” Naison said. “It makes this a lot of fun to study.”

Shaping Global Perceptions

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, helped facilitate at least 50 BAAHP interviews from 2004 to 2010, when he was the project’s research director. He said the archive is useful for anyone studying how cities have changed over the decades.

“I hope people use it to think differently about the Bronx, to include the Bronx more deeply and broadly in urban studies in the United States,” said Purnell, now an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Bowdoin College, where he uses the Fordham archive in his own research and in the classroom with his students. “I hope that it also expands how we think about Black people in New York City and in American cities in general from the mid-20th century onward.”

Since 2015, when the BAAHP archives were made available online, the digital recordings have been accessed by thousands of scholars around the world, from Nairobi to Singapore, Paris to Berlin. Peter Schultz Jørgensen, an urbanist and author in Denmark, has been using information from the digital archive to complete a book titled Our Bronx!

“Portraying and documenting everyday life in the Bronx, as it once was, is essential in protecting the people of the Bronx from misrepresentation, while at the same time providing valuable knowledge that can help shape their future,” he said. “Just as BAAHP gathers the web of memory, my book is about the struggles that people and community organizations have waged and are waging in the Bronx. And more important, and encouraging, it talks about how they are now scaling up via the Bronxwide Coalition and their Bronxwide plan for more economic and democratic control of the borough.”

Championing Bronx Renewal

The movement Jørgensen describes is one in which members of the Fordham community have long played key roles, according to historian and journalist Jill Jonnes, author of South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. In the mid-1980s, when she published the first edition of the book, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment and arson that had ravaged the borough.

“Today, we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying these neighborhoods,” Jonnes wrote in a preface to the third edition of South Bronx Rising, published last year by Fordham University Press. “Even as fires relentlessly spread across the borough—as landlords extracted what they could from their properties regardless of the human cost—local activists and the social justice Catholics were mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.”

One of those Catholics was Paul Brant, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic (and later priest) who arrived at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the late 1960s to teach and to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. At the time, faith in the viability of cities was at a low point. Deindustrialization, suburbanization, and two decades of studied underinvestment had taken their predictable toll. The Bronx was experiencing the worst of it, and the people who lived in its neighborhoods were demonized as the cause of the problems.

Brant, who died in May 2023 at the age of 82, wanted to understand what could be done. He earned a spot in New York City’s prestigious Urban Fellows program, meant to harness ideas for a city in crisis. Gregarious and forceful, yet able to work diplomatically, he had the backing of Fordham’s president at the time, James Finlay, S.J., to serve as the University’s liaison to the Bronx. With other young Jesuits, he lived in an apartment south of campus, on 187th Street and Marion Avenue, gaining firsthand insight into the scope of neglect and abandonment afflicting the borough.

“Paul felt, well, look, there’s a lot of people still in these neighborhoods. It’s not inevitable that everything gets worse,” said Roger Hayes, GSAS ’95, one of Brant’s former Jesuit seminary classmates. “What are we going to do?”

Long conversations with Hayes and Jim Mitchell, another seminary friend, convinced Brant that solutions to the Bronx’s problems would come by directing the power of the people themselves. In 1972, they formed a neighborhood association in nearby Morris Heights. They used relationships within the parish to confront negligent landlords. Seeing nascent successes there, they moved to launch a larger group.

In 1974, Brant convinced pastors from 10 Catholic parishes to sponsor an organization to fight for the community, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCC) was born. The group expanded to include Protestant and Jewish clergy—membership was always nonsectarian—and went on to train leaders in hundreds of tenant associations and neighborhood groups, including the University Neighborhood Housing Program, which Fordham helped to establish in the early 1980s to create, preserve, and improve affordable housing in the Bronx, and which has been led for many years by Fordham graduate Jim Buckley, FCRH ’76.

All of these groups were knit together across racial lines and around share interests during the worst years of abandonment and destruction. When they learned that rotten apartments had roots beyond individual slumlords, they picketed banks for redlining, the practice of withholding loans to people in neighborhoods considered a poor economic risk. Before long, Bronx homemakers and blue-collar workers were boarding buses to City Hall, demanding meetings with commissioners and testifying at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

With similar people-power organizations nationwide, they won changes in the nation’s banking laws through the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, drove reinvestment to cities, and sprouted a new ecosystem of nonprofit affordable housing.

Preserving Hip-Hop’s Bronx Birthplace

It’s the stuff of legend now: On August 11, 1973, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a 100-plus-unit apartment building just blocks from the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music.

Fast forward to 2008, when 1520 Sedgwick was laden with debt acquired by Wall Street investors who were failing to maintain the building. Organizers from the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, a group focused on preserving affordable housing, hoped that documenting 1520’s history would help save it. They asked Fordham professor Mark Naison, Ph.D., to help. His research—which led to a lecture on C-SPAN and was highlighted in an August 2008 appearance on the PBS show History Detectives—helped convince the city government to intervene, eventually preserving the building as a decent and affordable place to live. In 2021, its standing became official: The U.S. Congress adopted a resolution acknowledging 1520 Sedgwick as the birthplace of hip-hop.

Learning About Bronx Renewal

Each year, Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning shares this view of Bronx (and Fordham) history with incoming students, particularly those who participate in its Urban Plunge program in late August. The pre-orientation program gives new students the chance to explore the city’s neighborhoods and join local efforts to foster community development.

“For 30 years, the Plunge experience has offered our students their first introduction to institutions like Part of the Solution and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, organizations founded by Fordham community members in collaboration with local residents that have built community, advocated for justice, and provided services and resources for the whole person,” said Julie Gafney, Ph.D., Fordham’s assistant vice president for strategic mission initiatives and executive director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Students learn directly from local residents and policy experts about how they can shape policy decisions and build a better future for Fordham and its neighbors. “We really want to introduce first-year students, along with their upper-class mentors, to what’s driving community work in the Bronx right now,” Gafney said. “It’s an ideal ground for fostering a four-year commitment to community solution-building here in the Bronx.”

Reimagining the Cross Bronx

On August 25, nearly 250 first-year Fordham students fanned out across the Bronx as part of Urban Plunge. They served lunch to those in need at POTS—Part of the Solution, where Fordham graduate Jack Marth, FCRH ’86, is the director of programs; they helped refurbish Poe Park and the community-maintained Drew Gardens, adjacent to the Bronx River; and they visited the NWBCCC, now led by Fordham graduate Sandra Lobo, FCRH ’97, GSS ’04.

Students also learned about the Cross Bronx Expressway, a major highway built in the mid-20th century that has been blamed not only for separating Bronx communities but also for worsening air and noise pollution in the borough, contributing to residents’ high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases.

Before visiting parts of the expressway, students heard from Nilka Martell, founding director of Loving the Bronx, a nonprofit that has been leading community efforts to cap the Cross Bronx and develop public green spaces above and around it. A few years ago, Martell connected with Fordham graduate Alex Levine, FCRH ’14, who was pursuing the same goal.

At Fordham, Levine majored in economics and Chinese studies and interned at the Department of City Planning in the Bronx. By 2020, he was a third-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he co-founded the Bronx One Policy Group, a student advocacy organization focused on capping an approximately 2.5-mile section of the Cross Bronx that runs below street level. The idea is to cover the road with parks and install vents to remove toxic fumes caused by vehicular traffic. They said the cost of the project, estimated to be about $1 billion, would be offset by higher property values and lower health care costs.

“When you think of preventive medicine, it impacts everyone’s life,” Levine told the Bronx Times in 2021. “If we can get a small portion of this capped, then it might be a catalyst to happen on the rest of the highway. This is a project that can save money and lives.”

Martell said Levine’s group connected her with Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who had published a study on the benefits of capping the Cross Bronx.

“We created this perfect trifecta,” she said. They brought their idea to Rep. Ritchie Torres, and in December 2022, the city received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study how to reimagine the Cross Bronx. Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning later received a $25,000 grant from the New York City Department of Transportation as one of only 10 community partners selected to help the department gather input from residents who live near the expressway.

The feasibility-study funding is just a first step, Martell told students during an Urban Plunge panel discussion that featured a representative of the city planning department’s Bronx office and an asthma program manager from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “This isn’t easy,” Martell said. “If this was easy and there was a point-by-point playbook on how to get it done, all these projects would happen.”

But recent Bronx history gives her ample reason to press on. “You know, 40 years ago, we had the restoration of the Bronx River. Fifty years ago, we had the creation of hip-hop.” When there was little support and “no other outlet,” she said, “Bronxites came together to create an outlet.”

“For me, this is what it’s like to be a Bronxite; this is what it’s like to be in the Bronx—to have this kind of energy and these organizing skills to get things done.”

—Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, teaches journalism at Lehman College and is working on a book about the people’s movement that helped rebuild the Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s. Taylor Ha is a senior writer and videographer in the president’s office and the marketing and communications division at Fordham.

Fordham grads are at the heart of a new collective giving artists and audiences space to develop and discover new works.

How do up-and-coming artists break through, and how do people discover new and exciting art?

A group of Fordham graduates thinks they have an answer. The Village is a new collective that the graduates created to support artists through live events that create community, similar to what they experienced as students at the University’s Lincoln Center campus.

“Our [art and media] consumption has become very individual and yet so impersonal because all of our feeds are just churning out more of what we already like,” said Marc David Wright, a 2019 Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduate and co-founder of the Village. “Our events provide a bit of excitement and surprise.”

Wright launched the collective a few years ago with Caroline Potter Shriver, a 2019 graduate of the Ailey/Fordham BFA in dance program, to give artists a place to share their work—or works in progress—with engaged audiences through live events called salons.

Singers, dancers, poets, writers, and visual and performing artists of all kinds can apply to be a part of the events, which are held four times a year and typically feature about 10 artists a night. The next one is scheduled to take place at Ideal Glass Studios in Greenwich Village on March 25. The salons are broken into three parts—a visual arts showcase, performances, and an after party featuring a DJ and an opportunity for artists and attendees to mingle.

Art for Humans, Curated by Humans

Shriver said that they curate the events so there’s a “diversity of artists and art types,” and people leave the events “feeling so inspired to create.” The mix of genres is designed not only to entertain audiences but also connect artists across disciplines.

“If they’re a painter and they saw an actor do something really cool, and now they’re thinking about how they can bring their art into the performance art space—just the creativity and the inspiration that comes from being celebrated is really impactful,” Shriver said.

Wright said he, Shriver, and Dana Seach, FCLC ’19, GABELLI ’20, the third member of the team, work to foster that kind of cross-pollination.

“We have preliminary artists’ socials before every salon in which just the artists present their work for one another, and we ask specific feedback of each other,” he said. “And it really just took me back to Fordham Theatre’s cultivating of community and of collaboration, which I think has greatly influenced the vibes of the Village.”

Shriver and Wright got the idea for the Village when they were working together on The Stella Show—Shriver’s one-woman performance piece exploring “sisterhood, grief, and the unpredictable magic of memory.”

The pair had developed a 15-minute segment in 2021 and wanted to get some feedback on it. At the same time, coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, they sensed a desire among artists to reconnect. That fall, in a friend’s Tribeca loft, they shared their work with some friends who were also “working on things that weren’t really ready, but were ready for some kind of audience,” Shriver said.

After it was over, Wright and Shriver said everyone immediately asked, “When are we doing this again?” And like that, the Village was formed.

A Growing Community

After that initial gathering, Seach reached out and said she wanted to get involved. Seach, who earned a bachelor’s degree in film and TV and a master’s in media management at Fordham, now serves as the group’s managing director, with Shriver and Wright as artistic directors. Wright also handles marketing and social media, and Shriver works on fundraising, sponsorships, and community outreach.

The Village has hosted eight salons in the past two years in Manhattan, selling out small studio spaces. The co-founders expect the upcoming Salon 9 to be their biggest event to date, as the group has continued to grow. The collective is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit arts service that allows them to take in donations that support the events and some of the artists’ works.

While most salons have been in New York City, in February the team expanded to the West Coast. Working with fellow Fordham alumni David Kahawaii IV, FCLC ’18, and Elizabeth Kline, FCLC ’19, the group produced its first event in Los Angeles.

“I feel like every salon improves from the last one, and I felt that was still the case with this, even though we were starting fresh out there,” Seach said. “I think just the opportunity to expand our community is so exciting and great for us.”

I first met Charlie in 1973, when I was a sophomore at Fordham University. I had heard him many times on CBS Radio and admired his work. So I wrote him a letter and asked if he had any advice for an aspiring broadcast journalist.

To my delight, Charlie wrote back. “I’m afraid I’m not much on advice,” he said. “But as you may know, I’m an old Ram myself. If you’d like to visit the Broadcast Center sometime, give a call and I’ll lay on the fifty cents tour for free.”

I called right away, before he could forget who I was, and one winter morning, I hopped on the D train in the Bronx and headed down to CBS News headquarters on West 57th Street in Manhattan.

Charlie had one of the most distinctive voices in radio. And over the years, I had formed a mental picture of him to match it. I thought. When Charlie greeted me, the voice was familiar but the image was not. I could not believe that amazing voice was coming out of this stranger. As he showed me around, it took a while before the voice and the speaker synced up in my mind.

Charlie bought me breakfast at the CBS cafeteria. He told me he had spent a lot of time in his Fordham days at the student-run radio station, WFUV. I took that as a suggestion, and when I returned to campus, I headed to the station and went to work in the news department.

A decade later, after working as an AP broadcast writer and editor, I was offered a job at CBS News, at the radio network, where Charlie was the star. By then, he had long since forgotten me, but we soon reconnected when I was assigned to write radio newscasts for him.

Charlie always ended with a kicker. One he wrote that I’ll never forget was about a truck flipping over and spilling its cargo of cookies all over the roadway. Charlie ended by saying:

“That’s the way the (pause) ball bounces. Fooled you!”

Brilliant.

My job when I wrote for Charlie was to find a kicker worthy of him and write it well. It was a challenge I enjoyed.

One Sunday night, I wrote a kicker for his 8 p.m. radio newscast about a study that found watching too much TV could make you fat. The punchline: “Someone once called television a vast wasteland. Looks like too much of it could lead to a vast waistline.”

Charlie looked at the copy and said, “This is good enough to steal.” And steal it he did. He used the line again on his 11 p.m. television broadcast.

That broadcast was called the CBS Sunday Night News. It was 15 minutes long and, in 1986, I became Charlie’s writing partner on it. We split up the stories and challenged each other each week to come up with the best line. I never had so much fun in my life.

I will always be grateful to Charlie for the kindness he showed me as a young college student and for the privilege of working with him as a colleague. May he rest in peace.

—Jerry Cipriano, FCRH ’75, retired in 2018 as senior news editor of the CBS Evening News. He began his journalism career at the Associated Press while still attending Fordham. He joined CBS News in 1984 as a writer for network radio and moved over to television news in 1986.

A version of this essay originally appeared in Connecting, a newsletter for retirees and former employees of the Associated Press. It is republished here with the kind permission of the newsletter’s editor, Paul Stevens.

Watch this on-air tribute to Jerry Cipriano during the last of his many CBS Evening News broadcasts. Anchor Jeff Glor describes him as “a mentor, a friend, and master craftsman who has written the first draft of history for more than three decades.”

Related Story: Charles Osgood, Beloved CBS Broadcaster, Fordham Graduate, and ‘Patron Saint’ of WFUV News, Dies at 91

One of history’s great startup success stories, the nearly 500-year-old Catholic religious order built a global network and helped create higher education as we know it.

Founded in 1540 by the former soldier St. Ignatius Loyola—and starting with little more than a mission to help souls and do it heroically—the Jesuits quickly established themselves around the world and became known as the finest educators of their day. Today there are more than 180 Jesuit institutions of higher learning—including Fordham—on six continents.

How did the Jesuits succeed? For one thing, they believed in the ultimate importance of their mission, which “breeds a level of resilience and determination and creativity,” said Chris Lowney, FCRH ’81, GSAS ’81, a former Jesuit, former managing director at J.P. Morgan, and author of the 2003 book Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World. In interviews, Lowney and other Fordham alumni spoke to the parallels between the Jesuits’ mindset and the entrepreneur’s approach to startup success.

Lesson #1: They didn’t carry the mental baggage that can hinder entrepreneurs.

The Jesuits made a virtue of detachment—that is, detachment from things like status, possessions, and settled ways of doing things, which enabled risk-taking. Asked by Ignatius to depart for India, Francis Xavier readily responded “good enough, I’m ready”—and took it on himself to establish Jesuit outposts not only in India but across Asia, Lowney writes in Heroic Leadership. Offering a present-day interpretation, he noted that attachments like greed or pride can hamper entrepreneurs by breeding a fear of failure and a reluctance to try new things.

Lesson #2: They led with love.

Unlike Niccolò Machiavelli, one of his contemporaries, Ignatius counseled Jesuits to lead with “greater love than fear,” tapping the energizing power of mutual affection, Lowney writes. Traveling in Asia, Francis Xavier carried papers bearing his fellow Jesuits’ signatures as an inspiring reminder of their love for him. For modern-day entrepreneurs, this might mean wanting one’s team members to flourish and reach their potential—which could mean challenging them when necessary, Lowney said.

Lesson #3: They adapted to new environments.

The Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci made inroads in China, after so many Europeans had failed, through enculturation: He learned Chinese, adopted Chinese dress, and shared his knowledge of geometry and astronomy, Lowney writes. Ricci’s predecessor in Asia, Francis Xavier, also “showed a remarkable respect for the cultures he was meeting” when he traveled to Japan, Lowney said. “He was way, way ahead of his time.”

Lesson #4: They reflected deeply on their purpose.

Former Jesuit Sal Giambanco, GSAS ’90, sees parallels between the entrepreneurial mindset and the self-knowledge fostered by the Spiritual Exercises, the four-week system of meditation and prayer created by Ignatius. “It’s about seeing things and patterns that haven’t existed before,” said Giambanco, an early employee and senior executive at four startups, including PayPal, where he was the first head of human capital, administration, facilities, and security. “You go into the silence, [and] you embrace that silence, such that you can then bring those insights into having effective change in the world. And if you think about it, that really is the mindset of the entrepreneur.”

Lesson #5: They sought input and brought out the best in others.

Contrary to the idea of the solo creative genius driving an enterprise, the best leaders foster collaboration—and innovation—by stepping back and “leaving the room” after posing a tough question to their teams, said Angelo Santinelli, GABELLI ’84, an entrepreneur and business educator who co-chairs the advisory board for the Fordham Foundry, the University’s entrepreneurship hub.

He often saw the Jesuits take that approach in the classroom when he was a student at Fordham, he said. In a collaborative workspace where everyone feels valued, “you’re constantly pushing the envelope and getting something better,” he said.

Since 2010, the Student Managed Investment Fund has helped launch graduates’ careers in the financial world.

Researching companies in diverse sectors. Analyzing stock market data to understand trends. Deciding how best to invest more than $2 million of someone else’s money. This type of work happens daily at investment firms across the country. It also happens at Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business.

Through the Student Managed Investment Fund (SMIF), a two-semester course run by James Russell Kelly, students manage $2 million of the University’s endowment in a portfolio of stocks, bonds, and alternative assets.

Students start as analysts and are paired with second-semester students who work as portfolio managers. The analysts monitor sectors such as health care, energy, and real estate, while portfolio managers help make investment decisions and can take on additional roles, such as chief investment officer or quantitative analyst.

The fund started in 2010 with $1 million and has grown to more than $2.1 million, said Kelly, a senior lecturer in finance who also leads Fordham’s Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis.

“The primary theme is student empowerment—students make all the investment decisions,” he said. “My role is to set the parameters to give guidance, guardrails.”

At the first-ever networking event for SMIF, held on February 6 in the 12th-Floor Lounge at the Lowenstein Center on the Lincoln Center campus, current students connected with alumni who shared how their experiences helped them in their careers in the finance and investing worlds. Attendees also shared their SMIF stories with Fordham Magazine.

Rohit Roy, Class of 2024
SMIF Role: Portfolio Manager, Health Care
Major: Finance with a Minor in Computer Science

“It’s active learning—you’re not learning from a textbook, you’re not learning theory. You’re looking at active real-world events and how they’re affecting the markets.

“Full time, I’m going to be working in trading [for Apex Capital after graduation]. So it’s a very, very direct kind of jump—you don’t really trade here, it’s more of a long-term investment mandate kind of thing. But a lot of the skills are obviously transferable. Like, you have to follow the markets closely, you have to understand how things work, be able to digest high-level information very quickly and act upon it. A lot of the skills link up quite nicely.”

Rishika Pal, Class of 2024
SMIF Role: Former Managing Director
Major: Finance with a Minor in Computer Science

“I learned about [SMIF] my freshman year and I was like, what a wonderful opportunity, given the fact that not many schools trust their students with a section of their endowment. Being able to actively manage it and gain mentorship was so important to me. It was a really great experience—I ended up becoming managing director for the fund, so that was a very full circle moment.

“It’s one thing to learn about [investing] in theory, but when you’re looking at it from a holistic portfolio perspective—what data is accessible to us? What should be our benchmarks? How do we forecast and manage our allocation and risk? That type of hands-on learning, I think, is very different and unique.”

Ria Naidu, Class of 2024
SMIF Role: Portfolio Manager, Information Technology
Major: Global Business with Concentrations in Finance and Economics

“I started looking into [the SMIF experience] my junior year, when I was figuring out my path. I thought it was a good opportunity to be able to [invest] money in an educational environment where there’s slightly more room for error than when you start in the real world. Whatever [work I’ll do as an equity research associate at Jefferies] will be pretty similar to what I’m doing now. So I think that’s been very helpful to get a glimpse of it, and actually be hands on and work with it, but also learn from Professor Kelly.”

Adam Arias, Class of 2025
SMIF Role: Analyst, Health Care
Major: Finance

“It’s kind of opening my eyes a little bit. It’s a very collaborative place. In SMIF, I can already tell your voice matters more. Your ideas are encouraged to come out.

“I’m going to be working in more of a client-facing role [in my internship at PIMCO this summer]. But [through SMIF] I’m getting experience in how to work in a team, where you kind of have an equal say, and then also just developing communication skills with everyone, being able to know what’s happening in the market and convey that to your manager. In my future role, hopefully I’ll be able to convey that to clients.”

Stephen Hearn, GABELLI ’15
Vice President, Public Finance & Infrastructure Direct Lending, J.P. Morgan

“I work in the bank’s public finance infrastructure portfolio, so [we’re] kind of taking all the management risk, very similar to what SMIF did. In SMIF, I learned the proper way to analyze risk, risk-reward, which is something I kind of carried into my job.

“[The SMIF experience is] something on your resume that most other kids from other schools won’t have, even if they’ve gone to an Ivy or something like that. You may not actually have practical investing experience unless you’ve done a program like this.”

Yaakov Musheyev, GABELLI ’20
High Yield Credit Research at J.P. Morgan

“I work in credit research, looking at industry trends, company-specific trends—and covering a sector in SMIF, I feel, was pretty similar: looking at headlines, looking at news for the sector we covered, building a model for one of the things we were trying to pitch, and then doing the whole presentation. So, building out the investment thesis and presenting it.”

Brigida Caruso, Class of 2024
SMIF Role: Co-Managing Director
Major: Global Business with Concentrations in Finance and Economics

“The hands-on research that we’re able to do—it’s more independently driven, so if you have an idea that you want to run with, you’re allowed to do that. And our class is done in the trading room at Rose Hill, so a lot of Bloomberg terminals are accessible there.”

Tyler Hoffman, Class of 2025
SMIF Role: Analyst, Industrials
Major: Finance

“I’m sort of working under someone who I learn from—[that’s] not to say that the professor doesn’t teach, but he’s there more to moderate and kind of give structure to things.

“I’ll be [interning] in banking this summer. A lot of it is just analyzing companies, and when you’re in a position of investing and having your money at stake, like Fordham’s money here, it kind of ups the ante in terms of how much work you put into looking at things. I think being able to transfer that to a banking context is really important.”