Many people with disabilities rely on assistive technology—tools like crutches, wheelchairs, and software—to help them with everyday tasks, said guest speaker Amy Hurst, Ph.D., associate professor of human-computer interaction at New York University and director of the NYU Ability Project. 

‘There’s Another Way’ 

The problem is that 30% of assistive technology is abandoned by users, said Hurst at the April 10 event, held at the Lincoln Center campus and livestreamed. These devices, occasionally created without user input, can be designed poorly. It can be difficult to obtain the devices themselves. Sometimes, they just don’t work well. 

“The system is broken,” Hurst said. “[But] maybe there’s another way.” 

What if you could create your own device—in a fast, customizable, affordable, and reproducible way? 

Today’s technology makes it possible for people without special training to obtain free designs and generate their own tools. As long as you—or someone you trust—can access a computer, you can send a design file to a machine that builds a physical tool for you. The final cost? Potentially under $300.

Empowering People with Disabilities 

To figure out how to make this more accessible to clinicians and users, Hurst conducted several projects, including partnering with a physical therapy program to create 3-D printed assistive technology for both simulated and actual clients. 

Two of the biggest roadblocks to accessibility are limited time to work on these devices and the occasional fickleness of the technology itself, said Hurst. But 3-D printing assistive technology also provides an opportunity—the creation of jobs, especially for those who identify as neurodivergent. 

Hurst recalled teaching 3-D printing to young adults with intellectual disabilities, who successfully created models of their own. 

“How can we provide these experiences that can empower people?” she said. “Many people with intellectual disabilities have a really high unemployment rate around 60%. … What else can we do here to show them some different potential?” 

The eighth Distinguished Lecture on Disability was organized by Fordham’s Disability Studies Program and Research Consortium on Disability. The event was co-sponsored by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, Graduate School of Education, Graduate School of Social Service, Communication and Media Studies Department, and Computer and Information Science Department.

On April 8, 2024, there will be an eclipse of the sun, visible from Fordham’s New York City location. According to the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, the oldest account of an eclipse was recorded on a clay tablet discovered in 1948 among the ruins of the ancient city of Ugarit, in modern-day Syria. Ugarit was overthrown shortly after the eclipse, a fate we don’t expect New York City to suffer next week.

The 2024 eclipse will begin in New York City at approximately 2:10 p.m. and should end around 4:36 p.m. Our viewing area will achieve approximately 90% coverage of the sun. The optimal viewing time will be between 3 and 4 p.m.

If you plan to view the partial solar eclipse in the New York City area, you must take precautions.

• Make sure to protect your eyes with ISO-certified solar glasses from a trusted supplier when looking directly at the partially eclipsed sun.
• Do NOT look directly at the sun during the event.
• Sunglasses will NOT protect your eyes.
• Use sunscreen with an SPF of 15 or higher.

Solar Eclipse Glasses
Beginning Friday, April 5, Public Safety will be distributing free ISO-certified solar glasses on a first-come, first-served basis at Room SL04  Lowenstein Center (just past the security desk) at Lincoln Center, and Thebaud Annex at Rose Hill. One pair of glasses per person, please.

All public libraries throughout New York City are giving away free eclipse glasses on a first-come, first-served basis. Additionally, free eclipse glasses are being distributed every day between 6:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m. at Moynihan Train Hall—MTA Long Island Railroad ticket windows (421 8th Avenue, New York, NY 10001).

You can also pick up a free pair of “I Love NY” eclipse glasses at various New York State Welcome Centers, Thruway Rest Stops, and other locations throughout the state.

Following these steps will allow you to safely enjoy the view of the solar eclipse.

Sincerely,

Robert Fitzer, Associate Vice President
Fordham Department of Public Safety

Follow us on threads: https://www.threads.net/@ramsafe_1841

Sept. 19 is Voter Registration Day and exercising your right to vote on Election Day is an important duty, too important to ignore or neglect. As Fordham people for others, we have a responsibility to be citizens engaged in the civic life of our local, state, and national communities. For those of you who have not yet registered to vote, let Fordham provide the start of your lifelong engagement.

If you are not registered to vote, you can register online at vote.org. You may also check your registration status, update your information if it has changed since your last registration, and request an absentee ballot if you are not going to be in your home state on Election Day. Note: If you need to update or correct your registration information (i.e., your name or address), simply fill out the voter registration form. To register to vote, you must

• be a United States citizen (either by birth or naturalization),
• meet your state’s residency requirements, and
• be at least 18 years old. Some states allow 17-year-olds to pre-register if they will be 18 before the general election; however, you must be 18 to vote.

Please know that if you plan on voting in this year’s general elections (non-presidential), which will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 7, you must register to vote on or before the registration deadline of your home state. For example, if you are interested in voting for candidates running for office in New York state, the registration deadline is Oct. 28 for both online and paper applications. You may find each state’s registration deadline at vote.org’s voter registration deadline page.

Finally, it can be difficult to determine the positions of each candidate running for office. Please feel free to visit nonpartisan voter information sites such as Vote Smart, Vote 411, and Ballot Ready for more information on candidates, including their biographies, voting records, positions on issues, and contributions to their campaigns.

Participating in the democratic process is a privilege and responsibility we all share. Please be sure to register and vote on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 7.

Lesley A. Massiah-Arthur
Associate Vice President and Special Assistant to the President for Government Relations

Bill Colona
Assistant Vice President for Government Relations, Federal and Urban Affairs

Steves’ long career in finance culminated in his service at Fordham, where he was assistant university treasurer from 2004 until his retirement in 2018. In 2021, he and his wife, Kathy, moved to Harwich, where they worked to restore a historic home.

While living in Scarsdale, New York, Steves was extremely active in his community, holding many positions in local government and nonprofit organizations. He was elected mayor of Scarsdale in 2013 and served until 2015. He sat on the Scarsdale Board of Education from 1998 to 2005, including one year as president, according to his obituary. He also served as a Scarsdale Village trustee and was active in the Immaculate Heart of Mary parish.

In addition to his wife, Steves is survived by his children, Karen and Michael, and nine of his siblings: Mary, Helen, James, Thomas, John, and Daniel Steves, Eloise Smarrelli, Theresa Vaga, and Elizabeth Forgays. He was predeceased by his son Matthew and his sister Margaret Guarino.

Read Steves’ full obituary and this collection of remembrances from community members.

But that’s not to say she doesn’t see opportunities for the country to reverse course. “I’m very hopeful with young people, and our students in particular,” said Gautney, an associate professor of sociology at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

The book, published by Oxford University Press this month, is billed as a companion piece to C. Wright Mills’ iconic The Power Elite (Oxford University Press,1956), which Gautney says drew back the curtain on the belief that 1950s America was a bastion of democracy. Her goal in writing a sequel of sorts was to “hopefully provide some explanation for how we got to this place with Trump, January 6th, and all this political unrest.”

Mills wrote at a time when inequality was at its lowest and there was consensus that America was the best of all countries. He argued that in reality America was more authoritarian, with  a consortium of corporate, political, and military elites, driven by greed, holding all the power and manipulating public opinion. Mills warned of “the military industrial complex,” a term made famous by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell speech. Mills also has been cited as an inspiration for the 1960s counterculture, Gautney said.

Such sweeping analyses are rarely written these days, which is a part of why she felt compelled to pick up where Mills left off. “It’s a lack of historical memory that is how we got where we are. I had our Fordham students in mind. They are so smart, but [because they’re young]they don’t have the historical references.”

Gautney has personal experience in politics at a high level: she was a senior policy advisor for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and served as an advisor in his Senate office and as co-chair of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Education. She also has connections to the film industry, in which her husband works. She says both have opened her eyes to how things really work.

The country now has enormous wealth in the hands of a few who are able to control policy through their billions, Gautney said, and political institutions and the military have been largely subordinated to the corporate sphere. Couple that with the merging of politics and celebrity, and America is fundamentally undemocratic, she argued.

“Celebrity has become a huge corporate conglomerate,” she said. “Now we have celebrities who wield corporate power and are billionaires.”

Mills wrote of the manipulative posturing of mass media. Gautney says today it’s far worse.  “Fox News can make a president now, obviously. It feels like it is an institution that is so far gone, and yet it is so fundamental.”

“It’s Chapter 1 in the authoritarian playbook—manipulating thought,” she said.

Gautney has some ideas for what can be done and hasn’t lost hope, even though she didn’t conclude the book that way. “It would be trivializing to try to summarize how to reverse course,” she said.

She did, however, share some of her thoughts for change in an interview. “Reclaiming the media: setting standards and decommodifying it. We need to start to recognize that certain things should be public goods, like health care and education. They cannot be accessible to only certain strata,” she says.

The way to accomplish all that is by creating and fostering spaces for thinking about systemic changes and how to separate the influence of money, said Gautney. “It is the job of academics to think of alternatives at a broad level.”

She believes students are coming in more well-read and publicly engaged nowadays, but they tend to be engaged more locally—in issues such as the environment or race issues. Building solidarity with other movements is imperative, she said. “You can’t afford to silo and diffuse this power. Young people interested in change need to bring in other groups. That’s vital.” 

Fordham’s service learning initiatives, Gautney believes, are valuable for exposing students to experiences different than the ones they inhabit, which is also key.

“Then you have potential for big impacts,” she said. “That’s how the world changes.”

“Data science is something that’s quite interesting to me … and I knew how important it was working in my neck of the woods, but what I didn’t really quite understand was how important it is right now to everything,” said Gilmer, who presented the Clavius Distinguished Lecture at Fordham on Nov. 16—the first held since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It is really the glue, the binder of nearly every academic department— from English to psychology to biology to the hard sciences. It is opening up profound new venues across the board.”

Held in Lecture Room 3-03 at the Law School, the lecture drew more than 80 students, faculty, and guests. Since 2010, the Clavius Distinguished Lecture Series, has brought scholars, researchers and entrepreneurs to Fordham to share their knowledge with the community and the general public. The series is named after Christopher Clavius, S.J., a 16th-century mathematician and astronomer who helped develop the Gregorian calendar.

Using Data Science in Energy

Gilmer said that data science in the oil and gas industries is used to help predict what types of rocks are under the surface, locate where oil and gas might be found, prescribe how to frack a well for the best return and lowest environmental impact, track supply and demand, and predict future needs and prices.

Gilmer gave some examples of how utilizing data analytics can make a company more efficient and effective. For example, data analytics can help a company learn how to frack oil and gas with the least amount of wells into the ground.

“How do you go out there and do it with a minimum number of well bores on the surface because you have a surface impact when you’re doing any of these things, and then also trying to figure out how you’re going to keep your aquifers safe—those are all pieces in the dynamics of this project,” he said.

Utilizing informatics can also help a company operate more efficiently, Gilmer said. His software company does a lot of work in seismics—exploring below the ground to find rocks that produce oil and gas.

“In this case, [our machine]was looking for discontinuity—discontinuity in these waveforms—it was going out there and it was a way of being able to very quickly identify fault patterns [in the Earth],” he said. “The machine went out there to find the faults—this would have taken a geologist a month to figure all this stuff out.”

With that data, they were able to see how production was impacted by faults.

“You can see that the closer you were to a fault, the less production you were making,” he said.

He also highlighted how informatics can be used to track and improve upon the environmental impact of a project.

Still, Gilmer told the students that while data was essential, they should use it to address bigger problems, not get stuck in the details.

“Whether you’re a physicist, a chemist, a geologist, or what have you—you should not look at your job as being a series of formulas,” he said. “You should be thinking about how to address real problems and how to think about them.” This, he said, is “where greatness comes from.”

In addition to sharing information about data science at lectures like this one, Gilmer—who was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year in Texas in 2012—is also committed to helping others learn more about it. He established the data analytics program at the University of Texas El Paso, with D. Frank Hsu, Ph.D., the Clavius Distinguished Professor of Science at Fordham, who also attended UTEP.

“If you don’t have the interest in doing it yourself, become good friends with somebody who’s really good at this stuff, because sometime during your lifetime, sometime in the next five or 10 years, you’re going to have a big need or a big use for these skill sets,” he said.

From Fracking to Film

While Gilmer’s background is as a geoscientist who worked in energy, he’s also had a passion for film, calling it “one of the best ways of storytelling.” He’s a managing partner of Redbud Studios and AHuevo Films, which produces and finances feature films and streaming content. Their upcoming film Alina of Cuba, starring James Franco and Ana Villafane, has made headlines as it tells the story of Fidel Castro’s daughter and her defection from Cuba.

Gilmer said he’s tried to also incorporate analytics into his film company’s work.

“We’ve been producing films for the last few years, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it in a smarter way,” he said. “It’s an industry that does not have a lot of good data, it doesn’t have easy access to [the data]—it is a closed-off system. It’s a very difficult business environment in which to go out there and make wise decisions.”

They’ve had to get creative to gather feedback from their audience, such as pushing out requests for Amazon reviews on social media.

“It’s really a business of building up a lot of different proxies with regards to figuring out how any of these things are going to work,” he said.

Hsu said that this was one of the best talks he’s heard, particularly in terms of the variety of topics discussed. He also joked that Gilmer—or one of his students—had their next task laid out for them: “Create a new field of movie informatics.”

“Inequality is rising in many countries across the world, and finding better policies to act against it is quite urgent. But we can’t just study what the effects of policies are,” said Stefanie Stantcheva, Ph.D. an economics professor at Harvard University and a guest speaker at a Feb. 9 Fordham lecture. “We also need to understand how people think about these policies.”

Stantcheva spoke at Fordham’s third distinguished lecture in economics, titled “How People Think About the Economy: Evidence from Social Economics Surveys.” She shared her newest research on how people view taxation and other policies that redistribute wealth to the poor. 

People tend to think about redistribution policies in four ways, said Stantcheva. How will they impact economic activity? Who will win or lose? Are people entitled to keep their income or should they redistribute their wealth? And how much can we trust in the government—the institution that puts forth these policies? 

The question that people are most concerned about is who will win or lose, along with the fairness of the policy, said Stantcheva. The problem, she added, is that we have very different ideas about what is fair.

Stantcheva and her colleagues examined four key factors that influence people’s perceptions on policy fairness: social mobility, immigrants, racial attitudes, and self-ranking in comparison to peers. They distributed surveys to thousands of people across several countries, including the U.S., to better understand their beliefs and the reasoning behind them. 

How Negative Experiences Change Views on Inequality 

One survey examined how people ranked their income level in relation to their peers and how their perception of their social position influenced their views on equity policies. The researchers found that people who ranked themselves more highly tended to believe that differences in income were fairer. They largely attributed their high income to their “hard work” rather than luck and believed that high-income earners deserved their income. They were also less supportive of redistribution policies, said Stantcheva. 

But the high earners responded differently when they experienced a negative event. In the survey, they discussed the impact of negative events, including unemployment, disability, and hospitalization. 

“What we can see is that a negative event makes people think that inequality is less fair, and a positive event like a promotion at work makes them think that inequality is more fair,” Stantcheva said. “There is much less effect on [beliefs about inequality when you consider]stickier views, like your political affiliation or your perception of how much of success is due to effort versus luck.” 

Opposing Views on Race and Racial Inequities

Another project explored how attitudes toward race and racial inequities shape support for redistribution policies in the U.S. Stantcheva surveyed non-Hispanic Black and white adults and teenagers across the U.S. They were asked about their stance on the economic conditions and opportunities of Black and white Americans, their views on racial issues and causes of racial inequities, and their level of support for race-targeted and general redistribution policies. 

The most controversial topic was causes of racial inequities and how to remedy them, said Stantcheva. 

“What’s very important is that … it doesn’t depend on how big you think inequities are. It actually really depends on why you think those gaps exist to start with,” she said. 

In the survey results, Democratic respondents from both races pointed to slavery in colonial America, long-standing discrimination, and racism as the causes of ongoing racial gaps. They supported income-targeted redistribution and race-targeted policies. On the other hand, many white Republican respondents said that lack of effort and individual decisions were the culprits of racial inequities. They were less likely to support the policies advocated by their counterparts.

What was incredibly striking was that these partisan gaps were already very prevalent among teenagers, said Stantcheva. 

“Teenagers, who themselves yet don’t have a political affiliation and don’t vote yet, still respond in a manner that’s very aligned with their parents’ political affiliation,” she said. “These youths are already very, very entrenched at a very young age.” 

Don’t Just Show Facts—Explain Their Story

Stantcheva and her colleagues wanted to know if they could change people’s policy views, so they conducted another experiment. First, they showed people facts about earning and opportunity gaps between Black and white Americans. This failed to sway anyone. But when they explained to the same group of people the causes and consequences of systemic racism—redlining, for example—that shifted people’s policy views, Stantcheva said. 

“Simply showing people how unequal circumstances and opportunities are doesn’t change their beliefs on why these are unequal and doesn’t change the narrative that they have in their mind … about why these gaps exist,” Stantcheva said. 

The lecture was organized by the Department of Economics’ Climate Committee and co-sponsored by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer and the Arts and Sciences Council. The inaugural 2019 lecture featured Janet Currie, professor at Princeton University and co-director of Princeton’s Center for Health and Wellbeing. The second and most recent lecture featured Darrick Hamilton, professor and founding director of the Institute on Race and Political Economy at The New School.

Watch a full recording of the lecture below: 

Roach taught for 38 years at Marymount, which merged with Fordham in 2000 and was closed in 2007.

A funeral Mass was held in Hyde Park, New York, for close family and friends on Dec. 11, followed by entombment at the mausoleum at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Read the obituary in the Poughkeepsie Journal.

“Economists are usually more concerned with money, wealth, and income, not so much with health. But health should come before money,” Deaton said at the Lincoln Center campus on Sept. 24—his first “non-Zoom” presentation in 18 months. “Money and health means very little if you’re not alive to enjoy it.” 

Deaton was the keynote speaker at the fourth event of the biennial conference “The Health of Nations: Pope Francis’ Call for Inclusion,” co-hosted by Fordham’s Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development (IPED) and the U.S. affiliate of the Vatican foundation Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice. The goal of the conference is to bring together international experts to address poverty and development issues raised by Pope Francis through the lens of Catholic social teaching. Deaton was joined by several speakers, including Frank J. Caggiano, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and award-winning economist and University of Notre Dame professor Joseph P. Kaboski for a moderated discussion. 

Deaton’s work is a critical part of Fordham’s IPED curriculum, said Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D., program director and associate professor of economics. 

“His work on measuring poverty guides our stuents in preparing our annual publication of Fordham’s Pope Francis’ global poverty index, and his writing on deaths in the tropics is at the core of how we teach our students about public health issues in the developing world,” Schwalbenberg said at the conference. “Because of Professor Deaton’s exceptional writings as well as the outstanding professional field experiences provided by Catholic Relief Services, our students are that much more prepared to understand and contribute to international efforts to reduce—hopefully, reduce—global poverty.” 

Many global health inequalities are driven by low infant and child mortality rates in poor countries, said Deaton. The U.S. can help them by requesting that organizations like the National Institutes of Health research more diseases that greatly impact poorer countries, he said. The U.S. government can also increase the distribution of global public goods, like the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, to countries that desperately need them. In addition, the U.S. can reduce arms sales, he said. 

“America makes huge amounts of money through exporting arms. I don’t know what we think we’re doing when we’re sending aid to countries at the same time we’re selling arms to them,” Deaton said. “When my students come to me and say, ‘What should we do to help people in poor countries?’ … I say, ‘The country you should go to is Washington, D.C. and you should tell people to stop harming people in poor countries.’ We can do a tremendous amount of that without actually going there and pretending to help or trying to help.” 

What doesn’t work very well, he said, is transferring monetary funds from rich to poor countries, what we commonly view as “aid.” What those countries need more than money is an “internal social contract” between the government and its people, he said. 

“We complain about our government, but we mostly pay our taxes … and in exchange, they give us all these things—police, defense, roads, laws, health, pensions and education—and that’s because we’re organized in a way that in exchange for our taxes, the government can give us these things back,” Deaton explained. It is the lack of this “contract” that is characteristic of poor countries. In other words, he said, financial aid from rich countries often prevents the governments of poorer countries from being held accountable for their people. 

“The governments don’t bother to look after their people because they don’t need to. Most African countries get more than 70% of the government budget from aid … You cannot get development without an internal social contract, without an internal community first. Whatever we do, we should try not to destroy that,” Deaton said. 

But the U.S. has its own problems to deal with as well, he said. Since 1980, adult life expectancy has steadily risen in rich countries across the world, but the U.S. is an exemption, said Deaton. Many Americans are dying “deaths of despair,” including accidental drug overdose and suicide. A large part of that population lacks a four-year college degree. They have been facing a declining labor market thanks to robots, globalization, and the increasing costs of health care. This loss of jobs has had negative ripple effects across their financial, social, and mental well-being, he said. 

“The key takeaway is that [in]the labor market, jobs for people without a four-year college degree have been vanishing … jobs that really gave meaning to people’s lives, gave them a chance at promotion,” Deaton said. “This failing labor market has brought social dysfunction in many forms and in many communities across America.”

In the pandemic, the less-educated and minorities have continued to suffer, while the rich and those with pensions in the market have increased their wealth. This division is troubling, said Deaton.  

“We really have built ourselves a two-class society in which the happy few are doing well, and the two-thirds are increasingly not being recognized as full citizens,” Deaton said. “One of the issues about inequality that I think is the key one is equality of moral standing within society. We want not equality of opportunity—we want equality of outcome … We’re all moral individuals within equal dignity, and that’s failing in America.”   

Watch a full recording of the conference below:

Today, as we celebrate Fordham’s auspicious founding, we reflect on the story of an Irish immigrant who sought to elevate his people—and all immigrants—with the promise of higher education. Below is a 2016 homily delivered by Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley, Ph.D., GSAS ’66, professor emeritus of theology at Fordham.

Founding Father: Archbishop John Hughes

Lady Chapel, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, June 24, 2016

219 years ago today, on June 24, 1797, St. John’s Day, Fordham’s founding father, John Joseph Hughes, was born in the little village of Annalogan in County Tyrone, Ireland.   “They told me when I was a boy,” he said, “that for the first five days I was on a social and civil equality with the most favored subject of the British Empire.  These five days would be the interval between my birth and my baptism.”  Once John Hughes was baptized a Catholic, however, like every Catholic in eighteenth-century Ireland, he immediately became a second-class citizen in the land of his birth.

John Hughes also preserved another vivid childhood memory.  When his younger sister died, after the funeral Mass, the parish priest led the funeral procession to the local cemetery, which was the property of the Protestant Church of Ireland.  Catholic priests were forbidden by law from entering these cemeteries.  And so, outside the gate of the cemetery, the parish priest bent down, scooped up a clump of earth in his hands, blessed it, and handed it to Hughes’s father to sprinkle it over his daughter’s coffin as it was lowered into the grave.  Childhood memories of this kind are not easily erased, and John Hughes never forgot this example of the prejudice suffered by Catholics in his native land.

John Hughes spent the first twenty years of his life in Ireland as the son of a poor Ulster farmer where he experienced not only prejudice but also the grinding poverty that prevented him from obtaining more than a rudimentary education.  When he emigrated to America in 1817, he worked in the only occupations for which he was qualified, as a laborer in the construction trades and in quarries.   When he applied for admission to a seminary to study for the priesthood, he had to spend his first year in remedial studies in order to qualify for the entrance requirements.

Exposure to prejudice and poverty was not limited to John Hughes.  It was the common experience of Irish Catholics both in their homeland and in America.  However, the difference was that America was the land of opportunity for immigrants, if they had the education to take advantage of these opportunities.   This was one of the primary motives that led Bishop Hughes to establish St. John’s College at Fordham in 1841.  He considered education the indispensable means for the members of his immigrant flock to break loose from the cycle of poverty that ensnared them and that prevented them from participating in what today we would call the American dream.  John Hughes’s first biographer, John Hassard, a graduate of St. John’s College, Fordham, in 1855, and Hughes’s former secretary who knew him well, said, “The subject that of all others that [Hughes] had nearest his heart was education.”

A public official who saw what Hughes was doing and came to admire him greatly was William Seward, the politically astute governor of New York State. Later, as secretary of state during the Civil War, Seward became the indispensable man in Lincoln’s cabinet.  Governor Seward told Hughes, “You have begun a great work in the elevation of the rejected immigrant, a work auspicious to the destiny of that class and still more beneficial to our common country.”  Incidentally Hughes never made a distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic immigrants.  He framed the issue this way, that foreign-born American citizens should enjoy the same legal rights as native-born American citizens.

Bishop Hughes became the effective leader of New York Catholics in June 1839.  Only two months later he made his first major decision when he purchased 106 acres at Rose Hill for a college, which confirms the statement of John Hassard that “the subject of all others that [Hughes] had nearest his heart was education.”  The price of the real estate was $30,000 ($29,750) and Hughes needed an additional $10,000 to renovate the two buildings on the property.  “I had not, when I purchased the site of this new college, St. John’s, Fordham,” Bishop Hughes said, “so much as a penny wherewith to commence the payment for it.”  He immediately launched a fund-raising campaign among New York’s impoverished Catholics.  After nine months the campaign netted a paltry $10,000.  Hughes then went to Europe on a ten-month begging trip, and generous Catholics in France and Austria contributed the money that he needed to start St. John’s College at Fordham.

John Hughes’s new college opened its doors 175 years ago today, on St. John’s Day, June 24, 1841, with a grand total of six students.  The faculty was larger than the student body.  For the next five years Hughes struggled to maintain his college as a diocesan institution with a faculty of New York diocesan priests, but it was a losing battle. There were four presidents in five years.  One president became a cardinal, another became an archbishop, but neither of them was a professional educator.

Then there was a third diocesan priest as president, the ineffable and eminently forgettable Ambrose Manahan, a scatterbrain cleric whom Hughes dismissed for incompetence.  When Hughes gave him his walking papers, he sent him this priceless letter, “I advise you to resign . . . in the almost extinguished hope that, on a new scene where your future character will be determined by your future conduct, you may disappoint the melancholy anticipations that the past is too well calculated to inspire.”  Fordham’s founding father may not have had much formal education, but he certainly possessed the innate Irish gift of eloquence.

Fordham’s fourth and most capable diocesan president was a young cleric named Father John Harley, but he died at the age of twenty-nine, a not uncommon occurrence at that time because of the rigors of seminary education.  Hughes had no one among his own diocesan clergy to replace Harley, and so in 1845 he turned to the Society of Jesus, an international order of scholars with a reputation as professional educators, to take charge of his fledgling college. The Jesuits in turn were happy to establish a foothold in the largest city in the United States.

Although St. John’s College remained a diocesan college for only five years, we rightly honor Archbishop John Hughes today as our founding father.  It was he who purchased the property at Rose Hill, raised the funds to pay for it, recruited the original faculty and administration, obtained the state charter and left to the Jesuits a flourishing little college whose ownership they were happy to obtain.  It was no mean accomplishment even for a man of the stature of John Joseph Hughes.

I do not think that the influence of John Hughes on Fordham University is limited to the past.  In many respects he remains an inspiration for us today.  For example, you are all familiar with the statue of Archbishop Hughes outside Cunniffe House on the Rose Hill campus.  That statue was the gift of the alumni on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of St. John’s College, Fordham, in 1891. Many of the alumni would have known Hughes when they were students.   Hughes had only been dead for 27 years.

The alumni wanted these words of John Hughes to be engraved on the pedestal of the statue: “I have always preached that every denomination, Jews, Christians, Catholics, Protestants—of every shade and sex—were all entitled to entire freedom of conscience, without let or hindrance from any sect or number of sects, no matter how small their number or how unpopular the doctrine that they profess.”

Unfortunately those words of John Hughes were not engraved on the pedestal of his statue perhaps, perhaps—and here I am only guessing—because the theologically conservative Jesuit Fathers at Fordham considered John Hughes’s words to be too bold and radical.  They certainly would have set off alarm bells in the Vatican.  However, in 1965, the Second Vatican Council effectively if posthumously endorsed those words of Archbishop Hughes in its Declaration on Religious Liberty and in Nostra Aetate, the council’s document on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.  Isn’t it inspiring to know that, at least in this all-important area of freedom of conscience, our founding father anticipated the work of the Second Vatican Council by a whole century?

John Hughes was no Mother Theresa.  He will never be canonized because, among his many other qualities, he was a tough and feisty street fighter who gave no quarter and asked no quarter in an often hostile environment.  In 1844 a Nativist mob unleashed several days of rioting and violence on the Catholic community in Philadelphia. They then threatened to do the same thing in New York City.  Bishop Hughes told the Nativist mayor of New York City, James Harper, that, if any harm came to his churches, he would turn the city into “a second Moscow,” a reference to the destruction of Moscow by the Russians in 1812 when Napoleon attacked the city.

That does not sound like Mother Theresa.  To be honest, it is also far removed from the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.  But it worked and may be justified on the grounds that it preserved peace and law and order.  The Nativist leaders backed down and disbanded their mob and spared New York City from the violence that only days earlier had engulfed the city of Philadelphia.

Many historians have criticized Archbishop Hughes for his bellicose style of leadership, but at least one distinguished historian of American Catholicism, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, offered a more nuanced appraisal of John Hughes’s leadership. Ellis said that “there were times when [Hughes’s’] very aggressiveness was about the only approach that would serve the end that he was seeking, viz., justice for his people.”  An integral element in his quest to obtain justice for his people and to give them economic and social equality in American society was to give them access to higher education.  That is why he went to such great pains to establish the university whose 175^th anniversary we celebrate today.

It is difficult to envision anyone else in the Catholic community in nineteenth-century New York City who could have accomplished what Archbishop John Hughes did for “the elevation of the rejected immigrant” (to quote again Governor William Seward).  A key element in Archbishop Hughes’s plan to elevate the rejected immigrant was to give them the opportunity for a college education.  We all owe him a great debt of gratitude for establishing St. John’s College at Rose Hill, the future Fordham University.  It is a debt that we gladly acknowledge today and will continue to acknowledge and repeat in many different ways over the course of the next twelve months.

Thomas J. Shelley

“The biggest thing is just the scope of it—and to realize that hundreds and hundreds of people are working on this thing that started out just in your head,” Quinn said, addressing more than 100 members of the Fordham community over Zoom.  

‘A Once-in-a-Lifetime Thing’: Stories From the Bridgerton Set 

Quinn recalled the journey from landing a contract with Shondaland Media, the company behind award-winning series Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder, to watching her romance novels become a television series. 

“It started with sitting in a Starbucks, drinking coffee, and getting a phone call and practically falling off my stool,” Quinn said. “[But] it was a very slow process. I thought publishing was slow, but adapting a book is glacial. From the very first phone call to the time the show actually appeared on Netflix was four years.” 

In those four years, Quinn served as a consultant for the TV series. She read the scripts before they went into production, but her involvement was limited. Quinn relinquished creative control on the project—and for a good reason. 

“I did not want to do anything to jeopardize this. This was clearly a once-in-a-lifetime thing for me,” said Quinn. She also knew her work was in good hands: “One of the smartest things that you can do is recognize other smart people. And I was not going to tell Shonda Rhimes how to make television.” 

Quinn said she loved the results, especially the color-blind casting and the diverse storytelling from the scriptwriters. 

“There were somewhere between 15 to 20 writers working on the project, and that group of people was incredibly diverse—not just race, but gender, sexual orientation, religion … they all can bring life experiences and imagination to the story that I can’t,” said Quinn. “One of the main things about a romance novel is the way it makes the reader feel and the happiness that you get at the end … I love that Bridgerton the television show has managed to create something where more people can see themselves in the story and see themselves getting the happy ending.” 

Quinn’s lips are sealed on the show’s second season, which will begin filming this spring. But she showed her audience an iPhone photo of her and Regé-Jean Page, who plays a leading character on Bridgerton, from a season one filming location. 

“Regé-Jean Page is absolutely as handsome as you think,” she said, while a few students gasped from their screens and typed their reactions in the chat box, including “JEALOUS” and “Love Love Love!!!!” 

Tips on the Creative Writing Process 

Two students from Fordham College at Lincoln Center, senior English major Mary Alter and junior art history major Sophie Choo, asked Quinn questions about her creative writing process and background, while several other students typed questions in the Zoom chat box. 

“All of your characters are very well developed. Any tips for developing characters and making their backstories?” wrote one student, Madeline Lanni.

Quinn advised her to think deeply about her characters’ backstories before beginning to write a novel—something she started to do while writing The Duke and I, the first novel in the Bridgerton book series. 

“I ended up understanding these characters so much more. Since then, I have adopted this in my prewriting. I’ll spend several pages talking about who these people are … because we are all shaped by our experiences. Does this person have brothers and sisters? Are they the oldest? Are they in the middle?” Quinn said. “Many of [these details]never show up in the book. But it means that somehow, in some amorphous, creative way, I know the character better. And I think that comes through.” 

‘Believe in What You Do’

Another student, Vivienne Blouin, asked Quinn how writers, especially young women, can defend the merit of their work genre—particularly in romance—against condescending peers.

Quinn recalled a quote from Nancy Pearl, a famous American librarian. 

“She said once that literary fiction is always judged by the best example of it, and romance is always judged by the worst. And it’s so true,” Quinn said. “I think you just have to stick to your guns and believe in what you do.” 

Mary Bly, Ph.D., chair of the English department, said Quinn offered some valuable advice and analysis. 

“Julia Quinn gave us a fascinating, authentic look at the life of a bestselling author, now propelled into the forefront of American pop culture by the Netflix series. It’s important for students to meet people at the top of their profession, if only to see that they are merely people. Julia offered great advice about writing, as well as explaining the process by which a book is optioned. Her discussion of consent in the first Bridgerton book—the fact that what is now seen as the hero’s lack of consent was greeted at the time by readers as the heroine’s feminist triumph—is also significant as a counter-weight to judgement of the past,” said Bly, who writes fiction and romance novels under the pen name Eloisa James. 

“Perhaps equally importantly, she confessed that she had no real idea why she chose her major [art history at Harvard College]. That was perhaps the most inspiring of all. My takeaway: learn how to write, and you can do anything with your degree.”