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.

“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: 

“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:

“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.”

The roots of the teach-in stem back to 1989, when Father Ignacio Ellacuría and his five fellow Jesuits were murdered in El Salvador, outside of the the University of Central America’s (UCA) Pastoral Center, where they lived and worked.

Since then, the teach-in has been held every year—virtually this year—as a way to continue to advance Jesuit causes of social justice and working for others.

Fordham has been an active participant in years past. This year, it had one of its largest groups ever join in the Oct. 24-26 multiday conference.

“Offering [the teach-in] to students this year, particularly during the pandemic, it was even more meaningful,” said Carol Gibney, associate director of campus ministry for spiritual and pastoral ministries. “I think everybody’s seeking and desiring community … It was very, I would say hopeful, joyful, inspirational. And reminded all of us that we’re part of a larger organization, with Ignatian spirituality and pedagogy.”

Gibney said that all of the students were able to participate in the conference remotely, but they also offered Bepler Commons at the Rose Hill campus throughout the weekend as a space where students could come and break out into small groups to discuss some of the topics including climate change, anti-racism work, and civil engagement. About 12 to 15 students took advantage of the in-person option.

For Lauren Pecora, a junior at Fordham College Rose Hill, the topic of “Asylum and Detention: Working Towards Dignity” stood out for her.

“The problem at the border is so multifaceted that it’s difficult to keep up with unless you’re directly involved, but the speakers were engaging and clear,” she said. “A complete reorientation of policy is needed at the border, away from criminalization and militarization.”

For Fordham College at Rose Hill junior Mari Teli, the session called “How Do We Build Up a Broken World,” held by the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, really impacted her.

“We talked about how do we, especially now, in the time of corona[virus] , how do we build up marginalized communities? It was a really big self-reflection of, what community are you involved in and how does that community harm or help other marginalized communities around you? Do you actively see yourself trying to uplift the voices of those marginalized communities?”

Teli was part of a group of students from GO! Vote, this year’s Global Outreach project, a section of which participated in IFTJ, according to Vanessa Rotondo, assistant director, immersions and student leadership at the Center for Community Engaged Learning, who coordinated the efforts.

“We got a little creative with Global Outreach this semester, and we formed GO! Vote, which was charged with raising civic awareness across both campuses,” she said.

Rotondo said the GO! Vote team hosted pre- and post-election talks and forums on civic engagement and awareness and participated in phone banking, in addition to being involved with IFTJ.

She said the students who participated in IFTJ will put some of what they learned in action through a partnership with Cristo Rey New York High School in Harlem where they will teach the students about civic education in early 2021.

“I think the big thing that struck my group in particular was this theme of planting a seed,” Rotondo said. “They want to do something where they’re physically both planted and see and watch it grow, and I think that really struck them through the lens of working with the high school students.”

At a Nov. 11 virtual event sponsored by Fordham and The Bronx Is Reading, which puts on the annual Bronx Book Festival, Rankine spoke about her new book Just Us: An American Conversation with Laurie Lambert, Ph.D., Fordham associate professor of African and African American Studies. 

Through Just Us, Rankine narrates her personal experiences related to race and racism with white friends and acquaintances—and, in some cases, their own rebuttal to her stories.

“The book’s intention was to slow down these interactions so that we could live in them and see that we are just in fact interacting with another person, and that there are ways to maneuver these moments and to take them apart—to stand up for ourselves, to understand the dynamic as a repeating dynamic for many Black people, white people, Latinx people, and Asian people,” said Rankine, a Jamaica native who grew up in the Bronx. 

Rankine has authored several books, plays, and anthologies, including Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the 2016 Rebekah Johnson National Prize for Poetry. Her other awards and honors include the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She currently serves as a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a professor at Yale University. 

A Portal to Reflect on Your Own Life

At the evening event, Rankine said she wants her readers to use her as a portal to reflect on their own experiences and assess them, rather than simply live them. Reading Rankine’s stories can also serve as a restorative experience for some readers, particularly Black women, said Lambert. 

“As a reader, I felt like I was being guided through these situations by a narrator I could trust—a narrator who understood a lot of my experiences as a Black person,” Lambert said to Rankine.

Naming ‘Whiteness’

The acknowledgement of a person’s “whiteness” can be perceived as threatening because it sounds similar to white nationalism and the violence associated with it, said Rankine. But “whiteness” is a necessary term when talking about race. 

“The kind of clever thing that was done by white culture is the naming of white people as people. They are allowed to hide behind the generality of that statement. They are people and we are African Americans, Caribbean Americans, Latinx Americans, Native Americans,” Rankine said. “That’s how white people have negotiated their lives: We are just neutral people living our lives, and you all are people of color.” 

This centralization of whiteness still stands in many places today, Rankine said. She cited the example of students and other people telling her they have received recruitment calls from white people who say they have perfect jobs for them, but they’re being “forced” to hire Black people to diversify their departments. This strategy to create equity is being falsely framed as something that takes something away from white people, said Rankine, who spoke at Fordham in 2016. 

‘It Gives Me Hope’

Rankine acknowledged that it’s hard to confront covert racism. She’s had to train herself not to let things go—to stop saying she’s tired, that it will stop the conversation, that somebody else in the room should say something instead of her. It’s essential, she said, to hold people accountable because they make critical decisions with long-term effects on places like juries, boardrooms, tenure committees, and dissertation evaluation committees. 

“We have been socialized so much towards silence and stability and not speaking up. And that’s what’s so amazing about the young people now—this new generation of high school students and college students,” Rankine said. “They are speaking up before things even get said. It gives me hope.”

Listen to the full conversation here. 

“We wanted to get into quality education, the ability to move around the city in our communities, the ability to get jobs, get paid, live in the community, get married, have children. And I think … we realized we could make a difference if we did it ourselves.”

These words come from Judith “Judy” Heumann, a 72-year-old pioneer of the disability rights movement recently featured in TIME’s list of the most influential women of the past century. Heumann reflected on her life of activism at Fordham’s fifth annual Distinguished Lecture on Disability, “The Disability Rights Movement: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We Need to Go,” in a Zoom webinar on Oct. 14. 

A Five-Year-Old ‘Fire Hazard’ Girl

Heumann became New York City public schools’ first teacher in a wheelchair after winning a landmark court case. She helped spearhead the passage and implementation of federal civil rights legislation for disabled people, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504, a federal law that prevents discrimination against individuals with disabilities. She also served in various leadership roles, including the World Bank’s first adviser on disability and development and the first special adviser for international disability rights under the Obama administration. In recent years, she has been working to change the portrayals of disabled people in the media as a senior fellow for the Ford Foundation. 

At the beginning of the webinar, she recalled that when she was a five-year-old girl with polio, the principal of a local school told her she couldn’t attend classes because she was a “fire hazard.”

“As I was getting older and meeting other disabled people, in my special ed classes and then at camp, it was becoming very apparent that we were facing discrimination without any real group of people speaking up against discrimination,” said Heumann, who had joined students earlier that day for a Q&A about the recent film Crip Camp, which featured the stories of disabled teens—including Heumann—at camp in the 1970s and their role in igniting the disabilities civil rights movement.

In that same period, she said, she also saw scores of people on TV standing up for civil and women’s rights across the country. They inspired her to lead demonstrations, start new organizations, and use legislation to fight discrimination directed toward the disability community, all while working closely with the community, religious leaders, and labor unions.

“All [these]types of activities were what enabled congressional representatives and U.S. senators to understand that the discrimination that disabled people were facing was not something that happened once in a while,” Heumann said. “It happened in every community, in every state—and it happened regularly.” 

Ongoing Obstacles for the Disability Community

In the wake of much progress, the disability community continues to struggle, said Heumann. Many Americans don’t realize they have a disability protected by law; others face stigmas and repercussions related to their disability, she said. There is a disproportionate number of disabled individuals in juvenile and adult facilities—people who may not have ended up in prison if they’d received “appropriate services along the way.” There isn’t enough money being dedicated to education for both nondisabled children and disabled children on local, state, and countrywide levels, she said, and many teachers-in-training at colleges and universities are not taught how to teach students in inclusive settings. 

Toward the end of the evening, the moderator of the event, Navena Chaitoo, FCRH ’13, a research manager at New York City mayor’s office of criminal justice, asked Heumann how people could take specific steps to help the disability community. 

“We’re talking about stronger parent training programs. We’re talking about better programs in universities for teachers, principals, and superintendents,” Heumann said. “We’re talking about our local school boards. Who are the people that you’re electing? … Are they fighting for you and your kids with disabilities?” 

“It all gets, to me, back to voting and knowing the people who are running for office and being more demanding and working collaboratively together.”

‘We Need to Normalize This’

In a Q&A, an audience member asked Heumann how society could lower stigmas around “invisible disabilities” like mental illness. 

“You look at Covid right now, and we’re talking about people having increased anxiety, increased depression, other mental health disabilities, and our inability to speak about this is both harmful to the individual person, to the family, and to the community at large. And so I think like with each category of disabled people, we need to normalize this,” Heumann said. She added that that specific movement needs to be led by people who have psychosocial disabilities themselves, like Andrew Imparato, executive director at Disability Rights California, who has openly spoken about his experience with bipolar disorder. She emphasized that we need to listen to people’s experiences and try our best to understand them. Lastly, she noted the importance of advocacy across generations and for youths, including students, to stand up for themselves. 

“Most importantly is allowing people the space and giving people the protections that they need,” Heumann said. “We have 61 million disabled people in the United States. If 5 million of us on a regular basis were speaking up and speaking out, it would have an amazing impact.” 

The live Zoom lecture, which featured two American Sign Language interpreters and live captioning, comes under two key initiatives on disability at Fordham: the disability studies minor and the research consortium on disability. The event was organized by the Faculty Working Group on Disability and co-sponsored by the offices of the provost and chief diversity officer, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Law, the Gabelli School of Business, the Graduate School of Social Service, and the departments of economics and English. 

Watch the full webinar in the video below: 

Those were the opening words of this year’s annual Black History Month lecture delivered by Saidiya Hartman, Ph.D., professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, at the Lincoln Center campus on Feb. 21. 

Jim and Julia

Hartman was reflecting on a short science fiction story by W.E.B. Du Bois and its implications on white supremacy as she began her talk, titled “Wild Thoughts and Rumors about the Auspicious Era of Extensive Freedom, or A Speculative History of the Demise of White Supremacy.” 

The words described Jim Davis, a black bank messenger, in Du Bois’ short story, The Comet. In Jim’s world, society is still segregated by race. After a comet hits New York and expels toxic gases that seem to have killed everyone around him, Jim finds a wealthy white woman named Julia. Thinking that they are the only humans left in the world, they start to connect and see past the color of each other’s skin. But at the end of the story, they discover there are more survivors. Julia’s father and fiancé find her, and she leaves Jim to join them, while an unnamed black woman holding a baby’s corpse falls into Jim’s embrace. 

To Hartman, a 2019 recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, The Comet is Du Bois’ attempt to explore the possibility of overturning white supremacy in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s a “tale about interracial love—less what happened to it than a question or doubt about the circumstances in which it might be possible or permitted,” she said. 

“One of the things you see in Du Bois is always attempting to imagine what’s going to allow an opening for a new arrangement to emerge or for abolition and democracy to in fact be realized,” Hartman said in Lowenstein’s 12th-floor lounge to an audience of roughly 100 guests, the majority of them students.

Du Bois, a leading scholar and civil rights activist in the first half of the 20th century, wrote The Comet—an example of speculative fiction focused on black society—“in the hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even if slighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people,” he wrote in the story’s postscript. The story, part of Du Bois’ book Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, is an old tale published in 1920, but its themes still resonate in modern media, Hartman said

“For those of you tempted to dismiss Du Bois and the comet as antiquated, as a variant of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, staged against the backdrop of climate catastrophe, I would encourage you to keep in mind contemporary films like Get Out or Bird Box, which also speculate about post-racial futures and end-of-the-world scenarios at the site of interracial love and intimacy,” Hartman said. “The coupling of black men and white women raises the question and possibility of a new race of people, in terms that might redress racial subjection and sexual violence, rather than reproduce it.” 

‘The Crime That Du Bois Swears Can Never Be Pardoned’

At the end of the story, white supremacy continues to reign. In this world, “the white world, the world of man,” it is the black woman who has suffered the most, said Hartman. 

“The history of insult and degradation, Du Bois notes, weighs most heavily on her shoulders. Her maternity is negated and exploited as a vehicle for the production of capital,” Hartman said. “She lives or dies at the white man’s whim and pleasure, a sentient tool and a property for enjoyment in every way imaginable. The harm the world has done to her has been so great and its violence so unrelenting, so seemingly irreparable, that it is the crime that Du Bois swears can never be pardoned.” 

She recalled the mysterious black woman carrying a dead infant at the end of The Comet.

“The damage done to the black’s reputation as human is most severe in her case. Given this, it is not surprising that she is unable to secure a place in the world for her children, or make this unlivable state habitable for the ones she loves, or create minimal conditions for survival, or ensure her future or anyone else’s,” Hartman said. 

Midway through the lecture, she looked up from her notes and scanned the audience. 

“I know this is all very heavy,” Hartman said. “But it is timely.” 

A Lesson on White Supremacy

In the final moments of her lecture, Hartman reflected on white supremacy in the past and present, in a commentary that intertwined Du Bois’ thoughts with her own. 

White workers and ex-slaves shared a common enemy: plantation owners and northern industrial capital, Hartman said. But that commonality failed to lead to interracial solidarity or retaliation. The white working class cared more about “the processes of racial enchantment and the possessive investment in whiteness.” They identified more with their white masters and rulers, she said, although they were separated by socioeconomic status. 

“This irrational and deep psychic investment in whiteness prevented—and we might add, continues to prevent—any recognition of a shared state or partial commonness with black people,” Hartman said. 

The lecture was sponsored by the Department of African & African American Studies, the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer; the Center on Race, Law and Justice; Department of Communication and Media Studies; Department of English; Comparative Literature Program; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. The event was also part of the Women of Color Initiative at Fordham launched in 2018, which encourages women of color to engage in conversation with one another. 

“To this day, there are numerous incidents of children and adults being discriminated against or punished because of their natural hairstyle. We’re hoping that this event empowers individuals to embrace their natural beauty and their hair,” said Olga Baez, MC ’05, GSE ’16, executive secretary in Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s residential life office, who is co-sponsoring the event with her nonprofit StriveHigher and the Office of Multicultural Affairs. 

The free event will take place on Saturday, Feb. 29, from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in Bepler Commons, located in Faber Hall. It will feature food, raffles, two authors of color who will read aloud from their children’s books, several speakers who will discuss their hair and style tips, and 10 local businesses from the Bronx and Harlem that will be selling natural hair and skin products on site. 

Among the books in the story time session are Don’t Touch My Hair! by Sharee Miller (Little, Brown Books, 2018) and The Girl With The Magical Curls (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018), a paperback by Evita Giron, a freelance writer whose book was inspired by her daughter. She is currently a pastoral mental health counseling student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. 

The expo speakers will reflect on their relationship with their hair and give the audience advice on how to care for their own. They include Martha Depumarejo and Kristopher Little, residence directors at Fordham College at Lincoln Center; Franchesca Ho Sang, GSE ’09, an English language arts teacher in the Bronx; and Courtney Gainous, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. 

Gainous’ talk, “Let’s Get Into This: Hair School 101,” will focus on how to take care of your hair as a college student on a budget. It will include quick and easy ways to style your hair and what to do when you’re having a bad hair day, she said. But overall, the goal of her talk is to empower young women. 

“I want [young girls]to know that protective styles and natural hair in general are professional and beautiful. Some girls might feel like they have to wear the straight wig or the straight, long weave in order to fit society’s standards. But the box braids and big curly hair—those are all beautiful, too,” Gainous said. “I’ve been wearing those all of my time here at Fordham, and I felt great every moment wearing them.” 

Another student speaker, Christine Ibrahim Puri, FCRH ’21, the co-founder and co-president of the Caribbean and African Student Association, will be talking about how she grew to love her natural hair. When she was a young girl in a Nigerian boarding school, she said, she and her classmates were forced to shave off most of their hair. They were told their hair was too difficult to manage and distracting to boys. Some of her classmates cried, she remembered. And she added that everyone should be in charge of their own hair.

“[People should] make it completely up to themselves, and not what other people have to say. Not what is on TV, especially, or magazines,” Puri said. “Whether that is keeping your hair the way it is or blowing it out—whatever it is, it should completely be up to you and not up to society or people around you.”

The Love Your Hair Expo is free and open to the public.

The capacity audience included members of two groups from a new University initiative titled “ReIMAGINE Higher Ed”—an incubator group that will seek to reimagine the Ignatian University for the 21st Century, and a reading group that will examine case studies from Davidson’s book as well as other readings. The initiative is being spearheaded by Eva Badowska, Ph.D., dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and special advisor to the provost.

In introducing Davidson, Fordham Provost Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., spoke frankly of an “increased mistrust” of universities at a time of “high polarization.”

“Fordham University does a lot of things well, but we’re not immune from these trends and concerns,” he said.

“I’m uplifted that Fordham is taking time to reflect on what the challenges are that lie ahead and is reimagining together how we prepare students for a world in flux.”

A Sinister Backstory to Standards

Davidson began by tracing the modern history of higher education, beginning with the origins of the letter grades A, B, C, D, and F. She said that it was the women’s college of Mount Holyoke that first instituted the letter grades, noting that F was added as the only referential grade, meaning “failure,” so that an E could not be misrepresented as “excellent.”

In time, she said, institutions of higher education reduced the complexities of learning to simple standardized measurements and expanded the practice to the ranking of students as well as institutions.

Without dismissing the value of university credentialing, she cast a light on the oftentimes sinister history of standards. She noted that former Harvard University President Charles Eliot, a champion of higher education standardization, who spent 40 years leading the education reform movement, was recently revealed to be a promoter of eugenics.

Eliot saw immigrants, and Catholics in particular, as a threat to the nation, she said. By World War I, a culture of I.Q. testing determined who would be sent to the front lines and who would become an officer, stationed away from the danger.

“These legacies are important. If we’re going to move forward, we have to know what our inheritance patterns are,” she said.

From there, a national credentialing system for everything from chemists to psychologists was born.

“We have a system of credentialing that’s methoding a system of credentialing, it’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to change because we’re constantly making self-referential systems,” she said, adding that it’s the same situation with school accreditation.

“Who created the first system of accreditation, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges? Charles Eliot. It’s hard to change because the standard by which you’re changing has standards for what is allowed and isn’t allowed for change.”

Digital Disruption

It’s within this legacy that the internet arose, promising users unfettered access to knowledge. She pegged the date to April 22, 1993, the day that the Mosaic 1.0 browser was introduced.

“Anyone with an internet connection can connect to anyone with an internet connection anonymously, without an editor or authorized publisher, or any kind of credential,” she said. “The utopian idea of the internet was that once you were anonymous and you didn’t need credentials, we’d all be making knowledge.”

The reality was that within six months of Mosaic’s introduction, a white supremacist group purchased the domain name of Martin Luther King Jr. to spread disinformation about the civil rights leader. The internet was quickly overwhelmed with fraud, bots, trolls, censorship, surveillance, massive corporate monopolies, and eventually, the devaluing and defunding of higher education, she said.

Within the tech sector, companies have in recent years created algorithms in their application process to screen out anyone without a STEM degree. Language, literature, history, and other liberal arts were considered “frills,” she said. But those same companies soon found themselves examining their own culture. Project Oxygen, which Google launched in 2013, found so-called “frills” majors yielded essential skills for advancement. Dubious of the findings, Davidson noted that the company turned to researchers from Stanford and Berkeley to study their findings. Their findings should cheer the hearts of liberal arts educators, she said.

“They hired a bunch of—hold your breath—cultural anthropologists to do ethnographic research, to go around Google and actually talk to people!” said.

“Sure enough, what they found in their data was certified by people that Google wouldn’t have even looked at before.”

A Way Forward

Davidson concluded her talk by pointing a way forward with four suggestions. First, she suggested restructuring the academic reward system so that that there is parity between research, teaching, and service. She said professors should be rewarded for researching how to advance the institution as they are rewarded for research within their own discipline. She also noted that service is leadership and should be referred to as “institutional leadership” and nothing less. Second, she said that the artificial wall between STEM and liberal arts should fall.

“It’s so demeaning to science not to have the humanities involved,” she said.

Third, she suggested rethinking the curriculum to stress life beyond school, navigating new technology, collaboration, and “critical thinking that leads to creative action.” Lastly, she encouraged a restructuring of class participation to become total participation. She said that novelist Samuel Delany insisted that all the students in his class raise their hands when he asked a question. She quoted him as saying:

“I’m going to call on you and if you don’t know the answer, I want you to say nice and clear: ‘I don’t know the answer to that, Professor Delany, but I would like to hear what that person has to say. And we’ll pass it on.’”

She said that while professors may appreciate the students who voluntarily raise their hand, they’re often the students who resemble the professor.

“That’s how you replicate the profession,” she said.

She added another upshot of everyone raising their hand.

“We actually know from cognitive neuroscience that’s a great way of saying, ‘I am here, I exist. I am in this room.’”