From there, he commuted for two hours. Each way.

“That is very difficult to do, if you do that every day,” especially in light of the “pretty intense” workload that comes with being an English major and biology minor on the pre-health track, said Feliz Varona, a senior.

Then he found out about the Fordham Housing Fund, devoted to helping students overcome the financial barriers to living on campus. With support from the fund, Feliz Varona moved onto campus in junior year and today lives in O’Hare Hall. The move enabled him to take leadership roles in clubs including the Black Student Alliance, for which he is now vice president, and the Minority Association of Pre-Health Students, of which he is president.

“[When] you have those extra four hours, your life changes completely,” he said. “The difference was way bigger than what I anticipated. And honestly, it’s just a blessing that I am thankful for every day.”

This year, the Fordham Housing Fund is supporting Feliz Varona and eight other students who came to Fordham via its Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program, or CSTEP, a New York state program that helps students from underrepresented groups enter science-related fields and the licensed professions.

The fund has been focused on CSTEP students since it was established in 2011 by Brian and Kathy MacLean, both FCRH ’75, who sought to help students who would most benefit from living on campus. Recipients had often struggled with long commutes or other challenges such as crowded and distracting living situations that made it hard to focus on their studies, hurting their grades.

The MacLeans, two of the University’s generous donors, made further major gifts to build the fund’s endowment after meeting recipients and hearing how they had benefited from it. “The stories from the CSTEP students that get the [funding awards]are so amazing,” said Brian MacLean, a former Fordham University trustee and current trustee fellow. Kathy MacLean, a current member of the Board of Trustees, noted one benefit in particular: “When we talked to the students, we were surprised that for many of them, the number one benefit they most appreciated was being able to sleep more. This positively impacted their grades and general well-being.”

The MacLeans have been the primary donors to the Fordham Housing Fund but left their names out of its title in order to encourage others to support it as well. In adding to the fund, they also sought to enhance diversity among on-campus residents—a goal that dovetails with those of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, which the MacLeans helped to advance with a new gift to the housing fund this year.

A Transformative Experience

Thirty to 40 students apply every year for funding awards, which cover housing and a basic meal plan, said Michael Molina, Fordham’s CSTEP and STEP director. Students are selected based on grade point average, an essay, and an interview focusing on how they would get more involved and contribute to the on-campus community if they could live in a residence hall.

For those selected, the experience of living on campus can be transformative, Molina said—especially if they would otherwise be living with multiple family members and wanting for privacy.

As a student, “there are those times you need to be around people, to be around your peers and your friends and your classmates, then there are those times that you need to have some time to yourself,” he said.

The number of CSTEP students helped by the fund has grown from two in the first year to nine today, Molina said. For this year’s recipients, the fund has made all the difference, helping them realize their ambitions for their time at Fordham.

A 180-Degree Change

Yu Jin In, a junior majoring in integrative neuroscience, had been waking up as early as 5:30 a.m. to commute to Rose Hill from her family’s home in Queens—taking two buses, occasionally having to run from one to catch the other, to arrive in time for 8 a.m. classes.

Now, thanks to her housing fund award, she lives in the Martyrs’ Court residence halls and her Fordham experience has “changed 180 degrees”—she’s better able to make friends, take night classes, and use her evenings for unbroken studying or other engagements. “I could finally say ‘yes’ to dinner [with]people,” she said.

Things also changed for Fawziah Fariha, a senior on the pre-health track who is double-majoring in psychology and theology, when she no longer had a long commute to and from her Bronx home.

With the extra time and flexibility, she was better able to get more involved with student clubs and push beyond her comfort zone. “I’m able to really lead,” said Fariha, who is a secretary in the Muslim Student Association; director in Fordham University South Asian Entity, or FUSE; president of the Laennec Society, a pre-health students’ club; and co-founder of the new Bengali Student Association. Through leadership, she said, “you learn so much about yourself.”

Some students faced long commutes even if they were relatively close to Rose Hill. For Giovanni Barreiro, a senior engineering physics major, it could take an hour and a half from the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx. For Chealsy Garcia, a junior general science major also in the pre-health program, it could take an hour to get to and from Washington Heights. Living on campus, Garcia is able to spend more time with various activities, like being a mentor with Mentoring Latinas, and is in the process of joining Fordham’s EMS service, known as FUEMS.

Daphne Buitron, a pre-health senior majoring in sociology and minoring in biology, enjoys being able to meet up with other students for studying, as well as having time for other things like joining the dance club, which has late meetings.

“This gave me the chance to do something for myself, but also continue with my academics,” she said. “I could do what I want instead of what I need and then leave.”

‘Somebody Looking Out for You’

Maria Del Sol Estrada, a senior double-majoring in political science and Spanish language and literature and applying to law school, originally applied for the on-campus housing out of concern about bringing home COVID-19 to her family members—including her grandmother—with whom she was living in Manhattan.

“It affects you subconsciously,” she said. “You think about things more. I literally think I washed my hands every single time I would touch something. I didn’t take my mask off for a really long time.”

Isaac Mullings, a junior psychology major on the pre-health track, said it’s been interesting to be able to pick up food on campus without opening his wallet; he can simply use his meal plan card.

He said the housing award has encouraged him to do well. “I think it’s served [as]a point of motivation—‘Okay, there’s somebody looking out for you, so just try your best in class today,’” he said.

Make a gift to the Fordham Housing Fund here. 

To inquire about giving to any area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, a campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.

The evening showcase, The Movement, Melodrama, and Melodies of NYC, featured dance solos from the Ailey/Fordham students and performances of the Grammy- and Academy Award-winning song The Shadow of Your Smile, as well as popular rhythm and blues song Route 66 by the Fordham Jazz Ensemble. Members of Fordham Theatre also performed an excerpt from the play Indecent, which celebrates the love, magic, and hope of the theater. Following the showcase held in Costantino Room, guests wined and dined at a reception held in the adjacent Soden Lounge and Bateman Room. 

In her closing remarks at the end of the showcase, Tetlow thanked the students for their “stunning” performance and their ability to evoke emotion. 

“There’s a world where we would have our business school students discuss a business plan, and watch the law student try to brief, and have a calculus problem on a whiteboard, just to demonstrate their talent and discipline and hard work, but none of them would have made us feel what you made us feel tonight,” Tetlow said. 

She also praised the students for their courage to perform on stage and admired the dancers’ agility. (Watching the Ailey dancers almost made her pull a muscle, she joked.) In addition, she highlighted the students’ nod to American history. 

“I think that you, tonight, really earned our spot on San Juan Hill. I feel the spirits of the people who lived here who were so important in American history and in American cultural history, from Zora Neale Hurston to Thelonious Monk. And you have made it such that we deserve this spot of their making and deserve our spot as part of Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts because we are part of this grand experiment to bring together such amazing culture of this country and in the world,” said Tetlow. “So thank you for demonstrating what Fordham is and your own talent and for making the kickoff to this inauguration so special.” 

Through more than 25 numbers, the show celebrates the years when Duke Ellington led the Cotton Club Orchestra. His songs, such as the sultry “Creole Love Call,” and his arrangements of others’ tunes, like the rousing “Freeze and Melt,” flow through the theater from the horns, woodwinds, and rhythm section of the Jazz at Lincoln Center All-Stars. The big band, handpicked by maestro Wynton Marsalis, rightfully sits not in an orchestra pit, but on stage, just as Ellington’s orchestra did at the old Cotton Club.

It’s not so much a Broadway musical as it is a flashback to one spectacular, idealized night at the popular club, a night that almost begs for the Brooks Atkinson Theatre to remove some of its seats so theatergoers can jive along with the performers.

“That’s a special thing about this show,” said Monique Smith, FCLC ’02. “It doesn’t have a big story line or a whole lot of dialogue; it’s just based on the talent of the cast. That’s why I love being in this show.”

Smith, Abney, Moore, and Cyrus (in her Broadway debut) spin and swing across the stage, making six costume changes during the 90-minute show. It’s all about celebrating the flirty melodies and flighty improvisations of the kind of jazz that swirled around inside the club during its heyday.

“It was a time when big band jazz was really coming into its own,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African American studies at Fordham. “Musically, it was unbelievable. This wasn’t jazz to listen to, this was jazz to dance to.”

Dulé Hill, from USA Network’s Psych, acts as the emcee for the evening, singing and dancing and dropping snippets of poetry by Langston Hughes, an Ellington contemporary perhaps best known for the opening lines of “Harlem” (“What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”). Hughes’ words hint at a complicated racial history that is largely absent from the show.

The Cotton Club, after all, was a whites-only joint run by the mob, showcasing black artists on stage while barring them from sitting at the tables as patrons. “It was a good time, but it was not egalitarian,” said Naison, who wrote the foreword to A Dancer in the Revolution (Fordham University Press, 2014), a memoir by Howard “Stretch” Johnson, a Cotton Club performer who went on to become a Communist Party youth leader and a professor of black studies.

“Some of the most powerful and chilling passages of the book,” Naison writes in the foreword, “describe the white underworld characters who controlled the Cotton Club and the upper-class whites who came to Harlem for all kinds of illicit thrill-seeking, people whom Johnson found himself needing to please, or manipulate, if he wanted to find any kind of work as an entertainer.”

Broadway shows are not racially exclusive places, like the Cotton Club was, but pleasing casting directors and finding theater work today may not be any easier than it was in Johnson’s time.

At the After Midnight auditions, the show’s producers were looking for “regality and refinement,” said Smith, who credits the Ailey/Fordham program for being “quite successful at training incredibly refined dancers.”

The program also demands discipline. Student-dancers complete Fordham’s core courses in liberal arts and social sciences, while taking more than a dozen dance technique and creative classes, as well as daily Horton- or Graham-based modern and classical ballet classes.

“Many times in my dance career, I have had to do a similar balancing act of juggling dance class, auditions, voice lessons, shows—sometimes all in the same day,” said Erin Moore, FCLC ’05, a St. Louis native who has performed in Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera and danced with Philadanco.

Ana Marie Forsythe, former director of the Ailey/Fordham program and chair of the Horton department at the Ailey School, taught all four alumnae. She’s not surprised by their success. “Not only are they talented dancers,” she said, but their “enormous versatility” also “gives them the opportunity to seek out any kind of work.”

After Midnight opened last November on a stretch of West 47th Street that, this spring at least, might as well be called Fordham Way. Across the street is the Barrymore Theater, where Fordham alumnus Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, is starring in a revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

On March 13, Washington’s name incited a chorus of cheers from the Ailey/Fordham alumnae, who, fresh out of their wigs and flapper dresses, sat at the edge of the stage to talk with a group of 30 alumni who had just watched the show. Fordham’s Office of Alumni Relations, which hosts cultural events for alumni throughout the year, organized the special talkback session with the cast.

Attendees wanted to know how the four dancers made it from the Lincoln Center campus to Broadway. Moore said it helps to be a part of the Fordham network.

“Once you graduate, there is no roadmap telling you what to do next,” she said, “but it is helpful to have alumni in different parts of the field. It gives you access to opportunities that you would have otherwise missed.”

She crossed paths with Abney, Smith, and Cyrus (a 2008 graduate) at Fordham, and they see each other and many alumni at the same auditions. “We pushed and supported each other as students,” Moore said, “and those students are now my community in the professional dance world.”

Abney, a 2007 graduate, added, “Now we’re all in the same dressing room, and we love that.” They also love helping to bring about a “rebirth of the Cotton Club.”

“Every night we give of ourselves,” Abney said, and “pay homage to those who came before us, to all the black artists who made a home at the Cotton Club.”

– Rachel Buttner

It is no wonder that Fordham’s President Joseph M. McShane, S.J., has described the dancers as “highly employable” – recently 81 percent of the graduating class got professional contracts.

More than 100 student-dancers are enrolled in the program, which allows students to earn a liberal arts undergraduate degree while also earning a BFA degree through study with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

A new program at the Alvin Ailey Dance Studio has Ailey-Fordham students moving in new directions—literally and figuratively.

Ailey Artistic Director Robert Battle has initiated New Directions Choreography Lab (NDCL) to help emerging choreographers develop new work. The program enlists highly trained Ailey students to work with them on the process as a purely creative experience, free from any type of restrictive expectation.

Recently, three Fordham students were given the opportunity to help up-and-coming choreographer Camille Brown actualize a dance-in-progress that she said was partly inspired by depictions of African Americans in a Subway sandwich commercial.

Fordham College at Lincoln Center sophomores Patrick Coker, Rachel Secrest and Jacquelin Harris were part of an ensemble that performed the three-part piece last semester at the Joan Weill Center for Dance on West 55th Street.

The student dancers collaborated with Brown on interpreting her vision of the history of African-American humor, its bald stereotyping and its use of caricature in minstrel shows and other venues.

Students were taught the choreography, which merged stereotypical movement, clichéd vocal riffs and vigorous modern dance steps, over a period of five weeks. During that time, they were encouraged to bring their own artistic expression to their dance, they said.

Secrest, a double major in dance and political science, said that the piece changed considerably from where it started. She valued the opportunity that NDCL had given her to go deeper into dance performance: Working with a choreographer on an emerging piece, she said, took her well “beyond technique.”

“It was really interesting to interpret, and hard,” Secrest said. “It was different from the normal Ailey training because this was a chance for us to build on our own artistry, which is important if you are working toward being a professional dancer.”

Sophomore Jacquelin Harris said that the topic made her think about how movement related to the creation of character.

“There is a symbolism behind each step,” she said. “[It] caused me to be more than just a dancer, but also an actor.”

Brown expressed her appreciation of NDCL’s collaborative aspect.

“This gave me the opportunity to work intensively to figure out what I am doing with the new piece,” she said. “It was amazing to have a creative playground.”

NDCL plans to support two new emerging choreographers every semester, offering Ailey-Fordham students a chance to stage cutting-edge choreography while earning their degrees. Students must try out at the beginning of each term for the choreographic labs. Those chosen are given credit for their participation.