On Feb. 2, Fisher, a professor of theology, used his final address to his colleagues to tell his own families’ story.

“I was determined not to do one of those ‘My family is crazier than your family’ kind of histories, because I wouldn’t know how crazy anybody else’s family is,” said Fisher, who is retiring in May to spend more time in California with his son Charlie, who is autistic.

“But the complementarity of [mine and Charlie’s]cognitive systems is such a positive thing, I started to get much more positive feelings about my own family’s history. I wondered about people who may help me understand who we are.”

He discovered, among other things, that his great grandfather moved from Brooklyn to Panama in 1906 to work as a plumber on the Panama Canal. There, he became Chief and Senior Sagamore of the fraternal organization the Improved Order of Redmen.

“They wanted to transplant all the putative virtues of white American Christian Republicanism to this utopian community on the Isthmus of Panama. The Improved Order of Redmen was one of these kinds of organizations,” Fisher said, noting dryly that membership was not, in fact, open to Native Americans.

“I had to readjust the longevity of my father’s side of the families’ devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. I’d been off by 12 to 15 centuries. My great grandfather was nobody’s idea of a Roman Catholic. He was in fact, a pagan.”

He died under mysterious circumstances, and Fisher’s great grandmother moved back to Brooklyn, where Fisher discovered she lived in Vinegar Hill, next door to William Sutton, the infamous bank robber who was credited with saying he did it, “Because that’s where the money is.”

His family, which would also later call Woodbridge, New Jersey, home, also belied the popular model of Catholic immigrants flocking to parishes to create a sort of “old world communal setting.”

“My father’s family presented itself as the ultimate exemplar of just that model, but empirically it was not true. They lived where the work was; they lived on the waterfront in Brooklyn, Manhattan and North Jersey,” he said.

And although his grandparents experienced the terror of a resurgent of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s, they did just fine in the end.

“They were homeless in the 1930’s. By 1946, because of the war, my grandfather worked up in his job, and sent their sons to the University of Notre Dame—the eighth wonder of the world for American Catholics,” he said.

Fisher’s talk was part of Arts and Sciences Faculty Day. This year, honorees included
Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, who was honored for excellence in teaching in science and math;

Jim Fisher, Ph.D.,professor of theology, who was honored for or excellence in teaching in arts and humanities

Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, who was honored for excellence in teaching social sciences;

Maryann Kowaleski, P.h.D., Joseph Fitzpatrick SJ Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies, who was honored for excellence in teaching in graduate studies.

The evening also celebrates 12 members of the arts and science faculty who have been chosen to work together to discuss innovative teaching techniques. The group, which includes graduate students and cuts across campuses and disciplines, meets five times a semester for two semesters to share recent scholarship in the field of teaching stories, and techniques. This year’s cohort includes:

Emanuel Fiano, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Abby Goldstein, associate professor of visual arts

Henry Han, Ph.D., associate professor of Computer and Information Science

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry

Jesus Luzardo, Ph.D. candidate of philosophy, Graduate School of Arts and Science

Jason Morris, Ph.D, associate professor of biology

Meenaserani Murugan, Ph.D., assistant professor of communications

Silvana Patriarca, Ph.D., professor of history

Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Margaret Schwartz, Ph.D., associate professor of communications

Richard Teverson, assistant professor of art history

Dennis Tyler, Ph.D., assistant professor of English

Alessia Valfredini, Ph.D., lecturer of Italian

Awards went to Brian Johnson, Ph.D.,assistant professor of philosophy, for undergraduate teaching in the humanities; Melissa Labonte, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science, for undergraduate teaching in social sciences; Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, for undergraduate teaching in the sciences; andBenjamin Dunning, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, for excellence in graduate-level teaching.

Larry Stempel, Ph.D., professor of music, was the event’s featured speaker. In his lecture, “What Is/n’t a Broadway Composer? The Case of Richard Rodgers,” Stempel, author of Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (W.W. Norton, 2010), presented his research on the role that Rodgers played in composing some of Broadway’s best-known show tunes.

Stempel approached Rodgers from a music historian’s perspective informed by first-person interviews, analysis of original composition notes, and placement of the subject within historical context.

He placed Rodgers among contemporaries that included Frankfort School philosopher Theodor Adorno and set out to frame not just the nature of Rodgers’ art, but also the nature of Broadway composers more generally.

Adorno felt that certain composers (Kurt Weill, for one) lost sight of what it means to be a composer through an association with the commercial venue of Broadway. The very notion of a composer, said Stempel, grew out of the 18th-century court musicians who struck out on their own as artists. By the end of the 19th century the Romantic notion of the composer as an autonomous artist had fully evolved.

On Broadway, however, a composer is hardly autonomous, said Stempel, but works with orchestrators, musical editors, conductors, vocal arrangers, and many more in a collaborative effort.

In the context of Adorno’s claim that Weill had abandoned the true composer’s ideal, Stempel said that Rodgers’ true talent lay in his tuneful songwriting rather than his composing.
Stempel gave as an example an early version of the song “Oklahoma” as presented in an out-of-town performance in New Haven, Conn. At the time the show was called Away We Go and was in desperate need of a showstopper.

Stempel said that the original “Oklahoma” composition shows Hammerstein’s lyric inserted into Rodgers’ chorus music, syllable-to-note. The song’s harmonies were altered during production, however, by musical arranger Robert Russell Bennett who was summoned by Rodgers himself. The new version of “Oklahoma” was so good that the show’s name was changed to bear its title, Stempel said.

“The song took on new heft,” said Stempel. “From a cultural perspective it [was]transformed into something more like an anthem… as the chorus now strove vocally to embody, in sound, certain tropes in the mythology of the American frontier.”

One risks settling for a more limited understanding of the song’s “cultural moment” without taking Bennett’s arrangement into account, said Stempel. But practically speaking, Bennett’s work gave the show its much-needed commercial appeal.

The annual Faculty Arts and Sciences day was sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences.

Can science operate under great stress?

If the results of Soviet prison camps are any indication, it sure can—and with great success to boot. But that doesn’t mean this science under duress came without a cost, one of Fordham’s top historians said on Feb. 4.

Asif Siddiqi, Ph.D., associate professor of history, discussed the Soviet prison science system in his keynote speech at the 19th annual Arts and Sciences Faculty Day. The talk took place on the Lincoln Center campus before an audience of his peers who later honored the school’s faculty members of the year.

In “Science and Freedom: In the Shadow of the Gulag,” Siddiqi pondered whether freedom was necessary for productive scientific and engineering activity to occur.

“The unfortunate answer from the Soviet case would seem to be, no,” Siddiqi said of the prison science system in the Gulag, whose existence spanned from the late 1920s to Stalin’s death in 1953. The system, which put roughly 1,000 scientists and engineers to work, resulted in the development of more than 20 major weapons systems or processes, including the Pe-2 bomber, one of the most successful Soviet weapons of World War II.

“But such science also leaves an undeniably horrific human cost,” Siddiqi added. “The thousands of lives lost, the institutions disbanded, the disciplines suspended. All, as one, comprise an extraordinarily depressing record of possibilities interrupted. Science may indeed operate without freedom but it is a costly path to take.”

Because the Gulag prison science system added members when prisoners gave up the names of friends from their “civilian” lives, Siddiqi said the system as a whole produced a host of Soviet scientists and engineers who “shared an enormous trauma that deeply affected their later lives.”

An entire generation of these elite engineers who were arrested during the second wave in the late 1930s went on to head their own design and engineering firms and dominate research and development, especially with in the Soviet military-industrial complex, in the post-Stalin era.

“Their adoption and occasional enthusiasm for certain traits of the organizational culture of the Soviet scientific and engineering—extreme secrecy, strict hierarchies, coercive practices, rigid reporting protocols—owed much to their shared experiences with similar peculiarities characteristic of the prison system,” Siddiqi said as he highlighted the story of one of these former prisoners, Sergey Pavlovich Korolev, a bright aeronautical scientist.

“Korolev’s life perfectly embodied and eerily mirrored all the contradictions of Soviet science,” Siddiqi said.

Arrested on June 27, 1938, he ended up in a prison science complex just outside of Moscow. After his release, Korolev joined a rocket research team and rose rapidly through the ranks.
And just 13 years after he was released from the prison, in the fall of 1957, Korolev stood in Central Asia as his brainchild, a giant rocket name the R-7, launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit.

“Korolev made his mark on the history of science and technology, but he paid a steep price for it. Even after the launching of Sputnik, his identity was kept hidden from the public,” Siddiqi said. “Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev refused to share credit for the spectacular achievements of the Soviet space program with the scientists and engineers in his pay; he kept them in the shadows.”

For these former “prisoners,” like Korolev, the experience in the Gulag represented not only a shared rite of passage—almost pride—but also a deep process of enculturation about the values of coercion, incentive and especially secrecy in institutional culture.

“If the vicissitudes of Soviet polity and society explained the obvious failings of Soviet science, then they must also explain its successes,” Siddiqi said. “The prison science system, like its parent, the Gulag, created walls within Soviet civil society that remained standing long after the Gulag itself was consigned to the scrapheap of history.

“Historians and philosophers of science have been grappling with this disturbing correlation, that some of the greatest advances in science and technology occurred simultaneously with some of the most egregious crimes against humanity. Sometimes, the two went hand-in-hand and, as we saw in the Soviet case, one enabled the other,” Siddiqi said.

Six members of Fordham’s arts and sciences faculty were feted at the Arts and Sciences Faculty Day event, which honors the work of professors in teaching, research and service, and recognizes individual professors for outstanding performance in those areas.

The 2011 winners in undergraduate teaching were:

Jason Z. Morris, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology, Department of Natural Science, for distinguished teaching in the sciences.

Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Ph.D., assistant professor of philosophy, for distinguished teaching in the humanities.

Christopher Maginn, Ph.D., associate professor of history, for distinguished teaching in the social sciences.

Three professors received the 2011 award for Distinguished Contribution to Graduate Education:

Michael Baur, Ph.D., associate professor of philosophy and adjunct professor of law; Moshe Gold, Ph.D., associate professor of English and director of the Writing Program at Rose Hill and Christine Firer Hinze, Ph.D., professor of Christian Ethics, Department of Theology, who received the award for their contribution to the Jesuit Pedagogy Seminar.

“Students’ aspirations were going up and the system was not ready to find a place in universities or in the job market for so many success cases coming from schools.” Lindo-Fuentes, a professor of history and director of Latin American and Latino Studies, noted how the program was instituted in junior high schools and required synergy between both virtual teachers and live teachers. However, despite successes in student achievement and curriculum standardization, he noted several far-reaching sociopolitical problems associated with the transition. Many critics interpreted the El Salvadoran government’s educational television plan as being part of an overall imperialist agenda, while others saw education being reduced to a mere instrument of economic development, Lindo-Fuentes said. In addition, teachers were having noticeable difficulty adapting to the changing landscape. Many were not familiar with the new curriculum being presented by the tele-teachers and others were finding it hard to compete with their virtual counterparts. They also had more students in the classroom.

After the government abolished the tuition fee for entering junior high, enrollment grew 35 percent, while the number of teachers stayed the same. The clash between teachers and government officials eventually led to a two-month teacher strike in 1971. Subsequently, as members of the teachers union became more and more actively opposed to the government, teachers were faced with many physical and psychological modes of intimidation. Such unrest plunged the educational system into further disrepair, eventually leading to the virtual extinction of educational television by the early 1980s. “Foreign aid of the ‘good kind’ empowered an authoritarian government to impose reform from above,” said Lindo-Fuentes to the crowd of more than 200 in the McGinley Center’s Rose Hill Commons. “It also gave new forms for the state to show its authoritarian colors and new opportunities for the counterinsurgency apparatus to work.

The problem was not that the reform made the middle classes hungry for more, it was that it was implemented in a way that clearly alienated the biggest group of civil servants.” After the lecture, the faculty gathered for dinner and the distribution of the distinguished teaching awards. Nancy A. Bush, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, presented the humanities award to Anne Hoffman, Ph.D., professor of English; the social science award to Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology; the science award to James Ciaccio, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry; and the graduate teaching award to Maryann Kowaleski, Ph.D., professor of history and medieval studies. The 2003 Faculty Day celebration was historic on two counts: It marked the first time the College at Lincoln Center organized the festivities, and it was the first time faculty members from Marymount College attended the annual event.