“A University can be no greater than its faculty,” said Fordham Provost Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., during opening remarks. “At the time each of you were hired, we selected you because we saw

great potential in you as a teaching scholar … we were confident that over time, you would demonstrate the fulfillment of your potential.”

It was the third annual faculty celebration, a tradition that began in 2022.

Eighteen faculty members were recognized at the ceremony. Each was introduced by their college’s dean: Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center; Lerzan Aksoy, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School of Business; Ji Seon Lee, Ph.D., acting dean of the Graduate School of Education; Debra McPhee, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Social Service; Bennett Capers, associate dean for research at Fordham Law School; Ann Gaylin, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Bob Hume, Ph.D., acting dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. 

The deans also read out a list of the faculty members’ accomplishments, ranging from publications in prestigious academic journals to bringing in millions in grant funding for research to the University. 

President Tania Tetlow delivered closing remarks, congratulating the faculty members and thanking them for their service to Fordham, on behalf of the University and its students.

The honorees promoted to professor were as follows: 

• Christopher Aubin, Ph.D. (Physics and Engineering Physics)
• Lauri Goldkind, Ph.D. (Graduate School of Social Service)
• Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D. (Computer and Information Science)
• Robert Hernández, Ph.D. (English)
• Ron Lazebnik (School of Law)

The faculty members who earned tenure were: 

• Norrinda Brown (School of Law)
• Natasha Burke, Ph.D. (Psychology)
• Rufus Burnett Jr., Ph.D. (Theology)
• Leah Feuerstahler, Ph.D. (Psychology)
• Elizabeth Gil, Ph.D. (Graduate School of Education)
• Lauren Kopajtic, Ph.D. (Philosophy)
• Elizabeth Matthews, Ph.D. (Graduate School of Social Service)
• Dominik Molitor, Ph.D. (Gabelli School of Business)
• Brandy Monk-Payton, Ph.D. (Communication and Media Studies)
• Rahbel Rahman-Tahir, Ph.D. (Graduate School of Social Service)
• Fadi Skeiker, Ph.D. (Theatre)
• Nicholas Smyth, Ph.D. (Philosophy)
• Laura Specker Sullivan, Ph.D. (Philosophy)

“Leo was an extremely active and committed member of the modern language and literatures department,” said Andrew Clark, Ph.D., the department’s current chair and professor of French and comparative literature, who worked with him from 2003 to 2015. Clark noted that Hoar served on multiple committees and advocated in particular for international education. He was also an active participant in Fordham’s ROTC program and a moderator for the university’s sailing team.

Clark said Hoar’s true passion was Cervantes, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and revered for The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, which he penned in the early 17th century. When Hoar joined the faculty in 1963, he took over the then 11-year-old Fordham Cervantes lectures, which had enjoyed international acclaim as the only continuous event of its kind devoted to Cervantes. He oversaw multi-day conferences held to commemorate 25-, 40-, and 50-year anniversaries of the lectures. 

A native of Worchester, Massachusetts, Hoar served in the U.S. Army from 1953 to 1955 and was discharged with the rank of second lieutenant. He earned a Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University in 1965. He started teaching at Fordham as an instructor in 1963, became an assistant professor in 1965, and was promoted to associate professor in 1970. 

In 2003, he was honored with a Bene Merenti medal for 40 years of service at Fordham and lauded as an enthusiastic and demanding teacher who developed innovative teaching methods and helped organize study abroad trips to Spain. In 2015, he retired after 53 years of service to the University.

A Home at Rose Hill

Even after he retired, Hoar regularly visited the Rose Hill campus and was a fixture on the fifth floor of Faber Hall, where the department is located. From that vantage point, he could gaze down on the University Church, where he and his wife Georgine were married on the United States bicentennial, July 4, 1976. 

The two met at Fordham in 1966, when Georgine was teaching full-time for the department. They two bonded over a love of the works of the novelist Benito Pérez Galdós; he was a focus of her master’s thesis, and he would go on to publish Benito Pérez Galdós y la revista del movimiento intelectual de Europa, Madrid, 1865-1867 (Madrid, 1968).

They honeymooned in Canary Island Gran Canaria, the birthplace of Galdós. After their children were born, Georgine continued to teach as an adjunct; she also served as a moderator for the foreign language society Alpha Mu Gamma and worked with Hoar on the Cervantes lectures.

 When she was also honored for 40 years of service in 2017, it was estimated that between her and her husband, the two had 100 years of teaching experience between them, adding up to 200 semesters and about 12,500 students.

“Fordham is really our home. It’s where we met, and we never counted the years. Leo always said that he would just never retire. It was the love of his life to teach the students,” Georgine said. 

“He was known as a tough grader, but fair, and the students always enjoyed him because he had a wonderful sense of humor. He absolutely enjoyed what he did. If he had a 10 a.m. class, he was in his office at 8.”

Cherishing the Life of the Mind

His daughter Jennifer Hoar said she spent so much time as a child with her father on the Rose Hill Campus that when she moved out to Los Angeles, she attended—and made friends at—a Fordham alumni event even though she went to Georgetown University. She said she never met someone who was as passionate about his work as her father.

“We’d be on vacation, and he’d have a briefcase and bring it out on the beach with a legal pad and pen and books,” she said

“I didn’t think it was weird because that was how he was himself. It was just, ‘I enjoy the life of the mind so much that it’s relaxing for me to be on the beach reading and writing and thinking and getting ideas.’”

Although Hoar was well known for his intellectual prowess, Jennifer said that something less known about her father was that he never missed an opportunity to express his feelings. 

“That really spoiled me for life. I’ve met very few people, and certainly few men, who are not only able to identify with such specificity and precision their feelings but are also unafraid to speak them. That was a massive gift he gave me,” she said. 

Like his sister, Hoar’s son Leo Hoar III, Ph.D., GSAS ’04, spent a great deal of time at Rose Hill and remembered being fascinated by his father’s commencement robes, which he considered a “full-out wizard outfit” when he was little. He returned to Rose Hill in 2002 to earn an M.A. in English and eventually earned a Doctor of Philosophy in English language and literature/letters at the University of California, Irvine.

During those two years at Fordham, he developed a routine where he’d periodically stop by his father’s office, and because the elder Hoar was often there well past office hours. He’d find himself chatting with his father and his office mate at the time, the late Paul Trensky, Ph.D., a professor of Russian literature and comparative drama.

“When Trensky was there, the three of us would just sit around, and they would tell sophisticated jokes and I would pretend to laugh at them because I had no idea what they were talking about,” he said laughing. 

“They’re some of my favorite memories of my life, to be honest. I didn’t tell myself, ‘I’m going to Fordham so I can hang out with my dad,’ but it was this amazing kind of side benefit.”

When he graduated in 2004, his father was there to give him his diploma. The younger Leo works in the private sector now but has no doubt that his father inspired him to get a Ph.D.

“I think it’s because the model that he put forward was so irresistible. It was so clear to me growing up that he absolutely loved every single day that he went to work,” he said.

A Legacy that Keeps Alumni Connected

Mary Ellen Kahn, GSAS ’73, earned an M.A. in Spanish literature with Hoar as her professor. Hoar’s enthusiasm for Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was so contagious, she said, she was inspired to delve deeper into the poet’s work and do more research on his influences. Kahn said Hoar also made medieval poetry, which some consider a bit obscure and dry, come alive

“I consider him kind of a Renaissance man because he had a way of linking music to the literature that he taught,” she said.

She harkened back to Hoar’s lessons for 30 years in her work as a high school Spanish teacher in Rockville Centre, New York.

“I was able to bring my enthusiasm, which I had caught from Dr. Hoar to my students to get them excited about poetry and literature,” she said, noting that her fond memories of Fordham inspired her to join a University Women’s Giving Circle.

“One of the reasons that I keep supporting Fordham is because of my memories of Dr. Hoar.”

A Life Filled with Joy

Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, Ph.D., a professor of Spanish and comparative literature, said Hoar was an important member of the “MLL family.” 

“I remember him most toasting to others and laughing. His generosity on these occasions and his great sense of humor, which were a balm during difficult times, is what I will remember and cherish most about him,” he said.

Clark remembered Hoar as an avid sailor who sailed out of the Bronx’s City Island with his friends and family. When Clark became chair of the department, he said, Hoar gave him a bottle opener, a bottle of champagne, and a note that captured his spirit quite well—’Enjoy the bubbly, and remember what Napoleon said about champagne: In victory you deserve, it and in defeat you need it. In your case, it’s victory!”   

“One of my favorite memories is when Leo and Georgine returned to Fordham for a spring departmental party in 2017. They were impeccably dressed, deeply gracious, and filled with youth. With a live Mariachi band playing, the two started dancing together with some pretty impressive moves. It inspired others to join in. You could see that there was great love between them and a life filled with joy, appreciation, and happiness,” Clark said.

“We will miss him and are blessed with the energy and contributions he gave to the department over many decades.”

Hoar is survived by his wife, Georgine Barna Hoar; his daughters Jennifer Hoar and Judith Tietz; his son, Leo Hoar III; his sister, Nancy Gunning, and many loving nieces and nephews.

A wake will take place at McGrath Funeral Home in Bronxville, New York, on Thursday, June 30, from 6 to 8 p.m. A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at St. Joseph’s church in Bronxville on Friday, July 1, at 10:45 a.m.

But three years ago, during a visit to Côte d’Ivoire’s Comoé National Park, Matsuda Goodwin, a primate conservationist and adjunct professor of anthropology at Fordham, discovered what she is almost certain is the first sighting in the wild of a monkey that is a descendent of both a mangabey and a baboon. This summer, she’ll continue her study of the hybrid “Mangaboons,” with an eye toward saving them.

One sighting is not enough to make a case for a new kind of monkey. But two more sightings by Matsuda Goodwin last year, which were documented via photo and video, convinced her that at least one hybrid monkey is living in the 4,400-square-mile park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In April, she published her most recent findings on all the sightings in the paper “Putative white-naped mangabey (Cercocebus lunulatus) × olive baboon (Papio anubis) hybrids from Comoé National Park in Côte d’Ivoire.” She is the lead author of the paper, which appeared in the journal Folia Primatologica. 

Since the white-naped mangabey is critically endangered, the presence of a hybrid of it adds a wrinkle to the effort to preserve it, Goodwin said.

“It challenges conservation practitioners. There are no countries in the world that say a hybrid has to be protected. Hybrids have a unique genome, and from my point of view, I think they deserve protection,” said Goodwin.

“But we can’t put them on the endangered species list, because they don’t really fit in. People might say they’re not pure, so they don’t need to be protected.”

Matsuda Goodwin still needs to conduct a genetic analysis of the monkeys’ scat, or feces, before making a definitive conclusion and will be teaming up with a geneticist from NYU to test samples that she is searching for this summer. Until then, she is referring to it as “putative,” as it is only presumed to be a hybrid. But evidence from four photos that she took in June and video taken from remote canopy cameras in January and May 2021 makes a strong case for the hybrid theory.

The putative hybrid’s nose and muzzle resembles that of a baboon, but its forehead is dark like a mangabey, she said. The dark tips of its ears are reminiscent of a baboon, but the reddish color of its chest is more like a mangabey.

“The face is so unique. It doesn’t look like a baboon or a mangabey. It’s very peculiar,” she said.

In the videos, the putative hybrid, which may be the same one from 2019 or may be a different one, also exhibited behaviors that lend credence to the hybrid hypothesis. Its tail droops downward like a baboon, not up in an arc over its back like a mangabey. It is also seemingly less agile than a mangabey.

Mangabey baboon hybrids are not unprecedented, as they have been born in captivity. When they are born in the wild though, it can either be the result of random mating of species, which is known as a stochastic phenomenon, or it can be a sign of an ecosystem under stress. Baboons, for instance, are plentiful in other parts of Africa, but in the Comoé National Park, their numbers are worrisome.

“We need to obtain a lot more data to say that that locally, a species is endangered, but something may be going on with the baboon population situation, and something really strange may be going on with the mangabey population,” she said

“If there are enough mates of the same species, why would one mate with a different species? From a conservation point of view, it’s important to study them.”

Held at the Joseph M. McShane, S.J. Campus Center in the week after Commencement, the ceremony was the first of its kind at Fordham. It honored those promoted in the academic years 2021 and 2022.

Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, told assembled faculty members, friends, and family that a university can be no greater than its faculty.

“The faculty develop the curriculum, they write the books, they teach the courses, they investigate at the frontier,” he said.

“At the time each faculty member was hired, we recognized in them and each of you the potential to do great things, and it’s only over time that that potential manifests itself in the kinds of achievements that we’re celebrating this evening.”

As part of the ceremony, Jacobs presented faculty members in attendance with a ribbon, while University deans read citations detailing their accomplishments—from papers published in prestigious journals to studies presented at conferences and memberships in academic societies.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, praised the faculty members, who hailed from the arts and sciences, business, law and social service, for their service during the past two difficult years.

He noted that while Fordham honors longtime faculty for their service at the annual convocation, their contributions also deserve recognition at this stage in their career as well. He thanked them on behalf of students, for expanding their horizons, challenging them, cherishing them, and lifting them to a level of intellectual greatness and acuity that they never thought they’d achieve.

“When I meet with our students, no matter what school they’re in, they talk to me about the faculty members who made all the difference in their lives. When I speak to the alumni, they don’t talk about buildings. They talk about how faculty members changed their lives,” he said.

“They talk to me about the way faculty mentors brought into their field of vision enterprises, initiatives, and fields of study that they didn’t think were open to them, or they didn’t think they were worthy of entering.”

“You are the heart and soul of the university.”

Traina delivered her talk, “This Year’s Model: Updating Dulles,” after being installed as the second Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Chair in Catholic Theology. The chair was established in 2009 in honor of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., who was the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham from 1988 until his death in 2008. The first holder of the chair, Terrence Tilley, Ph.D., professor emeritus of theology, was also present.

Traina began by noting that Cardinal Dulles’ groundbreaking book, Models of the Church, (Penguin Random House, 1973) was a perfect example of his “creative approach to ecclesiology,” because its use of models instead of strict definitions offered a path forward.

“His vocation was to help ordinary Christians understand and be inspired by the church so that we could embody it. Divided over gender and sexuality, abortion, racism, war, economics, and even sacraments, we need his wisdom now more than ever,” she said.

Dulles’ book described the church in terms of different models: an institution, a mystical communion, a sacrament, a herald, a servant, and a community of disciples. It was published right after the conclusion of Vatican Council II, which, Traina said, “let a thousand ecclesiological flowers bloom,” and encouraged Catholics to think about different ways of communing with God.

To the many ideas put forth about the church during Vatican II, she said, “Dulles replied that we should run toward multiplicity, not away from it. Because the church is a mystery—a graced reality beyond our full experience or knowledge in this life—only by embracing many simultaneously true visions of the church could we even begin to capture the church’s full reality,” she said.

The Woman by the Well

Traina said that during his life, Dulles knew that his own ideas—groundbreaking as they were at the time—would need to evolve. Building on his work, she suggested that an image of a Samaritan woman meeting Jesus in the Gospel of John, when seen through the lens of queer and feminist theology, inspires a vision of inclusiveness that the church aspires to but fails to live up to.

In the story, the woman was Jewish, as Jesus was, but as a resident of Samaria, she would have been eyed with suspicion by residents of Jerusalem. In the story, Jesus stops in the town and encounters the woman who, by virtue of being alone at noon, must be someone of “ill-repute.” 

He offers her “living water,” in exchange for a drink from the well, but it is not until he tells her that he knows about her five husbands and her lover that she recognizes him as a prophet. Traina noted that womanist scripture scholar Wil Gafney has said that this is where “Jesus shows up in the place where private lives become public fodder…. where those who have been stigmatized and isolated because of who they loved and how they loved, thirst.” 

“Jesus welcomes all whose loves the world shames,” Traina said.

What’s also relevant is that for a time, Samarians had worshiped the gods of five foreign tribes, even though, as the woman explains to Jesus, they firmly expected the Messiah. His knowledge of her “five husbands” is what lets him pass her test, proving he is the messiah.

“The question is not whether the Samaritan woman is worthy of Jesus, but whether he is worthy of her,” Traina said.  

In addition to showing that a person who is “only a lay person” can be theologically sophisticated, Traina also noted that the woman points out that Samaritans worship on a mountain, and not in Jerusalem, as the Orthodox Jews do.

“Jesus could have responded by saying, ‘That’s OK, we’re inclusive, from now on you can worship with us in Jerusalem; we welcome you to join us there.’” she said.

“Instead, he says, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. … the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.’”

John’s message, she said, is that Jesus preserves diversity:  Samaria does not have to follow the style of Jerusalem to be faithful, but neither does Jerusalem have to follow the style of Samaria. The same goes for Christians of all varieties today.

She noted that the time is right to reexamine Dulles’ models, because in recent years, American Catholics have given into a temptation that Dulles himself emphatically condemned, “sliding from acknowledging the church’s institutional dimension to equating church with “institution”—at the expense of its other essential characters.”

This has led to clericalism, which places all power in the hands of clergy; juridicism, which leads to excessive policing of who is “in” and therefore eligible for the benefit of the sacraments; and triumphalism, which Dulles wrote “dramatizes the Church as an army set in array against Satan and the powers of evil,” Traina said. 

Catholics can look to the example of the woman at the well as they wrestle with the ways that race and sexuality get in the way of true inclusivity, she said.

“With respect to God, the distinction between Jerusalem and the mountain, between Israel and Samaria, has dissolved, for the Samaritans but also for the Jews in Jerusalem.  There is no inside, no outside. Rather, there is just “spirit and truth.”

But on that day, German leadership agreed to double its defense budget, to 84 billion Euros (roughly $91 billion), and it also authorized a one-time expenditure of 100 billion Euros to modernize its armed forces, signifying that if NATO countries were to get involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Germany would be ready.

In another first, the country also sent weapons to Ukraine and authorized other countries to send German-made weapons there as well.

For Annika Hinze, Ph.D. an associate professor of political science, the director of Fordham’s Urban Studies program, and a native of Germany, the change of heart couldn’t come soon enough.

Q: Were you surprised that Putin decided to invade Ukraine?

A: No, I don’t think I was. Especially in the last few weeks leading up to it, I think the West was completely asleep and quite frankly, I was really angry. I was angry to see the way that especially German foreign policy was dealing with this. There’s a German phrase Wandel durch Handel, which means “peace through trade.” It’s based on this old but very flawed theory that countries that are engaged in trade relations don’t go to war with each other. But I think all of that is out of the window now.

The German foreign minister said on Thursday, when Putin marched into Ukraine with a full-scale invasion, that she was outraged that Putin had lied to her face and had lied to the face of the German chancellor. Really, are you really surprised? How many times has he lied before?

Q: Do you think Europeans want Germany to get involved?

A: It’s the largest scale conflict on European soil since the end of World War II. All of European policy has tried to work toward preventing any sort of conflict in the European theater again, especially on that scale.

This is different because it’s a full-scale invasion by a former superpower of a sovereign, outspokenly pro-Western democracy. But when we talk about countries like Hungary and Poland, there’s that old ghost of Russia. There are still people alive who remember the Soviets very forcefully overthrowing uprisings for democracy in Eastern bloc countries and, suppressing public opinion and freedom of expression.

As someone from a former aggressor nation, I know my grandma’s stories about World War II. It’s something that’s very vivid still in a lot of Europeans, and especially for Eastern Europeans and Ukrainians, who were invaded by the Nazis, then invaded by the Soviets. And now they’re once again being invaded, by the Russians.

Q: Why do you think Germany has been slow to respond, and what impact does that have on Europe and NATO countries?

A: It’s been very frustrating to see German silence on so many issues. It doesn’t just concern Russia; it’s so many conflicts around the world, or in front of the German doorstep. I think that the European Union should have spoken more forcefully toward violations of human rights and freedom of expression in Hungary, for instance, where we’ve seen a rapid progression towards authoritarianism.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated, [the magazine]Foreign Policy had an article on whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel could replace any American leader as the leader of the free world. It became quite clear that Germany could not fill that position, even though it’s one of the strongest economies in the world. It could not fill that void because the German military is basically defunct right now. They have a lot of work to do before they get back to even a basic defense army.

This was for good reason, of course. The Western allies and the Soviets really didn’t want a strong Germany at the center of Europe again [after World War II], and Germany had to prove its peaceful intentions. But Germans have been too successfully taught not to be aggressors anymore.

Q: How deeply embedded in the German psyche is this importance of not getting involved in war or military conflict?

A: It’s part of our school system. We talk about the Holocaust, we visit concentration camps. There’s been a serious effort to confront in the collective memory what has happened and what Germany did specifically, not just in terms of two wars of aggression, but also in terms of mass genocide at the heart of Europe. That’s allowed a lot of Germans to say, ‘OK, we’re smarter than that now. We’ll never go to war anymore because war is unnecessary and we’re all pacifists.’ But you can’t really be a pacifist without weapons. And that sounds horrible, but I think in today’s world, that is just the truth. If you don’t have any weapons for collective defense, then you can’t keep the peace, especially not against aggressors like Putin.

Q: Do you feel like Putin’s aggression has spurred Germany to take on a leadership role in the world militarily?

A: It’s really too early to say where it will go. But I think the fact that they will then sit on a military that is going to be considerable on a world scale will put them in a position where they’re going to have to make decisions like that. It’s quite amazing that the German Bundestag made its announcement last Sunday, and in response, almost 500,000 people staged a protest against Putin in downtown Berlin. They did it to say we support what has just been decided.

That was really mind-blowing because very suddenly, there’s not just been a turn just in politics, but a turn in public opinion. Suddenly German political leadership has public opinion behind it on this, which has really never had happened since the end of World War II.

Millions of Americans are now living with HIV with the aid of a multitude of antiretroviral drugs. Fordham student Elizabeth Breen is one of many researchers working to make sure they get the neurological attention they need.

This fall, the Fordham College at Lincoln Center senior learned that the paper “Medical Outcomes Study HIV Health Survey (MOS-HIV) Subscales and Neurocognition Among Latinx People with HIV” has been accepted for presentation at the International Neuropsychological Society’s annual meeting, which takes place in February virtually.

The paper details the results of an analysis that Breen and nine others conducted of surveys on medical outcomes that 105 people with HIV took in 2014.

The group was 74% Latinx and had an average age of 46. The goal was to get a better understanding of what aspects of their mental health had the greatest effect on their neurological health. As part of the survey, they were asked to perform tasks such as listening to a list of words and then repeating them back to an interviewer or thinking of as many words as they could that started with the letter T in 60 seconds.

“Everyone that we work with does well in some areas and struggles in others. That’s just how our brains work. But overall, once we collect that data, we get a pretty good estimate of how good people’s psychological capabilities are at the time of testing,” she said.

“We really haven’t had the opportunity to investigate how a chronic condition like HIV could affect people as they age. Maybe it’s not even the HIV. Maybe it’s the medication they’re taking.”

Findings

The survey found that the Latinx participants had better physical health than the non-Latinx white participants, and there was a direct correlation between their neurocognitive abilities and their mental health. More specifically, when mental health was broken down into different categories, the categories of energy and social functioning were found to correlate the most with healthy neurocognition.

“These are the specific areas in which if you’re doing really well in, then you’re probably going to be doing better in your neurocognition as well,” she said.

Knowing that these areas are important to this demographic is important because like Black patients, the Latinx population has historically received treatment inferior to their non-Latinx white peers. Findings such as these can help researchers better tailor future treatments that are conscious of those differences.

“Brain health specifically has huge disparities in the rate of diagnosis, so it’s an important factor to be aware of when you have dementia or cognitive decline among these culturally diverse populations,” she said.

The research is being conducted under the supervision of Monica Rivera-Mindt, Ph.D., professor of psychology.

Although the pandemic interrupted the study and halted the collection of in-person survey data, Breen, who is majoring in neuroscience and theology and is on track to earn a master’s in ethics, has been able to return to research.

Under Rivera-Mindt’s supervision, researchers such as Breen are collecting similar data connected to neurological health from a wider set of participants. Black, white, and Latinx participants are being interviewed, as are patients both with and without HIV. Breen conducts interviews over the phone; for in-person aspects of the survey, participants visit Mount Sinai Hospital. It’s that personal interaction that drew Breen to the research.

“I’m a huge proponent of equitable health care in general and given the disparities that we’re seeing in the recent diagnoses among people of color for Alzheimer’s and other dementias, it’s just starting,” she said, adding that her work in this area has been very rewarding.

“To be able to get involved in clinical neuropsychology research, and to be able to meet new people and build these relationships has been so fulfilling for me.”

Andrew Rasmussen, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology who studies trauma and psychosocial stressors in humanitarian disasters. We talked with him about his thoughts on getting through the coming months.

Q: The word resilience has been bandied about more than usual recently. Do you think that the pandemic has changed the understanding of the word?

A: I think that the pandemic has taken the word resilience back to its initial meaning in psychology. It had become a somewhat cheapened version of its former self prior to the pandemic. In psychology, it’s a concept taken from engineering where, if a material is resilient, it can bend, but it won’t break. It had become like, “Oh wow, this person had a hard day, but you know what they feel okay today. So, they’re resilient.” No, it’s more than that.

Q: Your research has involved talking to refugees who’ve moved to new countries, both voluntarily and involuntarily. Their experiences are obviously much more extreme than anything most of us will go through, but is there anything we can learn from their experiences?

A: What the refugee experience does most often for me is it reminds me that humans are adaptive creatures. That’s one of our cardinal assets and our evolutionary advantages. A lot of people point to our cognitive abilities relative to our other primate cousins, but really, it’s our ability to rebuild after going through major life changes. I see it among the refugees and low-income immigrants that I have worked with over the years and particularly among those who I’ve worked with in the last two years where they’re dealing with COVID stress as well as all the other things that they’ve dealt with.

People keep going. Sure, they mourn, and they come together as a community in whatever way they can. Bad things happen, but that doesn’t mean that life is over. In fact, sometimes you can emerge from a really stressful period with a renewed sense of purpose, a renewed sense of community, and for some people, a renewed sense of faith.

Q: What does the field of psychology have to say about resilience?

A: Psychological research says that it’s a little bit more normative than you would think. When faced with severe loss or trauma, most people do okay after a period of grieving and loss. You can think about the way that almost everybody in New York City felt from about March 2020 to May. There was this sort of palpable sense of fear and the sort of eerie silence to the city. A lot of people were isolating and staying inside their apartments. The tales of the first responders and the health workers were harrowing, but sometime around May or June, people started coming out. That is a narrative of resilience in as much as it’s a narrative of troubled times.

Q: Talk to me about the role of fatalism versus optimism. You’ve done research recently that highlighted how that could play a role in people’s behaviors.

A: As the result of a couple of really enterprising undergraduates, we launched a survey of Fordham undergrads and asked questions about various protective behaviors, and also their intentions to get vaccinated. As we expected, there were some gender differences, but the biggest factor in all of this was the sense of fatalism.
We found that the idea that your health was just out of your own hands contributed to whether you were more or less likely to wear a mask and your plans to get vaccinated. If you had a “Well, if I’m going to get it, I’m going to going to get it” sort of attitude, that was the number one predictor of how much people adhered to preventive behaviors. So the quicker we can get across this message of, “We’re going to be OK if we do X, Y, and Z,” the more that instills some sense of optimism and agency among other people, and fights against fatalism.

Q: It sounds like a classic feedback loop.

A: It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You might think, “I know I should be wearing my mask, but we don’t really know much about this stuff, and there’s always new variants and it’s really not up to me.” These attitudes are attractive because they allow us to be a little bit lazy and not spend so much energy on things that we don’t want to spend energy on in the first place. But once you do that, you get sloppy about prevention, then you’re more likely to get the virus. Then you say, “See, I couldn’t have done anything.”

But if you say, “I really should be doing this” or you’re talking to your friends and they say, “There’s nothing you can do anyway,” you might respond, “You might think that, but I still want you to wear a mask when we’re in the same room together because I know that it can help you.” That kind of attitude doesn’t have consequences just for individuals, it has consequences for social interactions as well.

Q: This would seem to run counter to the notion of rugged individualism that is cherished by Americans.

A: That study with Fordham undergrads and my other work revolves around culture and individualism and collectivism. Are you somebody who is completely individualistic? This is, of course, a mainstream idea. It allows people to say, “I’m going to make my decisions about whether I should get the vaccine or not, and it really shouldn’t matter what anybody else thinks or what anybody else does.” But actually, vaccines work because other people take them. It’s not just about what you think. The way that people think about their relationship to the culture they’re in is important in determining what health behaviors they’re practicing.

Q: How can we each help each other continue to bounce back in the face of change?

A: If we’re going to be supportive for resilience purposes, to bounce back as a society, we need to listen to people’s objections as to why they won’t do what are essentially non-intrusive prevention measures like wearing a mask, getting tested, or getting a vaccination.

At the same time, there are plenty of people for whom just listening and having conversations isn’t going to work. Maybe this is reflective of my own American individualism, but I don’t like the idea of telling people that they have to do something. I do think there’s a place for mandates though, in that they allow people to say, “Well, I didn’t really want to get vaccinated, but I guess I have to in order to keep my job.” But even in that case, it needs to be like, “Yeah, you know what? I know it’s tough.” It’s knowing we’ve all had to do things we don’t want to do.

There still needs to be the openness for listening to people who don’t want to engage in these things. I think that’s how we support each other.

“Racism, sexism, and other ‘isms’ are not simply irrational prejudices, but long-leveraged, strategic mechanisms for exploitation that have benefited some at the expense of others,” he said.

Hamilton, the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and founding director of the Institute on Race and Political Economy at The New School, noted that in a just world, one’s race, gender, or ethnicity “would have no transactional value as it relates to material outcomes.” The pandemic made it abundantly clear that is not the case.

“We should recognize that the biggest pre-existing condition of them all is wealth itself,” he said.

Hamilton’s lecture, “A Moral Responsibility for Economists: Anti-Racist Policy Regimes that Neuter White Supremacy and Establish Economic Security for All,” was the second distinguished economics lecture, which was launched last year by the economics department’s climate committee as a way to enhance diversity and inclusion.

‘Dysfunctional Concentration of Wealth and Power’

Hamilton began by pointing out that even before the pandemic, the United States was afflicted by an “obscene, undemocratic, dysfunctional concentration of wealth and power.” Currently, the top .1% of earners in this country—defined as those earning $1.5 million a year—own as much of the nation’s wealth as the bottom 90 percent of earners. The bottom 50 percent of earners own 1% of the nation’s wealth, he said.

This has affected Black people and other people of color disproportionately, as they’ve been denied economic opportunity through official policies such as redlining in the 1950s and events such as the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. But the narrative of why Black Americans have been unable to attain wealth has not reflected this history, he said.

The Narrative is Wrong

“Much of the framing around the racial wealth gap, including the use of alternative financial service products, focuses on poor financial choices and decision-making on the part of largely Black, Latino, and poor borrowers. The framing is often tied to and derived from a culture of poverty thesis, in which Blacks are presumed to have a low value for and desire for education,” he said.

“The framing is wrong; the directional emphasis is wrong.”

The idea that education alone is the path to prosperity is itself belied by what Hamilton called the “property rights,” which are the advantages that whites have been granted through history by the government.

Disparities in Education and Health

Black college students today are saddled with an average of $53,000 in debt, while white students graduate with an average debt of $33,000. Black college graduates are actually overrepresented in graduate education, relative to their share in the population, he said, but this is not enough. On average, a Black family with a head of the household who dropped out of college still has less wealth than a white family where the head dropped out of high school, he said.

“The fact that a Black expectant mother with a college degree has a greater likelihood of an infant death than a white expectant mother who dropped out of high school, and a Black man with a college degree is three times more likely to die from a stroke than a white man who dropped out of high school—these are all examples of property rights in whiteness,” he said.

Hamilton said that reparations are a necessary remedy but would only be a start. Only by implementing a program such as baby bonds, where government creates investment accounts for infants that give them access to capital when they turn 18, would we get the bold, transformative, anti-racist, anti-sexist policies that are long overdue.

“We need a deeper understanding of how devaluing, or othering, individuals based on social identities like race relates to political notions of deserving and undeserving,” he said.

“The structures of our political economy and race go well beyond individual bigotry as a matter of course.”

Eye-Opening for Students

Andrew Souther, a senior majoring in economics and math at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said that the talk was eye-opening for him, as his senior thesis is focused on behavioral economics, where biases and discrimination are key concepts.

“The language that Dr. Hamilton used in basically describing racism as this very strategic collective investment, as one group strategically investing in this identity of whiteness which has a return and also extracts from other people—that is a really, really powerful concept,” he said.

“It really cuts at something much deeper and much more radical than just conversations about behavioral biases, which of course are important too.”

Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., a professor of economics, said Hamilton’s perspective was an example of a topic students at Fordham might not otherwise be exposed to in the course of their studies, a key goal of the series.

“At a time of extreme polarization in the United States, Dr. Hamilton’s scholarship and anti-racist policy proposals are more important than ever,” she said.

“He powerfully prompted us to think about the need to move from an economy centered on markets and firms to a sustainable moral economy, an economy with, at its core, economic rights, inclusion, and social engagement.”

The full lecture can be viewed here.