Less visibly, the event also showed the power of philanthropy. Hosting Ignatian Q is just one thing made possible by a fund that is creating new momentum around the University for initiatives that support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning students, plus other sexual and gender minorities.

Founded last spring, the LGBTQ+ Student Wellbeing Fund is supporting everything from pastoral care to academic events and the development of classes reflecting LGBTQ+ themes—with the promise of more initiatives to come.

“I’m really encouraged and optimistic about the kind of response the fund has gotten, not only from LGBT members of the Fordham family but also straight members of our family who are deeply committed to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” said Joan Garry, FCRH ’79, a former executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD and nationally recognized activist who serves on the Fordham University President’s Council executive committee.

Garry and her wife kick-started the fund last year by leading a Fordham Giving Day campaign for it and providing a $50,000 matching gift.

The need is plain, Garry said: The number of students who identify as other than heterosexual or cisgender is growing “off the charts.” These students “have all kind of struggles every day,” from self-acceptance to harassment to bullying, and suffer disproportionately from anxiety and depression, she said.

The fund is also needed because of a political climate that has become “downright terrifying,” she said, pointing to the Human Rights Campaign’s June 6 declaration of a “state of emergency” for LGBTQ+ people due to laws being enacted around the country.

By helping to foster a more inclusive campus community, the fund dovetails with a key priority of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.

Impact of the Wellbeing Fund

In addition to providing critical support to the Ignatian Q conference, the Wellbeing Fund has supported Campus Ministry programs including Queer Spirit Community and the Prism Retreat, as well as the publication of a Queer Prayer at Fordham booklet distributed at Ignatian Q, said Joan Cavanagh, Ph.D., senior director for spirituality and solidarity at Fordham.

The fund has also supported Center for Community Engaged Learning initiatives including scholarships that helped LGBTQ+ students take part in Fordham’s Global Outreach and Urban Plunge programs, a panel discussion on LGBTQ+ history, and grants for faculty. Co-sponsored by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the grants support innovative classroom projects related to LGBTQ+ history and advocacy.

The Wellbeing Fund has “ignited an understanding that there is so much to do,” Garry said. “I am excited about the forward motion the fund is creating to educate, drive awareness, and galvanize support.”

Learn more about the uses of the LGBTQ+ Student Wellbeing Fund and make a gift.

Learn about Queer Spirit Community, the Prism Retreat, and other Campus Ministry resources for LGBTQ+ students.

See related story: Pope Francis Sends Warm Letter of Support for LGBTQ+ Conference at Fordham

In an online conversation on June 16, Westenley (Wes) Alcenat, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history, urban, American, and African American studies at Fordham, and Rafael Zapata, Fordham’s chief diversity officer, discussed how the two events are tied to each other.

“You have this classic example of hundreds of thousands of people who were free in Texas but would remain unfree for another two years because the news was suppressed,” Alcenat said.

Just as the news of the Emancipation Proclamation took years to reach enslaved people in Texas, the news of the Haitian revolution—and the French Revolution—took years to reach Black men and women who might have been emboldened by such victories.

“If you go back to 1791, not only were words of the French Revolution being suppressed among the enslaved population in Saint-Domingue (as it was known back then) but news of the Haitian revolution, which lasted over a decade, was suppressed among the free Black and enslaved population here in the United States,” he said.

When the Haitian people finally won their independence from France in 1804, it also had unexpected consequences for the United States, he said. In a sense, it was both a gift and a curse for Black and indigenous people.

“It’s a gift in the sense that, nowhere else had this ever taken place before in human history—enslaved people rebelling and fomenting a revolution that established a state,” he said.

“At the same time, with the loss of Saint-Domingue as such a productive colony, France all of a sudden found itself without the funds to continue its many continental wars, so it turned over the Louisiana territory to the United States, which doubled the size. So, the domestic slave economy in the U.S. expanded very fast.”

Victory also brought serious hardships to the new Haitian nation, as the French would demand punitive reparations for its “loss of assets.” A recent New York Times investigative series, The Ransom, showed how two centuries of debt and dependency would follow.

While Haiti is still to this day struggling to thrive as a nation, Alcenat, a Haitian native, said that the principles guiding its founding can be found in the spirit of today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

When the country was formed, “Haitian constitutionalism,” as he dubbed it, granted citizenship to anyone who was indigenous or of African descent. Most of the indigenous inhabitants had been massacred by Christopher Columbus, but the move symbolically restored dignity to those who claimed the land first. Even the name of the new country, Haiti, which means “island of mountains,” was the name the indigenous inhabitants had chosen for the island.

“It’s not reparations in the conventional wisdom, but as a returning of dignity to that to whom it belonged and humanizing the indigenous folks whose land this was in the first place, and in the process, claiming for themselves a new form of indigenity,” he said.

What really connects the Haitian constitutionalism to Black Lives Matter was the principle that said that for someone to become a Haitian, they first had to declare themselves Black. Under the new post-revolution laws, white males were explicitly banned from owning land and property.

“This is the precedent to the Black Lives Matter, because what it’s saying is, the degraded, the dehumanized, the oppressed, those who are at the very bottom of society, we are going to reverse the order. They really do know what freedom is because they also know what non-freedom looks like,” he said.

“There are historians who very much want to argue that this was reverse racism, and excuse my French, but that is pure B.S. It had little to do with whiteness because in fact, white men could become Haitian. All they would have to do is say, ‘I declare myself Black,’” Alcenat said.

It wasn’t an abstract concept either, as he noted that during the war, 400 to 500 Polish soldiers who had been sent by Napoleon to reclaim the island and reimpose slavery defected from the French army and stayed on the island permanently. Their descendants can be found there to this day.

“In order to incorporate them into this new revolutionary society, the Haitians had to find a way to assert the principle of Black freedom, but not have that principle restricted by race,” he said.

“So Black freedom is, in a sense, the most capacious, most expansive form of freedom that was allowed.”

Zapata noted that although this was the third time the University had honored Juneteenth, this was the first event that connected it to research on Black liberation.

“The Haitian revolution was always an important piece to the notions of freedom,” he said.

“I can think of no better way to honor Juneteenth than to honor our outstanding faculty whose research is so close to this work”

The conversation was sponsored by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Office of the Provost.

Academic Affairs/Office of the Chief Diversity Officer (CDO)

With funding from the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the CDO, this academic year we enthusiastically welcome sociologist Daniela Pila, Ph.D., our inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Race Studies, in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Pila’s research and teaching focus on race, ethnicity, immigration, and the law, with a focus on the experiences of Filipino immigrants in the greater New York City area.

The Office of the CDO has awarded 22 mini-grants across more than 20 departments for exploring ways to integrate questions of race into their introductory and major/minor courses as part of the Teaching Race Across the Curriculum grant program, launched last spring.

In August 2021, during the annual planning retreat, the University Deans Council— which includes the deans of all of the schools, the Provost, and other academic leadership—participated in a Racial Justice Examen, connecting the work of racial justice to the goals of the division for the coming year.

This summer, Chief Diversity Officer Rafael Zapata helped create and facilitate a series of mission-based racial justice workshops for about 50 participants of Cohort 14 of the Ignatian Colleagues Program (ICP) held at Loyola University Chicago’s Retreat and Ecology Campus, focusing on the Racial Justice Examen created last year by a group of mission officers and chief diversity officers of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) network.

Building on the success of these workshops, the Office of the CDO will be piloting a series of mission-based community building/racial justice workshops adapted to Fordham students, faculty, and staff. The four workshops (roughly 2.5 hours each) are based on foundational Ignatian concepts and designed to foster action. They are titled: Building Community Toward Racial Justice, Developing Discerning Leadership in Service of Racial Justice, Discerning Leaders in Action, and Eyes to See: Committing to the Work of Racial Justice.

Office of Undergraduate Admission

In August, Fordham welcomed the most diverse class it has ever had—and also its largest ever, with more than 2,800 students. The Class of 2025 has more than 44% domestic students of color. The new Rams hailed from 45 states, 51 countries, and all five boroughs of New York City. More than 600 students in the incoming class are from New York City, including more than 160 from the Bronx—up significantly from last year. Finalized admissions numbers are as follows:

• Hispanic 18%
• Asian 14%
• Black 7%
• International 6%
• Unknown <1%
• American Indian/Alaska Native <1%
• Pacific Islander <1%
• Two + 4.5%
• White 49%

As the office continues its hiring process for a new associate director of admission for diversity initiatives, Ike Uche has recently been promoted to senior assistant director and will be working on many of our DEI-related initiatives.

Fordham School of Law

In August, Fordham Law School launched its Realizing Excellence and Access in the Law (REAL) program to expand opportunities for first-year law students from historically underrepresented backgrounds, including underrepresented racial, ethnic, geographic, socioeconomic, LGBTQ, and first-generation college student backgrounds.

REAL will orient students to the study of law and help new first-year law students feel prepared, confident, and welcome in the Fordham Law community. It provides a pre-orientation program consisting of classes that introduce students to the foundation of law and focus on the basics of legal reasoning and analysis and fundamental legal concepts.

There is a wellness component to the program, which includes peak performance sessions to manage the personal aspects of navigating law school. Participants will also learn useful information from peer mentors during the program.

“The practice of law and our law school community benefit when students from all backgrounds are provided a real opportunity to succeed,” said Kamille Dean, Esq., director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Fordham Law. “We find that prospective lawyers thrive when they learn the skills they need from individuals with shared experience, and that’s what drives our new program.”

Student Affairs

New Student Orientation hosted a number of enhanced, annual programs for incoming students, including multicultural receptions for students and families, a reception and mixer for LGBTQ students, a presentation and video from the Office of Multicultural Affairs, DEI speaker Mohammed Soriano-Bilal from Stanford University, and DEI-focused small-group conversations facilitated by orientation leaders.

These conversations continued after orientation through the mandatory Civility Core Program for new students, in which students explore a number of DEI concepts and terms and receive an overview of the University’s bias policy and how to report a bias incident. Survey results indicated that 84% of students agreed, or agreed strongly, that the presentation was interactive and engaging.

The Office of Multicultural Affairs hosted its first OMA Block Party at the Rose Hill campus with various cultural clubs and committees advised by the office, followed by BIPOC student mixers at both Rose Hill and Lincoln Center.

The Office of Residential Life has continued to see progress in increasing the diversity of the resident assistants (RAs) and resident first-year mentors (RFMs). The percentages below represent the racial and ethnic breakdown by campus (identity categories differ by campus) for 2021-2022:

• Lincoln Center total number of RAs and RFMs: 42
  • Asian 26%, Black 14%, Hispanic/Latinx 10%, White 29%, Mixed Race 21%, Total BIPOC 71%
• Rose Hill total number of RAs: 95
  • Asian 12%, Black, Afro-Caribbean, or African American 21%, Hispanic/Latin/Latinx 19%, White 48%, Total BIPOC 52%

Office of Alumni Relations

Alumni Relations held its MOSAIC (Multicultural Organization Supporting Alumni Initiatives and Community) fall networking event on September 30 at the Princeton Club in New York City. MOSAIC  supports the inclusion and engagement of diverse Fordham community members in the life of the University—it is the premier annual event for alumni of color.

Recent Fordham DEI News

Fordham CSTEP: A Home for First-Generation College Students

STEPping into Biology with Hip-Hop

Fordham Welcomes First Diversity Fund Aid Recipients

Fordham Welcomes Most Diverse, Largest Class in History

Fordham STEP Receives ‘2021 Inspiring Programs in STEM’ Award

Dean of Students Jenifer Campbell on Holistic Care for All Students on Campus

School of Social Service Receives $1.9 Million to Support Graduate Students of Color and Help Underserved Youth

Board of Trustees

Fordham’s Diversity Fund has received $329,000 in gifts to date.

University Leadership

In addition to attracting accomplished and talented leaders, the University is committed to ensuring that the senior leadership of the University is diverse and representative of the city we serve. This year Fordham brought on board several experienced and gifted senior leaders: Tyler Stovall, Ph.D., as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; José Luis Alvarado, Ph.D., as dean of the Graduate School of Education; Anand Padmanabhan as vice president for Information Technology and CIO; Jenifer Campbell as dean of Students at Lincoln Center (a promotion from director of Residential Life at that campus); and Tracyann Williams, Ph.D., as the assistant dean for Student Success at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

Office of the Chief Diversity Officer

Teaching Race Across the Curriculum

The Office of the Chief Diversity Officer (OCDO) launched its inaugural Teaching Race Across the Curriculum (TRAC) Grant Program, designed to aid academic departments in their efforts to thoughtfully and intentionally integrate questions of race into their curricula, both in core offerings and within a major or minor, and support excellence in the teaching of topics related to race in the curriculum.

The OCDO also added new resources to its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) pages:

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Fordham
• Anti-Asian Racial Violence Resources
• Teaching Race Across the Curriculum (TRAC) Grant Funding

Academic Affairs

On May 6 and 7, the Department of English held a Teaching Racial Justice Symposium, bringing together English teachers and writing tutors who are committed to supporting the department’s Teaching Racial Justice Initiative, setting goals for the upcoming academic year, and learning from some of the leading scholars of antiracist pedagogy. The two half-day events, Visioning an Antiracist Writing Program and Visioning an Antiracist Writing Center, featured the panels “Directions in Antiracist Writing Pedagogy & Program Design” and “Directions in Antiracist Writing Center Work.” The symposium was one of the signature initiatives from this year’s Teaching Race Across the Curriculum (TRAC) grant program.

The Graduate School of Education (GSE), with the OCDO, co-sponsored “We’re Speaking: Giving Voice to Empirical Research on Anti-Racism and Social Justice,” a conference
highlighting the research of GSE students, on April 21. Nearly 100 students, faculty and staff attended.

Arts and Sciences

The Conference of Arts and Sciences Deans (CASD) offered capacity-building workshops on “Antiracism as Everyday Practice” to department chairs, program directors, and associate chairs, in partnership with the education and training organization ArtEquity this spring.

Fordham School of Law News

• PRIDE: Fordham Law OUTLaws Are a Catalyst for Inclusion
• Juneteenth Event Explores Race and History Through a Family Lens
• The Fordham Law Community Reflects on Pride’s Past, Present, and Future

Undergraduate Enrollment

The Office of Undergraduate Admission has been committed to the goals of increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in our efforts to recruit, admit and yield the Class of 2025. As of June 30, more than 43% of the class identify as domestic students of color and an additional 7% are international. The largest percentage increases were among Black and multiracial students. In order of percentage increases they are:

• Increased representation in the incoming class of students who identify as Black by 181% to 216 students.
• Increased representation in the incoming class of students who have more than one racial or ethnic identity by 84% to 136.
• Increased representation in the incoming class of students who identify as Hispanic/Latinx by 62% to 551 students.
• Increased representation in the incoming class of students who identify as Asian by 31% to 432.

The Class of 2025 represents a 39% increase in students from New York City, and a 79% increase of students from The Bronx over last year’s incoming class. Overall, we believe the test-optional policy played a major part in enrolling the largest, most diverse, and most accomplished entering class in the University’s history, as did our close collaboration with the DEI Council.

Our efforts included a number of initiatives at every stage of the admission process including most notably:

• Developed and implemented 7 new programs for students of color throughout the college application cycle including: 2 sessions for applicants in the fall (introduction to Fordham, its community and the application process) as well as sessions for admitted students this spring (3 on academics and 2 on Student Life). Ninety-five students enrolled who attended these programs.
• Granted eligibility to National African American Recognition Program (NAARP) Scholars as candidates for our National Recognition Program Scholarship, in addition to our existing consideration of National Hispanic Recognition Program Scholars. This year we have awarded the scholarship to 129 NAARP Scholars and 256 NHRP Scholars.” We enrolled 15 NAARP scholars with full-tuition awards. 1 additional NAARP student enrolled as a Dean’s scholar and 1 student is joining the class as a Cunniffe Presidential Scholar.  We have also enrolled 40 NHRP students with full-tuition awards.
• Executed outreach to students of color with a welcome email from Dr. Anthony Carter, member of Fordham’s Board of Trustees.

Student Affairs

Divisional Staff Training: Student Affairs requires all full-time and part-time staff to participate in a Divisional Training Day each semester. The topics for the training days vary, but are focused on issues related to our students and how staff in the Division of Student Affairs can best serve students. Diversity and inclusion have been the main topics for numerous mandatory Divisional Training Days with significant focus during the 2020–2021 academic year on anti-racism, including the spring 2021 Jesuit Mission and Commitment to Anti-Racism training.

Diversity Graduation Celebrations: In collaboration with the President’s Office, the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, and Senior Week committees at Rose Hill and Lincoln Center, the Office of Multicultural Affairs formalized four identity-based graduation celebrations for Asian, Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ seniors. Spring 2021 marked the first year these programs were offered to the undergraduate student population in this way. While there had been some similar events for Black and LGBTQ students during spring 2019, this iteration involved student committees for each graduation celebration.

Human Resources Management (HR)

HR prepared an Affirmative Action Plan (AAP) for Women and Minorities, which sets up flexible goals to mitigate underutilization of these populations to reflect the gender, race, and ethnic profile of the labor pools from which Fordham recruits and selects.

HR revised its New Hire Orientation Seminar, which now includes a video greeting from Father McShane; a video greeting from Rafael Zapata, Fordham’s chief diversity officer; and a video greeting from Kareem Peat, Fordham’s Title IX coordinator, as well as information on the University’s DEI initiatives.

HR instituted Monthly Diversity and Inclusion E-News, which covered:

Eli Clare acknowledged during his 2019 Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability that these and other difficult questions he raised in his talk come without easy answers.

During his wide-ranging lecture, Claire analyzed what it means to restore something to its natural state. He also identified examples in which the paradigm of restoration falls short—as in instances of disability at birth when there never was a “before” that could be restored.

A writer, activist, and teacher, Clare wrestled with the notion of cure. Not entirely against it nor entirely for it, he embraced the ambiguities and contradictions of this “messy middle,” yielding no tidy solutions, but rather providing attendees with a starting point for vital, challenging conversations about disability and environmental destruction.

His talk, titled “Notes on Cure, Disability & Natural Worlds,” explored the meanings of words like restoration, natural, and normal, contextualizing the ideologies and assumptions that underlie their use, and considering what this language reveals about our culture and thinking.

The lecture built upon concepts explored in Clare’s latest book, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure.

Clare’s writings “challenge us to think deeply about the ways that racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia shape our perceptions of what constitutes a ‘normal’ body-mind or a valuable life,” Interim Provost Jonathan Crystal said while introducing the lecture.

(Clare utilizes the term body-mind “to resist the white, Western impulse” to conceive of the body and mind as distinct systems. “They are one tangled, complicated, complex, ambiguous, contradictory entity,” he said.)

In his lecture, Clare called for a “broad-based grappling” with “the ideology of cure”—a way of thinking that has subtly permeated our culture. Cure, by its very definition, Clare explained, carries with it the notion of restoration—of something damaged in need of fixing.

Clare reflected on his own interactions with strangers, who often respond to his cerebral palsy by offering unsolicited platitudes, prayers, crystals, or vitamins. “Even if there were a cure for brain cells that died at birth, I’d refuse,” he said. “I have no idea who I’d be without my tremoring and tense muscles, slurring tongue. They assume me unnatural, want to make me normal, take for granted the need and desire for cure.”

“How would I, or the medical-industrial complex, go about restoring my body-mind?” Clare continued.

“The vision of me without tremoring hands and slurred speech, with more balance and coordination, doesn’t originate from my visceral history,” he said. “Rather it arises from an imagination of what I should be like, from some definition of normal and natural.”

By engaging with topics ranging from the pernicious assumptions about disability embedded in a Sierra Club antipollution advertising campaign to the work of environmentalists striving to transform a former agribusiness cornfield back to tallgrass prairie, Clare also explored connections between environmental loss and body-mind loss.

Through his interrogation of the concept of restoration, as applied to both people and ecological systems, Clare ultimately laid bare an essential question: “How do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of body-minds—plant and animal, organic and inorganic, non-human and human—while not equating disability with injustice?”

Bella Eitner, a sophomore at the Rose Hill campus who is pursuing a minor in disability studies, said she found valuable lessons in Clare’s writing and activism. “I think getting into advocacy is really important, and a lot of the things that he says about it are very useful, especially coming from someone with a disability himself,” Eitner said.

The annual Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability, now in its fourth year, is organized by the Faculty Working Group on Disability and co-sponsored by the Provost’s Office and the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer.

–Michael Garofalo

Faruque, who was born in Bangladesh and whose interests skewed toward math and science as he was growing up, earned an undergraduate degree in Financial Economics from the University of London in 2011. But he headed back east to Iran shortly afterward, to Tehran University, where he earned an M.A. in Islamic philosophy in 2014. The worldwide financial crash of 2008 had given him pause and spurred him to think about big questions in life.

“The more I was exploring, the more I became convinced that I want to change my field,” he said.

Last year, he earned a Ph.D. in Islamic thought, philosophy, and mysticism (with an emphasis on comparative thought) from the University of California at Berkeley. Since September, he has been the Graduate School of Arts and Science’s (GSAS) first George Ames Postdoctoral Fellow.

A Joint Effort to Expand Recruitment

The fellowship was jointly created by GSAS, the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, and the Office of Research as a way to advance the recruitment of scholars from underrepresented communities and showcase the value of teaching and research at a Jesuit institution.

It is also partially funded by the George Ames Endowment for Junior Faculty at GSAS, which was created by Ames, a 1942 graduate of the School of Law, the Dean of Arts and Sciences Faculty, and the Office of the Provost.

As part of his two-year-long fellowship, Faruque is working on an expanded version of his Ph.D. dissertation that is forthcoming under the title The Labyrinth of Subjectivity: Islam, Modernity, and the Formation of the Self.

“I used to think, when it comes to things that happen in our life, we can very much control them. Not just what happens in the economic and political sphere, but also in your personal life. I was very confident that I could plan and control every single movement of my life, and progress towards achieving what I wanted to achieve,” he said.

“Eventually I came to realize that all of these matters (i.e. the existential questions) hang together on our conception of selfhood or who we are, which as one medieval philosopher rightly pointed out, is the knot of the universe. Unless we know or understand ourselves fully, we will not be able to understand or make sense of all the phenomena that we observe in the external world.”

A New Concept of the Self

In Labyrinth of Subjectivity, Faruque engages thinkers from Islamic and Western philosophies, as well as leading scholars of neuroscience, to ultimately arrive at a multidimensional conception of the self that is comprised of three degrees: bio-physiological, socio-cultural, and ethico-experiential.

In addition to Western philosophers such as Saint Augustine of Hippo, René Descartes, and Michel Foucault, he includes the contributions of Islamic thinkers such as Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi, Avicenna, Mulla Sadra, and Muhammad Iqbal. He tackles the works of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, Walter Freeman, and famed DNA researcher Francis Crick as well, to push back against any notion of the self that is reduced to a series of cognitive abilities such as sensory perception.

“That’s a very narrow conception of the self that ignores the moral dimension. This is because to think of myself as an “I” is to already think of others, as there cannot be an “I” without a “you,” he said.

“I put forward this multidimensional conception of the self that I think would bring new options to the table for addressing some of the central concerns in the modern world, such as the nature of happiness and suffering, transhumanism, and especially, the nature of the ethical life.”

Going Beyond Stereotypes of Islam

The Ames fellowship is open to all departments; J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Ph.D., chair of the theology department, said he was honored that his is the first to host it.

“It’s very clear that understanding Islamic thought is a key goal for many of our students. Many of them are Muslim themselves, others are pursuing majors like Middle Eastern studies or political science or international studies, where a knowledge of Islam that goes deeper than just stereotypes is absolutely essential in order to think about how to build a more peaceful and constructive world,” he said.

“What Muhammed is able to do is not just provide excellent teaching in classic Islamic texts, but also to think about ways in which Islam as a tradition has encountered modern thought in all of its complexity.”

After teaching Faith and Critical Reason last semester, Faruque’s teaching Classic Islamic Text: From the Quran to the Islamic Humanities this spring; next fall he’ll be teaching a course titled Religion and the Making of the Self.

“I really enjoyed teaching my first semester. The students were very engaging. It was very much a discussion-oriented class, and I’m someone who always enjoys dialogue rather than just lecturing,” he said.

Fordham’s Jesuit roots were appealing as well, Faruque said, as he had incorporated St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises into his dissertation. He also appreciates that the University’s approach to education is holistic, rather than fragmentary.

“Teaching does not just end in class or with a course that you teach. What’s much more important is the life that is about to come, and the skills that [a student]is supposed to acquire through her time in this kind of institution,” he said.

“You do address enduring questions of human experience, and equip students to think critically, to develop practical skills for constructive intellectual dialogue across religious, cultural, and political divide, and to know one’s place in the wider world, which is essential for engagement in shifting national and global contexts. As a critical educator, I have found that anchoring diverse intellectual thought promotes greater cross-cultural learning and understanding, in addition to helping develop a global consciousness in the classroom.”

Q: You’re Fordham’s first chief diversity officer. It’s a title that you’ve held before, most recently at Providence College. Can you tell me a little bit about what you see the job as?

A: The job is to provide leadership and help the University attract and retain outstanding students, faculty, and staff from all backgrounds, and help them thrive. How can we craft a culture that affirms, values, and supports members of this community to be their best selves? How do we draw on the mission of cura personalis to support people to be their best, so that their god given talents can shine through?

We live in a deeply segregated society, and college is usually the first time that students can come together in some way, shape, or form as equals. We may have different class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, but for the first time we’re encountering each other as actual people, not as abstracts. Having a gay roommate, having a roommate who has a disability or who hails from the suburbs—you will learn from being in close proximity with people different than you.

Q: You were born and raised in New York City, so this is a homecoming for you. You grew up in Chelsea, right?

A: Yes, I grew up in the Chelsea public housing projects and attended Rice High School in Harlem.

Q: This the most diverse city in the country, if not the world. So why do we need to pay attention diversity in a place that’s already diverse?

A: In New York, you can have the presence of diverse people, but what is the nature of those interactions? I grew up in public housing, and there were people who lived around the corner in very different housing who I never saw. We knew the same convenience stores and the same landmarks, but we didn’t worship in the same churches, attend the same schools, and we certainly didn’t play in the same sports and recreation leagues. You can be neighbors, but does it mean that you’re one community?

When students are on a college campus and are roommates or classmates, the University has to intentionally create opportunities for them to interact and learn with and from one another. How faculty and staff engage with our students and with each other is also really important. The quality and nature of those interactions are often times based on abstractions or assumptions. Such experiences can be disruptive, but disruption can also lead to new learning.

What people often learn is what not to say. That is not what this is about. It’s about how we can develop the tools to exchange ideas and learn from one another—as opposed to avoiding ideas that we might find uncomfortable and even repulsive.

Q: Can you talk about this idea that this is more than just learning what not to say?

A: Clearly, we don’t want students using misogynistic, homophobic, or racist language…or anyone on campus, for that matter. Sometimes, where people are coming from, that’s normalized and maybe viewed as being a bit irreverent, playful. In intimate circles, it may be understood that that’s not something being done seriously or to intentionally cause harm. But when there is no relationship – in fact, even when there is a relationship – such language can be troubling. In those instances, we need to help people understand why these words, actions, or attitudes can be viewed as harmful by others.

“Just don’t say it” is oversimplified and will be dismissed as political correctness. If I don’t know why I shouldn’t say this, or why you think I shouldn’t say this, I don’t have a chance to understand why you feel the way you feel. When people feel coerced or don’t have an opportunity to have a real conversation about the reasons behind why an idea bothers someone, that defeats the whole point of an education.

It can also become a burden for students who constantly have to explain why certain jokes, remarks, and attitudes they encounter day after day after day are incredibly difficult to endure. Institutionally, we need to examine structures, policies and practices that may result in similar, negative impacts. We need people from an array of backgrounds to engage these questions. So white students need to talk to each other about why using racial epithets may affect students of color or other people who find such words offensive. Men need to talk to one another about misogynistic language, attitudes and actions. And even more importantly: students, faculty, staff, alumni and residents of the neighborhoods need to be engaged with one another about the kind of community we want at Fordham University, because it will take all of us.

Q: How does a diverse campus population benefit everyone?

A: Even in ostensibly homogenous groups, not everyone thinks the same way. What’s more, having a broader range of diverse identities and experiences in the classroom and among the staff and faculty provides a dynamic environment for substantive, mutual learning that’s simply not possible when people all come from the same place. It’s central to the notion of cura personalis, and to the academic mission of the University.

Q: What do you expect will be the biggest challenge you face?

A: I see two significant and related challenges. The first is being new to the institution, and second is the importance of articulating this work as a collective responsibility. I learned a great deal having been the inaugural CDO at Providence College, but each context is different. Fordham is a much more complex university, with three campuses locally and the Calder Center and programs in London, Pretoria, and Beijing. There’s a shared identity, but there are unique elements, I’m sure, to be found at each campus.

I’m going to ask a lot of questions, like ‘what are the initiatives in your area,’ ‘what are the challenges you’ve faced around equity, diversity and justice,’ ‘what are your priorities going forward, and what resources and other sources of support might be required.’ I may not be able to furnish all of those resources, but it’s important to know what people feel are the priorities in a particular context, and how we address them. It goes back fundamentally to building relationships, developing an awareness, and asking questions so we can develop and move forward together with a shared vision of diversity, equity and justice.

Zapata comes to Fordham from Providence College, where he has held the title of associate vice president/chief diversity officer since 2012. His appointment marks the culmination of a nationwide search that commenced in May, when Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, announced the appointment of a search committee chaired by Anthony Carter, FCRH ’76, former chief diversity officer at Johnson & Johnson, assisted by Koya Leadership Partners, a national search firm. The creation of a chief diversity officer was a key recommendation of the President’s Task Force on Diversity.

“I believe this is a pivotal moment for Fordham, one which brings us closer to the ideals we espouse—especially that of care for the whole person,” Father McShane said. “And which makes us better able to carry out our sacred mission.”

At Providence, Zapata drew from the College’s Catholic and Dominican mission and history to develop an institutional infrastructure to foster diversity, institutional change, and academic excellence. To achieve his goals, he worked with members of the College and the greater Providence communities.

He created strategic initiatives focused on enhancing campus climate, deepening faculty and staff diversity, developing inclusive pedagogical practice, improving underrepresented students’ access to STEM majors, and creating opportunities for critical dialogue across different groups.

Zapata is a longtime and active member of the Liberal Arts Diversity Officers (LADO). He led Providence’s institutional participation in The Creating Connections Consortium (C-3), funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. He is currently a member of the Rhode Island Commission on Prejudice and Bias.

Before moving to Providence, Zapata worked at Swarthmore College and New York University. He has served as a trainer and consultant with the Bill and Melinda Gates Millennium Scholars Program and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.

A first-generation college graduate, Zapata earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Iona College and a master’s degree in sociology from Arizona State University. He spent three years in the doctoral program in sociology and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he focused on comparative racial and ethnic inequality in the United States.

He regularly addresses the issue of diversity in public forums as well, most recently in January, when he presented at the “Presidents and Chief Diversity Officers Panel: Lessons Learned: Presidential Leadership on Diversity,” a panel held at the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU) Annual Conference.