“This memoir stands out for a particularly gripping kind of sentience in the storytelling,” said Amy Aronson, professor of communication and media studies and director of the Sperber Prize. “Ferguson knows how and when to report the cruel, jagged facts of conflict and when to insert herself into the experience of confronting them, humanizing the stakes, bringing us in.”

The prize honors the late Ann M. Sperber, who wrote Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press. The $1,000 award was established through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette Sperber to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on journalism and media. Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies has presented the award annually since 1999.

Jane Ferguson is an international correspondent for PBS Newshour and a contributor to The New Yorker who has reported from nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. As a journalist, she lived in Beirut and other cities in the Middle East for 14 years, reporting from the heart of conflicts in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Sudan, and Gaza. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into civil war during the Arab Spring. She was smuggled into rebel-held Syria as revolution became all-out war, traveling alone to film and document the Assad regime’s crackdown on its own people. 

Ferguson traveled to South Sudan in 2017 to cover the complicated conflict and humanitarian disaster engulfing the country, reporting on the widespread famine and horrific war crimes that were causing droves of people to flee. When the Taliban claimed Kabul, Afghanistan in 2021, she was one of the last Western journalists to remain at the airport to cover the United States’ withdrawal from the country.

As a Protestant who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 1980s and 1990s, Ferguson is no stranger to sectarian violence. Journalism became a calling that could provide a small measure of justice. She previously received the prestigious George Polk Award, an Emmy Award, and an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award. 

Ferguson joins a storied list of previous Sperber Prize winners, including Robert Caro, Charles M. Blow, and Seymour M. Hersh. 

The award ceremony is Nov. 11 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus at 6:00 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

A recent presentation at Fordham’s cybersecurity conference last month helped illustrate why.

“When I asked the CEO of a major movie company recently, ‘What’s the craziest thing you can imagine will happen in the next two to three years?’ he said, ‘We will have a full cinematic feature starring zero actors, zero cinematography, zero lighting, and zero set design,” said Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing director of Lux Capital at a keynote speech on Jan. 10.

“It will all be generated.”

As an example, Wolfe, whose firm invests in new technologies, screened a fan-made movie trailer that used AI to imagine what Star Wars would look like if it had been directed by Wes Anderson.

A Threat to Storytelling

James Jennewein, a senior lecturer in Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies whose film-producing credits include Major League II, Getting Even with Dad, and Stay Tuned, said the prospect of AI-powered screenwriting is deeply concerning.

He called storytelling “soul nourishment” that teaches us what it means to be human.

“We’re still watching films and reading books from people who died centuries ago, and there’s something magical about an artist digging into their soul to find some kind of truth or find a unique way to express an old truth, to represent it to the culture, and I don’t think that AI is going to help make that happen more,” he said.

In many ways, AI has already infiltrated movies and TV; major crowd scenes in the show Ted Lasso were created using AI tools, for example. This summer, the directors of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny used AI to render the nearly 80-year-old Harrison Ford to look like he was in his 20s.

The ability to use fewer actors in a crowd scene is obviously concerning to actors, but Jennewein said the strike was about more than just saving jobs–it’s about protecting creativity.

“We don’t want AI to create the illusion that something is original when it really is just a mashup of things that have been created before,” he said.

“Flesh-and-Blood” Films Coexisting with AI

Paul Levinson, Ph.D., a professor of communications, saw first-hand what AI can do to his own image and voice. A 2010 interview he did was recently altered by the journalist who conducted it to appear as if Levinson was speaking in Hindi.  But he is less concerned about AI taking over the industry.

He noted that when The Birth of a Nation was first screened in 1915, it was predicted that it would kill off the live theater.

Levinson predicted that in the future, the majority of what we watch will be AI-generated, but there will still be films that are made with live human actors. Just as theater co-exists with live movies, traditional movies will co-exist with AI content.

“I think we are going eventually to evolve into a situation where people aren’t going to care that much about whether or not it’s an AI-generated image or a real person,” he said.

Levinson acknowledged that AI could inflict real harm on the livelihood of actors and screenwriters, but said an equally important concern is whether those who work with AI tools get the credit they deserve.

“I’m sure people are going to think I’m out of my mind, but I don’t see a difference, ultimately, between a director who is directing actors in person and somebody who understands a sophisticated AI program well enough to be able to put together a feature-length movie,” he said.

“What could ultimately happen as AI-made films become more popular, is that films that are made with real flesh-and-blood actors will advertise themselves as such, and they’ll try to do things that maybe AI can’t quite yet do, just to push the envelope.”

As a mentor, Guzzone, who majored in communication and media studies and minored in theater, has been paired with students interested in similar fields. This year’s application deadline is September 28, and in early October, the program team will pair undergraduates with alumni for one-on-one mentorship throughout the academic year.

“It’s been really awesome to give back, especially since I found my career path through my courses and my major at Fordham,” said Guzzone, now a senior development manager at the New York City-based Crime Victims Treatment Center. “I really enjoy being a part of that and … getting to work with students who are interested in either communications or maybe specifically nonprofit” organizations.

Alumni and students agree to a 24-hour time commitment, which includes events, surveys, and goal setting, in addition to their one-on-one interactions. The program is part of the Fordham Mentorship Network, which also provides alumni with opportunities to share advice with current students through a “flash mentoring” tool.

Last academic year, the network facilitated more than 1,300 alumni–student mentoring connections—something that may have helped Fordham earn a spot on Town & Country magazine’s list of colleges with the “best alumni networks.”

All NYC Has to Offer

Guzzone, who said she has been interested in theater, dance, and performing for as long as she can remember, didn’t think twice about applying to Fordham when an admissions counselor visited her high school in Washington Township, New Jersey. (In fact, she said, her mother had to force her to apply to any other schools just in case she didn’t earn admission to Fordham.)

“Being able to be in the neighborhood that Lincoln Center is in, to be so close to all of the theater and dance and … [to]have the opportunity to continue doing some shows as a student was just really, really attractive to me,” she said.

“I remember during our time, they would always say, ‘New York is my campus. Fordham is my school,’ and I think that was really apparent,” she said. Things like exploring the Upper West Side, catching a baseball game, or stopping by a farmers market “and really immersing ourselves in everything that the school was offering through the city was really awesome.”

Though the University has changed in many ways since she graduated, Guzzone said that serving as a mentor allows her to stay connected and abreast of what’s happening on campus.

“A lot of the professors that I had are not there anymore. … There are new buildings that didn’t exist, but it seems like, at the same time, the core Fordham values are very much still apparent, and the experiences are still pretty similar, which is cool.”

Remembering Casey Feldman

During her first year at Fordham, Guzzone met Kelsey Butler, Christina Halligan Asaro, Callie Fisher Hall, and Casey Feldman. The women lived together through their junior year, 2009, when Feldman was tragically killed in a car accident by a distracted driver. Guzzone said she and her roommates helped plan a memorial for Feldman at the time.

Today, Guzzone serves as a board member of the Casey Feldman Foundation, which Feldman’s parents established shortly after she died. “It’s really a gift, I think, that her parents have allowed us to continue to be involved and to really help her memory be carried on,” she said.

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
I’m passionate about connection—whether it’s through mentorship or hosting a big dinner party for friends and family. Having the opportunity to connect with so many different people is the best part of working in fundraising, too, in my opinion. Meeting with donors, hearing why they’re passionate about our work [at the Crime Victims Treatment Center], collaborating with funders, building relationships: It all boils down to connecting with people on a personal level, and I love it!

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? 
Always be kind. You never know what someone else is going through, and a smile or nice gesture can go a long way.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
It may be cliché, but my favorite place in New York City is Central Park. I have so many amazing memories from my Fordham years—picnicking in Sheep Meadow, waiting in line for free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte, trying (and failing!) to ride my bike—and I still love to visit the park today with my dog or go for a run.

I’ll also always be a Jersey girl at heart, and nothing beats a beautiful summer day on the Jersey shore.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
I love to read, so it’s so hard to pick just one! Anything by Nora Ephron will always be top of the list. She’s such an iconic author and feminist and is a quintessential read. My guilty pleasure is also any mystery or thriller stories—I’ve been known to stay up way too late trying to find out the ending!

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most? 
Brian Rose! He introduced me to the world of communications when I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to major in, and he really helped me set the course for what would become my career.

I still use lessons from the internship seminar he taught in my work today—and definitely pass his advice on to my mentees.

Becker, who covered Cambodia for the Washington Post, was awarded the Sperber Prize for her biography You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (Public Affairs, 2022). Kalb was awarded a certificate of achievement for his distinguished career in journalism and two memoirs: Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, (Brookings, 2022) and The Year I Was Peter the Great, (Brookings, 2018). 

The Sperber Prize, given annually for biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism, has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999. 

Breaking Out of the ‘Pink Ghetto’

Becker said she wanted to highlight how her subjects—Frances Fitzgerald, Kate Webb, and Catherine Leroy—broke the thickest glass ceiling in journalism by covering the Vietnam War, and in doing so, paved the way for women such as herself. They hailed from three different countries and came from radically different backgrounds, but all three paid their own way to get to Vietnam, and with little formal training, broke out of the “pink ghetto” of fashion, food, and family coverage that women journalists were confined to at the time.

Their outsider status was key, she said, to their ability to look beyond the battlefield, where their male counterparts had been trained to focus their coverage.

“So, you had ultimately with these three women an approach to war that included the whole country, the society, the people,” she said.

“Catherine Leroy spent a lot of time in the field, and she didn’t just take pictures of battle. She took a lot of pictures of soldiers waiting, soldiers being afraid, soldiers being in anguish when they went into battle, soldiers praying with the pastor, reading their mail.”

War Reporting Takes its Toll

Although they found some semblance of success and recognition—Webb won the George Polk award and Fitzgerald won the Pulitzer—Webb and Leroy both suffered from PTSD, and all three had messy personal lives that Becker did not shy away from in her writing. She noted that none of the women expressed regrets about going to Vietnam.

“One of the big gifts for me in writing this book was that I felt it was really good for me as a woman to be a part of all that that,” she said. 

“There was something that we could all be proud of, and I wanted to show that they not only broke the ceiling, but they changed journalism as well.”

Remembering Murrow and His Report on Buchenwald

Kalb, who appeared via Zoom, said he was touched to be honored with an award connected to famed journalist Edward R. Murrow. The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of the critically acclaimed biography Murrow: His Life and Times (Fordham University Press, 1999). 

Kalb was the last person who Murrow hired at CBS News, and he said his favorite anecdote about Murrow was how in 1945, he visited the Buchenwald Concentration camp and saw for the first time what a death camp looked like. 

“Murrow was overwhelmed, and when he went back to his hotel room and to sit down to write his piece, he couldn’t do it. I don’t know whether it was two days or three, but it took him a while before he could absorb what he had seen, and be able to present it adequately to the American people on radio,” he said.

An Appreciation for Khrushchev

Today’s broadcast journalists would not be given the same opportunity, he said, and he noted that in writing the third memoir of his time in Russia, which he’s doing now. the benefit of time has given him a better appreciation for Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. Khrushchev is a major focus of all three of his memoirs.

It’s hard to believe that Khrushchev was so foolish to believe he could move missiles and 50,000 Soviet troops into Cuba without the United States noticing—thus triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he said. But Kalb, who covered the crisis as a new reporter, has come around to respect him now, particularly compared to current Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“He was the one Communist leader who recognized that he had made a profound mistake, and he publicly apologized and pulled the missiles out of Cuba and saved the world from a nuclear confrontation,” he said.

“I take my hat off to him this many years later. I don’t know any other Communist leader, perhaps even non-Communist leader, who would have had the guts to do that.”

“I’m a year away from finishing this third memoir, and it is fun, it is exciting, and I thank all of the Sperber committee for thinking about me for this award.”

After graduating from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2016 and launching a career in public relations and event management, Zuckerman got involved with Fordham’s Young Alumni Committee—a group of alumni who coordinate social events, educational programs, and opportunities for professional development and community engagement for recent Fordham graduates.

Now, having just finished her second term as the committee’s communications chair— a position that gave her an opportunity to stay engaged with what’s happening on campus, reach current students, and meet more alumni—she fully appreciates the power of the Fordham alumni network.

Making the Most of the City

After spending her first year of college as an economics major in Canton, New York, Zuckerman realized she wanted a change: She wanted to study communications at “a larger school with more opportunities” and “be in a city rather than” the small village she had originally chosen. Though she grew up at the Jersey Shore, Zuckerman has always been familiar with the Lincoln Center area—her aunt and uncle lived just a block away from Fordham’s Manhattan campus.

Excited to be able to “actually study what I wanted to study” in an environment that was both familiar and full of opportunity, Zuckerman transferred to Fordham the fall of her sophomore year and majored in communications and media studies. Almost immediately, thanks to an art history class she took as part of the undergraduate core curriculum, she realized just how much she’d be able to take advantage of all that New York has to offer.

“For one of our first assignments, we were instructed to go to a museum in a city,” she said. “I went to the Metropolitan Museum with a few other classmates … and I remember just being really excited. … I realized that I was going to be able to do that a lot more by going to school in New York.”

New York’s status as a communications hub made it possible for Zuckerman to complete internships at various organizations—from Good Housekeeping and Town & Country magazines to Bloomingdales and Time Inc. But between commuting and serving those internships, she said she had little time to get involved with clubs and other activities on campus—that’s something she’s been trying to rectify in recent years, through her involvement with the Young Alumni Committee. And she’s grateful for the opportunities she had to complement her coursework with work experience as an undergraduate.

“It was important to be able to have all those internships,” she said. “I definitely look back on [them]as being really helpful and helping me narrow down what I wanted to do with my career.”

Keeping Young Alumni Engaged

Zuckerman learned about the Young Alumni Committee in 2018 when she attended an event sponsored by the Fordham University Alumni Association. Matt Burns, the alumni relations office’s director for reunion programs and affinity groups, introduced her to some members of the committee.

A few weeks later, Zuckerman attended one of their meetings and eventually got more involved. She recently finished her second term as the committee’s communications chair, engaging with alumni and getting the word out.

This past year, that included reaching out to the editors at Fordham’s student-run news outlets, including The Fordham Ram and The Observer, to gauge their interest in writing “articles about the committee so that way the current students and recent graduates could learn about it and potentially join,” she said.

Zuckerman told The Observer that, thanks to the Young Alumni Committee, she’s been able to connect with a wide range of Fordham graduates, including alumni of other degree programs, schools and colleges, and class years. She said she hopes the committee will see the payoff of those articles as “even more members come to our meetings and events this year.”

Maintaining a Commitment to Service

Thinking about the lasting effects of her Fordham education, Zuckerman points to her ongoing commitment to service. In addition to her work with the alumni committee, she volunteers with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Junior League (NYJL).

“Since I am very involved with volunteering and different nonprofits, that’s something that I really appreciated about the University and, looking back, definitely just appreciate even more now that I’m a graduate,” she said.

She joined the NYJL as a sophomore at Fordham to get involved with a philanthropic organization in the city and meet people outside of the University community. Today, she serves as the training council head, overseeing three committees responsible for conducting “ongoing training for everybody to be able to be the most effective volunteers” possible.

Though it’s her first time serving in “such a big role,” she’s taking a bit of the advice she hopes current Fordham students will follow: “Always try something new if it’s offered to you—because you never know if you’re going to really like something or not.”

Fordham Five (Plus One)

What are you most passionate about?
Definitely volunteering and philanthropy! I joined the New York Junior League, a women’s nonprofit organization, while a sophomore at Fordham in order to be connected with the wider NYC community beyond school and to have a long-term volunteer opportunity after graduation. Beyond the NYJL, I volunteer [with]the Billion Oyster Project and School Year Abroad.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Never be afraid to try something new! One of my favorite things about Fordham was the ability to hold so many internships during the school year, in addition to the summer. I tried so many different types of internships, which really helped me narrow down what I wanted to do after graduating.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
My favorite place in New York City is Union Square. I lived nearby in Flatiron for a few years and loved how centrally located it was and how many great restaurants were nearby. Most of all, I loved stopping by the Greenmarket on my way to the subway before work or for a leisurely stroll on the weekends. Not to mention how festive it is at Christmastime!

My favorite place in the world is the Jersey Shore, where I’m from. It’s of course at its best during the summer, but it’s so special year-round. I love the natural beauty, rich traditions, local businesses, and close-knit community.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
I love books set in New York City, so would have to say either The Age of Innocence or The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
Kathleen Adams, FCRH ’10, GSAS ’12: We didn’t overlap while at Fordham, but we volunteer together at the New York Junior League. I was so excited to learn that she is also a Fordham alumna, but not surprised, as she embodies the University’s mission so well! I am so impressed by all that she does in her professional and volunteer life.

What are you optimistic about?
I work on the marketing team for an educational consultancy and am impressed by current high school students and optimistic about the impact that they will have on the world as they continue to pursue their passions.

On Aug. 26., in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the state restrictions on mass gatherings, fall classes at the University commenced under the auspices of a brand-new flexible hybrid learning model.

The model, which was laid out in May by Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., Fordham’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, is designed to be both safe and academically rigorous. After being forced to pivot to remote learning in March, professors and instructors, aided by Fordham’s IT department, spent many hours this summer preparing to use this model for the fall.

Today, some classes are offered remotely, some are offered in-person—indoors and outdoors—with protective measures, and still others are a blend of both. Whatever the method, professors are engaging students with innovative lessons and challenging coursework.

Rethinking an Old Course for New Times

Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., a professor of art history, said the pandemic spurred her department to reimagine one of its hallmark courses, Introduction to Art History. The course, which covers the period from 1200 B.C. to the present day, is being taught both in-person and in remote settings to 327 students in what’s known as a “flipped” format.

Before classes are held, students are provided with pre-recorded lectures, reading material, and videos, such as Art of the Olmec, which Mundy created with the assistance of Digital and Visual Resources Curator Katherina Fostano and her staff. When students meet in person or via live video, they then discuss the material at length. The content was changed as well; it now also addresses the representation of Black people throughout history and showcases artists who tackle themes of racism.

“Because we were looking at a situation where we couldn’t just do business as usual, I proposed that we take this moment to really rethink our intro class, which we’ve been teaching for decades,” Mundy said, noting that the department has expanded in recent years to include experts in art from more diverse sections of the world.

Contemplating the Bard

Before the COVID crisis, Mary Bly, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of English, presented materials to students in her Shakespeare & Pop Culture class and encouraged them to generate their own ideas on them during live discussions. Now she breaks her students up into pairs, and later “pods,” of about six students on Zoom, to form a thoughtful argument about a particular work of art, video, film, or theater.

“An argument is not a description,” said Bly. “It has to have some evidence or context to make their argument, say, for example, ‘This film is a racist portrayal of the play for the following reasons,’ or, ‘The director of this film pits the values of pop culture against Shakespeare and the British canon.”

To propel the conversations, she created a series of video-taped lectures with Daniel Camou, FCLC ’20. In some cases, students are expected to respond with a video of their own.

Embracing New Technologies

Paul Lynch, Ph.D., an associate professor of accounting and taxation at the Gabelli School of Businesses, is teaching Advanced Accounting to undergraduates and Accounting for Derivatives to graduate students this semester. Of the five classes, four are exclusively online, and one is exclusively in person. For his remote classes, he’s turned to Lightboard, which allows him to “write” on the screen. He jokingly refers to it as his Manhattan Project.

“I love being in the class with the students. I enjoy the interaction, and I thought that was missing,” he said. “This gives me the ability to let the students see me as if I was in class writing onto a transparent whiteboard.”

He said he hasn’t had to change much of the content. The only major difference now is that instead of passing out equations on printed paper, he emails students custom-made problems in PDF format, and then edits within that document after they’re sent back.

“I’ve always given them take-home exams, and always worked off Blackboard, so it’s just a natural extension of what I used to do in class,” he said.

In Jacqueline Reich’s class Films of Moral Struggle, students are using the platform Perusall to examine how films portray moral and ethical issues. They watch and analyze films like Scarface, a 1932 movie about a powerful Cuban drug lord, and The Cheat, which shows the early representation of Asians in American films, said Reich, a professor of communication and media studies.

Among other things, students can use Perusall to annotate scenes from movie clips, such as the classic film Casablanca, where they identified shots ranging from “establishing” and “reaction” to “shot/reverse shot.”

“It’s a really good exercise to do in class when you’re teaching film language or talking about editing or lighting, because students can pause and comment on a particular frame,” Reich said.

She meets with 11 students on Zoom on Thursdays and another eight in person at the Rose Hill campus on Mondays.

In another virtual classroom, Peggy Andover, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, is teaching undergraduates at Rose Hill how the laws of the environment shape behavior in an asynchronous class called Learning Laboratory. Andover said that platforms like Panopto, which transcribe her lessons, can make it easier for students to look for specific information.

“Let’s say you’re studying for an exam, and you see the word ‘contiguity’ in your notes, and you don’t remember what it means. You don’t have to watch the entire lecture again—you can search for ‘contiguity’ and see the slides and the portion of the lecture where we were talking about it,” Andover said.

Graduate students teaching in the psychology program are also using Pear Deck to make their virtual classrooms more engaging on Google Slides, she said.

“You have this PowerPoint that’s being watched or engaged in asynchronously, but [Pear Deck] allows you to put in interactive features,” including polls and student commentary, she said.

“Our grad students found it’s a way to really get that engagement that they would potentially be missing when we went to online learning.”

Learning from Classmates

Aaron Saiger, a professor at the Law School, made several adjustments to Property Law, a required class for all first-year law students. Instead of meeting in person twice a week for two hours, his class of 45 students meets on Zoom three times a week for 90 minutes, an acknowledgment that attention spans are harder to maintain on Zoom.

The content is the same, but the way he teaches it had to change. While he was able to record four classes’ worth of lectures to share asynchronously, that wasn’t an option for everything.

“I’m spending less time talking to students one-on-one while everyone else listens, which is the classic law school teaching mode; we call it the Socratic method,” he said. “Everyone else is supposed to imagine that they’re the person being called on.”

Saiger’s solution is having students share two-sentence answers to questions in the Zoom chat function to gauge what everyone’s thinking about a topic, having them do more group work, and leaning more on visual material.

“The difficulties are not insubstantial, but I think we are meeting the challenges and finding a few offsetting advantages that will make it a good semester for everyone.”

Getting Creative with Lab Work

Stephen Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, holds most of his experimentation class in person, with a few students attending remotely.

The in-person group is working on a hands-on solar project that allows them to learn about the material, electric, programming, and optical components of physics.

Students who are attending the class remotely are doing related mathematical work as a part of their semester-long project.

“One student is studying interference coding in optics, so I have him looking at designs in a paper,” he said. “He’s learning all the underlying physics for what goes into a portion of these mirrors that are used in laser systems.”

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry, is sending lab kits to the students in his general chemistry class so they can conduct experiments from home.

“We were between a rock and hard place—you can’t have the kids in the lab, and at the same time, we can’t not have some kind of hands-on,” he said.

The kits will allow students to participate in labs virtually through a Zoom webinar with their professor, as well as in breakout rooms with their lab teams.

“We adapted as many of our experiments as we could to just use simple household chemicals that are all completely safe,” he said.

Elizabeth Thrall, Ph.D., an assistant professor of physical and biophysical chemistry, likewise sent a kit to students that they can use to build a spectrometer. Students can build it out of Legos, using a DVD and a light source to create different wavelengths of light. They capture them using their computer’s webcam which processes the data. They will then design an experiment that everyone in the class will conduct.

“Designing an experiment so that you learn something, that answers the question you set out to answer, and gives a protocol that someone else can follow so they can get the same results that you got, is really at the heart of what it is to do scientific research,” she said.

—Taylor Ha, Kelly Kultys, and Tom Stoelker contributed reporting.

Ironically, the award was given to Hersh for a book— Reporter: A Memoir (Knopf, 2018)—that he never planned to write.

An investigative journalist who’s penned 10 books about topics as varied as Henry Kissinger, John F. Kennedy Jr., and the Gulf War, Hersh said Reporter was actually the result of his failure to finish what would have been his 11th book. After decades cultivating sources deep within the American military and intelligence community, he signed a contract and got a big advance to write a book about former vice president Dick Cheney. Then his sources got cold feet.

“I began to share some of the stuff I was going to say, and they said, ‘We’re going to go to jail if you do that,’” Hersh said at the award ceremony, held at the Lincoln Center campus.

“I’d gotten a huge contract and I’d worked for years on their money, and said, ‘I’m dead.’ [The publisher] said, ‘Well, you can do one of two things. You can go to the gulag and start paying us a dollar a week, or do a memoir.’ So that’s why I did it. Not for mercenary reasons, but to save my life,” he said, laughing.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, lauded Hersh, whose work also includes a 2004 bombshell piece about U.S. military abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, for being someone who educates the public through his life’s work. Father McShane called Reporter “a story of incredible strength, and incredible courage that is told with a very critical but loving eye.”

“There is one phrase that I think probably characterizes your life, and it is this: There is no hunger like the hunger of truth,” he said to Hersh.

“Once you have tasted it, it creates a longing, and you have spent your life really giving into that longing.”

Andrew Meier, chairman of the department of journalism at the New School, said at the ceremony that he read Reporter in one night and it left him mesmerized, stunned, and eternally grateful to Hersh for his work. He called it a landmark of our generation. When he reviewed the book last summer for Book Forum, he dubbed it a “miracle.”

“Hersh has done more than stand witness; he has done the hard digging, again and again and again, and even now, he’s still digging, five decades and counting of scoops,” he said.

In his acceptance remarks, Hersh also reflected on the lessons he learned as a young reporter covering crime in Chicago. Some were harsh ones about the pervasiveness of racism, even within journalism, such as when he was instructed by an editor to “cheap up” a story about the death of a family when it was revealed they were black.

He also recalled a time when he was instructed to self-censor a story about police misconduct to protect a good relationship with authorities. And in a knock at the current obsession with breaking news first, he also said he learned you could be a better reporter even if you were the second one to write about something.

Perhaps most relevant to today’s current events, he said, is the value of the sources that he’s been able to cultivate over the years. As an example, he singled out Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who sacrificed his career in the military when he leaked a report on Abu Ghraib to Hersh.

“Over the years I’ve learned that the people to find are those people on the inside who believe in being there even now, in this government, who believe the best thing they can do is the best they can. Who are inside, in a sense, and are not afraid to talk about things that go wrong, and take a chance,” he said.

He also had advice for aspiring journalists in the audience.

“If you want to do better in life and reporting, as a journalist, do read before you write,” he said. “Have enough information so you can do a narrative. That means do a lot of work.”

The Sperber Prize was established in 1999 by Liselotte Sperber to honor the memory of her daughter Ann, who wrote the definitive biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Freundlich, 1986).

Past winners have included New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, for his memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), and Robert Miraldi, who won in 2014 for his biography of Hersh, Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

The prize is administered by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.

This past May, Fordham took a big step toward embracing this new world, as 14 members of the faculty and administration traveled to Sophia University in Japan as part of the first Fordham Faculty Research Abroad program.

The delegation, which was led by Fordham’s provost, the late Stephen M. Freedman, Ph.D., hailed from fields as varied as political science, economics, biological sciences, education, social service, and art history. The theme of the trip was comparative urban studies.

George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs, said the trip was the result of Fordham’s Continuous University Strategic Planning (CUSP) process, which the University began in 2015.

In the CUSP process, four areas were given high priority: Interdisciplinary research, sponsored research, global research, and faculty-student research collaborations. This trip fulfilled all of those priorities by bringing Fordham researchers into contact with peers in Japan who are pursuing research on many topics within that field. It also established an exchange program for faculty and students between the two schools.

Collaborating on Food Justice

One of those connections was between Garrett Broad, Ph.D., assistant professor of Communication and Media Studies and James Farrer, Ph.D., a professor of sociology and global studies at Sophia University. Farrer has been researching food entrepreneurship in Tokyo and the role that small vendors play in local economies, a topic of interest to Broad, who penned More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016).

“We’re talking about setting up a workshop here in New York at some point next year where we bring together a group of scholars who are exploring issues related to food, society, globalization and local food economies,” Broad said.

“The hope for this enterprise is it’s not a one off, where we had this nice trip to Tokyo, made some friends and that’s that. We want to continue and build some partnerships, and since there’s only so much you can do in just a few days, a workshop is a way we can keep the momentum going.”

Broad also took the opportunity to visit and interview scientists at a Tokyo organization that is experimenting with “cellular agriculture.” The technology, which Broad had already been researching for an upcoming project, involves growing meat in a laboratory, negating the need to slaughter animals. To help him overcome language and cultural barriers, he recruited Sophia University undergraduate students to accompany him.

Making Personal Connections in the Field

Annika Hinze, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of Fordham’s urban studies program, came away from the trip deeply affected by potential collaborations. While one group from Fordham was given a tour related to sustainability and environmental issues, she attended a tour centered on social issues that was led by Nanako Inaba, a professor in Sophia’s department of global studies.

Of particular interest to Hinze was a public park that had recently been partially sold to private interests, including Nike. A sizable homeless population still calls the park home, and Hinze interviewed one of them to get a sense of how his presence was actually a form of protest.

“I’m a field researcher first and foremost, and in order to understand places, it’s vital to actually visit them and get to know them a little bit. The initial connections you make with people can be the jumping point for creating meaningful research partnerships,” she said.

“The walking tours were amazing, because they were done by people who are academics who are researching social or sustainability issues and who really know the environment.”

Global Partnerships Critical to Funded Research

Connections such as these are crucial to solving challenges, Hong said. They’re also often a prerequisite for researchers who wants to get their projects funded by some external sources.

“More and more American foundations are requiring global partnership as precondition for applications. If you don’t have an international partner, you are out,” he said.

On that front, the trip was also a success, as Fordham faculty identified 27 researchers in Japan who are ready to collaborate on joint grant proposals, research projects, and research papers. Hong and his team also identified more than 40 funding opportunities to support these research projects. Several faculty members are working on joint proposals, he said, and one has already submitted one. He expects that there will be opportunities for Fordham students to assist in future studies as well.

Hong noted that a byproduct of Fordham faculty traveling together was also an increase in collaborations amongst themselves. Next summer, a group of them will travel to Europe, where the theme will be “digital scholarship.”

“They immediately picked up some ideas and learned from each other. It was the same subject, urban studies, but different disciplines, education, social service, the sciences, history, social sciences, humanities, natural science,” he said.

In addition to prearranged meetings, there were serendipitous meetings at Sophia University as well. Takehiro Watanabe, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology at Sophia whose research touches on participatory community environmental processes, led the Fordham contingent on a tour of a river revitalization project and chaired a panel discussion that Broad participated in.

“Afterward, he saw some things in my presentation that connected to some of the subjects that he’s interested in, such as participatory science and citizen science,” Broad said.

“The more time you’re able to spend, and the more people you’re able to meet, you realize you have more in common.”

At the same time, the decline in newspaper readership started to accelerate, said Beth Knobel, Ph.D., associate chair for undergraduates at the Rose Hill campus and a professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies.

“I kept asking myself, what is this going to mean in terms of what newspapers were going to be able to do?” said Knobel, an Emmy Award-winning journalist who has worked for CBS News, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

“When I started working on this research project in 2011, I actually thought that I was going to be chronicling the death of watchdog and investigative reporting,” she said.  “It seemed logical to think that the watchdog function was fading away because newspapers had gotten smaller.”

For her new book, The Watchdog Still Barks: How Accountability Reporting Evolved for the Digital Age (Fordham University Press, 2018), Knobel assessed the front pages of nine American newspapers around the country, of varying sizes.  Included in her study were large papers like The New York Times, metropolitan dailies like the ones in in Minneapolis and Denver, and small papers like the one in Lewiston, Idaho. She aimed to chart how investigative or “watchdog” reporting has evolved since 1991, as the Internet transformed communications.

“Much to my surprise, I found that when I actually looked at the front pages, which would be the place that you would most likely see a big watchdog or investigative piece, the amount of accountability reports went up over time,” she said. “In the 2011 sample, there were actually more deep watchdog stories being done at these papers—more than ever before.”

Knobel spoke with current or former editors of all the newspaper studied, including the Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Albany Times Union. She learned that investigative reporting, which informs the public of falsehoods, wrongdoing, corruption, fraud and other offenses, remained a high-priority because the editors felt it was in the public interest.

“Newspapers do the job of trying to hold government accountable,” she said.  “That’s why they were enshrined in the Bill of Rights as a critical institution for our country.”

Among the newspapers that have championed watchdog reporting over the years is the Wall Street Journal, she said, citing a 2001 investigative report and lab study the paper did that exposed misleading GMO-free labels on foods.

“This was the kind of story that served public policy well and suggested that companies were not being truthful with consumers,” she said. “But that was an expensive story that took months to do.”

She learned that smaller papers, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had almost no investigative reporting on its front pages in 1991. But by 2011, more than 11 percent of its front-page content was focused on stories that required advanced investigative reporting techniques.

“The profile of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has grown dramatically because it now focuses so much on accountability journalism,” said Knobel.

Nevertheless, newsrooms still face several hurdles today, she explained.

“Just trying to decide what to cover with a newspaper’s limited resources is always a challenge,” said Knobel. “The government is so huge now that it’s impossible to cover it all. One of the things that I found from my research is that there are vast parts of government that are getting very little attention, like the judiciary and intelligence sectors.”

In recent months, she said, the free press has been disparaged by President Donald Trump—yet it remains vigilant.

“Just because the press is being criticized by the president and the administration, doesn’t mean that it’s not doing its job,” she said. “This book only proves that. The watchdog function is alive and well.”

“My mom said, you know, ‘Sheri, it would be cool if you could get an internship at a place like The Daily Show and really take advantage of the opportunity,” said DeNucci, a double major in psychology and communication and media studies.

When DeNucci applied and was accepted as an intern with The Daily Show with Trevor Noah last fall, she was elated—but there was another surprise. She wasn’t the only Fordham student there. FCRH junior Reed Horner and Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior Reese Ravner were also selected, though none of them had known one another prior to the internship.

“I was super happy because hundreds of people apply for an internship with the show,” said Horner, a journalism major. “It’s a small world.”

As interns at the award-winning news satire program, which airs weeknights on Comedy Central, DeNucci, Ravner, and Horner learned the ins and outs of television production.

Lessons and Opportunities 

From the Equifax data breach to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, they said The Daily Show delivered the world’s biggest news stories with unmatched humor.

“Millennials and people my age want to know what’s going on in the news, but they don’t want the news to be presented in a dry way,” said DeNucci, who was drawn to the show’s writing process. “There’s definitely this kind of sharp, witty, New York energy that goes into the show, and I think that’s important.”

Along with more than a dozen other interns, the Fordham students helped with daily tapings. Two to three days a week, they also supported different departments of the show, including the control room, talent, audience, studio production, and field production.

“When you watch the show on TV, you don’t really think about the fact that there are so many people involved,” said Ravner, a double major in communication and media studies and Spanish language and literature. “Everyone from the security guard to the people in the post-production office work together to put the show on every night.”

Horner, a beat reporter at WFUV whose dream is to be a late-night show host, said watching host and comedian Trevor Noah work collaboratively with his team was a source of inspiration.

“I learned that just because you’re on camera or have your name on something, it doesn’t necessarily make you better than the people around you,” said Horner, who believed the internship underscored the power of teamwork. “You can’t let your belief in yourself turn into arrogance because you could miss out on a lot of lessons and opportunities.”

Ravner is taking many of those lessons with her at her new internship at NBC News this spring.

“You have to always ask what’s the next thing you can do to help [after you’ve completed a task],” she said. “To see this in practice in a work environment like The Daily Show was really cool. That’s something I’ll take with me moving forward.”

The award, which was presented in a ceremony at the Lincoln Center campus, was given for Gottlieb’s memoir, Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). It was accepted by Gottlieb’s wife, Maria Tucci. During his considerable career, Gottlieb served as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker. Considered one of the greatest editors of the mid-to-late 20th century, he worked with the era’s leading authors—John Cheever, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Janet Malcolm, and Robert Caro, to name a few.

Jonathan Crystal, Ph.D., Fordham’s associate vice president and associate chief academic officer, called it an especially relevant tome to be honored amidst a crowd of book lovers.

“I think in the academic world, you’ll find many of us who identify completely with Robert Gottlieb when he writes ‘From the start, words were more real to me than real life, and certainly more interesting,’” he said.

“It was fascinating for me to see how editors work with authors to, as he put it, ‘Edge a book closer to its platonic self.’ I felt like I was peeking behind a curtain and getting a glimpse of this mysterious process.”

Patricia Bosworth, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a member of the Sperber Prize jury, hailed Avid Reader as a “buoyant memoir of a remarkable career,” and spoke fondly of her experience working with Gottleib on Diane Arbus: A Biography (Knopf, 1984).

She recalled that although she had earned the trust of Arbus’ brother Howard Nermorov, Arbus’ estate refused to work with her or let her reproduce the late artist’s photography.

[Gottleib] said, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re going to write about the photographs, describe them, find out how she took the pictures. Photographs will not matter,’” she said.

“Once he said that to me, it gave me confidence. I was really worried about it before.”

He taught her that work is more fun than fun, she said.

“Digging deep into something can be one of the most exciting things a writer and editors can do—discovering collecting, shaping. Bob said in his book, that ‘Work is my natural state of being.’ That’s what I learned from him, so I’m forever grateful,” she said.

In remarks delivered on his behalf by Tucci, Gottleib joked that he assumed that, having edited biographies of George Balanchine, Charles Dickens, and Sarah Bernhardt, tackling a book about himself would earn him ridicule for engaging in an “act of nervy self-indulgence.” He said he was thrilled that the prize was being given for a book that is really about books.

“I don’t know which is more gratifying: helping a writer make his or her book even better than it already is, or watching your enthusiasm for a writer or a book spread out into the world at large. And they’ve been paying me to do these things for 62 years now!” he said.

“I’ve always believed that editors should do their work invisibly, without attention being called to them. And yet I can’t pretend I’m indifferent to seeing our work honored, so I’m happy to accept this tribute not in my name only, but in the name of my whole club.”

The Sperber Prize was established by Liselotte Sperber to honor the memory of her daughter Ann, who wrote the definitive biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Freundlich, 1986). It is administered by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.