With relief and gratitude for all of those who helped us get through the pandemic, we announce our ability to move beyond many of the University’s COVID protocols. We continue to encourage you to make individual choices to maximize your own safety, and we continue to offer enormous respect and care for the more vulnerable among us. But the same data that has driven Fordham’s decisions all along now counsels a different path. The federal government has announced the termination of the emergency phase of the crisis as of May, thus we can move forward into the endemic stage of the virus. We make this decision after broad consultation with our community.

As of May 15, Fordham will not require members of the University community or visitors to be vaccinated against COVID. Vaccinations and boosters will continue to be strongly recommended because they remain very effective in protecting each of us individually from serious illness and death. Vaccines will no longer be required, however, because new variants increasingly have evaded the vaccine’s initially strong ability to prevent transmission of the disease. What was once a critical way to protect the most vulnerable in our community has become more of an individual choice about safety, one we urge you to take seriously.

While many of us have learned to live with the risk of COVID, it is critical that we remember the most vulnerable—to care enormously about those who beat cancer (or face other risks) and now live in fear of being felled by a virus. To state the obvious, stay home if you test positive for COVID. But not just that—we all learned some good habits about staying home when we are sick with any infectious illness. And masks remain a critical way to keep from spreading our own germs when we are sick, and a tool for those who want or need to protect themselves.

The University will continue providing COVID vaccinations and testing to students as much as we can. Schedules will be posted on the Health Services Page. Employees should see their healthcare providers.

As of May 15, the University will no longer use VitalCheck to track vaccination status, nor to report COVID cases, and members of the on-campus community will no longer receive the daily VitalCheck questionnaire via text or email.

Long before the fall semester begins, we will take a look at all other policies in consultation with the data and our community, and will announce any changes with plenty of notice. Until then, all classroom and other policies remain in effect. If you have questions about any of this, you can email vpforadministration@fordham.edu.

I arrived after the worst of the pandemic, but I want to say how proud I am of what you collectively achieved these last grueling years. In the midst of the terrible toll the virus took on New York City, Fordham’s data shows how well it managed to provide protection on campus and to model its concern for the neighborhoods around us, and for the communities you each returned home to. After the initial lockdown, the University carefully balanced the need to teach and serve students in person against the risks.

Fordham spent millions on these efforts—for vaccines, testing, masks, infrastructure modifications, and health and safety personnel. Fordham’s faculty, administrators, and staff worked tirelessly to teach and serve students. From the ridiculous juggling act of teaching in hybrid fashion to caring for students in the residence halls, from maximizing safety in our ventilation systems to giving thousands of COVID tests—I can’t possibly list here everything you sacrificed, but it was a miracle.

Students, we are so proud and grateful for the ways you helped us through, the millions of individual choices you made to keep our community safe. You lost so much, from critical years of social engagement to precious moments like graduations, and for some of you, far worse. We look at the data on levels of anxiety and depression with enormous concern. And despite how exhausted we also are, the Fordham community comes to work every day determined to be there for you.

We will continue to be prepared for whatever the world may throw at us, while praying for a reprieve from these ridiculously difficult times. Thank you all so much.

All my best,

Tania Tetlow
President

Pollak’s latest book Recalculating: Navigate Your Career Through the Changing World of Work, hit home for the attendees, many of whom are recalculating what it means to be an entrepreneur, a student, a consumer, or a teacher in the time of COVID-19. 

“Companies and organizations need to recalculate by listening to their employees,” noted Pollak. “One of the positives of COVID is that a lot of employees started having town halls, asking questions and surveying their employees because they aren’t seeing them as frequently. They had to get that insight and didn’t make assumptions. The assumption that many companies made is that younger employees were perfectly happy to work from home for the rest of their lives, but surveys have shown us that it’s the opposite. A lot of young employees want to come back to the office because it’s social, and that’s where they find mentors.” 

COVID an Accelerating Mechanism

The conference—which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year—offered Gabelli School students and other attendees a view into the future of work as forecasted by CEOs and other experts. 

“In my view, we are in the midst of a tech cycle that’s going to make a big change. In the next five years, we will see a merge of virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence. This tech trend will change the way we live,” said Lyron Bentovim, president and CEO at the Glimpse Group, a virtual reality and augmented reality platform. 

“The ability for us to be where we need to be without physically being there, to interact with people and objects in a way that catapults us as consumers and big businesses,” said Bentovim, will transform the modern office. “Instead of seeing pictures of us on a screen, I think we will be sitting together in a space without being together.”

The idea of recalculating can be scary, speakers said, but for entrepreneurs, disruption opens doors. COVID has been an accelerating mechanism for many in the e-commerce or virtual industries that provide connectivity, like Zoom, Amazon, and Netflix. 

Many existing trends that were on the cusp exploded during COVID-19, including telehealth, said an executive.

“[Before COVID-19] telehealth was the tiniest fraction of how to deliver care. Almost immediately, it became 15, 18, 20% of people’s low hanging fruit. It was always going in that direction, and COVID helped it skip five years ahead. Individual doctors and hospitals who had never considered it before were forced to move in that direction. And through all the tumult, it turns out people like it. Patients like it, doctors like it,” said Reed Mollins, cofounder, and chief strategy officer at Doctor.com. 

The conference itself pushed the boundaries of what was possible at a virtual event. Attendees were able to see the latest in virtual reality and augmented reality thanks to reps from PagoniVR and D6 VR. The presentations by the two companies included demos of virtual spaces, avatars, and 3D charting. 

Eye Contact Still Matters

The event provided an opportunity for alumni to reconnect with Fordham and each other. Currently head of sales & business development at Block Renovation, Steve Treacy, GSB ’14, described the lessons he learned from working at Mike’s Deli on Arthur Avenue before landing his first big tech job at Tesla.

 “It was awesome. I managed their office, did some accounting for them, some social media. Then it got to a point where I needed to quit that job and believe it or not I left in order to join Tesla.” 

Treacy often thinks back on a communications class at Fordham that taught him the essentials of eye contact, shaking hands, and how to present in front of a room. Those skills are invaluable in business, he said. 

“I also learned how to listen to people. This is one of my biggest assets is to be able to listen to what the customer wants. If it weren’t for that class, I may not have worked at Mike’s Deli and then later Tesla, or now be able to build a team from the ground up at Block Renovation.” 

Another central idea present in many of the panels was the notion of controlling what you can and not letting the rest get to you because change is inevitable. Even databases will change dramatically, said Mollins, and that change will bring new opportunities for collaboration.

“The most disruptive technology in the next five years is the interoperability of databases and the digitization of all records and the development of those relationships. One of the side victories of most people moving to three main cloud services is it makes it possible for different software to gain access to each other,” Mollins said. 

This event was sponsored by the Gabelli School of Business and Deloitte.

“As things were rapidly changing around us, I started to really think about how COVID was really impacting everyone,” said Maria Jimenez-Salazar, who spearheaded the project with Evan Auguste, a fellow doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “I became really motivated to hear from different perspectives and try to make sense of how other people were thinking about it.”

In mid-March, Jimenez-Salazar and Auguste recruited graduate students from more than a dozen disciplines, including history and cybersecurity. Most of the students are master’s or doctoral candidates from Fordham, but some study as far away as the University of California, Los Angeles.

In the first week of the project, the students were divided into nine working groups: economy/finance, editors, education, ethics/philosophy, media communications/technology, psychology, public health, social work, and sociology. Each group worked on an opinion piece that described how the pandemic affected their field and offered ways to help individuals and systems cope with the global crisis. 

On May 22, they published seven essays on Medium.com. The first essay, “Neocolonial Travelers, Demonization, and ‘the Diseased,’” considers how previous health crises have worsened through group conflict and prejudice. Another essay, “A ‘Great’ Economy—Disrupted,” analyzes how the pandemic has exposed long-term issues in the U.S. economy that were not addressed after the 2008 global financial crisis. 

“This [essay collection]is an example of how strong interdisciplinary work can be in terms of tackling and offering the full range and picture of a given event,” Auguste said. 

Auguste and Jimenez-Salazar collaborated with four Fordham doctoral students on the essay “Mental Health in Crisis: Considerations for Individuals, Families, and Communities during COVID-19,” which describes the psychological impact of the pandemic. 

Auguste and Nicola Forbes, a second-year doctoral candidate in applied developmental psychology, wrote about how the pandemic can be a source of cultural trauma, especially for the Asian-American community. 

“What we’ve seen from previous health crises is that it’s almost expected that you’ll have this racist bigotry. But the issue that we’ve seen in some of the responses is normalizing that and saying that we can’t be overly critical; we can’t be too upset about this because it only makes sense,” said Auguste. “This can become a kind of trauma that exists far past the pandemic. It can become attached to a person’s identity and impact how future generations understand their culture and their ethnicity.” 

The pandemic has changed Auguste and Jimenez-Salazar’s lives, too. 

Auguste moved from his Harlem apartment to his parents’ home on Long Island. Instead of gaining clinical experience in a hospital, he now volunteers for the New York State Office of Mental Health’s Emotional Support Hotline and counsels people who have been impacted by pandemic, including those who have lost loved ones to the coronavirus, he said. 

Jimenez-Salazar said she was diagnosed with COVID-19 in the second week of their writing project. For two weeks, she experienced most of the classic symptoms; they continued to linger for two more weeks. Since then, she has made a full recovery, she said, speaking in a Zoom call from the Bronx. 

The coronavirus cut short Jimenez-Salazar’s time working with teenagers and young adults at an adolescent health clinic, where she worked as a psychology extern. Her spring semester ended from a distance, instead of in a classroom with her cohort. But she said this writing project has been a good way to connect with others and create something meaningful during the pandemic. 

Jimenez-Salazar said she hopes this essay collection will not only acknowledge the negative impact of the virus, but also impart hope for a better, improved future. 

“It’s been a big lesson on how diverse we all are in our understanding of global events, like a pandemic, and how interesting and important it is to have conversations that really capture that diversity and give voice to different perspectives,” said Jimenez-Salazar. “Right now in our society, we are seeing a lot of animosity or polarized opinions … By taking the time to really listen to diverse perspectives—not from a critical lens, but just out of curiosity—you can really learn a lot.”