The campaign officially closed over the summer with $371 million raised, exceeding its goal by $21 million. That success reflects the generosity of the Fordham community and the Jesuit principle of magis that for 183 years has prompted Fordham to go beyond expectations in serving students, said Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham.

“Today, more than ever, Fordham is attracting students who are passionate about engaging with the great issues of our time and building a better future for humanity,” she said. “With this campaign, we have shown that their desire to make a difference is more than matched by our community’s willingness to support them in every way possible. To all who gave, no matter the size of your gift, thank you, and I hope you will take pride in what you have accomplished for our students.”

Educating the Whole Person

The Cura Personalis campaign—named for the Jesuit principle of educating the whole person—was formally launched in 2021. Its four pillars were access and affordability, academic excellence, student wellness and success, and athletics, and embedded within each pillar was the overriding imperative of fostering a sense of welcome and belonging throughout the University.

Visit our Cura Personalis campaign site for stories of students who benefited from donors’ gifts.

Varied gifts both large and small propelled the campaign. Thirty-five percent of the gifts were less than $100. Thirty-one donors gave $1 million or more for the first time. Bequests and planned gifts account for 29% of the total. And 37% of the campaign total was contributed by members of the Fordham University Board of Trustees.

“Through this campaign, the entire Fordham family of alumni, parents, faculty, staff, students, and friends of the University has shown the depths of its generosity,” said the board’s chairman, Armando Nuñez, GABELLI ’82. “And I’ve never been prouder to serve on the board with this extraordinary and generous group of trustees.”

Among the campaign contributions was the largest gift the University has ever received: a $35 million gift to the Gabelli School of Business from Mario Gabelli, a 1965 alumnus for whom the school is named, and his wife, Regina Pitaro, a 1976 alumna of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

Impacts Large and Small

The campaign left its mark across the University—perhaps most prominently with the creation of the Joseph M. McShane, S.J. Campus Center on the Rose Hill campus. The project combined an 80,000-square-foot addition with existing buildings, providing vastly greater space for student activities and University events. It also provided bigger, upgraded spaces for the Career Center, Campus Ministry, and the Center for Community Engaged Learning, enabling students to gather, socialize, and take greater advantage of their resources.

A ‘W’ for Students

In the athletics arena, the campaign supported a host of new and improved facilities as well as the New Era Fund for the basketball program, which boosted the number of wins by the men’s team and helped with revving up Ram spirit on campus.

Many gifts were tailored to the goal of inclusion—including those made to the Trustee Diversity Fund for economically disadvantaged students from historically underrepresented backgrounds, a fund spearheaded by Fordham Trustee Valerie Rainford, FCRH ’86. Another new fund, the LGBTQ Student Wellbeing Fund, was led by Joan Garry, FCRH ’79.

Scholarships, Advising, Internships, and More

Students benefited in numerous other ways: Campaign contributions created 153 new financial aid funds, supported student-faculty research, fueled an expansion of community engaged learning courses, helped create the Fordham College Advising Center, and funded the popular Serving the City internships with local cultural institutions. The campaign also supported an emergency fund and other resources for student veterans who often live on tight budgets while pursuing their studies.

Susan Conley Salice, FCRH ’82, one of five co-chairs of the campaign, noted one of the through lines connecting this and other Fordham fundraising campaigns: financial aid.

“Fordham was founded by an immigrant, and the University has a proud tradition of serving students of limited means, including first-generation college students,” said Conley Salice, a first-generation college graduate herself. “Thanks to all who supported our campaign, Fordham is well positioned to sustain its tradition of welcoming the most talented, committed students, regardless of their financial need.”

Supporting STEM

Campaign gifts provided new resources in the STEM fields, such as research fellowships, a new laser for optics research, and an endowed professorship, one that evokes the legacy of one of the University’s most involved and generous alumni.

With a $5 million gift, Fordham Trustee Kim Bepler, recipient of a 2022 honorary doctorate from the University, created a chair in the natural and applied sciences in honor of her late husband, Stephen E. Bepler, FCRH ’64. It was the fifth endowed chair in the sciences created by gifts from Kim Bepler and the estate of her husband, who served as a Fordham trustee and gave generously to many areas of the University before he died in 2016.

The campaign’s success bodes well for future fundraising efforts, noted Roger A. Milici Jr., vice president for development and university relations, who leads Fordham’s fundraising division.

“The pace and level of support for this campaign are a reflection of the energy and passion for Fordham’s Jesuit and Catholic mission in a fractured world desperately in need of hope,” he said.

Milici noted that Fordham just completed its second-best fundraising year ever, with more than $80 million in total gifts and pledges. “With the successful closure of this campaign,” he said, “we are also building a more mature advancement operation capable of greater impact, thanks to so many mission partners.”

But some scholarship donors are advancing this goal through their focus on students from particular schools—like the Catholic schools in Fordham’s backyard.

One of the newest such efforts is the Cristo Rey‒Fordham Scholarship Fund, which supports Fordham students who graduated from schools in the Cristo Rey network. The fund’s initial gift came from Thomas Kelly, M.D., FCRH ’71, who sought to help students overcome financial need and receive a Jesuit education, which for him took place at Canisius High School in Buffalo, New York, and then at Fordham, with scholarship help.

“Those were important years for me, and therefore I’d like to see the next generation have that opportunity,” said Kelly, a member of the Fordham University President’s Council.

Schools in the Cristo Rey network serve students from lower-income backgrounds, providing a four-year corporate work-study program that helps pay their tuition. Nearly all Cristo Rey graduates at Fordham come from Cristo Rey New York High School in East Harlem. Kelly’s scholarship adds to Fordham’s own commitment, announced four years ago, to meet up to the full cost of tuition for students from the Cristo Rey network.

Bronx Catholic Schools ‘Feed’ Fordham

Further north, in the Bronx, are Catholic high schools with socioeconomically diverse students that have long been “feeder” schools for Fordham—educating many a first-generation Irish American like William Rockford, FCRH ’67, GSAS ’72. A “dayhop” student who commuted to Fordham and worked his way through, he established a scholarship to Fordham for students at his alma mater, All Hallows High School, seeking to help the less-advantaged students of today.

He and his wife have been contributing to the William D. and Beverly B. Rockford Endowed Scholarship for more than two decades. “I hope it helps out these kids that are probably very ambitious but couldn’t afford to get a good education,” he said.

Albert Salvatico, FCRH ’71, another Bronx native from a working-class background, established a scholarship with his wife, Jean, to enable graduates of his own alma mater, Cardinal Hayes High School, to come to the University. A believer in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, he wanted to help students overcome socioeconomic barriers to a Fordham education.

So far, the scholarship has helped eight Hayes graduates do just that. “It’s been one of the more rewarding things of my life,” he said.

Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student and make a gift.

He is the founder of two scholarships at the Gabelli School, including one that honors the memory of his brother, Jonathan Gach, GABELLI ’82, who died from cancer in 2018. He also created a research award named for his parents, Harold and Sydelle Gach, and has given to various academic centers and other initiatives at the Gabelli School. He’s a member of the Fordham University President’s Council and a supporter of the Founder’s Undergraduate Scholarship Fund.

Gach’s teaching and philanthropy are informed by his own student experiences but also by values honed during his varied career with Accenture, the global technology and consulting firm he served for 37 years.

Tell me why you created the scholarship in your brother’s memory.
Ours was a working-class family, and our parents didn’t have money for the University, so my brother and I both worked to pay for school. We were not really beneficiaries of campus life because of our working schedules. As much as I loved the Gabelli School, and it set me up for life, I know I missed out on some opportunities, so I want to afford students a chance to have that broader experience.

Why do you support so many different areas?
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate is the school’s integrated objectives. I’m involved in the Responsible Business Center, which is geared toward research on many of the world’s challenges. I started off with the endowed scholarships, but as I started to understand better the importance of research, I’ve started to give in that area as well.

You teach a course called The Ground Floor that’s popular beyond the Gabelli School. What does it cover?
We give the students a business foundation. They get a little bit of accounting, marketing, finance, operations, etc., but also mission and ethics. We have guest speakers who help them with career discernment. We also ask them to develop an idea for a startup that addresses at least one of the U.N.’s sustainable development goals, and almost every year, at least one or two teams try to launch their business. A few have even gone to the Fordham Foundry for help.

What’s your approach to teaching students about ethics in business?
The point I make to students is that very seldom do companies’ ethical issues arise from malevolence. It’s a slippery slope, and I teach them about the warning signs. Management is not infallible. They make mistakes. You can’t just assume, “I’m in the corporate world, I need to toe the line”; you need to have your own point of view. To me, this is deeply ingrained in Fordham and the Jesuit culture, and I think this is a broader lesson for the role of a citizen in a democracy or an employee in a company. Almost every company has whistleblower channels.

What other lessons do you emphasize in your courses?
The importance of maintaining relevancy in the business world. That’s terribly important, because business is changing very fast. Companies used to do five-year strategic plans; now they do one-year strategic sprints. You have to stay relevant in your domain and continue to invest in your ongoing education.

Scholarship gifts support access and affordability, one of the pillars of Fordham’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more about our campaign and make a gift.

Sarah Girardi, M.D., PAR ’24, made her gift last year after seeing how hands-on learning unlocked a passion for physics in her son, Anthony, now a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill. In addition to the instrumentation fund she created, which will pay for the laser, she is also establishing a fellowship to allow physics and engineering physics students to pursue independent research projects over summer break.

She knows from experience how such projects can advance a young scientist’s career.

“If it represents a really genuine interest in what you’re doing, I think there’s nothing more valuable,” she said.

The laser will be housed at the Rose Hill campus in an optics lab, now being set up, where students will explore various properties of light and their possible applications. Optics innovations in recent decades include everything from advanced medical imaging to high-speed internet service to the barcode scanners used in supermarkets.

In addition, the laser—an Nd:YAG model—will advance faculty research into polymers and other aspects of materials science, said Steve Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics and chair of the physics and engineering physics department.

When acquired, possibly within the year, the laser will “open up the door to look at all sorts of optical phenomena that the students otherwise don’t get exposed to,” Holler said. “Having this kind of tool … is going to be extremely important for their future careers.”

Lighting Up with a Love for Physics

Girardi well remembers a pivotal moment in her son’s time at Fordham: In sophomore year, during a visit home, he showed her some things he had made in his lab courses, including a small motorized device that changed direction in response to light.

Talking about his creations, he lit up himself. “He was realizing how much he loved physics,” said Girardi, a urologist practicing in Manhasset, New York.

Also important to her son’s education and career discernment, she said, were the small laboratory classes at Fordham; the personal attention from associate professor of physics Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., who guided his research; and the classroom insights provided by Martin Sanzari, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics.

Then there was the summer research grant provided by Fordham, which allowed him to conduct research in quantum physics rather than seek a paying job to help cover his expenses, as he would normally do, she said.

That made her think of other students who may also face financial obstacles to summer research, giving her the idea to fund a fellowship. “When it comes right down to it, unless they can make some money over the summer, they’re not going to be able to participate,” she said.

She was also inspired to give because of the memory of her mother, Anne Klemmer, who died in 2022. “My parents valued education over everything,” Girardi said. “And so I thought I would like to carry on that legacy.”

Scientific instruments support academic excellence at Fordham, a pillar of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more about the campaign and make a gift.

And then there were all the people who inspired and challenged him athletically, like track coaches Ed Kilkelly, Arthur O’Connor, and Jack Brown—to say nothing of Fordham track’s most famous alumnus, two-time Olympic gold medalist Tom Courtney, FCRH ’55.

Courtney enjoyed “a certain degree of royalty” at Fordham, said Ostling, who met him during one of his many visits to campus.

These and other recollections come up as Ostling discusses his recent major gift to Fordham’s track and field and cross country programs in honor of coaches O’Connor and Brown.

By giving, he seeks to help today’s student-athletes have the best possible experience—like he did.

“I thought it was time to try to help make a difference” for them, Ostling said.

A Lesson in Giving

Ostling, who retired as chief operating officer at EY, formerly Ernst & Young, earned his bachelor’s degree from Fordham’s former Undergraduate School of Education before enrolling in Fordham Law School. A longtime generous donor to the school, he is quick to praise all the people who made a mark on his personal and professional growth—from coaches to classmates to colleagues in his legal career.

Those who inspired his philanthropy include a past dean of the law school, Joseph M. McLaughlin, FCRH ’54, LAW ’59, who made a lasting impression with a quick act of generosity. It happened when Ostling was being interviewed by McLaughlin after first arriving at the law school as a recently commissioned military officer, wearing his U.S. Marine Corps uniform.

Expressing concern about Ostling’s ability to pay for a more diverse wardrobe, McLaughlin turned around and wrote him a generous check, only asking that Ostling pay it back when he could.

“I can’t tell you what that meant to me,” Ostling said. “I guess he knew a lot about my financial background and that sort of thing from my application. That moment of him without any need to, or request, turning around and doing that just made a huge [difference].”

He noted that his gift to Fordham track followed Courtney’s death last fall, so in a way it helps continue Courtney’s unstinting support for the program.

“My aspiration is that the young men and women at Fordham who participate in track and cross country have the chance to feel the same experience I felt,” Ostling said. “I had a great academic experience, a great social experience, a great athletic experience at Fordham.”

Athletics fundraising is one of the pillars of Fordham’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more and make a gift. 

Today, they’re helping Fordham build its own.

When they learned about the waterfront center that Fordham is planning, “it was something that we felt really strongly that we’d like to be able to help create,” Laura Ekholm said.

They’re doing just that with a major gift toward the project, for reasons that have a lot to do with their children’s experience at Fordham.

Support for Sailing and Other Aquatic Sports

The waterfront center will be built on Eastchester Bay in the Bronx, four miles east of the Rose Hill campus, to serve the varsity women’s rowing team as well as men’s crew, co-ed sailing, and women’s sailing. The first phase, construction of docks, is expected to be completed in time for the fall 2024 season.

Fordham donors and supporters have been moving the project along for years, led by Fordham Trustee Fellow Dennis Ruppel, FCRH ’68, and his wife, Patricia Ann Ruppel, who are making another major gift to the project this year. In October, Fordham Trustee Kim Bepler hosted and underwrote a fundraising dinner for the project at the New York Yacht Club in Manhattan.

The event raised $1.3 million for the project—with $1 million of that coming from the Ekholms.

‘Something of Great Value’

The Ekholms raised their family on Minnesota’s Lake Minnetonka, and their children grew up sailing on it, so when two of them—Anders, FCRH ’17, and Annika, FCRH ’20—went to Fordham, it was no surprise that they signed up for sailing.

They were impressed at the strength of the classroom education their children received, as well as the tight-knit sense of community in the sailing program and its rigors that hone time management and other life skills.

Today, Anders Ekholm is a team lead with TransPerfect, a translation and language services company in New York, and Annika Ekholm is involved with the sailing program full time. In addition to volunteering as a coach, she works for the Fordham Sailing Association, helping to set up a community sailing program in conjunction with the Villa Maria Academy, a Catholic elementary school next door to the waterfront center’s site.

She’s excited to see how the center could support other programs for area youth as well. “Sailing has given me and so many other people in the Fordham sailing sphere so much,” she said, “and anything that we can do to spread that, to give that to the community, will be a great, great thing for all involved.”

Being involved with the sailing program has been “a ton of fun,” Laura Ekholm said. “It’s just a fabulous community.”

She and Paul are investing in the waterfront center not only because of its immediate benefits but also to advance the University generally. “Giving money away is something to do when you find something of great value,” Paul Ekholm said. “For me and Laura, the great value of Fordham was the education they got, and we feel like we should support Fordham beyond sending our kids there.”

Gifts in support of the Fordham waterfront center advance the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more about the campaign and make a gift.

The fund has personal resonance for Crawley, a Fordham trustee and business executive raised on Chicago’s working-class West Side by grandparents who were born in the Jim Crow-era South. On the way to his current role as executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Morgan Stanley, he has made a second career of giving back—among other efforts, serving on the boards of Covenant House New York and the national Boys and Girls Club, from which he benefited while growing up.

The Crawleys’ contribution advances the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student—in particular, its goal of fostering a richly diverse, inclusive campus community. In fact, Fordham’s commitment to that goal was one reason Crawley came to the Gabelli School of Business for his executive MBA, graduating in 2009.

The program was infused with real-world experience, Jesuit values, and a strong sense of community, and left him with many strong friendships—hence the joy in making his gift, he says. “I have a real heart for the University, and now that I have an opportunity to devote financial capital to this mission, in addition to my personal human capital and my time, it feels awfully good to be able to do so.”

Why did this giving opportunity appeal to you?
I’ve had a tremendous amount of help and support that made a real difference for me. There are no silver bullets in life, but education is probably the closest thing to it in terms of putting folks who come from under-resourced areas on a path to not just self-sustainability but success over time. So for me, being a beneficiary of such efforts over the years, I feel like now that I’m in a position to give back in a meaningful way, what better way to do it than through a mechanism like the Trustee Diversity Fund?

Do you see progress in improving racial equity and justice in America?
Undoubtedly we’ve made progress in middle-class representation, health and life expectancy, housing and homeownership, and the number of Black and brown folks who are graduating with college degrees. One area that really gives me the greatest degree of optimism is the vibrancy of entrepreneurship in Black and brown communities, even though capital raising is uneven and remains a challenge. I’m not saying “mission accomplished”—in some areas you could argue we haven’t made as much progress. There’s still a lot of work that remains.

What’s the best way to achieve greater workplace diversity and inclusion?
I think there are three non-negotiables. You’ve got to commit resources to the necessary programming. And you’ve got to always be thinking about new, creative ways to get at this—for instance, looking for talent beyond your typical talent pools, as long as they’ve got the requisite hard skills to make the transition. But most of all, it’s having sustained will for the work and creating a culture in which everybody feels like they belong, including our majority colleagues.

To what extent can greater workplace diversity boost a company’s performance?
This is an area where there’s a great deal of debate. Diversity on its own is insufficient; I think the important added context is a team that has a high degree of competence, a necessary level of collegiality, and competitive urgency. If you have those foundational factors, and then you add to that a diverse mix and different perspectives, I think it’s irrefutable that you’ll get outperformance.

What do Jesuit values look like in a business context?
I’d say, within my industry, avoiding the false choice—the idea that in order to be wildly successful in your financial pursuits, you have to compromise your morals and virtues. It really gets at ethics and character.

Learn more about Fordham’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, and make a gift. 

There are easier things to pin down. “Generally, as a field, economics is very focused on the ‘hard’ things,” such as wages and benefits, said Souther, now a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. “You have to be very careful to tease out the impacts of something like autonomy.”

To do that, he would need to design and conduct an experiment of his own. Luckily, he had received a Fordham scholarship that provided funding for just such a thing.

Leveraging Talent

Souther was one of the inaugural recipients of the Cunniffe Presidential Scholarship, created by a $20 million gift from Maurice J. (Mo) Cunniffe, FCRH ’54, and Carolyn Dursi Cunniffe, Ph.D., GSAS ’71, two of the most generous donors in Fordham’s history and supporters of its current fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.

Their presidential scholarship has had 43 recipients to date, including 25 current students. It is meant to leverage the abilities of the most talented students, helping them succeed while also making an impact on the world. It funds tuition and living expenses but also academic enrichment—“probably the most important part” of the scholarship because it empowers recipients to pursue an interest, “be really good at it, and through that, make a contribution,” Mo Cunniffe said.

For Souther, this academic enrichment funding proved crucial: it enabled him to attend a summer workshop in behavioral economics at the University of Alabama, pay 400 people to take part in an experimental exercise during his senior year, and buy statistical software needed for analyzing the data.

Benefits of Autonomy

That study, as well as a follow-up study he conducted with two Fordham economics professors, Subha Mani and Utteeyo Dasgupta, shed light on the impact of giving employees a say in the work they perform. The interpersonal aspect proved important—for instance, when an “employer” participant let other participants choose their preferred tasks, they worked harder than when they got their preferred tasks as a result of a random assignment. They were also more likely to give back to the group by contributing to a communal fund.

It’s possible that employees are more appreciative “if you know that there’s a human being explicitly making a decision to … give you the autonomy,” Souther said.

Such under-studied questions are timely, especially in light of conversations about workers’ autonomy that arose out of the pandemic, he said.

“A lot of us spend at least eight hours a day at work for almost our entire life, and understanding the conditions that make work meaningful and motivating and interesting are absolutely crucial for having a productive and engaging and equitable economy,” he said.

Today, he’s getting close to submitting the research to an academic journal. He said the Cunniffe scholarship did more than propel this project.

“What it also did was allow me to go to Fordham. And that itself has had countless effects on my career and my life.”

Learn about opportunities to invest in the Fordham student experience via the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.

She was also a double Fordham graduate who, whenever she could, encouraged people to give back. “She always instilled in her [students] who ‘made it’ that it’s your responsibility, because people helped you,” said her daughter, Susan Smith.

Monta died in 2020, but will be helping Fordham theater students posthumously through a scholarship that Smith recently created out of her mother’s estate. It comes as another Fordham alumna, actress Patricia Clarkson, FCLC ’82, is also creating a scholarship for students in the Fordham Theatre program.

Smith is certain her mother would approve. “She really, really liked contributing to education and providing opportunities for students,” Smith said.

Lessons from an Irish Immigrant

Growing up in New Jersey and Virginia, Monta was “the dramatic one in the family,” an aspiring actress who later set her sights on a career in education. Its importance was brought home to her early, when her live-in grandfather would always “sit there with a book in his hand,” reading voraciously to carry on the education that was cut short during his childhood in Ireland, Smith said.

Monta studied speech, English, and speech education at Fordham, earning a bachelor’s degree from the Undergraduate School of Education in 1952 and a master’s from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1953. She later earned a doctorate in theater arts from Cornell University.

Arriving at what was then Pan American University in 1971, she established the theater area within the communications department and set about building the program, sometime sewing the costumes for productions herself, according to a statement from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, as the university is now known.

‘Pay It Forward’

Over the years, she gave to charities, created a theater scholarship at the university, and helped others in numerous small ways, Smith said. One day, headed out to eat with colleagues, she gave away her brown-bag lunch to a student—and then kept bringing a lunch for him when she learned he was struggling financially.

When one of her former students—Valente Rodriguez—launched his acting career in California and tried to repay the money she had given him for moving there, she declined, telling him to “pay it forward” by funding a scholarship. And when her colleagues wanted to throw her a party upon her retirement in 2007, she declined again, citing the expense—until someone suggested turning the party into a fundraiser.

As a teacher, she was “a character,” known for blunt, colorful comments, Smith said, but she was also “incredibly loving.”

“She came across like a real hard-ass,” Smith said, “because she expected more of you than you expected of yourself.”

Scholarship gifts support the Access and Affordability priority of Fordham’s current $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more and make a gift. 

It was a new ambience for the Joseph M. McShane, S.J. Campus Center: eerie music, wolf howls, ghoulish costumes, giant cobwebs, a hallway-size haunted house, laughter mixed with the occasional frightful yelp.

The one flaw in the spookiness? All that natural light flooding in through the huge windows. “The sun is always shining in, it’s beautiful,” said Gabriel Chavarria, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior passing through the Career Center and Campus Ministry areas.

The Haunted Open House marked a new effort to help fully integrate the McShane Center into University life by enticing students to wander the full length of the second floor, discovering the cavernous hallways and hangout areas along the way—as well as all the offices there to serve them.

The second floor’s Halloween-season transformation highlighted a much larger, permanent transformation of student life brought about by the campus center’s construction, a pillar of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.

Enhancing the Entire Student Experience

Construction on the campus center has continued since it opened to students last year. Amid the second-floor Halloween hijinks on Oct. 17, crews were working on the first-floor Marketplace renovation that will produce a vastly better dining experience in another nine months or so.

Unfinished as it is, the McShane Center already feels like students’ home. “This is such a huge resource, and I think it’s a real asset to the University,” said Isabella Guariniello, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who found the haunted house to be “a really cool way to interact with the students and the faculty here.”

Commuter student Ryan Nole, a Gabelli School of Business junior, appreciates being able to hang out in the campus center between classes. He’s noticed that it’s brought new visibility to student clubs and organizations and provides a kind of social lubricant—“I know if I want to see someone, they’ll probably be here,” he said while checking out the open house. “It definitely fulfills its role as a community space.”

In fact, with so many students gravitating toward the new student lounge and communal spaces on the first floor, “we wanted another way for students to kind of say, ‘Hey, there’s more parts to the building, there’s a whole bunch of stuff up here,’” said Juan Carlos Matos, assistant vice president for student affairs for diversity and inclusion—dressed up for the occasion as “Dr. Acula.”

Students partook of Halloween candy—including the allergy-free kind—and activities like pumpkin painting. All of the second-floor offices got into the act, including Student Services, the Office for Student Involvement, and the Office of Multicultural Affairs.

‘Cathedral-Like’ Light

To be sure, the new campus center has already been boosting the work of second-floor offices including the Career Center, which gained a new suite equipped with 10 interview rooms, event space, and other amenities, including new capabilities to promote career-related events.

The new suite “has truly elevated our office University-wide,” said Annette McLaughlin, director of the Career Center. The 840 career counseling appointments held from July through September represent a 24 percent increase over the same period last year, she noted.

Campus Ministry and the Center for Community Engaged Learning, or CCEL, now share a roomy, inviting suite with floor-to-ceiling windows providing “cathedral-like” light, in the words of Campus Ministry administrator Carol Gibney. It offers plenty of room for students to study or hang out and unwind, making it more likely that they’ll learn about something they want to get involved in, said Amanda Caputo, FCRH ’23, a program manager with Global Outreach. “Students [have]made this their home, in a way,” she said.

By providing generous, dedicated space for CCEL’s meetings with its New York City partner organizations, the facility “demonstrates the University’s commitment to community engagement and experiential learning,” said the center’s executive director, Julie Gafney, Ph.D.

“It helps to show that this is what we mean when we say we’re a Catholic and Jesuit institution,” she said. “We mean that we create spaces that put our mission work first.”

Learn more about the McShane Campus Center renewal and opportunities to give in support of it.

His reasons stem from challenges family members have faced, and from his own experience as a first-year Fordham Law student whose vague worries about fitting in were quickly put to rest.

“I immediately had a feeling of belonging and felt a lot of support there,” rather than feeling like “the odd person out” as someone who came from a working-class family and was a first-generation law student, said Torrente, a senior partner with the law firm Kirkland & Ellis in New York.

Cultivating that sense of belonging is one aim of recent law school initiatives such as IDEAL, or Increasing Diversity in Education and the Law, founded in 2019 to help New York City college students from underrepresented backgrounds learn about careers in law. Torrente gave in support of IDEAL before the law school’s new diversity effort got his attention.

Supporting Students, Unleashing Potential

The number of Fordham Law students that report some kind of learning difference has steadily increased during the past decade. The differences range from physical ailments to sensory issues, cognitive or psychiatric challenges, and ADHD. An initiative under development, Empowering Every Mind, is aimed at helping them thrive at Fordham Law and as leaders in the profession.

“As law schools increasingly think about the importance of professionalism and leadership skills, I’m delighted that Fordham Law is squarely focused on supporting our neurodiverse students in ways that will help them realize their full potential as future lawyers and leaders,” said Joseph Landau, associate dean for academic affairs at Fordham Law, noting that these differences can be sources of professional strength.

Torrente and his wife, Jill Torrente, had seen this in a few close family members who have had to navigate learning differences, ADHD, or physical ailments while working to live up to their full potential by capitalizing on their strengths and tackling their challenges. In fact, these experiences were among the reasons that inspired Jill to go to graduate school and earn her master’s degree in social work from Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service. “So when this initiative came up … it made a lot of sense for me and my wife to support it,” he said.

He noted that Kirkland and other law firms are striving to be accommodating to lawyers with learning differences. For example, Kirkland offers professional networks, mentoring, and other resources to support all attorneys in their professional growth.

“For me, this just is another dimension of making people feel like they belong, and enabling them to voice how they feel, and also make them feel comfortable being vulnerable,” Torrente said. “It opens the door for more candid conversations.”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are key priorities of Fordham’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more and make a gift.