“Herb Granath’s passing is a great loss to Fordham, and of course to his family and loved ones—and in the latter category I would include everyone who ever had the pleasure of meeting him,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “Herb brought to Fordham a steadiness of heart, openness of spirit, and a strong faith that there was a world of possibilities waiting over the horizon. His great gifts of heart, mind, and spirit were readily apparent whenever Fordham’s Board of Trustees convened: when he spoke, we all listened, and listened intently.”

Born and bred in Brooklyn, Granath started in the television industry as an NBC page during his college years and steadily climbed the ranks of entertainment juggernauts, moving from NBC to ABC to ESPN and the Broadway stage. He made his name in the then-nascent world of cable television, rising to become chairman of the board of ESPN (and later chairman emeritus) after ABC purchased the cable channel in 1984. He’s the recipient of two Tony Awards and six Tony nominations, an International Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in International TV, and a U.S. Emmy for Lifetime Achievement in Sports.

His career was a tribute to a liberal arts education. He parlayed an undergraduate education in physics to a graduate degree in communications, and spoke specifically to the value of both degrees in advancing his career.

“One of the reasons I enjoyed physics was looking into the essence of things,” he said in an interview with Fordham just before the University honored him with its Founder’s Award, adding that a course in logic was among the most influential he ever took. “It is amazing to me in American business how little a role logic plays. It has been a hallmark of the way I approach business.”

His stint working evenings as a page at NBC inspired the young Granath to pursue graduate work in communications at Fordham. What followed was a career that redefined an industry. But when he saw the page position pinned to a bulletin board at Dealy Hall, he didn’t even know what the job entailed. He simply needed the work to get through school.

He also credited financial aid with helping him get his degree. He continued to generously support Fordham throughout his life and served as an honorary co-chair of Fordham’s Excelsior | Ever Upward fundraising campaign.

“Without financial help, I never would have been able to attend Fordham. Supporting the campaign is one way for me to repay the moral grounding I received at the University, which has served me well over the years both in my business and personal lives,” said Granath, who was elected to Fordham’s board in 1993.

At ESPN, Granath backed his business savvy with a sports fan’s enthusiasm. And while his love of sports helped the network grow to become one of ABC’s single largest profit centers, his other interests also spurred networks that would become household names, including A&E, The History Channel, and Lifetime.

In its infancy, during the 1980s, A&E was truly an arts and entertainment network that featured opera from La Scala and ballet from Paris, Granath said.

“It was gorgeous stuff,” he said. “We were the darlings of the critics.”

He also helped ABC branch into theater, managing its investments in partnership with the Shubert Organization. The relationship gave the network first dibs on plays that might make good television series. Ironically, Granath told his bosses at the network that he didn’t necessarily see Broadway as a profit-making venture.

In an amusingly understated 2004 interview for the McGannon Center TV Oral History Project, Granath told Fordham communications professor Albert Auster, “We got into something very early called Cats, we got into something called Phantom of the Opera, we got into Les Miserables, we got into the things that really have over the years turned out large sums of revenue and, therefore, profits for those who invested.”

Amidst the glamour of stage and screen, Auster noted that Granath maintained a low-key demeanor in an industry filled with massive egos. When asked how he managed to remain unassuming and rise so swiftly, Granath credited Fordham.

“Everyone knows that if you’re a Fordham graduate, no matter what it says on that piece of paper, you really majored in philosophy,” he said, which allowed him to take a “bit of a different point of view” and stay focused on what matters, a trait that came in handy in the entertainment business’s notoriously meandering meetings.

“My first reputation was established, I think, when I would sit back and listen to all this babble, and then about 20 minutes or so into the meeting, I’d restate the reason for the meeting. And people would go, ‘Wow, that guy really has it together,’” he said with a chuckle. “It’s a very simple prescription for success, but I’m afraid it may be all that simple.”

Granath held a number of other leadership positions, including trustee of the American Museum of the Moving Image, president of the International Council of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, governor of the National Academy of Cable Programming, director of the International Radio and Television Society, and president of the Veterans’ Bedside Network. He served in the U.S. Army, assigned to Special Services as a writer/producer.

For all his success, Granath said business should always take a back seat to family.

“Business is business. It’s part of a life,” he told Auster. “The things that are the most important to me are the fact that I’ve got a wife and four young people that we brought into this world and they, in turn, now are forming their families.”

Granath is survived by his wife of 61 years, actress Ann Flood, and four children, Kevin Granath (Danielle), Brian Granath (Kathleen), Peter Granath (Elizabeth), and Karen Charlton (Michael). He also leaves behind 11 grandchildren: Nicole, Caroline, Will, Terence, Gavin, Farrell, Benjamin, Amanda, Leigh, Jane, and Nolan.

Titled, “Comets, Craters, and Calendars,” the lecture celebrated the 480th anniversary of the birth of the great mathematician and astronomer Christopher Clavius, S.J. Father Mueller is the vice director of the Vatican Observatory and superior to its Jesuit communities in Rome and Arizona. Following the talk, a panel of Fordham mathematicians and scientists shared how Clavius influenced their lives and work.

Champion of Mathematics

For the lecture, Father Mueller took listeners on a tour through the history of a man who, among his many accomplishments, is perhaps most noted for championing and helping design the Gregorian calendar that is still in use today. But the calendar, famous as it may be, was not the primary focus of Father Mueller’s talk. Instead he equated the scene from 2001 to Clavius’ championing of mathematics.

“In my view, Clavius played a historical role somewhat akin to that of Kubrik’s monolith: Through his teaching and textbooks and curricular reform, Clavius was the midwife of one of humanity’s great leaps forward: the scientific revolution,” he said.

Father Mueller was careful to point out that Clavius, who was born in Bamberg, Germany, may not have played an “active first-person role in the scientific revolution of the first half of the 17th century,” as he died in 1612. But through his many years of teaching at the Jesuit Roman College and through the wide use of his textbooks on mathematics and astronomy, Clavius greatly influenced the innovators and discoverers. He also “amplified” the importance of mathematics at universities, Father Mueller said, which theretofore had been taught at the 16th-century equivalence of high-school level.

“In the 16th-century curriculum, mathematics did not have the high status of a science,” he said. “A science was understood to be a discipline capable of knowledge of true causes. Mathematics was held to deal not in true causes but in mere abstractions—in mere possibility rather than reality. Mathematics teachers and faculty members were seen as being of lower status—they didn’t have much of a say.”

Forming a Pedagogy

Having joined the Jesuits in 1555, Clavius was received into the order by St. Ignatius himself, placing him amidst the “explosive growth” of the young order and its ever-expanding roster of Jesuit schools. Near the time of Clavius’ death there were 372 Jesuit schools that would have been the equivalent of junior colleges today. Even outside of the Jesuit institutions, from the 1580s to the 1640s “just about everyone got their introduction to math and astronomy from textbooks written by Clavius,” said Father Mueller.

Father Mueller noted a few examples of Clavius’ fame, which he cemented through his role as the official public explainer and defender of the calendar.  As a young professor, Galileo relied on lecture notes obtained from Clavius’ math and astronomy class, which led him to conclude Clavius “worthy of immortal fame.” During Clavius’ own lifetime he was known as “the Euclid of our Time.” And at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, there are only two Jesuits who are portrayed: St. Ignatius of Loyola and Clavius, who can be found on the tomb of Pope Gregory XIII, presenting the new calendar.

In Part VI of his Constitutions for the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius called for a separate document to provide guidance for Jesuits schools. That “separate treatise” eventually became the famous Ratio studiorum of 1599, and Clavius held significant sway in its treatment of mathematics, said Father Mueller.

“An earlier 1591 draft of the Ratio includes an admonition to university administrators to make sure that philosophy teachers do not disparage the dignity of mathematics,” he said. “In a document written as a contribution to preparing the Ratio, Clavius wrote: ‘Since … the mathematical disciplines in fact require, delight in, and honor truth… there can be no doubt that they must be conceded the first place among all the other sciences.’”

Post-Lecture Q&A 

Father Mueller said that both the new Gregorian calendar and Clavius’ proposals for an augmented role for mathematics in the curriculum met with significant resistance, and in both cases Clavius took on a “prominent role as explainer and defender”—of the “validity of the calendar and of the dignity and worth of mathematics as a path to objective truth.” It’s a role that resonates to this day, with science and truth under attack at the highest levels of government and religion. In a conversation after the lecture, Father Mueller drew parallels between Clavius’ role and that of contemporary Jesuit institutions.

In your talk, you noted that at the time of his death Clavius had not finished publishing his theory of astronomy. It sounds like he was very cautious with the truth.

At the end of his life, he mentions in a letter to one of his colleagues that he’s in the middle of writing a theory of astronomy, but he also mentions explicitly that he’s waiting for more data from [Danish astronomer] Tycho Brahe, to help him know what he wants to do. He never ended up publishing it in his lifetime. I personally think what happened was he saw that astronomy was changing so rapidly, the time was not right to write a theory.

Last spring’s Clavius lecture dealt with artificial intelligence. Things are moving so quickly in that sphere that peer-reviewed articles are almost an impossibility. What would Clavius make of that?

Be careful about imposing the whole notion of peer review back on him. His time is where the whole idea that empirical observation of the heavens can affect astronomical theory. That itself is a new idea. You knew your astronomical theories from ancient authorities. That’s part of what got Galileo in trouble, but I think Clavius was doing it more cautiously. The whole thing with Galileo blew up after Clavius died, so he had no notion that there was theological danger. But, I think, as a teacher, he didn’t want to go in print with a textbook with stuff that’s not right. In the late 1500s there was an extraordinary series of comets and novas in the heavens, which really wowed people because physics at the time said that the heavens should be immutable and unchanging. Clavius participated in proving this stuff shouldn’t be changing. So, I think that’s part of what slowed him down. He says at one point, ‘Maybe we need to rethink at a fundamental level, our astronomy.’ Today, we all agree what the standards are. Clavius was in a time when the very notion of standards themselves were changing.

Clavius had the ability to speak to the public and the men in power to convince them of truth and the importance of empirical standards. What lesson we can draw from that today?

Clavius had to explain and defend. I hope I don’t sound too despairing here, but he lived in a time when everyone knew and believed that there was such a thing as an objective truth. They might have disagreed about how to get there, the standards were changing, but no one disagreed that there is objective truth. We are now in a very strange time, a new time, where for many reasons, people’s confidence in the very notion of objective truth has been shaken. And, I find that to be a really dangerous and a sad step backwards. … I’m very discouraged by the fact that, as a culture, we seem to be backing away from the notion that we’re capable of coming to agreement on objective truth. It’s hard, you’ve got to work at it, you’ve got to be willing to fight, but there’s a truth out there.

Yet so much of the recent challenges to science come from people of faith. How do you, as a Jesuit, deepen your faith in light of scientific truths?  

My colleague at the observatory, Guy Consolmagno [S.J.], is always clear in saying that when he does science, for him it’s an act of worship. If God is the way, the truth, and the life, then when you look for the truth via science, you are also looking for God. I believe that the very search for truth means that I trust that my reason participates in God’s reason. I’m made in God’s image and I really think that matters. We really need to work together to come to some kind of agreement on these things, because it’s a great, lovely mystery that should bring us together.

On July 30, the answer came from space: a call for human unity during a time of bitter conflicts, articulated by someone who is—quite literally—above it all.

“We watch the news up here every night, and we’re aware of what is going on in the world,” said Ricky Arnold, a NASA flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, speaking via live webcast. He cited the crew’s cooperative efforts as an example of what can happen when people from diverse nations work together.

Haig and her fellow interns watched from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

“It was really exciting,” said Haig, who is getting ready for the fall quarter at Stanford, where she will pursue a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics.

The experience, part of a NASA educational program, fueled her enthusiasm for becoming an aerospace engineer and, hopefully, an astronaut herself one day. It also provided a thrilling coda to an undergraduate career that was heavy on science and grant-funded scientific research but also on classic humanistic aspects of Jesuit education.

Science Studies Inflected with Jesuit Values

Haig graduated summa cum laude from Fordham in May with a double major: engineering physics, with a concentration in mechanical engineering, and classical civilization. At NASA in Cleveland, she spent the summer in the ARETEP (Aeronautics Research and Engineering Team) program, studying the movement of urban air masses with an eye toward safety standards for new aerial vehicles that could one day be zipping around city skies.

Aviation is a longtime interest. In high school, she volunteered at an aviation museum near her Long Island home and enjoyed working with the museum’s elderly docents—an experience that led her to volunteer at Fordham as an aide to a former missionary—Richard Hoar, S.J.—living in the Murray-Weigel Hall retirement residence on the Rose Hill campus. “He actually has a master’s degree in physics, so it was a great fit,” Haig said.

A student in the honors program, she loved the program’s classics-related courses and kept signing up for more of them—Roman art, Latin, Greek. “Before I knew it, I had a major,” she said. For her senior thesis, she melded her two majors by examining how the Romans, known as great engineers, might have managed to fill the Colosseum with water for mock naval battles, as some have suggested they did.

There’s little evidence this happened. However, “the drains underneath the Colosseum are a lot larger than they would need to be just for rain water and waste water,” Haig said.

She also pursued varied scientific research projects. During the summer between sophomore and junior years, a Fordham Undergraduate Research Grant made it possible for her to work with physics professor Stephen Holler, Ph.D., on developing a new optical-fiber probe for use in analyzing tumors. For her second undergraduate research project, she worked at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago between junior and senior year and diagnosed a malfunction in the accelerator’s monitoring components.

She traveled to present her research at academic conclaves on the West Coast, thanks to travel grants provided by the University, and recently was awarded the Fordham College Alumni Association’s Undergraduate Research Symposium grant.

Haig suspects that her research helped her attain the NASA internship, a long-sought prize.

“I’ve been applying for the NASA program for a while, for at least a couple of summers, and I guess this summer I finally had enough research experience,” she said.

She found the internship to be a cornucopia for the scientifically curious. In addition to getting intensive introductions to aerodynamics and computational fluid dynamics, Haig has found scientists and engineers readily responsive to her email queries.

“I’ve found everybody to be so helpful and so willing to talk about their projects,” she said. “There are people working on missions that are going to Mars, stuff that’s going into deep space eventually. People say, ‘Yeah, come on over.’ I’ve been able to make so many connections.”

Aiming a Question at the Heavens

When she was chosen to record a question for the space station’s astronauts, she moved away from the technical and leaned toward the liberal arts, asking a question with a philosophical bent: “In today’s world, what is the most compelling reason to engage in human spaceflight?”

In his answer, Ricky Arnold, the NASA flight engineer, cited the scientific research conducted in space, as well as the crew’s perspective—“a higher plane of agreement”—on all the strife occurring far below.

“We have two Russians, three Americans, and a German right now,” he said, bobbing up and down in the zero gravity and casually moving his hands away from the microphone floating in front of him. “We have found something we all believe in, and the operations both here and on the ground are seamless because we all believe in the same thing. …

“There’s a really powerful message to all humans about what we as a species … are capable of when we put aside differences and focus on higher objectives as a species.”

Watch NASA astronaut Ricky Arnold’s webcast below. Bernadette Haig poses her question at the 5:22 mark.