The fund dovetails with one of the key priorities of Fordham’s recent fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, with its emphasis on equity and inclusion as well as the wellness of every student. Here are five examples of the numerous activities it has made possible:

No. 1: Ignatian Q.

With support from the fund, 10 Fordham students traveled to St. Louis University in April for this annual conference organized by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities to promote community and spirituality among LGBTQ students. (Fordham hosted Ignatian Q in 2023 with support from the wellbeing fund.) In the words of one Fordham graduate student who attended, Tatum Allen, FCLC ’24, “it offered me a space to feel less alone as a queer person of faith.”

No. 2: Students Together for Acceptance, Respect, and Support (STARS).

Piloted last year by professors and students in the psychology department and the Graduate School of Social Service, this network brings Fordham students together with local high school students seeking to engage with LGBTQ peers, find support, and build community. Two of the high schoolers also took part in a year-long research project on LGBTQ experiences in school and presented their research at the Eastern Psychological Association Conference in Philadelphia.

No. 3: Oral History Project with SAGE Center Bronx.

Last year, undergraduate students in a communications class—titled Photography, Identity, Power—worked with residents of the SAGE center, a community center for LGBTQ seniors, to produce a digital exhibition of their photography that includes an oral history element. Students in an art class, Visual Justice, later met with the seniors and made portrait photographs of them.

No. 4: Queer Prayer Book.

The book Queer Prayer at Fordham was developed in 2023 and distributed at Ignatian Q when it was held at the University. 

No. 5: NYC Interfaith Pilgrimage/Retreat

This daylong retreat at the Lincoln Center campus, held in February, centered on art as a way to explore the intersection between spirituality and queerness. About two dozen students and alumni gathered for morning presentations, toured sites important to the LGBTQ community in Greenwich Village, and reconvened on campus to produce their own art. 

No. 6: Urban Plunge and Global Outreach Scholarships.

With support from the wellbeing fund, LGBTQ students received scholarships to take part in Urban Plunge and Global Outreach, two programs of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Sources: Fordham Campus Ministry, Center for Community Engaged Learning 

Beyond the death toll, millions of people have been injured and displaced. The United Nations said that the earthquake had affected as many as 5.3 million in Syria alone. And for Turkey, the situation is all too familiar: Turkey sits atop two major fault lines and has suffered major earthquakes before. In 1999, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake was blamed for an estimated 18,000 deaths.

Complicating the current crisis is the fact that the area of Northern Syria impacted by the earthquake has been riven by violence for the past decade due to the county’s ongoing civil war. The war, which grew out of the wider Arab Spring protests of 2011, has left northern sections of the country in the hands of rebels opposed to Bashar al-Assad, the country’s leader.

To shed light on the complexities of this ongoing catastrophe, Fordham News spoke with experts in international humanitarian aid, the Middle East, and mental health.

Politics and Aid

Anjali Dayal, Ph.D., associate professor of political science and a senior scholar in residence at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.

The aid situation in Syria is deeply dependent on United Nations Security Council politics because the region in Syria that was hardest hit has been part of complex international negotiations about the passage of aid. The U.N. is an intergovernmental organization, and under the terms of the U.N. Charter, the Syrian government has ultimate authority over the area–but the northwest part of the country remains locked in an ongoing civil war, where the Syrian government’s authority is contested on the ground. The politics of U.N. aid passing into this part of Syria have become really complicated, as a result.

Over the years, the negotiations in the Security Council, where Russia has veto power, narrowed down the number of open crossings to a single one in northwest Syria, Bab al-Hawa, which was badly hit by this earthquake.

Thankfully, after a closed-door U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that the Syrian government has agreed to allow two more border crossings between Syria and Turkey to open up for three months [to allow for]  humanitarian relief to the earthquake-struck zones.

This is important because it means that the international community [including the U.N.]  can get aid to a part of Syria [run by the anti-al-Assad rebels]  where the Syrian government is more than happy to let people die. There are local organizations on the ground that cross through other crossings, but nobody really has the scale or reach that the U.N. does for the volume of aid that’s necessary at this moment in particular. That’s why this has become so contentious.

So a huge crisis like this really highlights how important it is to have concerted multilateral abilities to respond right away in the service of people who really need the best assistance that they can get.

Consequences of Corruption and Civil War

Melissa Labonte, Ph.D., associate professor of political science and a faculty affiliate of Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs

I would describe this as sort of a tale of two humanitarian crisis responses. In Turkey, you have a capable state, but it’s a state that is sclerotic and has been plagued by corruption. Anyone who has traveled to Turkey in the last few years has seen huge construction projects that have been doled out as political favors to loyalists of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party. You have buildings that have not been built to code, in areas that are very close to the fault lines. This was a recipe for disaster.

The other is Syria, where prior decisions stemming from the Civil War mean that in an area with about 11 million people in it, more than half are internally displaced persons from other parts of Syria.
Most people understand that the Syrian Civil Defense Force, or “white helmets,” have been working in this area for a really long time with very little assistance from the outside world.

You’ve got millions of people who are now living in structures that were decimated by the war. They have no food, no shelter, no medicine, and no water. It’s that last element that is going to turn that part of the post-earthquake crisis into one where the death toll is going to start to mount catastrophically. Because what’s going to happen next is there’ll be a massive outbreak of cholera.

As an international community, we have to come to the recognition that things are so deeply interconnected. Our failure to deal with crises like Syria and our failure to cultivate a more responsive democracy in Turkey are the antecedent conditions that lead to the inability or the unwillingness of regimes to respond effectively to their populations.

‘Recovery Will Take Time’: The Importance of Ongoing Donations

Selin Gülgöz, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology who lived in Istanbul from 1993 until 2009, when she moved to the United States for graduate school. Her family still lives there today.

Istanbul wasn’t affected directly by this earthquake, but we did live through the major earthquake back in 1999, where the epicenter was a little bit outside of the city. I was very fortunate at that time that our family was unaffected, but it’s hard to remain unaffected even if your close ones are not hurt. I was 11 at the time, so it was quite traumatizing.

It’s estimated that this earthquake has impacted roughly 15 million people. Turkey as a whole country has about 80 million. So that’s a huge percentage of the population.

Most of my efforts so far have been trying to raise awareness of some of the local organizations that have been there from day one, and are often faster than governmental organizations.

There are two that have a proven record of trust and professionalism, are reliable, fast-acting, and have networks in Turkey on the ground: Turkish Philanthropy’s Turkish Earthquake Relief Effort; and Bridge to Turkiye’s Earthquake Relief Fund.

Right now, 30,000 people have died and the number is expected to rise. Even more have been displaced, including children who have lost their families, so monthly contributions are encouraged, as healing and recovery will take time.

An Event That Affects the Whole Region

Samantha Slattery, FCRH ’15, GSAS ’19, Regional Programmes Officer for Jesuit Refugee Service in Beiruit, Lebanon. Slattery earned an M.S. in humanitarian studies at Fordham.

I work with projects addressing the crisis in Lebanon, which has the highest refugee population per capita in the world. Our office supports JRS teams in Syria in Aleppo and Homs, and right now they’re helping with emergency distributions, especially winterization materials because it’s very cold here right now. Anyone who wants to help our teams can do so by donating here.

The difficulty that all organizations are experiencing right now in Syria is that a lot of aid workers and volunteers there have also already experienced multiple traumas from the war. Now they’ve survived this earthquake, and many have suffered their own personal losses.

In Lebanon, the earthquake woke us up from our sleep here, and luckily, it missed us. But people are still affected here. So many of the people we work with have lost loved ones in Aleppo. It affects the whole region.

A concern that I have is that international attention could wane. Right now there’s a big effort from the international community to respond to these crises, but once crises become protracted, the eyes of the world look away to new emergencies.

Focusing on Mental Health

Lynne Jones, child psychiatrist and course director for the program on Mental Health in Complex Emergencies at Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs

I hope that this will shake people into their senses and realize that human beings are human beings, and they need their basic needs addressed. I would add to that list the emotional need for connection. Whether somebody has died or not died, everybody has experienced loss. If it’s compounded by the loss of a loved person, of course, it’s much worse, but even if you haven’t lost a person, you’ve lost the environment in which you’ve lived. You’ve lost any sense of security, you’ve lost all your belongings.

Imagine you’re standing there and everything around you has been destroyed. What you need is to be reconnected with people that are familiar to you and reestablish as quickly as possible some kind of structure and routine in your life. And, these two things will really help you address the other issues of maintaining your physical health.

I’ve written guidelines with others for both the COVID pandemic and the Ukraine crisis on how we can support children who have suffered a bereavement. We’re adapting them now. The key points are, to tell the truth in a way that’s appropriate to a child’s developmental age and to make sure that they have continuous loving care.

Yip has explored the human relationship with ethnic identity in more than 50 peer-reviewed papers. Her research specifically focuses on ethnic identity development among underrepresented populations, the association between ethnic identity and psychological adjustment, and the impact of ethnic-specific and general stressors on people’s well-being. Her work on racial and ethnic identity was featured in a 2019 Fordham News Q&A.

Andrew Rasmussen, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology who studies trauma and psychosocial stressors in humanitarian disasters. We talked with him about his thoughts on getting through the coming months.

Q: The word resilience has been bandied about more than usual recently. Do you think that the pandemic has changed the understanding of the word?

A: I think that the pandemic has taken the word resilience back to its initial meaning in psychology. It had become a somewhat cheapened version of its former self prior to the pandemic. In psychology, it’s a concept taken from engineering where, if a material is resilient, it can bend, but it won’t break. It had become like, “Oh wow, this person had a hard day, but you know what they feel okay today. So, they’re resilient.” No, it’s more than that.

Q: Your research has involved talking to refugees who’ve moved to new countries, both voluntarily and involuntarily. Their experiences are obviously much more extreme than anything most of us will go through, but is there anything we can learn from their experiences?

A: What the refugee experience does most often for me is it reminds me that humans are adaptive creatures. That’s one of our cardinal assets and our evolutionary advantages. A lot of people point to our cognitive abilities relative to our other primate cousins, but really, it’s our ability to rebuild after going through major life changes. I see it among the refugees and low-income immigrants that I have worked with over the years and particularly among those who I’ve worked with in the last two years where they’re dealing with COVID stress as well as all the other things that they’ve dealt with.

People keep going. Sure, they mourn, and they come together as a community in whatever way they can. Bad things happen, but that doesn’t mean that life is over. In fact, sometimes you can emerge from a really stressful period with a renewed sense of purpose, a renewed sense of community, and for some people, a renewed sense of faith.

Q: What does the field of psychology have to say about resilience?

A: Psychological research says that it’s a little bit more normative than you would think. When faced with severe loss or trauma, most people do okay after a period of grieving and loss. You can think about the way that almost everybody in New York City felt from about March 2020 to May. There was this sort of palpable sense of fear and the sort of eerie silence to the city. A lot of people were isolating and staying inside their apartments. The tales of the first responders and the health workers were harrowing, but sometime around May or June, people started coming out. That is a narrative of resilience in as much as it’s a narrative of troubled times.

Q: Talk to me about the role of fatalism versus optimism. You’ve done research recently that highlighted how that could play a role in people’s behaviors.

A: As the result of a couple of really enterprising undergraduates, we launched a survey of Fordham undergrads and asked questions about various protective behaviors, and also their intentions to get vaccinated. As we expected, there were some gender differences, but the biggest factor in all of this was the sense of fatalism.
We found that the idea that your health was just out of your own hands contributed to whether you were more or less likely to wear a mask and your plans to get vaccinated. If you had a “Well, if I’m going to get it, I’m going to going to get it” sort of attitude, that was the number one predictor of how much people adhered to preventive behaviors. So the quicker we can get across this message of, “We’re going to be OK if we do X, Y, and Z,” the more that instills some sense of optimism and agency among other people, and fights against fatalism.

Q: It sounds like a classic feedback loop.

A: It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You might think, “I know I should be wearing my mask, but we don’t really know much about this stuff, and there’s always new variants and it’s really not up to me.” These attitudes are attractive because they allow us to be a little bit lazy and not spend so much energy on things that we don’t want to spend energy on in the first place. But once you do that, you get sloppy about prevention, then you’re more likely to get the virus. Then you say, “See, I couldn’t have done anything.”

But if you say, “I really should be doing this” or you’re talking to your friends and they say, “There’s nothing you can do anyway,” you might respond, “You might think that, but I still want you to wear a mask when we’re in the same room together because I know that it can help you.” That kind of attitude doesn’t have consequences just for individuals, it has consequences for social interactions as well.

Q: This would seem to run counter to the notion of rugged individualism that is cherished by Americans.

A: That study with Fordham undergrads and my other work revolves around culture and individualism and collectivism. Are you somebody who is completely individualistic? This is, of course, a mainstream idea. It allows people to say, “I’m going to make my decisions about whether I should get the vaccine or not, and it really shouldn’t matter what anybody else thinks or what anybody else does.” But actually, vaccines work because other people take them. It’s not just about what you think. The way that people think about their relationship to the culture they’re in is important in determining what health behaviors they’re practicing.

Q: How can we each help each other continue to bounce back in the face of change?

A: If we’re going to be supportive for resilience purposes, to bounce back as a society, we need to listen to people’s objections as to why they won’t do what are essentially non-intrusive prevention measures like wearing a mask, getting tested, or getting a vaccination.

At the same time, there are plenty of people for whom just listening and having conversations isn’t going to work. Maybe this is reflective of my own American individualism, but I don’t like the idea of telling people that they have to do something. I do think there’s a place for mandates though, in that they allow people to say, “Well, I didn’t really want to get vaccinated, but I guess I have to in order to keep my job.” But even in that case, it needs to be like, “Yeah, you know what? I know it’s tough.” It’s knowing we’ve all had to do things we don’t want to do.

There still needs to be the openness for listening to people who don’t want to engage in these things. I think that’s how we support each other.

“We arrived on August 26. And right after Labor Day, I started the third grade,” Lopez said. “I didn’t really speak English. I didn’t really know what was happening. We didn’t really have a network, and we had to do a lot on our own.”

Being on their own was new. Though she’d grown up with 12 siblings in the Dominican Republic—each of her parents was married and had six children before they met each other—she arrived in New York City with only three family members: her mother, one brother, and one sister. The rest of the family stayed put while the four of them set up a home in the U.S.

The family settled in the Inwood area of Manhattan, home to “a large Dominican contingency” that allowed Lopez to remain connected to her cultural roots while trying to bridge the gap “between being a Dominican and being an American,” she said.

Part of the network she developed, as a newly arrived third-grader attending public school, ultimately led her to Fordham. Lopez attended John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx with a “dear friend from the third grade.” The two were discussing where they wanted to attend college when the friend asked her to tag along for a visit to Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

“I came in through that entrance on East Fordham Road, [past]the gate, and onto that pathway that leads up to [Duane] Library, and I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in terms of, ‘Wow, this is what a college looks like, a university,’” she said.

Not only did Lopez fall in love with the campus, but she also said it immediately “felt so safe to me after coming from a Bronx high school where girls felt quite unsafe. I just very much immediately felt at home in an odd way.”

Finally afforded a “chance to really learn,” Lopez said her Fordham experience wasn’t filled with many extracurricular or community activities. Instead, the academics alone made her feel that she was finally getting what she “came here to this country for.”

As a psychology major, Lopez enjoyed studying the human mind—delving into “some of the mental issues that people in society face, and how people deal with them”—and she threw herself into preparing for her next step: law school.

“I knew that I needed to have very good grades to get into law school, so I spent a lot of time in Duane Library studying to get the best possible,” she said. “It was the academic deep dive that I was sort of waiting to have all my life.”

She found another love at Fordham, too: her husband, Ray Garcia, FCRH ’89. They met in a class as first-year students, and after some relentless note-passing, Lopez agreed to go out with him. “The first few weeks of school, classmates would send a little note up from the back row where he sat to the front row where I sat.” She usually declined his invitations, but “after a while I just decided, OK, I guess I’m going to go on a date,” she said, “and so that was the beginning.”

They were eventually married in the University Church, with longtime Fordham sociology professor Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., presiding, and they have two children: a son, Nicholas, who graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2019, and a daughter, Giselle, who is currently attending George Washington University.

After earning her B.S. from Fordham, Lopez earned a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and has been practicing law ever since. For the past 23 years, she’s worked at McKinsey & Company, but soon she’ll take over as general counsel and chief legal officer at Spencer Stuart, an executive search and leadership advisory firm, in what she described as a dream role.

“One of the things I love doing is leaning into the development of people because we can all be really smart and really capable, but if we’re not investing in people and their growth and their excitement, and we’re not making them feel like they’re part of something special, I’m not sure we’re accomplishing very much,” said Lopez, who was honored as a Latina Trailblazer in 2018 by the nonprofit advocacy group LatinoJustice.

The imperative to invest in young talent to create future leaders isn’t one that’s limited to Lopez’s legal work; she thinks ensuring that current and future students can thrive is one of her duties as a Fordham alumna: playing a role so that “other students have the benefit of the experience I had.”

“Fordham taught me how to think differently and focus on being a good human and a student of life, not just a student for four years. To focus on doing good things and service and living in service.” There’s something more that comes with being a Fordham graduate, she said: “It’s something broader; it’s about purpose.”

Fordham Five (Plus One)

What are you most passionate about?
Making the community in which I live and work better. One of the ways in which I do this is through my involvement in Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York, both as a member of the board of trustees and as a mentor. I have mentored several young women since they were in high school, and they are all moving successfully to the next chapter in their lives. Seeing kids succeed is awesome!

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
My mother told me to get the best education possible because it would be the path to a better life. She was right.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
My favorite place in New York City is the neighborhood I grew up in, 215th Street and Seaman Avenue, tucked in the most northern part of Manhattan near Inwood Hill Park. What a gem of a neighborhood. I love the stairs that connect Broadway to Park Terrace East, built in 1915 and a great reminder of the world before the automobile. My favorite place in the world is Italy. I love the food, culture, people, and variety of landscapes. Somehow, I feel very much at home there. I’ve dragged my children there several times, starting when my youngest was 5 years old. It’s never too early to learn a different culture.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Night by Elie Wiesel. It is a beautifully written, wrenching, and deeply moving memoir. I have read it many times and will read it many times more. Night helped me understand the suffering and anguish of a people and the imperative to be ever mindful of the suffering of others.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I admire many Fordham professors who opened my eyes to the world, including “the Notorious Ph.D.,” Mark Naison; Raymond Grontkowski, Ph.D.; Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J.; and Claude Mangum, Ph.D. There is one [grad]who stands out above the rest: my husband, Ray Garcia. Ray has been a huge supporter of everything I’ve tried to do professionally since we both graduated from Fordham. He has been my biggest fan, and I admire him for his willingness to sacrifice so much so that his partner can shine. Thank you, Ray! You embody everything that is good and genuine in this world.

What are you optimistic about?
The ability of young people to change the trajectory of the world we live in. This next generation of leaders is less patient and hopefully will not tolerate injustice for as long as prior generations have. I am optimistic that new leaders will demand more, as they should.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Sierra McCleary-Harris.

Q: Seven years ago you left your position as rector at Fordham to take over leadership of the newly combined USA Northeast Province of the Society of Jesus. What did you learn from your time that you’ll be bringing back to the University?

A: A large part of bringing together the New York and the New England provinces was to focus on the core features that united us. The different missions are all rooted in a common appreciation of how God labors in the world and through each of us, and our response is one of gratitude, love, and generosity.

Having been at Fordham for 15 years, I have a special interest in Jesuit higher education. What is unique about Jesuit higher education is that same spiritual foundation we’re focused on in the province. We’re in the business of not only preparing people for careers, but also informing how they see the world, how they orient themselves toward God and other people. No matter what profession they pursue, they put those gifts at the service of others, and especially the poor, the marginalized, and those members of society who are ignored or overlooked.

I think sometimes we forget to articulate that we’re not here only to introduce people to great ideas, but also to make them “men and women with and for others.” My role is to work with others in the University to keep our focus on why we are engaged in the business of Jesuit education here.

Q: What will be some of your biggest priorities?

A: One of my biggest priorities is working with the Board of Trustees. In 2013, I was asked to coordinate a meeting of the board chairs of 28 Jesuit colleges and universities with Father General Adolfo Nicolás, S.J. He said to them, ‘You are the leaders of the colleges and universities.’ In a legal sense, that’s absolutely true, but it’s also true in a mission sense. The board allocates finances and makes decisions that help people like me and others with overseeing and implementing the mission.

Another is faculty. I was a full-time member of the faculty for 15 years, so I know that faculty are very busy. The challenge is to help faculty have some time to reflect on that key question, ‘Why am I doing this in the context of a Jesuit university?’ That’s going to be through a series of talks and presentations, and through personal reflection and exploration. I’m working closely with Jim McCartin in creating initiatives that will include seminars and retreats.

We also want to expand the work that Lito Salazar, S.J.,  and campus ministry does. We want to serve the Catholic students and those who are interested in explicit religious practices, but there are others who I’m sure would benefit from programs designed to open them up to a spiritual worldview.

We also have the Center for Community Engaged Learning, which Dr. Julie Gafney just took over last year. They’ve increased the number of courses that are offered where faculty engage with students who participate in community engagement projects and integrate that work with academic work. It’s a wonderful opportunity to be of service to the poor and marginalized right here in the Bronx community.

David Gibson has been doing some wonderful talks, discussions, lectures, and seminars with the Center on Religion and Culture. I’m going to be working with him to expand that programming to include topics that would be of particular interest to younger people.

Q: Talk to me about life trap theory, which is your area of expertise in psychology. Is that going to play a part in how you approach your new role?

A: What gets in the way of productively focusing on mission are our personal, and you might say institutional, life traps. One of the life traps is overdependence. So for example, students or faculty might say, ‘Well, mission is the work of others and, I’ll let them do it.’ That’s kind of a trap because it’s shirking a responsibility that is really incumbent on all of us to participate in.

Q: This year is the Ignatian Year, which celebrates the 500th anniversary of the “cannonball moment” of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits. Why is Jesuit spirituality so important even after five centuries?

A: It was May 20 of this year that was the 500th anniversary of St. Ignatius being hit by a cannonball when he was a soldier. It was a turning point in his life because that wound literally laid him on his back, and during his convalescence, he started to read Lives of the Saints and started to think, ‘Maybe this whole ambition of worldly success is not that important—what’s really important is following Jesus Christ.’

What you might call the “cannonball moment” is what Jesuit education is all about. We’re not going to shoot students with cannonballs, but hopefully in the course of their time in a Jesuit school, their worldview gets shaken, maybe shattered, certainly rocked, and they get opportunities to radically rethink who they are, what they are, and what their purpose in life is, just as Ignatius did. So this year, we’re celebrating a focus on conversion and higher education. That’s the core mission.

Q: Does it feel more relevant given what a tumultuous time this is?

A: Pope Francis [who is a Jesuit]had something to say about that. He did a series of interviews recently and they were published in a book called Let Us Dream (Simon & Schuster, 2020). He says the pandemic is just like the cannonball for the whole world, and he hopes that the new normal will be a more radically transformed world, where we come out of it with a heightened awareness of the needs of others. He sees it as a fertile, if extraordinarily painful, moment for us.

“I was struck by the diversity of projects featured, but what most impressed me was the creativity and resilience of our students, several of whom had to reinvent their projects in the face of pandemic restrictions,” said Stark-Gendrano. “It was inspiring to see such good work come out of such challenging conditions.”

From combating global warming to undermining misogyny to embracing immigration to parsing gender identity and sparking the attention of boys with ADHD—the ideas of graduating seniors and their undergraduate peers filled four days of sessions on Zoom.

This Land is Her Land

Senior Selena Juarez-Galindo, a visual arts major, presented her multimedia work in a project titled “Exploring my Mexican Family History through Art.”

“My family are all basically undocumented immigrants and I am the first generation,” Juarez-Galindo said, noting that since she was born in the U.S. she has full citizenship.

Juarez-Galindo’s family is from a town called Guerrero, where people native to the land still speak Mixteco, a language that predates the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The intention of her artwork is “to chase a native narrative” and portray distinct images of her family’s culture and show others that it’s not unlike their own.

She noted that her required courses in theology deepened her understanding of the plight of her family and the struggles faced by immigrants and refugees.

“When it comes to immigrants here, there has to be a kind of morality that’s above the law, especially when American nationalism can create really horrible effects,” she said of the consequences facing people crossing the border, such as separating children from their parents. “There have been so many immoral things in history that were legal, such as slavery. Our morality has to come first.”

Keeping Boys’ Attention During Online Programs

Senior Arbi Kumi, a psychology major, has always been interested in what makes the mind tick, though he had never concentrated on the mind of a child. His study, “Exploring the Feasibility and Effectiveness of a Virtual Summer Treatment Program for Children with Behavioral and Social Problems,” sprang from an internship at the Child Mind Institute, a mental health nonprofit clinic for children. There, he was assigned to a virtual summer camp for boys with ADHD. With permission from the institute and from parents, he studied how boys’ attention improved and/or degraded during a virtual adaptation of a summer camp program. Instead of five days a week at six hours a day, the program ran for just two hours a day for five days a week. The boys, who worked in peer groups, showed substantial gains during treatment that sought to improve their social skills over the course of the program, he said.

“We knew anecdotally that screen fatigue was a problem and it might not be interesting enough to keep the boy’s attention, so online games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox were used as a reward and something we could use to teach them new social skills,” said Kumi.

By using parental surveys and a point system administered by camp counselors, Kumi found that post-treatment levels showed significant improvement in social skills, including group discussions, helping or being flexible, and sticking to a plan—particularly with peer support. However, he said, certain problem behaviors, such as interrupting, did not improve. Beyond the findings, Kumi said that he learned a lot about his own perceptions of children.

“It was so much fun; this one boy had a new nickname for me every day, he was so funny, so smart,” he said. “I also realized how much stigma is placed on mental health as opposed to physical health.”

Delving into Arabic LGBTQ+ Identity in NYC

Senior Batool Abdelhafez, who goes by the pronoun they, majored in anthropology and psychology. For their project titled “Identity, Duality, and Kinship Among LGBT Arab-Americans in the American Diaspora,” they interviewed 15 members of the LGBT+ Arab American community and the Southwest Asian and North African community (SWANA). They set out to find what gave people in the group a unique sense of personhood, and in what spaces the group felt free to be true to themselves. Lastly, they sought to define whether LGBT+ Arab American and SWANA individuals consider themselves to be a separate subculture from the LGBT+ community at large.

“The emergence of colonialism demonized and categorized LGBT+ Arabs as something to be duly exoticized, but also viewed as somehow degenerate, backward, or uncivilized,” they said. “We see this context even today just for Arabs in general, right? But it’s even more so for LGBT Arabs.”

They noted that all their subjects were proud of being LGBT+, which helped them dissect layers of identity that included class, national identity, and being LGBT+ in New York City. Their study found that all subjects expressed sentiments about being racialized, being discriminated against, and feeling exoticized. The group’s experiences were unique enough that a community separate from the LGBT+ community has formed, they said. They spoke of a burgeoning scene expressed in art, music, and culture at nightclub parties such as Yalla! and via community groups, such as Tarab NYC.

Teenage Girls on the Verge

Senior Gillian Russo majored in journalism. Her presentation, “Women Of Mass Destruction: Power, Violence, and the Supernatural in Teenage-Girl Theatre,” examined four recent plays that combine violence and witchcraft as perpetrated by teenage girls. The plays were produced and directed by women and non-binary artists. Russo asserted that the plays shocked audiences with an uncomfortable truth that teenage girls—”the last group you’d expect to be violent”—could also be viewed as “natural partners” to horror.

Russo chose the plays because she saw a trend developing between magic, witchcraft, and teenage girls in the theater. She also noted that the plays took on societal views of women more broadly. Too often media employs the catty girl trope, she said, and ignores the depth of adolescent emotion that could rise to the level of theatrical violence.

“Most girls aren’t necessarily this violent in real life, but in the elevated world of the theater you can go to extreme examples,” she said. “What better way to drive that home than putting it live on stage in front of you, and showing the most extreme thing that a girl can do, like violence, so she can lead her own charge for self-recognition and self-realization?”

Going Rooftop Green

Lydia Hallett, a senior majoring in environmental studies, presented on “The Cost-Benefit Analysis of Urban Green Roofs.” After studying abroad in Sweden, Hallett saw a proliferation of green rooftops there and decided to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of green rooftops in New York. She found herself with more questions than answers.

“In my research that I wanted to understand these kinds of large solutions, and what it actually means for a city to take that on,” said Hallett.

Hallett identified public benefits that green roofs provide, including stormwater management, biodiversity, and improved air quality. However, she also found that high up-front installation costs often overshadowed returns on investments for most developers.

“No one wants to put a price tag on nature, but that’s kind of what has to be done for order in order for people to understand the benefits of green roofs,” she said.

The program’s Community Mental Health Clinic, which opened in January 2020, aims to provide low-cost mental health services to the Bronx community while also giving third-year doctoral students the chance to gain practical experience.

The project addresses a significant health issue in the Bronx: According to a report from Montefiore Hospital, 91% of the borough’s Medicaid patients live in “a mental health professional shortage area” based on the ratio of providers to the population and its needs.

“The idea is that we live in one of the most disenfranchised communities in America, where mental health services are extremely hard to come by,” said Barry Rosenfeld, Ph.D., professor of psychology. “We’ve got really well-established faculty members who are often experts in their respective areas. We have really strong graduate students who are invested in providing services to the community under our supervision. And wouldn’t it be really good if we could do something to give back to the Bronx?”

The clinic offers services in four areas—adult psychotherapy, child psychotherapy, adult general assessment services, and forensic assessment. Patients can be referred to the clinic from hospitals, the court system, school districts, and others, or can call the clinic for a screening at 718-817-0590. If appropriate and if there’s availability, the patient will receive an appointment with a third-year doctoral student who is supervised by faculty members. Doctoral students only can spend a few hours a week in the clinic so only have about one to two cases at a time.

Ariella Soffer, Ph.D., GSAS ’08, director of the clinic, said that they’ve seen clients with high needs for depression, anxiety, stress, and trauma, particularly now due to the problems and challenges exacerbated by the pandemic.

“What we’ve been seeing, I think, [is]just a profile of exaggerated need that the nation or New York at large would see,” said Soffer.

Rosenfeld said since they opened they’ve had a waiting list, in part because of their low-cost services.

“It’s a sliding scale. So I think it’s often $5 or $10 for a psychotherapy session, as opposed to maybe $250 [at a private office],” he said. “Our forensic evaluations—we have a set fee that works out to probably $5 an hour.”

Like all organizations, the clinic had to pivot to a new virtual model in March. It had been operating in person at its location a few blocks from the Rose Hill campus at 557 East Fordham Road for “a solid five weeks,” before they made almost all services remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s ironic, in some ways, it makes some things easier, like scheduling,” Rosenfeld said. “I think the field of mental health will probably never be the same; I think we will probably always rely much more on virtual mediums than we ever used to. But I think it’s more challenging to develop a relationship [virtually], to have an interactive exchange.”

Despite the challenges and changes the clinic faced in its first year, those involved said they’re excited to keep the work going and see it grow.

Doctoral Students Receive Supervision and Credit While Serving Community

Plans for the clinic had been discussed for more than 10 years, Rosenfeld said, but really came together about three years ago when Soffer was brought on in fall 2018 as director.

“I spent a bulk of the first year basically trying to figure out—how do other schools do this?” she said. “I had graduate students talking to a lot of graduate students in other clinical programs to try to figure out what works,” she said, particularly when it came to how the work could be integrated into the curriculum so students could receive course credit.

Third-year doctoral students in the clinical psychology program, many of whom already have some practical experience from other externships, are divided into the clinic’s four areas.

Each of the tracks has two faculty supervisors. Instead of taking or teaching another course, the students and faculty work at the clinic for a few hours each week. The teams meet weekly, right now virtually, to discuss patients, best practices, and ideas for care.

“The population is clearly one of the most underserved and high-need populations in the New York area, and so I think it provides that opportunity to the students to offer services to people that are really in need, and I think that the faculty offer some niche expertise,” Soffer said.

For Michelle Leon, a third-year student in the program, the clinic has allowed her to explore the forensic assessment field.

“I’ve always been interested in forensic work, but I hadn’t gotten clinical experience in the forensic field at all up until I joined the forensic assessment team this fall,” she said. “I’m getting more of that hands-on experience in an area that I was always interested in.”

Faculty Expertise Benefits Patients

Rosenfeld and Dean McKay, Ph.D., professor of psychology, said the structure allows patients to receive high-quality care from leading faculty experts in their fields, which is something other clinics can’t always offer.

“So my expertise as an anxiety disorder expert—one of the cases that was seen in the clinic was for obsessive-compulsive disorder, which has historically been an anxiety disorder,” McKay said. “We were able to work with a man from the community who had OCD, and was treated by one of our students and was supervised by me and and by Dr. Ariella Soffer. We’re able to fill that gap that maybe is a little less readily available in the community.”

Because the clinic currently has limited resources, Rosenfeld said they often have to “triage” requests. Cases they can’t handle will be referred elsewhere; severe cases, such as a person with suicidal thoughts, are referred to St. Barnabas or other hospitals.

Community Outreach and Care

Besides just providing direct services, Soffer said they are also working on a community outreach project that would put information and resources directly in the hands of community members who might not need individual therapy.

“We don’t have a huge capacity right now for direct service,” she said. “But we do want to be able to provide as much to the community as we possibly can. So we are also thinking of other creative ways to be able to offer resources and our expertise, so we’re creating a series of four trainings right now.”

Leon said she and two graduate assistants for the clinic are putting together PowerPoints, flyers, and other written materials for the trainings which include information on trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy for children, particularly for those who have experienced loss, neglect, or abuse; social media and its impact on children; updated CPR materials; and COVID resources related to mental health.

The materials would be distributed to community leaders, such as local nonprofits and “pediatricians and dentists, and doctors and pastors,” Soffer said, who could get the info to people they know in need.

“We know that COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting minorities,” Leon said, noting particularly Black and Latinx individuals. “They’re already disproportionately affected by health disparities. And so we wanted to also create a resource for them where we’re giving them that information.”

Soffer said that she would love to be able to expand the clinic’s offerings, which could include bringing in a postdoctoral fellow or funding to allow graduate students to spend more clinical hours at the clinic. A fundraiser for the clinic was planned in the spring but had to be canceled due to COVID-19. In the meantime, she said the faculty and students will continue to serve the community in as many ways as they can.

“There’s clearly demand, because the minute we opened, we had a waiting list,” Rosenfeld said. “I get requests all the time. ‘Here’s another case, can I do this?’ So, the need is almost unlimited. We’re hoping we can increase our capacity.”

Dean McKay, Ph.D., a professor of psychology, specializes in anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the connections between anxiety and disgust. With winter approaching and potentially leading to more isolation, we thought it would be a good time to talk to him about what we can do to cope effectively during what will likely continue to be a traumatic time.

Listen here:

Full transcript below:

Dean McKay: Look. Anxiety, as an emotion, it’s an important one because it does stop us from having injury and harm come to us. Unfortunately, a lot of times it’s an overcorrection, and the experience of anxiety is definitely uncomfortable. But the flip side is that it also can, when experienced properly, it’s a great problem-solving strategy. I mean, if you’re worried about anything, good effective worry leads to effective problem-solving.

Patrick Verel: the events of the last nine months have thrown us all for a loop. Schools closed, businesses shuttered, and people all over the world began dying from a mysterious airborne virus. In the ensuing months, the United States has experienced a summer of civil unrest and a brutally close and nasty election for president. Now, with the holidays approaching, the coronavirus is raging out of control again. On November 13th, the number of Americans infected with the virus surged to a staggering 181,000 in one day, and the number of deaths reached 246,000.

PV: Dean McKay, a professor of psychology at Fordham, specializes in anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the connections between anxiety and disgust. With winter approaching and potentially leading to more isolation, we thought it would be a good time to talk to him about what we can do to cope effectively during what is likely to be a traumatic time. I’m PV, and this is Fordham News.

Let’s talk about anxiety. There are multiple kinds and they sometimes work in tandem in our minds, right?

DK: You’re right. There are several kinds of anxiety, really, several different ways that anxiety manifests. And so, for starters, the reason why we get anxious is because it’s an evolved reaction to protect us from threat. And as a result of experiencing anxiety, in small as well as major ways in the course of our lives, we end up really having basically three different kinds.

One is based on what we call a real threat. So if you have, let’s say, a near-miss accident, or you’re confronted by an assailant, the anxiety that you feel in the face of that is a bona fide reaction to a real, imminent threat that you face, some real danger.

A second kind is where you have a false alarm. We’re evolved to basically overcorrect for threat, and so since in our environment there are certain things that sound or look dangerous, it’s better to know that in advance and act, rather than have to wait until it’s verified. So if there’s, let’s say, a shadow that looks threatening and you’re approaching it, the anxiety that you feel is in response to the fact that it might be a danger. Now, it’s possible that you’ll end up learning later that it’s actually a tree in a formation that resembles an assailant, and so that’s a false alarm. It looked real, but then it ended up being, on closer inspection actually, not.

Then the third one is what we called learned alarms, and so because our environments are idiosyncratic to us, and over the course of our lives we end up having certain anxious experiences, some of those are ones that are specific to us, that we might find to be potentially dangerous. So, those are ones that we learn to be afraid of and we start to avoid those, as well. Now, those also don’t have to be bona fide dangers, but because we’ve consistently avoided them and we’ve consistently associated those with the experience of anxiety, then we have that association.

Let’s say that you were out at night and you were attacked. In fact, you survive. Now, in the future you got to, let’s say, those same places and you see shadows or figures in those places that might not be real threats. You might experience anxiety, anyway, and that would be a learned alarm.

PV: It feels like right now we’ve got all three kind of mixed up together.

DK: Well, that’s true. The issue that we face with a pandemic is that it activates anxiety in a very specific way, and it does call all three of those to bear.

First of all, there’s a real threat, so we know that in our midst there is something that is dangerous. Now, what makes it more challenging is that we can’t see it, so the examples that I used of a real alarm is where there’s like a visible danger. But now there’s an invisible one, and we have to now learn other ways to manage it. That means connected to that there are going to also be, let’s say, false alarms. So, you encounter somebody who looks sick. They’re not sick, necessarily, or they’re sick with something other than COVID. That would be a potentially false alarm.

Then there are learned alarms, because we’ve now been taught, based upon public health information and other media sources, that there are certain things that we should avoid. So, let’s say if you’re the kind of person that routinely wears a mask, a learned alarm is if you encounter somebody coming really close to you who’s unmasked. That’s going to also pose a pretty significant threat.

PV: You’ve conducted research directly connected to anxiety and the coronavirus. What can you tell me about your findings so far?

DK: First of all, given that the threat of COVID is an invisible one, that only manifests visibly in people who are ill, we really have five major dimensions that we can describe as being relevant factors that are implicated related to COVID. Those factors are what we call contamination and disease risk. So, that concern that you may have contracted an illness, or a concern that you may have come in contact with something, that would be one facet of this COVID-specific kind of reaction.

The second is because we are acutely aware of the social and economic consequences, that forms another factor that activates a lot of anxiety for people. So, we are concerned about our own well-being, but then kind of competing with it is also the concerns about social and economic consequences of the disease.

Another factor, so the third of these five, is traumatic stress reactions. This is a largely traumatic event for the public. It’s a pretty widely shared traumatic event, and some people experience it more acutely than others. So, if someone has contracted and survived COVID, or if someone has had someone close to them pass away or contract and remain ill with COVID, there’s a lot of ways in which COVID is experienced by sufferers.

Obviously, the biggest concern that we have is the risk to one’s life from COVID. But then there are also people who survive it, who are the so-called long-haulers that we hear about, who have neurological consequences and all kinds of lasting physical consequences, multi-systemic consequences. And so, those form the basis for a series of traumatic reactions that sufferers may have.

A fourth factor is a broader social category of xenophobia. This has been observed in prior pandemics, by the way, where the natural desire for the public, given that we want to make seen that which is unseen, so what better way to do it than to ascribe cause to a group? We’ve seen this happen in multiple ways. For example, the attribution of the disease to being brought to these shores from China has led to some xenophobic reactions to people from China. Or even to, in a smaller scale, things like not eating Chinese food.

Then finally, the last factor: that is an anxious-related response is checking. People engage in checking behavior either for themselves, to see whether or not they’re ill. It’s sort of like this internal monitoring that people might engage in. Let’s say for right now if somebody were to feel a little bit of a scratchy feeling in their throat, they might start to really pay much more attention to that than they might have pre-pandemic. Because they are now attending to whether or not maybe they’re coming down with the illness, and there will be some checking that they might engage in to see whether or not this represents the onset of illness.

So, on the one hand, there’s a constellation of individuals who have what we would call a COVID Stress Syndrome. They have elevated levels of many of those five factors, and that leads to all kinds of other mood and anxiety reactions, ones that we might see pre-pandemic. People get depressed. It’s a lot to manage if you experience all five of those factors that I just listed. That’s stressful, and people experience it in a pretty demanding way.

There’s a flip side to this, though, and it’s one that we’ve seen here. There are people who, as we’ve had well-documented in the news in this country, people who are basically denying that COVID even matters. So, you see people who are neglecting to bother with wearing masks and are not engaged in social distancing, and are basically taking the position that, really, this is nothing, and why are you making a big deal of it? They have low levels on all of those factors, and also would feel that their personal risk is just low, for reasons that have little to do with reality.

PV: I hope this doesn’t sound flippant, but it seems like this is a golden age of time to study anxiety.

DK: Well, that’s true. There is an abundance of anxiety, and rightfully so. The theory that helps to describe why we see some of these things that I’ve described as those five-factor,s is called the behavioral immune system. It’s basically an automatic process that we have evolved, which is when there’s an unseen danger, what steps can we take to try and make it as seen as possible? What ways will it be visible, and how can we protect ourselves?
DK: So, it’s an important evolved feature, and in order to do it successfully it does require anxiety. Look, anxiety as an emotion, it’s an important one because it does stop us from having injury and harm come to us. Unfortunately, a lot of times it’s an overcorrection, and the experience of anxiety is definitely uncomfortable.

But the flip side is that it also can, when experienced properly, it’s a great problem-solving strategy. If you’re worried about anything, good effective worry leads to effective problem-solving, and that’s true for everything. We would get very little done if we never, ever worried. We’d be like, “Oh, whatever. I guess that will come and go. The deadline is here and gone.”

And if we didn’t worry about getting diseases, then we’d probably get sick and die very easily. There’s a value here to this, and so it’s not flippant to say that. It’s actually accurate, and a lot of my colleagues and I, we’ve been very, very active during this time.

PV: I want to talk a little bit about this connection between the virus and xenophobia because I think that’s really interesting.

DK: There’s a lot of talk right now about tribalism in our politics, and so this does kind of cross the barrier into the political realm. In politics right now, the tribalism suggests that you have groups of people that form coherent wholes: they share attitudes and opinions and culture. But that notion of tribalism goes back also centuries; and tribes, as let’s say bubbles of groups, they would also be protective of themselves.

One way to protect themselves would be to make sure that outsiders who carried, literally, disease risks that would be foreign to them and could wipe them out, they would then be vigilant to guard against that. And so, an outsider would be deemed dangerous, just for being an outsider. So, xenophobia … We’re hardwired to be somewhat xenophobic. That doesn’t make it defensible, but it is certainly a bulwark that we have to work against.

Now, in the modern era, because in modern technology we don’t really need to have that kind of disease vigilance about outsiders the way that we once did, with the rising of a more global economy and the fact that people can travel all over the place very readily. It doesn’t change the fact that you can capitalize on that natural xenophobic impulse, at least in some individuals.

In 2018, President Trump went to great pains to talk about the caravan of people who were coming north from Central America, and his descriptions of it were very much designed to capitalize on that disease risk that people are concerned about. He’s done this all along, from the beginning of his campaign.

That notion is something that we see now, and now bringing it fast forward to the pandemic, Trump’s use of terms like “the China virus,” which has been roundly attacked as a xenophobic statement, is exactly for that reason. It’s to try and assign an ethnic cause to the pandemic. We see this throughout history, and politicians have known how to capitalize on it, on the left as well as the right. I mean, there are left-leaning leaders who have certainly used this.

PV: I want to move from the theoretical to the concrete for a second here. I left Brooklyn in March with my wife and our five- and eight-year-old, and we moved in with my in-laws in Vermont, so we could work remotely while they attend school online. My father, who is 72 years old, died of COVID about three weeks after we left.

I’ve had very few opportunities to see the rest of my family, and thanks to the New York City school situation it’s unclear when we’ll be able to return home. So, I have a bit of anxiety these days. Everybody’s situation is unique, of course, and I know I’m probably not alone when I describe this sort of crazy situation. So, what advice would you give to fight this kind of anxiety, which is born largely from circumstance?

DK: Sure. First of all, I’m really so sorry for your loss. I know we spoke prior to this podcast, and it’s tragic. Your life has been touched in a very specific way by this virus, and so adversely. The experience that you have of anxiety, in terms of returning to what might resemble a pre-pandemic way of life, is a hard one to imagine. So, that traumatic kind of symptom that I described before as one is particularly salient for you.

To deal with that in some way, probably it will be necessary to be able to return to your environment that you lived in originally. Just to really start to etch new memories in, that will be present to allow you to recapture some sense of normalcy, given that you experienced this loss in a rather significant way. And now it’s going to be very much crystallized with your experiences of life now, in a way that’s so abnormal from what it was prior to this.

That’s true for most sufferers, people who have lost a loved one. They’re going to face some real challenges going forward, especially when the pandemic is over. There’s going to be this really lingering memory of this event, and the way to really handle it is to honor the person that they’ve lost in a way that’s meaningful for them.

In the meantime, there are some other lingering issues, and the stop-gap measures are things like the extent that you can engage in any kind of social practices now. We do have the benefit of remote technology that allows us to stay connected with people; and it’s easy to not do that, because we get busy with things, especially if you have children. But to try and capture some of that. Like, married couples who have children, it’s very difficult now. You’re home all the time with your kids, and how do you get time alone?

Well, that’s a very significant challenge, and there needs to be some creative problem-solving around how to do that, even to steal away some time alone, because that’s something that couples usually try to do. If you routinely did that pre-pandemic, and you’re not doing it now that we’re eight months on, that’s something that should be done and really prioritized. That will help to alleviate some of the anxiety because you can share with each other some support.

If you don’t have someone in your life but you have a social network, you should definitely make sure you stay connected to people. If you are a solo person, and you’re not connected to somebody right now but you have a social network, you really want to strengthen that as much as you can, and make sure you stay connected to people. Maybe rekindle connections that have dwindled a little bit.

All of those help to buffer anxiety. You know, that shared experience so you don’t feel so isolated can put a block on it. It also allows you to share information with people that facilitates problem-solving, which is really the point of experiencing anxiety in an adaptive way.

PV: I would imagine there would be people out there even who don’t necessarily … who might not have lost somebody, who might just look back and say, “Oh, my God. What happened to the life that we had in New York City?” in particular.

DK: Right. Loss is very global right now. There’s loss in terms of not just potentially loved ones, which is maybe the most profound in this case. But loss of livelihood, change of livelihood to something that is not what was desirable before. Maybe you had an ideal or a very desirable lifestyle beforehand, and that’s been upended. Loss of time with loved ones, because of distance and inability to connect because you can’t travel. That’s something that a lot of people are experiencing.

On a personal side for me, my daughter lives in Florida. We haven’t seen her since the end of February. We happened to go to visit her in February and we really haven’t been able to travel down there since, because my mother-in-law, who’s 84 years old, we’re the sole caregivers and it’s just too risky. So, a lot of people experience these kind of losses.

PV: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up that your daughter and the holidays because that’s something that I do think is important to note for this conversation. I wonder if you have any thoughts for people who right now are hearing this, and are very anxious about whether they’ll be able to have any semblance of a holiday. Whether it’s this coming Thanksgiving, or even Christmas and New Year’s and Hanukkah, and all the other holidays that the winter months usually bring us?

DK: Yeah. This week, as we’re speaking, also brought some hopefulness. That is, it seems that there is very rapid and encouraging news on a vaccine, so maybe the first time in months that people feel a glimmer of optimism that maybe this is going to be over. So, it’s hard to do this in the moment, because you’re thinking “this year,” “this holiday,” this thing that we’re looking forward to so much, like Thanksgiving. Which … I, too. We love Thanksgiving. My family, we celebrate Hanukkah. We love the holidays to spend time with our kid, or to at least have some engagement in a real meaningful way.

But if you think about it in the course of your life, you’re going to celebrate the holiday around 75 or 80 times, and so you’re going to miss it once. It’s not even really that you’re going to miss it entirely. This is an opportunity where we might want to think about creative alternatives. Since we do have the luxury of remote technology, there is something to be said for at least making sure that you maintain contact for the holiday. Yes, it’s not the same. Absolutely, you’re going to feel the change and the difference. It is going to be abnormal.

But think about the fact that we have some measure of optimism on the horizon that you’ll be able to do it next year. And, yeah. It’s frustrating, but the other side of it is that we want to contain the spread. The danger really remains great. So this is, I think, probably the best alternative, is that we have to think in terms of how many more holidays do we get to enjoy? And we get to look forward to the fact that we can enjoy them because we’ll be hopefully making sure everybody stays healthy.

PV: Let’s talk about the future. Let’s say, fingers crossed, that a vaccine is approved this winter; and by this time next year we’ve returned to our offices, schools have reopened, and the economy has begun to crawl back out of the hole that it’s in. What kind of psychological aftereffects can we expect in the years to come?

DK: First of all, there will probably be an uptick in mood disorders, so depression is probably going to be the thing that will be a lingering aftereffect. In all likelihood, people who were anxious prior to the pandemic or prone to being anxious, it may kick it off for some people. The return to a pre-pandemic life, to whatever extent we retain that level of comparable lifestyle, I would imagine over a reasonably short timeline, in a matter of months, not years, a lot of those anxious reactions will fade.

So, let’s say there are some people who may be much, much, more attentive to washing. They’re probably not going to develop OCD, like based on contamination fear. It will probably snap back once it’s clear that it’s safe. For people who may have treatable levels of contamination fear, they probably were near to developing OCD prior to the pandemic, and this was the stressor that pushed things over the top. So, I would not think that these are pandemic-specific, but more like this was the stressor that got it going.

The other thing that I think will be left over will be probably a fair bit of alcohol and substance use problems. We see that now, and those are harder to shake. Those are habits that people develop. Alcohol is abused because people like it, and so after the pandemic is over, if you’ve been drinking a lot, you might continue to drink a lot. Maybe you’re going to carve out the time to work and do other things that you did before, but alcohol abuse will stick around.

And alcohol has a great history of alleviating anxiety. I mean, it has all kinds of horrible other consequences attached to it, but it’s well known that people engage in what they call self-medicating, to use a mental health term. And self-medicating, if we manage it effectively, it’s not universally bad, and I don’t think we should refer to it as such. It’s a mental health term when we talk about people who are alcohol abusers, and it’s what we call secondary.

So, secondary meaning like the first thing that really was there was anxiety problems, and that individual identified alcohol, or other drugs like opiates and other kinds of medications, as a way to tamp down their anxiety. So, they don’t have to necessarily deal with it through other structure coping mechanisms, they can just drink it away. And plenty of people do that. The notion of saying, “I’m going to have a drink to unwind,” that statement alone is a self-medicating statement. You don’t have to have an alcohol problem to make that statement.

PV: Okay. That makes me feel better.

DK: Yeah, good. Yeah, yeah. This doesn’t have to be like, oh, let’s reveal your psychiatric problems on the podcast. There’s a giant normal range, here.

PV: I’ve already revealed way too much in this podcast.

DK: Yeah. This was a very … Yeah, yeah. We both did a little bit of sharing here.

PV: What gives you hope right now?

DK: I probably really only felt hopeful, myself, in the last week-and-a-half. I’m trying to avoid being overly political, but I’ll be personally political right now. I think the election results point to some things that I think will change in a way that will be beneficial for us, at least in terms of the country managing COVID more effectively. I’ve had the good fortune of having a pretty large network of colleagues in other places, and what I hear about them doing in other countries, it’s stark. And it’s not political, by the way.

I have friends across the country in Canada. I have colleagues in almost every province, and in Canada … They have all kinds of political divisions in Canada, like deep, deep political divisions like we have here. But they did not politicize the virus. That’s the one thing that they did not do, and Canada is one of the countries that’s actually doing the best.

I frankly don’t blame Canada for keeping Americans out. We’re not allowed to go to Canada right now. We’re not about to be able to go anytime soon and for very good reason, because in this country, we’ve been doing a terrible job of it. The idea that maybe that’s going to change is something that I feel very optimistic about.

That and the news, I think, they would not report these promising vaccine findings without there being some reason to expect that it will be ultimately scalable so that the public at large can benefit from it. Those are the two things that give me real, true optimism about this. Had we had this conversation three weeks ago, I would have really struggled to answer that question, frankly. I don’t know that I would have been able to end on a more upbeat note, so I’m glad that we’re speaking now.

What are some of the reasons why you decided to attend Fordham?
Two major reasons why I decided to attend Fordham University were the location of both campuses and the reputation of the University. When I was doing research on schools, I was intrigued by Fordham’s selective admissions, notable alumni, small class sizes, and its access to an abundance of research and resources.

What do you think you got at Fordham that you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere?
The opportunity to connect with alumni through the Fordham Mentoring Program. Being a Fordham mentee helped me get my foot through the door and into the professional world. I [took part in]the mentoring program in my junior and senior years and was matched both times with amazing people who were able to help me grow and develop my skills and career mindset.

Did you take any courses or have any experiences that helped put you on your current path? What were they, and how did they prepare you for what you’re doing now?
I had little to no experience in the office setting before I was placed in the Office of Alumni Relations for work-study. Through the staff’s guidance and instruction, I was able to learn and develop important skills such as data management, efficient communication, and organizational skills that serve as the core of my professional abilities. As a human resources intern, I was able to learn more about the functions of a human resources department and how HR supports a company or organization. The department is the backbone of an organization and plays an integral role in its success.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
Professor Karen Siedlecki in the psychology department! I had her for most of my required classes in the psychology major and learned so much. I love how she breaks down detailed scientific concepts into topics that are easy to learn and easy to remember. She is always willing to help students and is always available to talk about research, psychology topics, or life.

What are you doing now? Can you paint us a picture of your current responsibilities? What do you hope to accomplish, personally or professionally?
Right now, I am the human resources administrative assistant at University Settlement/The Door/Broome Street Academy, a family of organizations that give back to immigrant and low-income communities and provide youth services for New York City’s disconnected youth. I am involved in onboarding new hires, data management and compliance, and maintaining the human resources information systems. I hope to gain enough experience to become a knowledgeable and skillful HR practitioner and one day lead my own team of HR professionals.

What are you optimistic about?
The end of the coronavirus pandemic! I am excited about travelling the world and trying out different cuisines, and I hope to be able to do that safely soon.

Is there anything else we should know about you, your plans, or your Fordham connection?
I am thankful to be a Fordham graduate and proud of where I am today as a first-generation college student who graduated magna cum laude in three-and-a-half years. I would not have made it here without the amazing faculty and staff members of Fordham, especially those in the Office of Alumni Relations, the psychology department, and the Mandarin Chinese department.

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.