But three years ago, during a visit to Côte d’Ivoire’s Comoé National Park, Matsuda Goodwin, a primate conservationist and adjunct professor of anthropology at Fordham, discovered what she is almost certain is the first sighting in the wild of a monkey that is a descendent of both a mangabey and a baboon. This summer, she’ll continue her study of the hybrid “Mangaboons,” with an eye toward saving them.

One sighting is not enough to make a case for a new kind of monkey. But two more sightings by Matsuda Goodwin last year, which were documented via photo and video, convinced her that at least one hybrid monkey is living in the 4,400-square-mile park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In April, she published her most recent findings on all the sightings in the paper “Putative white-naped mangabey (Cercocebus lunulatus) × olive baboon (Papio anubis) hybrids from Comoé National Park in Côte d’Ivoire.” She is the lead author of the paper, which appeared in the journal Folia Primatologica. 

Since the white-naped mangabey is critically endangered, the presence of a hybrid of it adds a wrinkle to the effort to preserve it, Goodwin said.

“It challenges conservation practitioners. There are no countries in the world that say a hybrid has to be protected. Hybrids have a unique genome, and from my point of view, I think they deserve protection,” said Goodwin.

“But we can’t put them on the endangered species list, because they don’t really fit in. People might say they’re not pure, so they don’t need to be protected.”

Matsuda Goodwin still needs to conduct a genetic analysis of the monkeys’ scat, or feces, before making a definitive conclusion and will be teaming up with a geneticist from NYU to test samples that she is searching for this summer. Until then, she is referring to it as “putative,” as it is only presumed to be a hybrid. But evidence from four photos that she took in June and video taken from remote canopy cameras in January and May 2021 makes a strong case for the hybrid theory.

The putative hybrid’s nose and muzzle resembles that of a baboon, but its forehead is dark like a mangabey, she said. The dark tips of its ears are reminiscent of a baboon, but the reddish color of its chest is more like a mangabey.

“The face is so unique. It doesn’t look like a baboon or a mangabey. It’s very peculiar,” she said.

In the videos, the putative hybrid, which may be the same one from 2019 or may be a different one, also exhibited behaviors that lend credence to the hybrid hypothesis. Its tail droops downward like a baboon, not up in an arc over its back like a mangabey. It is also seemingly less agile than a mangabey.

Mangabey baboon hybrids are not unprecedented, as they have been born in captivity. When they are born in the wild though, it can either be the result of random mating of species, which is known as a stochastic phenomenon, or it can be a sign of an ecosystem under stress. Baboons, for instance, are plentiful in other parts of Africa, but in the Comoé National Park, their numbers are worrisome.

“We need to obtain a lot more data to say that that locally, a species is endangered, but something may be going on with the baboon population situation, and something really strange may be going on with the mangabey population,” she said

“If there are enough mates of the same species, why would one mate with a different species? From a conservation point of view, it’s important to study them.”

When she showed up for class one day at her school in Bellerose, Queens, without gym clothes, she had to sit it out in a room that happened to have a diagram of a heart on the wall.

“Another one of my friends didn’t have gym clothes, so she also had to sit out too, and I was looking at the diagram, and I was like, ‘I’m going to teach you the parts of the heart,’ she said.

“I said, ‘This is the right ventricle, this is the left atrium, this is where the SA node is. My teacher came over and said, ‘How do you know all of this?’”

A Focus on Public Health

For that, she credits her grandfather Osmond Quiah, M.D., a psychiatrist in Brooklyn who was a cardiologist in his native Bangladesh. Quiah schooled her in the intricacies of the heart, and today, Bhuiyan is on the pre-med track and pursuing a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. She plans to earns a master’s degree in public health and hopes to earn an MD so she can specialize in cross-cultural psychiatry; she wants to help cultural institutions better respond to mental health crises.

Bhuiyan’s minor in environmental science has allowed her to work on public-health-related research with Guy Robinson, Ph.D., lecturer in biology, on research related to public health. Before the pandemic, she was working on a method to detect microscopic bits of plastic and tire rubber amid the dust particles that get collected at the Lincoln Center aeroallergen station. When the lockdown last spring made that unfeasible, Robinson tasked her with analyzing 20 years of pollen records from the Calder Center to see if the lockdown had any effect on the weed pollen in the air last spring.

“Our reasoning is that mowing of highway verges, ball fields, and parks was much reduced, with a resulting increase in grass and weed pollen,” Robinson said, noting that the research also involves calling municipalities and landscaping companies to find out how much their work was delayed.

An Eye-Opening Trip to New Orleans

Bhuiyan said the fact that a major increase in pollen, which is an allergen, could precipitate a public health emergency, is what drew her to the project. In the spring of 2019, a trip to New Orleans with Global Outreach gave her a first-hand view of how the environment, health, and politics can collide in devastating fashion.

“We learned about how the introduction of the [man made]Mississippi River gulf outlet led to a devastation of cypress trees, which increased the surge during Hurricane Katrina, and how that devastated out the Lower 9th Ward, which predominantly consisted of people of color. I just saw how everything that was going on was so interdisciplinary,” she said.

Robinson said Bhuiyan’s experience as the sports and health editor at The Observer student newspaper has proved invaluable in their research.

“Aiza has been great to do research with; she takes initiative and thinks about her work expansively. Her journalism experience makes her really good at explaining things and knowing the right questions to ask,” he said.

Examining Colorism

As part of her anthropology work, Bhuiyan is also working on a senior thesis, “Navigating Colorism in Bengali Communities in NYC.” She said she was inspired by her own experience growing up in a community that is grappling with ideas of race and ethnicity.

“I am darker in complexion than a lot of people, especially my family. There were things that I had to hear, and that affected my mental health,” she said.

“It made me more cognizant of my own identity, and how I choose to present myself, and I thought it would be something really interesting to research further.”

Yuko Miki, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history who got to know Bhuiyan through her class Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World, called her a force of nature.

“She brought so much positive energy to our class while also dedicating herself to helping others,” she said, citing Bhuiyan’s role as co-coordinator of the Fordham College at Lincoln Center chapter of Peer Health Exchange, a group that offers health education to ninth graders in public schools.

“Students like Aiza have truly enriched my experience as a Fordham professor, and I think she will do great things in the world,” said Miki, who has focused much of her own scholarship on issues of race and ethnicity.

Finding Ways to Maintain Connection

Bhuiyan said the pandemic has made her senior year very difficult, and although she’s had more free time since she only commutes from home in New Hyde Park in Long Island once a week, she’s felt more disorganized and busier than in the past. The silver lining, she said, has come from the ways she was able to maintain relationships from afar. Starting in the fall, for instance, she and her Peer Health Exchange colleagues held weekly workshop group meetings where they were free to discuss any and everything on volunteer’s minds.

“It’s been amazing finding ways to retain my relationships with family, friends, and people I work with, and trying to find a way to keep some sense of normalcy going,” she said.

“It was America’s dead babies. I was trying to get my head around why so many babies, about seven out of 1,000 born, die before they turn 1,” said the New York Times columnist in an online conversation on Oct. 29.

Even though scientific achievements made over the last 50 years have dramatically increased the mortality of children born after 32 weeks, the mortality rate in the United States is almost double the rate in Korea, three times the rate in Japan, and six times the rate in Iceland, he said. Most of the U.S. babies who die young are also born to mothers who are poor and Black.

“The U.S. may be the richest country in the world, so the question is, why don’t we behave like one? It’s racial conflict,” he said.

In an online conversation hosted by Fordham’s departments of American Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Sociology and Anthropology, Porter laid out the premise of American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise (Penguin Random House, 2020), which is that racism weakens American’s belief in one of the most critical components of a modern, functioning society: public goods.

“One of my core arguments is that Americans decided that if public goods must be shared across lines of race and ethnicity, they would rather do without them,” he said.

In his talk, which was followed by a response from Janice Berry, Ph.D., associate professor of economics, and a lengthy question and answer period, Porter said that although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is lionized by liberals, his New Deal was colored by the stain of racial hostility. To win the support of white southern Democrats in the Senate, Roosevelt made sure that major parts of the legislation excluded anyone who was not white.

Porter cited several examples:, a major component of the New Deal that is credited with increasing homeownership, was a big contributor to redlining, a process by which predominantly black neighborhoods were declared blighted. The Civilian Conservation Corps, a work relief program created in 1933 that employed hundreds of thousands of young men, housed them in camps that were segregated by race. And when it was first created, Social Security excluded domestic and farm workers, the majority of whom were black

“This may offend those believers in the grand alliance of working men and women, immigrants, and racial minorities coming together to confront corporate leviathans, but that is what happened. Racism stymied the great liberal leap in American policymaking,” Porter said.

The civil rights movement provoked a backlash of the white majority against the idea of a society wrapped together by a common safety net, he said, adding that it was not a coincidence that Medicare and Medicaid, the last programs inspired by that ethos, were signed into law in 1965, one year after the Civil Rights Act. After that, he said, white Americans resisted the creation of additional social welfare programs.

“That same year, President Lyndon Johnson presented Americans with a ‘War on Crime,’ and a few years later, Richard Nixon offered this war as the new lodestar for American social policy,” he said, noting that for the next five decades, prison became the country’s preferred tool of social management.

Today, the country is considerably less healthy than its peers as a result, as measured by metrics such as the number of Americans living below the poverty line. And although technology advances and globalization are often blamed for the decline, Porter noted that countries such as France, Germany, and Canada have faced the same challenges.

“So when the good jobs went away, and wages stagnated, the bedraggled American safety net just could not hold the line. America’s dead babies, its bloated prisons, its idle men, its single mothers can all be traced to this exceptional fact: Americans chose to let those sinking sink,” he said.

“Why? Because a lot of those people sinking were people of color.”

Ironically, he said, these attitudes have betrayed white Americans as well.

“That part of white America that’s addled by opioids, ravaged by suicide, and despairing of a future is also a victim of a nation that refuses to care,” he said.

There is some hope that change is coming, he said, as the American population is growing more diverse. While three out of four Baby Boomers are white and non-Hispanic, only 55 percent of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 fall into that group. Eventually, Porter said, color lines are going to blur, and that the Black-white divide that has defined racial relationships for hundreds of years will soften.

Porter confessed that he is not very optimistic though.

“Minorities might eventually reshape American attitudes, but I would not discount the political clout of white voters trying to delay their decline from power,” he said.

The problem, he said, is that white voters in rural areas don’t interact with minorities, but they understand that minorities will eventually be moving into their towns, and it scares them.

“Conquering this fear, to my mind, is America’s most immediate challenge. The task of progressive politicians is to construct a public discourse that embraces America’s multiplicity of people,” he said.

“They must convince Americans to invite solidarity across lines of identity.”

To watch Porter’s lecture and Q&A, click here.

Last November, Wines found the image in an 1840 article about the then-new college while he was “systematically” sifting through periodicals at the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He came across an issue of the Catholic newspaper the Truth Teller with a headline “New Catholic College, at Rose Hill, Westchester County, New-York.” The article appeared a year before the institution, which would become Fordham, was founded as St. John’s College. It was also a time when Westchester still held jurisdiction over the area, and when New-York was still hyphenated.

“I think it’s probably the only copy in the world and this was probably included as part of the original fundraising campaign to get the college started,” Wines said. “These are newspapers that are not indexed on Google. You have to actually just go page by page.”

Wines said that historians like himself have to go where the material is. In many cases, Fordham’s history is spread out among several libraries, from O’Hare Special Collections at Fordham’s Walsh Family Library to Columbia University’s Avery Library to the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame.

“The fact is we can’t bring everything to Fordham, so we bring the information and then we tell people where we found the information,” said Wines.

The woodcut print reveals many lost details of the original building, and the accompanying article brings to light information about the building’s interiors as well as the heretofore unknown, if somewhat repetitive, name of the architect: Thomas Thomas (1781-1871), a well-established architect who was also working on St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street in Manhattan.

The new building’s entrance opened onto a central hall with a spiral staircase that swept up to the second floor and a rooftop lantern, providing light and ventilation. A southern room of the house—now the president’s office—was, fittingly, a chapel. Just off the chapel was a working greenhouse. The northern wing served as a refectory. A back porch overlooked a pasture that is now Edwards Parade, and the marble Greek Revival front steps, still in use today, looked out on Martyrs’ Lawn.

From Teacups to a Manor House, Excavating Rose Hill

Gilbert and Wines have spent a good portion of their careers researching Fordham’s history.  Gilbert is the editor of Digging the Bronx: Recent Archeology in the Borough (The Bronx County Historical Society, 2018), which includes a chapter written with Wines titled “Seventeen Years Excavating at Rose Hill Manor.” The book takes a practical look at archeology in the Bronx, including a chapter on the business of archeology to specific cases, as well as case examples of excavations in Van Cortland Park, Riverdale, as well as Rose Hill.

Gilbert said the 70-page chapter on Rose Hill is just an overview of the 17-year excavation. The excavations, which began in 1985, allowed scores of students from history and archeology classes to uncover everything from teacups to religious medals to the foundations of the original buildings, including Rose Hill Manor, which was razed in 1896 to make way for Collins Hall. Much of the material that was excavated fills rooms in Dealy Hall and in the basement of Cunniffe.

“If you look at the college’s history from 1890, the original Manor House was said to have been [George] Washington’s headquarters. That is romantic, but he probably just rode by on a horse,” said Wines, before adding, “We discovered in Washington’s papers that during 1776, a detachment of colonial troops was on campus. They were camped in the orchard. We found him coming back again in 1781.”

Dispelling campus lore is a necessary part of the job, said Gilbert.

“In our business, we’re trying to uncover as much new information as possible about what this place was like. Decades, centuries ago, before the college came here,” Gilbert said. “Ultimately, what we discovered, and what we probably knew subconsciously anyway, is that when local histories are put together, they’re frequently put together very quickly with very little information and that once those narratives form, they become fossilized.”

Staying Power

The drawing of Cunniffe House depicts the early days of an institution whose students would go on to bear witness to a civil war, two world wars, Vietnam, 9/11, as well as the current coronavirus crisis, which, with the recent wholesale shift from face-to-face interaction to online interaction, is unique in Fordham’s history.

The college held classes throughout the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. The 9/11 tragedy caused disruptions, but there was not any notice to vacate campus, said Gilbert. Wines said that campus protests during the Vietnam War are the closest parallel. The upheaval forced the administration to send students home and faculty were instructed to grade them on the basis of work completed for the semester—but this was well before laptops and Zoom allowed for instruction to continue, he said.

While Gilbert and Wines agreed that many romanticize the past, sometimes Fordham’s history can be quite, well, romantic. On reading the 1840 description of today’s Cunniffe House in the Truth Teller article, it’s hard not to be taken in by purple prose, some of which holds to this day.

“It is located in a beautiful situation remote enough from the city to make it in the country, enjoying all the advantages, and yet so near the city as to afford it all the conveniences attainable in town,” reads the text accompanying the image.

The article continues on to delve into the architectural details of the “blue free-stone building,” mentions the new railroad that was being built a short distance from the college, and waxes poetically about how the “river Bronx meanders not far from the college, amongst undulating fields, and magnificent forests.”

When the image of Fordham appeared in the Truth Teller, University founder Archbishop John Hughes was still 13 years away from announcing the construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. For the newspaper’s Catholic readership, the new college represented hope and staying power for the future. One particular phrase in the text accompanying the image, still resonates, particularly now:

“…[I]t will stand a perineal monument of zeal and success to the admiring eye of posterity.”

The park is also home to the white-naped mangabey (Cercocebus lunulatus), a slender, long-limbed primate that was recently elevated to be its own distinct species. And although it is critically endangered, it is doing better than the white-thighed colobus (Colobus vellerosus), which is also a critically endangered species and extremely rare in the park.

Reiko Matsuda Goodwin, Ph.D., a primate conservationist and adjunct professor of anthropology at Fordham, wants to know why.

“In other forests, large-bodied mangabeys are being hunted out. They are the favored food that the hunters go after, so they’re going extinct locally. Here, they’ve somehow managed to survive. What makes them abundant? We don’t have an answer yet,” she said.

In December, Matsuda Goodwin traveled to Comoé along with Sery Gonedelé Bi, Ph.D., assistant professor at Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and Alec Baxt, a New York-based arborist, to conduct a systematic study on the viable population of the white-naped mangabey and the white-thighed colobus. By counting the number of individuals seen on camera and conducting surveys, researchers can estimate the size of their populations in the park.

Working with Juan Lapuente, the head of the Comoé Chimpanzee Conservation Project, the team installed 24 video cameras in the tree canopy at select locations in Comoé. Although Lapuente, who is a Ph.D. student at Universität Würzburg, Germany, has already learned a great deal about the mangabeys from cameras he installed at ground level, little was known about their life in the treetops.

“Mangabeys really have adapted to both terrestrial and arboreal habitats. That may be one reason why they are the first species in mixed-species situations that give a loud call whenever they see humans approaching. They do it before any other primate species. They are really good at being vigilant against predators,” said Matsuda Goodwin.

Underscoring how little is known about white-naped mangabeys, it was just two and a half years ago that researchers elevated them to the level of full species, distinct from the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys), which they’d previously been considered a part of. Since the cameras have been installed, footage has captured them carefully choosing ripe fruit, discarding fruit skins, sniffing scents that other animals appear to have marked, and engaging in various vocal behavior such as “contact calls,” “dispute calls,” and “loud calls” The latter call is called the “Chaku” call and is given by adult males. These calls sound similar but are different from those given by sooty mangabeys.

“When the white-naped mangabey was elevated to its own species, we realized that its populations were so scattered. There are only two populations that we know of in Ghana, and there are only maybe two or three populations in Côte d’Ivoire. The Comoé population is now known as the most important one,” Matsuda Goodwin said.

Matsuda Goodwin, who teaches courses such as Primate Ecology and Conservation, Introduction to Physical Anthropology, and Introduction to Human Variation at Fordham, is planning to return to Côte d’Ivoire in May to resume the field-work, which is supported by the Primate Partnership Fund, Primate Conservation, Inc., the Pro Natura Foundation Japan, Sherrill, Inc., and an anonymous donor.

As part of their visit, Baxt taught two local assistants from the Côte d’Ivoire village of Kakpin how to use professional climbing equipment so they can safely service the cameras when they need new batteries or memory cards.

“Most of the time, the canopy is inaccessible to researchers, so the fact that they’re able to now climb up using secure, modern, nondestructive equipment is really opening up a new window for all sorts of different kinds of canopy research,” Matsuda Goodwin said.

Heather Gautney, Ph.D., felt the “Bern.” And now she wants to share what she learned from it.

In her just-published book, Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement (Verso, 2018), Gautney, an associate professor of sociology at Fordham, detailed what it was like to work with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as he campaigned for the 2016 Democratic party presidential nomination. Gautney had previously worked for Sanders when she was an American Sociological Association Fellow during the 2012-2013 academic year and joined his campaign in 2015 as a researcher.

She described the book as half policy analysis, half op-ed, with a particular emphasis on the lessons the Democratic Party should take from Sanders’ surprisingly strong showing in the primaries and the triumph of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Although Sanders ultimately lost the nomination to Clinton, Gautney said his candidacy exposed what she called the contradictions of the Democratic Party’s platform for the last four decades.

Shifting Attitudes Among Voters

“What his campaign did was expose that at least half of the Democratic Party are really people who identify as progressives or support a progressive agenda, and since he ran, I think we’ve been seeing a real shift toward supporting that agenda,” she said.

As evidence, she pointed to proposals to expand Medicare to all U.S. citizens. Sanders has been promoting the idea for years with little success, but this past year, the plan had 16 co-signers, including Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

To some extent, Gautney said she feels that the fact that Trump won is evidence that the party should reconsider issues that Sanders and Democratic leaders butted heads on, such as trade, free education, and universal healthcare.

A “neoliberal agenda that promotes growth, prosperity for all, the wonders of globalization and consumerism and the high-tech future” has left many people behind and cost Democrats voters in places like Wisconsin, she said.

“There’s been lots of glossy language about the wonders of free trade, and yet this was a huge issue in 2016 for people [who opposed it]in Midwestern states,” she said.

A Revival for Ideas Past

Gautney said she was as surprised as anyone else that Sanders got as far as he did and viewed his popularity with millennials as proof that the time is right to promote his agenda. This would have been true even in the event of a Clinton victory, which Gautney assumed would be the case when she started writing the book. To those who say the notion that free education is a radical idea, she noted that City College of New York, her alma mater, was once tuition-free.

“These are things that in some way or form have existed, so Bernie’s goal has been to say that. We are the wealthiest country on earth, we can achieve these things, and we can take care of our people,” she said.

“We can rebuild the middle class in this country. It’ll be like the middle class that existed in the 1950’s, except this time it’ll be a more diverse middle class, and women and people of color will be included.”

Gautney devoted a chapter to the schisms between the Sanders and Clinton camps that were never fully healed. In another, she elucidates the difference between social movements and elections. She also delved into the outreach efforts that Sanders embarked on after the November election to help him get a better handle on why former Barack Obama voters in battleground states then voted for Trump.

It was sobering, she said, because so many of the promises that Sanders had campaigned on—like more money for social security and stronger support of Medicare and Medicaid—were ones Trump embraced as well, and these voters chose to support Trump. She contends that class has a lot to do with it.

“Over the last three or four decades, a class perspective has increasingly been taken off the table, and one of the things that this 2016 election did was put it firmly back on. I argue that class is really a fundamental organizing principle of this election season, on both the right and left,” she said.

The takeaway of the book should be of interest to partisans on both sides of the aisle, she said.

“I think it’ll be interesting as a sort of historical accounting for this kind of moment, and one that reaches back into the 1970s and then reaches forward to 2020 and maybe even beyond.”

Gautney will discuss her book with Adolph Reed Jr. and Cornel West on May 16 at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. For more details, visit the event website.

In the keynote address for the conference “Hate Speech, Free Speech, A Workshop on the Politics of Language on College Campuses,” David Cole, National Legal Director of the ACLU, laid out three rationales for banning offensive speech, and then presented three reasons why the idea is counterproductive and dangerous.

College campuses are particularly important places to address the subject, he said, because a 2015 Pew Charitable Trust poll found that 40 percent of millennials support government suppression of speech.

“Those who care about maintaining a robust principle of freedom of expression on college campuses need to address our arguments principally to progressives, because I think that’s where the challenge to free speech on college campuses, at this particular moment, is coming from,” Cole said.

Arguments For and Against

His arguments against restricting speech on campus were that free speech is critical to the college experience because it promotes critical inquiry, and since students will be leaders of tomorrow, they will determine what free speech looks like in the future. Further, restricting speech is counterproductive, he said, because it elevates the same speech it seeks to suppress.

On the other hand, Cole said a case can be made for restricting speech, because some forms of speech undermine equality and enable speakers to intimidate others into silence. Some speech is also just inflammatory and not well thought out, and thus contributes nothing of value to society.

Of the first argument against restricting it, Cole said that universities have in recent years taken on a greater role as dialogue centers, because outside of campus, Americans are retreating to “safe spaces” organized by class, race, and ideology, and rarely encounter those they disagree with.

“The whole notion of diversity is we are stronger as an educational institution if we can bring different voices together and have them confront each other and learn from those different experiences. Because colleges are selective, they can actually do that,” he said.

Unintended Consequences

Stifling free expression has also long had unintended consequences, he said. In the 1990s, for instance, Cole defended the Old Glory condom company when it was denied a trademark for its prophylactics with American flags on them because the trademark office considered it offensive. As long as the company was losing its free-speech battle in court, it earned tremendous free publicity. But when it finally won, the attention evaporated and the company folded.

“Suppressing is frequently counterproductive. Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter know this, and they want to be suppressed,” he said. “They want to have the authorities or the students stop them from speaking, because that gives them a platform that they otherwise would not have.”

Cole was sympathetic to the notion that by protecting offensive speech, the First Amendment inadvertently promotes inequality, but he said that misses the point that other sections of the Bill of the Rights do the same. The right to private property, for example, allows those who can afford it to profit from it mightily, while the right to choose where you educate children means the rich can support private schools and advocate policies that deprive public ones.

The cost of sacrificing free expression is much higher though, and one only need look back to times when the U.S. did regulate speech from the 1920s through the 1970s. At the time, the governments’ rationale for suppressing speech that advocated violence or criminal conduct was that people could be harmed. It was a reasonable assumption, Cole said, but one that the government routinely took too far and abused.

“Who was targeted when the government had the power to target speech that advocated criminal conduct or violence? It was anarchists, communists, and civil rights activists—those who were challenging the majority,” he said.

When Censorship Makes Sense

Banning speech simply because it’s inflammatory and offensive actually makes the most sense in an academic setting, Cole said, where respectful dialogue is key. He made a distinction between a speaker who espouses ideas that could be offensive but does so in a respectful manner—Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), for example—and one who’s nothing more than a provocateur, he said, like Yiannopoulos.

He said this sort of censorship should not be applied outside of the campus, however, nor should it be applied to student-organized events.

“Free speech is critical to the maintenance of democracy. What the First Amendment protects is civil society, which is an absolutely essential ingredient in a liberal democracy,” he said.

“It’s why when authoritarian figures take power, they target [the press]for suppression.”

Workshop sessions at the conference included “Keywords” and “Situations on the Ground.” Lane Green, language columnist for The Economist, delivered an afternoon keynote address. The event was sponsored in part by Fordham’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Fordham Dean’s Fund.

But when it comes to acceptance of sexual preference, it’s much, much further away. In Engabao, being gay is ok. In Guayaquil and in much of the rest of the country, it is not.

A Situation Reversed

For O. Hugo Benavides, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology, this is a source of great interest. In most countries, members of the LGTBQ community are more accepted in cities than they are in rural areas. In Ecuador—one of the most homophobic countries in the world, says Benavides—the situation is reversed. But why?

One clue may lie deep in the past, long before Spanish colonizers arrived.

According to historical writings, when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, they encountered Enchaquirados—men and boys who wore ritualistic, high-status beads and engaged in same-sex relations with the male leaders of the community. The Spaniards looked down on them, but the Enchaquirados responded that they were chosen for the role, which they believed expressed a higher social status.

Fast forward to present-day Engabao. Since the 1990s, gay men there have been referring to themselves as Enchaquirados, said Benavides.

“The gay community did a lot of what we would call political work in claiming this historical identity,” said Benavides. “They said, ‘We shouldn’t be discriminated against because we were actually here before the Spaniards arrived. There’s a heritage that’s historical, but it’s a sexual heritage as well.’”

One document that modern-day Enchaquirados have relied on to conduct workshops on the subject is “The Representation of Guayaquil’s Sexual Past: Historicizing the Enchaquirado.” Benavides, who grew up just 90 minutes away from Engabao, wrote it and, in 2002, got it published in the Journal of Latin American Anthropology .

An Ethnographic Exploration

This past summer, Benavides returned for a three-week-long ethnographic exploration of the village. His visit was part of larger project on pre-Hispanic sexuality being spearheaded by the anthropology department at the Jesuit University Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE) in Quito.

His colleague and research partner, Maria Fernanda Ugalde, Ph.D., professor and chair of anthropology at PUCE, has written extensively on two-thousand-year-old figurines from the region. She found male/female and female/female combinations, and figurines sporting large hips and breasts that are dressed in male attire.

“You have all these combinations that have been put aside, or interpreted in a particular heterosexist way,” he said. “We’re trying to look at those not as exceptional, but rather as normative.”

And Engabao is not unique. “All of these small fishing villages in the central and southern Ecuadorian coast have very similar elements, structures, or situations,” he said.

Benavides said he’s working to fund a larger ethnographic project to take place in the summer or the fall. Oddly enough, he found the biggest challenge in last summer’s research was simply trying to convince Engabao residents that their Enchaquirado identity was a unique phenomenon.

“They really see themselves and their identity as quite normal,” he said. “We’d ask them, ‘What does it mean to be from Engabao?’ and they’d answer like, ‘We live here, and we fish.'”

Benavides feels that the story of how Engabao’s tolerance came to be is an important piece of anthropological history for Ecuadorian culture.

“Professor Ugalde and I see the work we’re doing as important in trying to make the country, as a whole, more sensitive to both its historical and contemporary gender and sexual diversity,” he said.

Q. What inspired your interest in the public expression of emotion?

 I got interested in public emotions through those informal shrines on the streets of my city neighborhoods that began in the late 20th century. All over the city but across the country too, people would leave candles and flowers for someone who had died and I said to myself, “This is something different, something important.” The first time historically that the country did this for a public person was after JFK’s assassination, a highly mediatized event where Dealey Plaza became a place where people wanted to go to remember and to mourn. Many years later, was the death of Princess Diana. Kensington Palace was covered with flowers and people came from all over the world. And again, in the days after 9/11, the posting of photos of the “missing” all over Grand Central and Penn Station. That this grew and expanded as a cultural practice, both locally and on the media, interested me a great deal.

Q. Your book ties emotional change to contemporary performance theory. How so?

Today, many of us dramatize our connection to a death or a tragedy. There’s something different about how we express our emotions—we do this in a public way, take and post photos or videos. It’s new. I grew up in the fifties and there was a formality and restraint to things you did if someone died, right? Even if it was a tragic death.

In short, I think that contemporary life is making actors of all of us. But not in a false, phony sense; rather, in the sense that we want to act things out that we know with conviction and that we feel strongly. This doesn’t mean that we’re overly scripted in what we do. It means that we want to dramatize things and express what we feel with other people in public places in much the same way that actors do; it’s an argument I make in this book.

Q. Don’t some theorists question whether that is real emotion?

I don’t go there in this book, but I do engage my students in those kind of questions. Whether these are real emotions or not, I see an awful lot of people talking today about being “authentic” and pursuing authentic lives and I think this indicates something important about culture and emotion today. For example, I see an authenticity in my students when they talk about the primacy of emotions in their lives. And that impresses me. As a sociologist, I have to listen to them, to pay attention to what they and other people tell me about the meaning of emotions today.

 Q. What is the main argument of your book?

Well, my argument is about the identity of the modern self in history and how many things about being a person have changed today. Whether we think about the person in the 16th century, or the 18th, or the 21st, we meet different kinds of persons with different kinds of experiences and ideas about what a person is, what feelings mean, and so forth.

To sum up: we are cultural and collective beings whose emotions are shaped by the lives we live with others. So my book’s about the changing emotional cultures of the modern and postmodern age. Some of these changes have deep roots in our past, like individualism and Romanticism. Other changes have to do with the economies and digital technologies of today and how these, too, are changing us.

For the productive oriented, summertime represents a chance to sock away a few credits by taking summer courses, many of which consist of a four- to five-week session.

While the condensed courses may be intense, they’re also pretty convenient, said Tara E. Czechowski, PhD, dean of Fordham’s summertime session. Czechowski said that the selections, offered in two summer sessions, accommodate a variety of summertime schedules.

Many of the classes also fulfill course requirements, but professors tend to get a little more creative during the summer, said Czechowski.

One core course requirement for seniors on eloquentia perfecta will focus on selfie culture. The course, Dilemmas of the Modern Self, is being taught sociology professor Micki McGee, PhD.

“The course looks deeply into how we see ourselves today and to what extent this new media changes our understanding of ourselves,” said McGee. “We’ll look at ideas, like Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am,’ and discuss whether that could be ‘I tweet therefore I am?’”

McGee said the course would look at how issues surrounding social media can take on serious personal and moral dimensions.

“Selfie culture includes the way we represent ourselves in all kinds of media—not just the images,” said McGee. “But at the heart are underlying issues of ‘How do you perceive yourself and what sort of self do you want to be?’”

McGee’s course is culturally timely, but several other course offerings will be pegged to events expected to unfold in the news, like political science professor Robert Hume’s Judicial Politics: SCOTUS Watch. The course, scheduled for June, is designed to coincide with the time the Supreme Court typically makes its landmark decisions.

Business professor Mark Conrad, PhD, will teach Business and Ethics of Sports, which he said will likely coincide with Tom Brady’s “deflategate” appeal. It will also take place just before Brazil Summer Olympics and the potential fallout of doping accusations lodged against several athletes expected to attend.

But the course’s focus extends well beyond players inside the stadium to the stadium itself, he said.

“We’ll look at the ethics of sustainability in stadium construction, as well as naming rights deals,” said Conrad.

Conrad said he plans to include guest speakers in person and on Skype to tackle subjects that range from labor injuries and concussions to gambling and fantasy sports.

On the communications side of sports will be Mike Plugh, PhD, who will survey sports reporting and writing, advertising, and public relations. The hybrid course, Sports Communication, takes place online as well as in class.

On the international front, Hamid Al-Bayati, PhD, who served as Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations from 2006-2013, will return this summer as an adjunct professor to teach United Nations and Political Leadership.

Fordham is offering two courses on humanitarianism to be taught by Alexander van Tulleken, MD, of Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs. The course offered during the first summer session will examine secular and faith-based NGOs based in New York City and the United Nations, and how they respond to crises that include famine, genocide, and displacement. The second session’s course will focus on global health and how those same agencies respond to epidemic disease and food security.

In the realm of the arts, English professor Rebecca Sanchez, PhD, will discuss modernist writers from the turn of the last century to the end of World War II, with a particular focus on American expressionism, industrialization, and the “fetishization of difficulty.”

And combining art and politics, political science professor Nicholas Tampio will bring back his popular summertime session on Political Theory in Popular Culture, which threads together scholarship and superheroes.

“I’m interested in the political aesthetics that the X-Men can help us see,” Tampio said.