“It was like a monastery,” Connolly joked. “It was very different from today. At the time, it was a mostly commuter school and it was still all male”—women didn’t arrive in a big way until his senior year, with the fall 1964 opening of Fordham’s Thomas More College for women.

From the start, Connolly and his classmates were determined to enliven the atmosphere. He and Donald Ross, FCRH ’65, his lifelong friend from the Bronx, began organizing concerts on the weekends. They booked popular performers of the day, including Ray Charles, the Clancy Brothers, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul, and Mary.

The concerts were a big hit in the community, and they became a profitable business venture for the Class of 1965.

Next, Connolly and his friends tackled the matter of football. The sport had a rich history at Fordham but had been discontinued due to financial concerns in 1954. So the students spearheaded a campaign to bring it back. They enlisted the support of Fordham College Dean George McMahon, S.J., who in September 1964 helped win the University leadership’s approval to restart the sport.

‘The Campus Was Abuzz’

David Langdon, FCRH ’65, volunteered to serve as coach, and the students quickly set to work building the team. They hosted tryouts and pooled their own money, including funds raised from the concerts, to purchase uniforms, equipment, and insurance.

On November 7, 1964, Fordham’s newly formed club football team beat New York University, 20-14, before a crowd of 13,200 fans at Coffey Field. Jim Lansing, FCRH ’43, the former All-American at Fordham and owner of a local sporting goods store, was soon after hired as coach, and three years later, Fordham boasted the top club team in the country. By 1970, football was a varsity sport at Fordham once again.

“It was a heavenly moment. The campus was abuzz,” Connolly said of the 1964 victory against NYU.

He and his friends found other ways to perk up the local social scene while honing their entrepreneurial skills. For example, he and Ross partnered with their fellow Fordham Prep grad Mario Gabelli, a 1965 graduate of the Fordham business school that now bears his name, to form JMD Enterprises, a company they established to host dances off campus. Connolly said the undertaking was a great success and that the money he earned from the venture made it possible for him to spend a summer in Europe—a journey that turned out to be life-changing.

“I decided that I was definitely going to apply to go to Oxford after college and, at the end of those two years at Oxford, I met the woman who became my wife,” he said. “So I’m grateful to Mario because he was the business genius among us!”

A Tribute to Three ‘Brilliant’ Fordham Mentors

As an undergraduate, Connolly was devoted to the campus community in many ways—through his roles on student government, as an athlete on the tennis team, and as a member the Fordham Glee Club. He was also a dedicated student, building the pillars for his future career in academia.

Though he was an English major, Connolly gravitated toward philosophy and medieval history, areas he later specialized in as a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, where he taught and served as an administrator for more than 40 years.

So influential were his Fordham professors in inspiring his interest in the Middle Ages that he dedicated his 2014 book, Living Without Why: Meister Eckhart’s Critique of the Medieval Concept of Will (Oxford University Press), to three of them.

“Norris Clarke, S.J., Robert O’Connell, S.J.—both philosophers—and Jeremiah O’Sullivan, a medieval historian, were among my very best teachers ever,” he said. “They were brilliant lecturers, and expert at engaging our interest in their respective and fascinating subject matters.”

Connolly said he knew nothing about the Middle Ages before taking O’Sullivan’s course as a sophomore, and he was “hooked” in the first half hour. He still has his notes from that class.

“Meister Eckhart said in one of his sermons: If the only prayer you ever said was ‘thank you,’ it would suffice. I inscribed it on the same page as my dedication in the book.”

After graduating from Fordham summa cum laude, Connolly earned a master’s in philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University. While living abroad, he traveled around Europe and met his wife, Marianna, while visiting Maria Laach Abbey in Germany. They eventually had their wedding there, and made their home in Massachusetts. The couple have two children and three grandchildren.

Connolly also pursued graduate studies at Princeton University and earned a doctorate at Harvard University. In addition to teaching at Smith, he served as the college’s first provost and dean of faculty, and as acting president during the 2001–2002 academic year. He returned to full-time teaching as the Sophia Smith Professor of Philosophy before he retired in 2014.

Connolly has kept in touch with many of his friends from Fordham and looks forward to reminiscing about the good times they shared together at the upcoming Jubilee weekend, June 3 to 5. It will be the eighth or ninth Fordham Jubilee he has attended—he’s stopped counting—and he encourages his classmates and other Golden Rams to join the celebration. “I think we had quite an extraordinary class,” he said. “Don’t waste an opportunity. It’s a very special experience.”

Among the festivities, Connolly is eager to attend Friday night’s dinner and breakfast on Saturday, and to hear from Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, whose Jubilee welcome address Connolly expects will be a “valedictory” of sorts. Connolly’s also looking forward to hearing more about Fordham’s future with Tania Tetlow, whose tenure as president begins on July 1.

“[Father McShane is] finishing his 19 years, and he’s had a great run. I’m looking forward to hearing his point of view [about the University’s future]. With the first woman president—and first layperson—this is a very exciting time for Fordham.”

Fordham Five (Plus One)

What are you most passionate about?
I am most passionate about race, racism, and the Civil War in this country that never ended.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
I’m going to appeal to 14th-century philosopher Meister Eckhart. He told his listeners to live without “why.” Do the good, but don’t do it in order to be rewarded in any way. That’s the merchant mentality. You do something good in the hope of being rewarded and in particular, being rewarded by God, by getting to heaven or something. He said that’s the wrong attitude. The right way to do it is to do the right thing because it’s right. My book is built around that. It’s called Living Without Why: Meister Eckhart’s Critique of the Medieval Concept of Will.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
I think it has to be either the Rose Hill campus or the Cloisters. My favorite place in the world is home.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you, and tell us why.
I have probably read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings five times. It has this medieval flavor to it though it’s not set in the Middle Ages. He’s a masterful narrator and gives such loving attention to the natural world. There is something profound in the story about our inability as human beings to firmly establish a just society. The central character says, “Sometimes some people have to give things up so that others can live in peace.” That sums up a lot of what’s going on in the book, which is this heroic, epic quest.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
That’s impossible to answer! There are so many. Certainly my classmates Donald Ross, David Langdon, and Peter Carter. My professors, philosophers Norris Clarke, S.J., Robert O’Connell, S.J., and medieval historian Jeremiah O’Sullivan. George McMahon, S.J., who was the dean in my last three years at the college, also had a major impact on my life, along with Father [Vincent] O’Keefe, S.J. who became president at the start of our junior year.

What are you optimistic about?
That’s a hard one, at this moment with COVID and the incredible Ukraine disaster. I like to believe, along with Martin Luther King Jr., that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. Right at the moment, it doesn’t look like it’s doing that. But I suppose I’m taking the longer view and I would say sooner or later, we’ll regain our sanity as a nation. That’s my hope, anyway.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Claire Curry.

After virtual gatherings in 2020 and 2021, Jubilee 2022 will be held in person on the Rose Hill campus from June 3 to 5. The alumni relations office anticipates welcoming its largest group of Jubilarians ever. Learn more and register today.

Mary Ellen Ross, Joanne Grossi, Cheryl Palmer Normile, and Susan Barrera Fay—a Fordham photographer brought them together on graduation day as representatives of their “pioneer class” of 210 graduates, the “first girls to invade the male environs of Rose Hill en masse,” as a University press release put it at the time.

They weren’t the first women to attend Fordham. Women had been earning Fordham degrees in law, education, social service, and other fields for nearly five decades. But they helped initiate a tremendous cultural shift at the University, one that culminated a decade later, when TMC graduated its last class and Fordham College at Rose Hill began accepting women. They challenged themselves and everyone around them—including skeptical faculty and students at the all-male Fordham College—to see beyond boundaries of expectations for women.

Their undergraduate days were also indelibly marked by social unrest—the civil rights and burgeoning women’s liberation movements, political assassinations, race riots, and anti-war protests that shocked and roiled the country.

“It really is hard to have perspective in the moment,” Normile said of being in the first class of TMC amid the “tumult” of the times. “But I think as women, we did have a sense that we were breaking some ground.”

Grossi expressed a similar sentiment. “When we got there,” she said, “we knew it was a big deal.”

‘She’s Done Well, She Deserves to Go’

Fay first visited Rose Hill for a debate workshop as a high school sophomore. “I thought it was a beautiful campus,” she said. So when she learned that Fordham was opening a college for women, she leapt at the opportunity. Admission was highly selective. In a letter welcoming the first incoming class to the University, Vincent T. O’Keefe, S.J., president of Fordham from 1963 to 1965, admitted, “[W]e don’t even know whether to call you freshmen or freshwomen.” But he praised their academic records: “Your College Board scores are collectively above average.”

Academic requirements were no problem for Fay, but finances were another issue. As the oldest of five children (the youngest was born while she was at Fordham), she wasn’t sure she would go to college at all. “My father said, ‘Maybe you should go to secretarial school, so when you get married and have children, you’ll have something to fall back on if you need it,’” Fay recalled. Not that he was unsupportive, she said, just worried about providing for the rest of the family. “And it was my mother, who had not gone to college, who put her foot down and said, ‘She’s done well, she deserves to go,’” Fay said.

Like Fay, Ross was already familiar with Fordham. She grew up on Perry Avenue in the Bronx, a 15-minute walk from campus, where her brother, Donald, was a senior and the student government president. “We were very different,” he said of his sister. “I was a glad-hander, and she was not, but she was very well organized.” Grossi remembers Ross as warm and well liked, and thinks her proximity to power, as it were, might also explain why she was elected TMC student government president. “There was a lot of, ‘Can you ask Don about it?’ or ‘Who do we see?’” Grossi recalled with a laugh. But the women were often on their own, and Ross felt the challenge of being first. “There was nobody to look up to,” she told the Fordham press office in her senior year. “We had to solve our own problems.”

‘They Were Not Ready for Us’

Most of the women were commuter students, as there were no campus residences for women until fall 1967. Grossi traveled from Jersey City, New Jersey; Normile from Mount Vernon, New York; and Fay from Queens. Ross walked to campus. Grossi’s and Normile’s parents eventually let them live in nearby apartments, both for the experience and, in Grossi’s case, because her science labs were early in the morning.

Some students lived in the Susan Devlin Residence, a Bronx boarding house for working women that was run by Catholic nuns and was so crowded, Grossi said, that some residents had to climb over other beds to get to their own.

“They got us admitted and got us seats in classrooms, but they were not ready for us,” she said, recalling a dearth of ladies’ rooms and places for the women to gather on campus. Funny and outgoing, she succeeded Ross as TMC student government president. She said the administration tried to keep women in separate classes at first, but “in a year or two, we took classes with the men. And I think most of the guys changed their minds and got used to us.”

In a history class her first year, Fay was the only woman among about 50 students, she said. She found the last seat, in the back, where she hoped to go unnoticed. No such luck. Her future husband, John Fay, FCRH ’68, came in late and stood behind her, stealing glances at her name on her notebook. “The attempt to keep classes separate broke down quickly,” said Fay, whose facility with Spanish—her father was from Ecuador—landed her in advanced Spanish literature instead of an intro, girls-only section. “I hadn’t had boys in class since the third grade, so it was a bit of an adjustment.” She added with a laugh, “As soon as we got to higher-level classes, they weren’t going to have [separate sections of]Chaucer for boys and for girls.”

Normile attended an all-girls Catholic high school and never doubted that she would go to college. She remembers her guilt at skipping class with a friend one day to visit the New York Botanical Garden. “I did it, but it just bothered me,” Normile said of their little adventure, “because I knew the tuition was a lot for my parents.”

‘Beyond Your Own Little World’

The first class of TMC was graduating just as protests against the Vietnam War were dividing campuses, including Fordham’s, where military recruitment became an increasingly contentious issue. “People didn’t want recruiters on campus,” Grossi recalled. “It was a difficult time.” Fay’s boyfriend (later husband) joined the ROTC because he figured it was better to go into the Army as an officer than to be drafted. “It was a looming reality,” Fay said of the war. Her husband was not deployed to Vietnam, but many Fordham alumni were: 23 of them were killed, including four members of the Class of ’68, one of whom, Staff Sgt. Robert Murray, FCRH ’68, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Normile recalled it as “a tense time, a disturbing time. But I think that kind of disturbance makes you think beyond your own little world,” she said, adding that a Jesuit education helped provide “a bigger balance” because it “encourages questioning, thinking, and exploring, and students were doing that on a much bigger level.”

Fay had an experience that took her out of her familiar world when she joined two mission trips to a sugar mill town in Mexico during the summers after her sophomore and junior years. She taught English classes there and lived in the parish rectory.

“It was an eye-opening experience for many of us, these privileged American kids going down to this little community where children had bloated stomachs and were walking around barefoot,” she said of the trips, which grew into the University’s Global Outreach program. “I think my attitude toward political and economic issues was shaped in part by seeing how people struggled to survive in Mexico,” she said, adding, “I also discovered I knew how to teach.”

Life After Thomas More

Fay and her husband were married in the University Church the year after graduation, and following moves to Hawaii, Chicago, North Carolina, and Texas, they eventually settled in Reston, Virginia, where they raised two children. She earned a doctorate in English from George Washington University and taught at Marymount University for 31 years before retiring in 2011.

Grossi majored in biology but also had a knack for computer programming. She worked in data processing at Con Edison and then at Chase Manhattan Bank, but both jobs proved unfulfilling, and the constant stress led to gastrointestinal troubles. The only thing that helped was visiting a chiropractor. “Even though people thought they were quacks, it worked for me,” said Grossi, who was so impressed she started chiropractic school herself in 1973 and became a practitioner.  She retired on full disability in 1992 after being diagnosed with Lyme disease and lupus. “It’s very difficult, when you’re still in your early 40s, not to have a profession anymore,” Grossi said. “What do you do?” Volunteer work with the local YWCA is one thing that has kept her engaged.

Ross earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Syracuse University and was a professor of psychology and women’s studies for 30 years at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where she found her niche.

Donald Ross remembers when he learned just how much of a difference his sister had made in the lives of her students. He was in Anchorage, Alaska, working on a juvenile justice project, and the administrator of a prison facility there had a St. Olaf mug on her desk. He asked her about it. She was an alumna, and she had known his sister. The woman began to cry when he told her that Mary Ellen had died, from Alzheimer’s, at age 66. “She said, ‘Your sister was so inspirational to all of the young women there, and treated us so well,’” he recalled.

Normile pursued a journalism career, which led to her becoming, she believes, the first female speechwriter on the staff of the secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Being a groundbreaking woman in the federal government in the 1970s meant facing sexist attitudes, despite holding a master’s degree from American University, Normile said. She left the USDA in 1981, got married, and later spent two years working on the Democratic Study Group of the U.S. House of Representatives before taking time off to raise two daughters and care for her parents. She returned to the USDA as a speechwriter in 1992, retiring in 2015. Her husband, Michael, died that same year.

Looking back, she attributes her decision to become a writer in part to William Grimaldi, S.J., a Fordham classics professor who encouraged her to go to grad school.  “It was because of him that I came to D.C.,” she said.

Fay was also friends with Father Grimaldi—he presided at her wedding and baptized her children. Years later, when he was visiting the Fays at their home, they fell into conversation about the impact of women at Fordham. They reminisced about those days when everyone was navigating unfamiliar waters, students and Jesuits alike.

“He had thought it was not a very good idea” at the time, Fay said, “but over the years, he realized it was the best thing that happened to Fordham.”

—Julie Bourbon is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C.