But like AI, the technology has raised ethical concerns. If used improperly, it could cause harm or violate a patient’s privacy.

Fordham researcher Laura Specker Sullivan, Ph.D., was awarded a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in August to assess the usefulness of ethics guidelines currently geared toward neurotechnology researchers.

“Neurotechnology is this really rapidly growing area of science and technology. There’s a lot of interest in it, and there’s a lot of money in it, so it’s not surprising that there are a lot of ethicists thinking about how we should do it and what direction it should go in,” said Specker Sullivan, an associate professor of philosophy who helped to write some of the guidelines herself. Her research project involves bringing researchers and ethicists together to see how they’re being used.

“Unless we connect ethicists with the people doing that scientific and technological advancement, it’s not going to have any effect. And we are going to have a technological future that we don’t have control over.” 

Titled “Principles to Practice: Ethical Guidance for Neurotechnology Researchers,” Specker Sullivan’s three-year project will be conducted with Anna Wexler, Ph.D. assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennslyvania.

A Growing Field

The field of neurotechnology–which involves creating and using technology that impacts the brain and generates data from it—is expanding rapidly. According to the Harvard Business Review, the global market for neurotech is growing at an annual rate of 12% and is expected to reach $21 billion by 2026. 

The technology being developed varies from things like a computer interface that can detect (and potentially even prevent) a potential seizure to implants that stimulate parts of the brain to affect mood and cognition.

Over the past few years, Specker Sullivan and Wexler helped create some of the first guidelines for researchers, but Specker Sullivan realized that there was no meaningful follow-up to see if researchers working in neurotechnology were aware of them, reading them, or finding them useful.

Connecting Ethicists with Researchers

As part of the research, they’ll be attending neurotechnology conferences and hosting roundtables that bring ethicists and neurotechnology researchers together”.

“If we find out that researchers are not using ethics guidance for X, Y, and Z reasons, we really want ethicists to know about those reasons,” she said. “We want other researchers to reflect on that and hopefully work to decrease that gap.”

Potential Pitfalls

Privacy is one of the project’s biggest concerns.

“Companies are already getting profiles of what we’re looking at on the internet. Imagine if they could do that with the actual electrical impulses that are coming from your brain. There are going to be intimate things that you would maybe never say to anyone,” she said.

Safety is another concern. The brain is so complex that if a treatment targets one specific symptom, it’s possible that there can be a cascade of effects that are not always anticipated. 

Specker Sullivan cited deep brain stimulation, which is being used to treat Parkinson’s Disease, as a good example. The goal is to reduce tremors and allow patients to perform motor tasks. The treatment, however, can also lead to personality and mood changes.

Specker Sullivan is optimistic that ethics guidelines can be useful for researchers in determining whether neurotechnology is good for people.

“If we’re just focusing on physical benefit, we might be thinking about one kind of definition of “good,” but what about other definitions of well-being?” she said.

“Philosophers bring the ability to ask incisive questions, but also an understanding of the broad range of possibilities for how we define ethical concepts, like good or bad or right or wrong.”

This year’s team features Fordham College at Rose Hill juniors Erika Carmody and Frank Tarul, Fordham College at Rose Hill seniors Kerry Soropoulos and Shree Talluri, and Fordham College at Lincoln Center juniors Monique Cauley and Yeenon Yu.

Because they won all four rounds of the competition on Dec. 3, they have been invited to join the top 36 teams in the country at the APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championships, which will take place in March in Portland, Oregon. 

They’re the first Fordham team to do so, and Steven Swartzer, Ph.D., associate director for academic programs and strategic initiatives at Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education, credited the work the students had done in Ethics in Action, a class he teaches that was created last year. The students were also singularly focused on parsing the possible scenarios that would be presented to them by a panel of three judges.

“Not only did we have our three-hour discussions in class, but I know that especially in the weeks leading up to the competition, they were having team meetings outside of those as well,” he said. 

“They were just a dedicated group of students who were really engaged and thoughtful, and everything just clicked at the right time.”

Although the students are given 15 cases to study when the semester begins, only eight are presented to them to discuss at the competition. This year’s cases included ones examining whether the government or oil companies should be held responsible for monitoring unused wells, what age young adults should be to make medical decisions without their parents’ consent, and whether the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is permissible when it might cause harm to animals.

Swartzer said that although the format of the ethics bowl is similar to debate, in that one team makes its case and the other team comments on that team’s analysis, the goal is actually to work together to address an issue, not just poke holes in the other team’s opinion. To do that, they need to show an empathetic understanding of other perspectives. 

“They really are encouraged in their presentations and their analysis to explain why somebody might come to a different conclusion, and then engage with that alternative understanding, to try to get those people on board, or to show why those alternatives don’t ultimately work,” he said.

“Ultimately, they’re not just supposed to do a caricature of those opposing views, or create a straw man, but get at why someone who is reasonable and thoughtful might come to a different opinion about this, and then share how we can address those different opinions.”

“One of the greatest aspects of this experience for students is that they are required to take both sides of an issue. It teaches them how to not only defend a particular position that they have, but also to modify it and take the perspective of those who may have a very different understanding of the issue,” said Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D., Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics, psychology professor, and director of several Fordham organizations. “It also moves us toward a more inclusive form of citizenship, which we need right now in this time of polarization.” 

Navigating ‘Thorny Ethical Issues’

For more than two decades, college students across the U.S. have competed in the national bowl and debated moral dilemmas. 

“It’s really important to get people together to talk through these sorts of conflicts,” said Steven Swartzer, Ph.D., coach and advisor for Fordham’s team and associate director for academic programs and strategic initiatives at Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education. “If you have people come together who are willing to try to figure out how to listen empathetically and see what’s driving the ideas of the other person, I think we can make a lot of progress when it comes to thorny ethical issues.” 

This semester, Swartzer formed a team of six students from Fordham College at Rose Hill, Fordham College at Lincoln Center, and the Gabelli School of Business. They met weekly on Zoom and studied 15 case studies that were provided in advance of the competition. Among the debate topics were the moral justification behind acts of political violence, including this past summer’s protests over the murder of George Floyd, and whether or not Harry Potter fans who have rejected J.K. Rowling’s controversial tweets about the transgender community should also reject her work. 

The team prepared with mock presentations, commentaries, and Q&A sessions, with Swartzer acting as judge. On game day, they wore Fordham maroon to the competition. 

In addition to the normal challenges of working remotely as a team, the group had to overcome some unique obstacles.

Victoria Munoz, a senior accounting major at the Gabelli School of Business and a student in the Accelerated BA/MA in Ethics and Society program, competed two hours ahead of her teammates. She logged in from El Paso, Texas, where the competition start time was 6 a.m., while her three teammates on the East Coast settled in at their computers at 8 a.m. Every time she entered or left a Zoom breakout room, there was also a slight time delay due to technical glitches on Munoz’s end. 

“We only had three minutes to prepare [our statement]. So instead of three minutes, I had two minutes and 30 seconds,” Munoz said. “And for the Q&A section, you only got a 30-second conference period, but our team wouldn’t even take it because by the time I’d get in, we’d have to come out. That was a disadvantage for sure.” 

Debating Dementia and Housing Evictions Amid COVID-19

In their first round against Yale, Munoz and her teammates debated the ethics behind concealing medication in food for dementia patients who were no longer lucid. They argued it was unethical, and won their case. 

“Upholding a patient’s dignity is sometimes put on the back-burner with our healthcare system, because everyone’s so overworked and rushing. So we said that it was understandable that a healthcare worker would want to conceal the medication, but ultimately, that wasn’t the most ethical thing to do,” Munoz said. 

“If we want to be completely ethical, we would have to devote time into restructuring our healthcare system to allow for each patient to have the time needed.” 

Another case considered the morality of housing evictions in a pandemic. Jada Heredia, a junior political science and philosophy major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, argued that evictions shouldn’t occur during a pandemic because they would increase the danger of viral transmission to the local community. There were other factors to consider as well: What about landlords losing income? Is the relationship between landlords and tenants fundamentally exploitative? Should people have to pay for shelter? How can society reorganize the housing system to make it non-exploitative, yet meet everyone’s basic human needs? 

“There is no such thing as a solitary issue,” said Heredia, who plans to work in the legal profession. “Every case where there’s an ethical dilemma always relates to a greater system; set of values; institution; or network of causes, effects, and impacts on people that requires consideration as well.”

The team placed 13th out of 20 teams, winning against one of two teams from Yale University, losing to the United States Military Academy at West Point and Boston College, and tying with University of Maryland, College Park. 

“This competition made me realize that every single industry will [relate to]ethics,” said Munoz, who plans on becoming a certified accountant and will advise companies on how their accounting processes can be more ethical as an intern at Deloitte next summer. 

“It’s always been true, and it’s growing to be even more true now.”

With just 5% of the world’s people but more than 20% of its prison and jail inmates, the United States clearly has an incarceration problem—and experts say it will take far more than federal legislation to truly fix it.

“Mass incarceration is not just a huge policy failure. It’s a humanity failure,” says John Pfaff, Ph.D., a professor at Fordham Law School and author of Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform (Basic Books, 2017).

Pfaff has shifted the debate about criminal justice reform by challenging the standard story about the runaway growth of the U.S. prison population since the early 1970s. The primary cause, he argues, is not the war on drugs and the proliferation of nonviolent offenders in prison but the unchecked power of local prosecutors and how we respond to violent crime.

Part of the solution is to give prosecutors incentives and tools to take a less punitive approach, Pfaff says. He has also called for more public consideration of the prison system’s impact on people and communities. “We spend $50 billion a year on running the prison system,” he says. “But we can’t tell you what we’re really spending in terms of the actual human costs.”

In prison, people contract diseases like HIV and tuberculosis at a rate 10 to 100 times higher than outside the prison system, he says. They suffer physical and sexual abuse, develop mental health problems, and have a hard time earning enough money when they’re released. Their families earn less and suffer from mental health trauma as well, and their children face a greater risk of going to prison. “And despite doing this for 40 years,” he says, “we’ve just never estimated those costs, and I think we haven’t measured them, because at a very real level, we don’t care.”

A change in attitudes is needed, he says. “How do you get people who aren’t in the prison system to care about those who are? Until we make that move, we’re going to really struggle to not be the world’s largest jailer.”

Prevention Before Incarceration

Like Pfaff, Anthony Bradley, Ph.D., GSAS ’13, decries overly punitive approaches to criminal justice, and points to a host of additional causes of mass incarceration: class, poverty, race, family breakdown, and mental illness.

In his book Ending Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration: Hope from Civil Society (Cambridge University Press, 2018), he argues for taking a comprehensive, long-term approach to safeguarding the well-being of people who are at a higher risk of getting in trouble with the law. Everyone can help in this effort, he says. “This is largely an issue about who we decide has human dignity and who does not.”

During a lecture at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus last November, he explained that the book had its beginnings in a class he took while earning a master’s degree in ethics and society at Fordham. He was “blown away,” he said, after learning about the links between young children developing post-traumatic stress disorder and ending up in the juvenile justice system later on.

“I realized that we’re not just locking up bad kids, we’re locking up hurt kids. It completely changed the course of my career,” said Bradley, a professor of religious studies and director of the Center for the Study of Human Flourishing at The King’s College in Manhattan.

The federal government’s war on drugs since the early 1970s can’t be the main cause of mass incarceration, he said, because 90% of all inmates are in state prisons, and of those, only 17% are drug offenders. In part because of a focus on federal prison data, “we get the story wrong,” he said. “If we don’t get the story right, we’ll get the solutions and interventions wrong.”

Part of that story, he said, is society’s views toward the poor. “Here’s a tough social fact in this country: We resent poor people in America regardless of their race,” he said. “We’ve used the criminal justice system to remove them, the poor, from civil society.”

And those who enter the criminal justice system are “overwhelmingly poor,” he added. With no money to pay legal bills, they have to rely on overburdened public defenders, and their poverty is compounded when their prison records create a barrier to employment, he said.

Caring for the Whole Person

Last December, the federal government enacted the First Step Act to reform criminal justice and reduce prison crowding, following on many state governments’ legislative efforts over the past decade.

While the new law is commendable, deep and meaningful change can only come from convincing the nation’s local prosecutors and police chiefs to do things differently, Pfaff says. “We tend to focus on the federal government as what is going to fix the problem,” but solutions must come on a “city-by-city, county-by-county level.”

In his talk at Rose Hill, Bradley also called for grassroots, “upstream” efforts to provide emotional, social, psychological, and moral support to children before they wind up in trouble with police.

“As long as we have hurting children, we’re going to have violent children,” he said. “We need to invite more players to the table. Yes, we need lawyers; yes, we need judges. … We also need coaches and teachers and business owners and cousins and aunts and uncles and community nonprofit leaders to offer the sorts of interventions that address the whole person.”

Bringing Ignatian Spirituality to the Incarcerated

Public defender John Booth, GRE ’14, has taken an interdisciplinary approach to the problem. After a decade representing people charged with serious crimes in Hudson County, New Jersey, he felt he was burning out, tired of watching clients repeat the cycle of incarceration.

“Why do I find myself representing the children of former clients?” he wondered. “When will all of this hurt end? Most importantly, where is God in all of this and why am I a witness to such horror?” He examined his own motives for becoming a public defender. “I knew I cared for them and was always fighting for them,” he says, “but I didn’t realize just how deeply they had touched me.”

Booth recognized there was a spiritual element to addressing the problems of criminality, mass incarceration, and recidivism. But there were limits to what he could do as a lawyer, ethically and practically. He knew it was inappropriate to discuss matters of faith with his clients, that “melding the roles of attorney and minister can add another injustice upon the accused person,” as he put it, but he also had no plans to give up his day job.

So in 2009, after he and his wife lost a child to stillbirth, Booth began further exploring his Catholic faith. He took “the Ignatian retreat in daily life,” a way to complete the 500-year-old Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola over a period of eight months instead of during an intensive 30- day retreat in solitude. Afterward, he felt that undertaking the Spiritual Exercises—a mix of meditations, prayers, and contemplative practices—could prove as valuable a healing process to incarcerated people as it was to him.

That thinking led him to Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, where he completed a master’s degree in religious education in 2014. His thesis explored how the exercises could provide emotional support and spiritual freedom to inmates and help them transition to society after release.

“A lot of [inmates]will say that they can’t do this on their own,” he says.

Bringing Guidance Behind Prison Walls

After completing his master’s degree, Booth met Zach Presutti, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic and a psychotherapist with an interest in prison ministry. Presutti read Booth’s thesis and realized it contained the kind of spiritual guidance he wanted his new nonprofit, Thrive for Life Prison Project, to provide for the incarcerated.

Booth created a brochure for Thrive for Life volunteers providing Ignatian spiritual direction to inmates—and he began volunteering with the group as a spiritual director. Several times a month, he visits with inmates in New York—at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, the State Correctional Institution in Otisville, and the Manhattan Detention Complex, also known as the Tombs—and leads them through an abridged version of the Spiritual Exercises, providing a safe environment that fosters self-expression.

“They can just kind of let go and be themselves,” he says. “And as time goes on, you see them expressing more and more and more, individually and collectively.”

Breaking the Cycle, Building Relationships

Thrive for Life’s spiritual directors stay in touch with the group’s participants. One former inmate now works full time with the group. Many other former inmates gather once a month with volunteers, friends, and family at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, where the organization is based. And Thrive for Life recently opened Ignacio House, a Bronx residence for people recently released from prison.

Meanwhile, Booth says his workload as a public defender was made more manageable by bail reforms New Jersey instituted two years ago, which include new standards for deciding whether an inmate poses a danger to society. His time at Fordham gave him new perspective on his day job—and on practicing his faith in service of others. “Courses were geared toward trying to live out your faith in the modern world, with constant interaction with the real world,” Booth says. “Fordham made me into the best spiritual director that I could be.”

College in a Maximum Security Prison

Since 2015, Steve Romagnoli, FCRH ’82, a playwright, novelist, and adjunct professor of English at Fordham, has been helping to bring the transformative power of education to women in prison. On a Thursday evening near the end of the spring semester, he led his students through the moral ambiguities of Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the wages of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The scene in the classroom was reminiscent of an undergraduate seminar on any college campus, with one exception: Students wore the green uniform of inmates at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the only maximum security women’s prison in New York state.

Like all guests at the prison, Romagnoli enters the compound through a trailer-like structure that separates the visitors’ parking lot from the prison buildings, which are ringed by metal gates topped with razor-wire coils. He passes through a security checkpoint carrying only his car keys, driver’s license, and notes for class.

“It’s like going in and out of a concentration camp, with the walls and the wires,” he says. “But sitting in the room and watching them talk and laugh and banter, you could be anywhere.”

Romagnoli’s students range in age and experience. For one woman, the course—Social Issues in Literature—is her first taste of college; for another, it’s the next-to-last class needed for her bachelor’s degree in sociology.

“Steve is always in demand,” says Aileen Baumgartner, FCRH ’88, GSAS ’90, the director of the Bedford Hills College Program. Overseen by Marymount Manhattan College, it offers courses leading to an associate’s degree in social sciences and a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

“Students really get a lot from his classes. I don’t know how he does it—I’ve said, ‘Really, Steve? You think they’re going to get through all this in a semester?’ Somehow or other they do.”

‘Students Have to Feel There Is Love’

At Fordham, Romagnoli teaches a similar course on ethics and literature, albeit with a more sensational title: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. In both settings, students focus on “moral dilemmas and ethical questions that confront us throughout our lives,” he says.

“The Fordham students have great things to say, but they’re initially a bit shy,” he says. “At the prison, sometimes you’ve got to pull them together, but they’re totally engaged, and they say what they’ve got to say.”

Romagnoli began his career as an educator at P.S. 26 in the South Bronx during the mid-1980s, not long after earning a bachelor’s degree in English at Fordham. He later earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at the City College of New York.

For 15 years, he was an itinerant teacher for the New York City Department of Education, working with students in their late teens to early 20s at drug rehabilitation facilities, homeless shelters, and halfway houses, among other locations. “I would go in and teach a lesson and go out,” he says. “Engage them, that was the whole thing. You’ve got to engage them.”

No matter where he teaches, his approach is essentially the same. “Students have to feel there is love there—not love love, but a deep respect. And if they come to the conclusion, consciously or unconsciously, that you have that deep respect, then it allows you to be as demanding as you want to be.”

Baumgartner notes that all of the students at Bedford Hills are required to work during the day—as porters or clerks or sweeping floors, for example. And they complete their coursework in the evening and early morning hours without the benefit of internet access.

Like Romagnoli, Baumgartner went to Fordham, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English. She started teaching at Bedford Hills in 2001, when she was a professor at Mercy College, and became the director of the college program in 2002.

“I had never given any thought to prison education programs,” she says. She recalled that on her first day of class, “all the students were looking at me, sizing me up, and they asked, ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I was asked to teach, and so here I am.’”

Baumgartner’s straightforward answer satisfied the students, who, she realized, didn’t want to “hear someone come in and talk to them about high-minded ideals.”

She notes that prison education programs reduce recidivism and create better employment opportunities for former inmates. “Whether you’re a prisoner or not, you have many more options in life if you have a college education. And if you are a prisoner and you have a felony conviction on your record, when you return to the outside, it’s very nice to have a college degree on your record too.”

Students also benefit in ways that are less tangible. “They gain a deeper understanding of the forces that shape communities, that shape themselves, that shape their children,” she says. “They learn that they have the power to act in positive ways in their communities that perhaps they didn’t feel they had before.

“And then there’s that ripple effect,” she adds. “They’re concerned with their children going to college. Now it matters to them.”

Regarding costs, she says “the college program is not as expensive as keeping people imprisoned.”

Approximately 150 women—or roughly 25% of Bedford Hills’ standing inmate population—are enrolled in the college program, Baumgartner says. And every spring, the program hosts a graduation ceremony. This year, she says, six women earned a bachelor’s degree and 14 received an associate’s degree.

‘A Fairer, More Effective Criminal Justice System’

Inmates at Bedford Hills have benefited from college education programs for decades. “Mercy College had a college program there until the tough-on-crime bill was passed,” Baumgartner says, referring to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which eliminated Pell Grants for inmates.

“Across the country, a lot of colleges, including Mercy, closed their prison programs in the mid-1990s because they just couldn’t afford it” without federal funding, Baumgartner says. The number of U.S. prison college programs dropped from about 300 to just a handful.

At Bedford Hills, a coalition of community members designed the college program, which is funded by private donors and grants. Since it began in spring 1997, more than 200 women have earned college degrees there.

And since 2016, it has also received support through the Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Pilot program, a three-year experiment that aims to “create a fairer, more effective criminal justice system, reduce recidivism, and combat the impact of mass incarceration on communities.”

Inmates who take part in prison education programs are 43 percent less likely to return to prison in three years, compared to those who don’t take part, according to a federally funded RAND Corporation study from 2013, the education department noted in announcing the program.

Baumgartner credits the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision for supporting higher education programs in prisons, including the one at Bedford Hills. “These programs sometimes tax their resources,” but the department understands their importance, she says.

Romagnoli talks with his Fordham students about his work at Bedford Hills, and about mass incarceration and criminal justice reform. “It resonates strongly with them,” he says. “And it’s something that’s really come into the public consciousness [in recent years]; the ball’s rolling a little quicker.”

‘Knowledge Is Power’

Back in the classroom at Bedford Hills, after a heavy but lively discussion about Ruined, Romagnoli gives the students a brief break before moving on to Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Asked to reflect on the course, which also includes discussion of philosophers from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir, students say they’ve learned that “knowledge is power.” They say that “perception plays a big role in how people judge people,” that the readings have helped them “gain different perspectives,” and yet the class “brings a unity, even if we agree to disagree.”

“You learn more about yourself, about your ethical system, and you question the things you do,” says one student. “I am one class away from a B.A. When I leave here, I will always question the morality of a situation.”

—By Chris Gosier, Adam Kaufman, and Ryan Stellabotte

At the heart of the drama is a brutal irony: When rape is used as a weapon of genocide, a ramshackle brothel can be a haven.

The establishment in question is run by Mama Nadi, who profits from the women she protects—and from the war. She runs a business, she says, not a mission. She provides food and shelter, and in exchange, the women prostitute themselves to government and rebel soldiers alike, all of whom must check their ammunition at the bar.

“How many of you give her a pass?” Romagnoli asks his students, a group of 11 women. Opinions are split.

“I hated her at first, but by the end, I understood why she was the way she was, and why she did what she did,” one student says.

“Which of the philosophies we’ve discussed could you use to support defending her?” Romagnoli asks.

“Utilitarianism,” suggests one student. Romagnoli nods. “And what would Kant say? Is there a redeeming element in her behavior?”

“It’s wrong to use people the way she did,” one woman says emphatically; several others agree. “OK,” Romagnoli smiles, “we have some Kantians here too.”

A College Class Like Any Other

To an outside observer, the discussion could have been part of an undergraduate seminar on any college campus—with one exception: Each student wore a green uniform that marked her as an inmate of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the only maximum security women’s prison in New York state.

Romagnoli, a playwright, novelist, and short story writer, has been teaching at Bedford Hills since 2015. Like all guests at the prison, he enters the compound through a trailer-like structure that separates the visitors’ parking lot from the prison buildings, which are ringed by metal gates topped with razor-wire coils. He passes through a security checkpoint carrying only his car keys, driver’s license, and notes for class.

“It’s like going in and out of a concentration camp, with the walls and the wires,” he says. “But sitting in the room and watching them talk and laugh and banter, you could be anywhere.”

Romagnoli’s students range in age and experience. For one woman, the course—Social Issues in Literature—is her first taste of college; for another, it’s the next-to-last class on the path to earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

In addition to studying Ruined, they read and discuss a broad range of books, including Night, Elie Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust, and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. They also screen several films, including Do the Right Thing, and Romagnoli introduces them to philosophers from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir.

“Steve is always in demand,” says Aileen Baumgartner, FCRH ’88, GSAS ’90, the director of the Bedford Hills College Program, which is overseen by Marymount Manhattan College and offers courses leading to an associate’s degree in social sciences and a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

“Students really get a lot from his classes. I don’t know how he does it—I’ve said, ‘Really, Steve? You think they’re going to get through all this in a semester?’ Somehow or other they do.”

‘Students Have to Feel There Is Love’

For the past several years, Romagnoli has also been an adjunct professor at Fordham, where he teaches a similar course on ethics and literature, he says, albeit with a more sensational title: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness.

In both settings, students focus on “moral dilemmas and ethical questions that confront us throughout our lives,” he says.

“The Fordham students have great things to say, but they’re initially a bit shy. At the prison, sometimes you’ve got to pull them together, but they’re totally engaged, and they say what they’ve got to say.”

Romagnoli began his career as an educator at P.S. 26 in the South Bronx during the mid-1980s, not long after earning a bachelor’s degree in English at Fordham. He later earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at the City College of New York.

For 15 years, he was an itinerant teacher for the New York City Department of Education, working with students in their late teens to early 20s at drug rehabilitation facilities, homeless shelters, and halfway houses, among other locations.

“I would go in and teach a lesson and go out,” he says. “Engage them, that was the whole thing. You’ve got to engage them.”

He says that no matter where he’s taught, his approach is essentially the same. “Students have to feel there is love there—not love love, but a deep respect. And if they come to the conclusion, consciously or unconsciously, that you have that deep respect, then it allows you to be as demanding as you want to be.”

It’s a lesson Romagnoli learned decades ago, particularly at Wadleigh High School in Harlem. He taught English there starting in 1993, later served as dean of students, and, although he had no prior coaching experience, was appointed head coach of the school’s fledgling boys’ basketball team. In 1998, he led the team to an undefeated season, capped by a victory in the Public Schools Athletic League B Division championship game at Madison Square Garden.

“He became a coach by chance, but turned players into students by design,” the Daily News reported at the time, adding that Romagnoli “took on the kids as he took on their problems: truancy, drugs, death, violence, poverty, fatherlessness, the entire roster of urban ills that puts teenagers ‘at risk.’”

He’s still in touch with his former players, who now joke about how strict he was at the time. “I felt that to succeed they needed a certain amount of rigor and discipline that they really didn’t have,” he says. “But they saw that I was in the gym with them after school and that I lived in the neighborhood. That definitely makes a difference.”

‘When They Get to Class, They’re Motivated’

At Bedford Hills, Romagnoli is helping to turn inmates into students, although he insists that the women in the college program don’t need much coaxing.

“They just live for this,” he says. “They know it’s not something that’s guaranteed. Some of them have had to get their GED” before they could even apply to the college program. “When they get to class, they’re motivated, they’re good to go.”

Baumgartner notes that all of the students at Bedford Hills are required to work during the day—as porters or clerks or sweeping floors, for example. And they complete their coursework in the evening and early morning hours without the benefit of internet access.

Like Romagnoli, Baumgartner is a Fordham graduate. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at the University. In 2001, she was a professor at Mercy College when she started teaching at Bedford Hills.

“I had never given any thought to prison education programs at the time,” she says, recalling that on her first day of class, “all the students were looking at me, sizing me up, and they asked, ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I was asked to teach, and so here I am.’”

Baumgartner, who has been the director of the college program since late 2002, says that her straightforward answer satisfied the students, who, she realized, didn’t want to “hear someone come in and talk to them about high-minded ideals.”

Still, she is quick to extol the benefits of prison education programs, citing data about lower recidivism rates and better employment opportunities for former inmates who have a college education.

“Whether you’re a prisoner or not, you have many more options in life if you have a college education. And if you are a prisoner and you have a felony conviction on your record, when you return to the outside, it’s very nice to have a college degree on your record too. You have a better chance of earning a decent living.

“And, practically speaking, keeping people in jail is extremely expensive,” she adds. “The college program is not as expensive as keeping people imprisoned.”

Baumgartner also speaks of individual and communal benefits of prison education that are less tangible, noting that students in the college program learn that “the world is wider.”

“They gain a deeper understanding of the forces that shape communities, that shape themselves, that shape their children,” she says. “They learn that they have the power to act in positive ways in their communities that perhaps they didn’t feel they had before.

“And then there’s that ripple effect: They’re concerned with their children going to college. Now it matters to them.”

Approximately 150 women are currently enrolled in the college program, which Baumgartner says constitutes about 25% of the standing inmate population at Bedford Hills.

Every spring, the program hosts a graduation ceremony. “It’s a big one for us this year,” she says, noting that six women will be getting a bachelor’s degree and 14 will receive an associate’s degree in June.

‘A Fairer, More Effective Criminal Justice System’

Inmates at Bedford Hills have benefited from college education programs for decades. “Mercy College had a college program there until the tough-on-crime bill was passed,” Baumgartner says, referring to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which eliminated Pell Grants for inmates.

“Across the country, a lot of colleges, including Mercy, closed their prison programs in the mid-1990s because they just couldn’t afford it” without federal funding, Baumgartner says, noting that the total number of prison college programs in the U.S. dropped from about 300 to just a handful at that time.

At Bedford Hills, a coalition of community members—including Elaine Lord, the superintendent at the time; Regina Peruggi, then president of Marymount Manhattan College; and Judith Clark, an inmate at Bedford Hills—formed a committee that designed the Bedford Hills College Program. It opened in spring 1997, and since then, more than 200 women have earned college degrees there.

Today, the college program is funded by private donors and grants. And since 2016, Bedford Hills has received some additional support through the Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Pilot program, which aims to “create a fairer, more effective criminal justice system, reduce recidivism, and combat the impact of mass incarceration on communities.”

In announcing the three-year experimental program, which is testing the effectiveness of making Pell Grants available to incarcerated people again, the Department of Education cited a 2013 Department of Justice-funded study by the RAND Corporation; it found that “incarcerated individuals who participated in correctional education were 43 percent less likely to return to prison within three years than prisoners who didn’t participate in any correctional education programs.”

Baumgartner credits the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) for supporting higher education programs in prisons, including the program at Bedford Hills. “These programs sometimes tax their resources,” she says, “but DOCCS understands the importance of higher education in reducing recidivism and enriching the lives of inmates while incarcerated and upon their release.”

Romagnoli says he talks with his Fordham students about his work at Bedford Hills, and about mass incarceration and criminal justice reform. “It resonates strongly with them,” he says. “And it’s something that’s really come into the public consciousness [in recent years]; the ball’s rolling a little quicker.”

‘Knowledge Is Power’

Back in the classroom at Bedford Hills, after the heavy but lively discussion about Ruined, Romagnoli gives the students a brief break. Some of them take the opportunity to reflect together, for the benefit of a guest, on the course.

They say they’ve learned that “knowledge is power,” that “perception plays a big role in how people judge people,” that the readings have helped them “gain different perspectives,” and yet the class “brings a unity, even if we agree to disagree.”

“You learn more about yourself through the process, about your ethical system, and you question the things you do,” says one student. “I am one class away from a B.A. When I leave, I will always question the morality of a situation.”

The images in this story are taken from a 2017 video produced by Marymount Manhattan College professor Erin Greenwell in honor of the Bedford Hills College Program’s 20th anniversary.

In an Oct. 22 talk titled “Challenges in Making Ethical Decisions: A Personal Journey,” Hellman, a 2015 Turing Award Winner, combined deeply personal anecdotes with highlights from his career at the forefront of cryptography. He shared stories from A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home & Peace on the Planet (New Map Publishing, 2016), which he co-wrote with his wife Dorothie, and offered five suggestions for ethical behavior.

If you want to behave ethically, stay vigilant, because it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’ll never stray, he said. Don’t underestimate the value of outside advice. Actively work at dealing with anger you feel for others, because it’s better to have friends than enemies. Make ethics a daily concern so you’re not caught off guard when you need to make a big decision. And remember that ethical standards change over time.

Noting that his talk was sponsored by the Department of Computer and Information Science, (CIS) Hellman acknowledged that the rise of artificial intelligence and drone warfare made ethics particularly relevant to computer science students. But all students, he said, should be thinking about the subject.

“Whether you’re an English major or a CIS major, making more ethical decisions is becoming critically important, because we live in a nuclear age, an age of drone warfare. If we can’t learn to make ethical decisions, we will not survive as a civilization,” he said.

He was particularly passionate about the grave risks posed by nuclear weapons, of which he noted there are still tens of thousands in existence. There have also been more close calls than are generally acknowledged, he said, including a recent incident when Turkey shot down a Russian jet three years ago.

A Personal Mea Culpa

For evidence of how one can go down the wrong path ethically, he said, audience members need look no further than the man standing before them.

“I think the best lessons are the ones we can get from real life, especially when the speaker can say ‘Mea culpa. I made a decision on unethical grounds,’” he said.

In 1975, he and Whitfield Diffie, Ph.D., posited that because technology was advancing by leaps and bounds, the National Data Encryption Standard (DES), which had been the basis for computer security for 25 years, would be compromised within 15 years. When they discovered that this flaw was deliberately left alone so as to allow the National Security Agency to hack computers, they decided to go public, against the entreaties of NSA employees.

“My intellect was telling me that going public with this was the ethical decision, because the NSA should not single-handedly decide what the security level should be. They’re an interested party,” he said.

Then he realized that regardless of whether going public was right or wrong, doing so would make him famous. “Run with it!” he thought.

“Now, you would not want to potentially cause great harm to national security just to be famous. That is not an ethical decision,” he said.

Watch Out for Shadow Motivations

They did go public, and six years later, Hellman said a documentary made him realize that it was the right decision, but for the wrong reasons. In the film, scientists said they were motivated to work on the first atomic bomb so as to defeat Adolf Hitler, who was also pursuing nuclear weapons. But when asked why they kept working on it even after Germany was defeated in World War II, they couldn’t answer. Hellman said he thinks he knows why.

“We all have socially acceptable motivations for doing things, and those we might admit consciously. But we also have, very often, socially unacceptable motivations, like, ‘Run with it, even if it hurts national security!,’” he said.

Hellman dubbed these “shadow” motivations, which often permeate our subconscious.  Scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, he said, are people whose identities are often closely associated with how smart they perceive themselves to be. In the case of the atomic bomb, he said, the scientists might have been wondering, “Is my brain powerful enough to destroy a city?”

“You never want to admit that you killed 200,000 people just to see if your brain was that powerful,” he said.

Hellman encouraged students to remember that 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson would have considered himself to be a highly ethical person, despite the fact that he owned slaves. In hindsight, it’s easy to see today how that’s an unethical behavior, he said. But it’s much harder to see ethical blind spots we suffer from today.

“What makes us think there isn’t something today that we shouldn’t be working on?,” he said.

“Being ethical in the world in a nuclear age is not an option, it’s a necessity.”

That was the message of “Conscience Matters: Tensions between Religious Rights and Civil Rights,” a panel discussion hosted on April 19 by Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education.

The panel, which was held at the Lincoln Center campus, featured Linda Greenhouse, the Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law and Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence at Yale Law School, and Nancy Berlinger, Ph.D., a research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute.

Greenhouse and Berlinger tackled the thorny issue of conscience-based refusals from the perspective of the law and the medical establishment, respectfully. Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times for three decades, spoke at length about one case that the high court ruled on in 2014, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and another, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which was argued in December and is still pending.

A Threat to Civic Society

Greenhouse was unsparing in her criticism of the courts’ willingness to grant exceptions based on “deeply held religious beliefs,” saying they undermine civic society and are granted with little consideration for the adverse effects they may have on others.

Sometimes the court grants exceptions even when it’s not clear that a person’s rationale is based on sound theology, she said. In the 2015 case Holt v. Hobbs, for instance, the court ruled unanimously that a prison’s rules against beards violated the rights of a prisoner who said it comported with his Muslim faith. Greenhouse noted that nowhere in the Quran does it explicitly stipulate men maintain facial hair.

The Hobby Lobby case, in which the court ruled in favor of a private business that defied a government rule that employers must provide birth control under the health plans they offer, is even more egregious, she said. The Hobby Lobby CEO tied his decision to his Christian faith, but he’d abided by the government rule previously. Greenhouse dryly noted that the owner also had no problem with the violation of Christian strictures when his employees used their salaries to purchase birth control themselves.

In a way, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which a baker says his Christian faith prevents him from baking a wedding cake for a gay couple, is even more ludicrous, she said. That’s because the case has hinged on whether his First Amendment rights will be infringed upon if he’s forced to bake a cake for them. She noted that cake is a poor vehicle for arguments about freedom of expression.

“Once it gets to the party, it’s just a cake. It’s not like he signed the cake. It’s not like a Van Gogh with the signature on it,” she said. “He doesn’t have to associate with or attend the [wedding]  party.”

Step Away, Don’t Step Between

Berlinger said that when it comes to medical treatment, there are actually very few cases in which medical personnel refuse to provide care. There may be instances when patients who are Jehovah’s Witnesses object to blood transfusions, and Orthodox Jews may dispute a doctor’s judgement of brain death.

But a bigger threat, she said, are structural issues, such as medical residents who simply opt not to get training for controversial procedures like abortion, and those who stall when faced with patients who inquire about physician-assisted suicide.

She said a conscience clause that the Hastings Center advocates says that even health professionals who feel more than the usual sense of “moral distress” that comes with working in the medical field must fulfill their duty of care. There’s no option to abandon a patient if their needs conflict with doctor’s conscience.

“You also cannot interfere with your patients’ access to care by others,” she said. “Sometimes the way this is explained is, ‘You can step away, but you can’t step between.”

She quoted British ethicist Alan Cribb, Ph.D., professor of bioethics and education at King’s College London, as having summarized it perfectly:

“We may exercise conscience objection to involvement in certain activities, but surely we cannot float entirely above the network of obligations in which we have emerged ourselves.”

Cuomo, a 1979 Fordham University graduate, delivered his remarks on curbing the power of independent expenditure campaigns in conjunction with the release of a governor’s counsel opinion laying out criteria to regulators and law enforcement officials on existing state law and whether coordination existed between these campaigns and the candidates they supported.

According to Cuomo, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission(2010) has created a perverse political system in which collusion and fraud are rampant and the voices of millions of American voters are disenfranchised. Citizens United held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation, a principle since extended to for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations.

The governor implored New York legislators to enact laws protecting voters before this fall’s elections rather than waiting for the Supreme Court to overturn its ruling in the future.

“They can lead this effort to reform or they can perpetuate the status quo,” Cuomo said of the legislature, whose session ends next week. “My friends, the status quo is unacceptable.”

In fact, Uwadione’s sons, ages 1 and 9, have provided the most important motivation during his years at Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, where he earned a degree in organizational leadership with a minor in economics.

“I know the importance of my degree not just for myself but also for my children,” he said. “I want to live a life of exemplary conduct. I want to be able to say, ‘Well, I could do this and you should be able to do it.’”

Originally from Nigeria, Uwadione has been living in New York for 12 years. He was drawn to study at Fordham not just by its academic reputation, he said, but also because of its Jesuit traditions.

“Fordham is unique in that there are elements of faith that are part of the academic community, and that is something that you don’t find everywhere,” he said.

For Uwadione, who is of the Bahá’í faith, the sharing of spiritual life is of central importance. Each month, he hosts up to 25 people in his home for a “tranquility zone,” an evening of meditation and conviviality.

“It is a devotional gathering, a place where people of different faiths, or of no faith, will come together once a month and we eat, we pray, and we play,” he said.

This concern for the creation of peaceful communities led Uwadione to a course in philosophical ethics taught by Gerard Farley, PhD, adjunct professor in the Department of Philosophy.

The course resonated deeply for Uwadione because it examined the role of ethics in daily life, a topic of particular concern for him, he said, “coming from a country where corruption has pretty much plagued the system.”

Uwadione works in supply chain management and is the director of operations at a small logistics company. He plans to use his degree to advance in his career, but just as important, he wants to continue the community service that plays a large role in his life.

He serves as president of the regional Ndokwa Association in America, a not-for-profit cultural organization dedicated to improving education and living conditions in a region in Nigeria. Uwadione also serves as the chairman of the association’s national scholarship board, which funds African students who excel academically but who cannot pay for their schooling.

In his own education, Uwadione’s steadfast pursuit of excellence has paid off. In 2015, he was inducted into Alpha Sigma Lambda, the national honor society for adult students, and in the 2015-2016 academic year he was the recipient of the Morton Levy Scholarship.

Though he leaves Fordham this spring, Uwadione says his ties to the school University will always be strong.

“Fordham is now family. Once you are a member of the family of academics you are there forever.”

–Nina Heidig

Solomon described one of his research subjects, Clinton, who was diagnosed at birth with diastrophic dwarfism, a condition that led to more than 30 operations during his lifetime. Such operations can address the medical aspect of the dwarfism, he said. But Clinton’s inability to reach items off a store shelf is an example of a social problem, particularly if the store doesn’t provide staff to assist persons with disabilities.

When Clinton was born, doctors told his parents to leave him to die at the hospital, said Solomon. His mother didn’t see him for three days, at which time she decided to take him home and find a good specialist. Most doctors foretold only medical problems, but eventually she found one of the best specialists in the country. Solomon said that the doctor lifted the boy up and announced “He will make a handsome young man one day.”

“This [story]is an example of how much language or belief can alter medical reality,” said Solomon, author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner, 2012).

The conference, sponsored by Fordham’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center and the Center on Religion and Culture, focused on spiritual and cultural diversity in healthcare. Solomon said that identity has played a large role in a person’s health in many of the cases he has studied.

A disabled person’s identity, he said, is defined in terms of “horizontal and vertical” influences. The vertical identity is one formed in the home and related to language, religion, ethnicity, and class. A horizontal identity is one discovered outside the home, where the identity is learned from a peer group.

For example, Solomon spoke of befriending a deaf person who introduced him to deaf culture. He went to deaf theater performances and deaf gatherings. He discovered a “beautiful society” of hearing-impaired people—something that a deaf child would likely not discover until he or she left the family and went out into the “real world.”

The horizontal culture of disabled people is very similar to the gay experience, said Solomon. There, too, the horizontal identity is often discovered in adolescence.

Solomon said he was a believer in medical progress and social progress, but that “I wish they could see each other more clearly.”

He reminded the audience that it was not long ago that homosexuality was diagnosed as a medical disorder: he read from a 1966 Time magazine article that described homosexuality as a “pernicious sickness.”

Regarding Down syndrome, he said, the Atlantic Monthly published a 1968 article that stated, “There is no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down syndrome child away, whether it is put away in a traditional sense of hidden in a sanitarium, or in a more responsible lethal sense.”

Today our understanding of diversity has so shifted that there are even Hollywood stars with Down syndrome, he said.

Yet even today, parents of children with Down syndrome could choose to have cosmetic surgery for their child that would reduce the size of the tongue and lift drooping eyes so that they’d appear “normal,” he said.

“That is a medical solution to a social problem, and it’s very deeply troubling,” he said. “It’s a kind of a tyranny of mainstream values.”

He then cited several medical breakthroughs that may also eliminate some of the identity cultures he celebrates in his book. A cochlear implant could be placed in a child’s ear so that he or she could grow up and function in the speaking world; and a substance, BMN 111, could soon block the gene that causes dwarfism.

“There is the question of what should be treated, what should be cured, and what should be left alone,” said Solomon. While Clinton needed surgeries to be able to walk, does a child with Down syndrome need plastic surgery?

“There are people who have been subjected to treatment who didn’t want to ‘get better’ or change in the way that was put forward,” he said. “What they wanted was to go on to live their lives as themselves.”

Several investigations have been launched and what exactly happened remains to be seen. In the meantime, Fordham’s Christiana Peppard, an assistant professor of theology, science, and ethics, the author of “Just Water: Theology, Ethics an the Global Water Crisis,” weighs in on the ethical implications of this crisis.

For more on Peppard, who also teaches in the environmental studies program at Fordham, watch this TedEd video about “Where We Get Our Fresh Water,” and this CNN piece she wrote on “The resource problem you probably haven’t heard about.”