And then there are shipping containers.

Americans are aging and many are downsizing. Online shopping has exploded, leading to a crushing demand for containers used to bring goods to the U.S. from overseas. Turns out, shipping containers are a great investment. And they’re not the only unusual investment out there.

“The world’s a changing place. There are a lot of changes in where people live, how they work, how they consume their entertainment, how they store their goods, and what they think is collectible,” said Kevin Mirabile, D.P.S., a clinical associate professor of finance and business economics at the Gabelli School of Business

“If you dig into this, there’s a lot of opportunity for investors.”

Mirabile examined all manner of quirky, offbeat investment opportunities in Exotic Alternative Investments: Standalone Characteristics, Unique Risks and Portfolio Effects (Anthem Press, 2021). The book delves into asset classes such as life insurance settlements, litigation funding, farmlands, royalties, weather derivatives, and collectibles. It follows Mirable’s first book, Hedge Fund Investing: Understanding Investor Motivation, Manager Profits and Fund Performance (BookBaby, 2020), which he updated for a third time last year.

As the head of the Gabelli School’s alternative investment concentration, Mirabile has been leading students through the finer points of real estate, hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital investments.

“If you look over the last five or 10 years, a lot of alternative asset classes no longer produce the kinds of returns that live up to investor expectation,” he said.

“I really had a desire to search for new asset classes that fulfill the promise of what alternative investments were supposed to bring. These are investments that diversify a portfolio.”

Baseball Cards, Esports, Cannabis, and Bitcoin

Mirabile established three parameters to distinguish something as an “exotic investment.” An investor needs to be able to readily trade the asset, there needs to be a publicly available index to compare its value to similar assets, and there needs to be an instrument that allows them to purchase a share in the asset, rather than just buying the underlying object. Beanie Babies don’t make the cut, but art, baseball cards, life insurance, tax liens, e-sports teams, cannabis farms, Bitcoin, and shipping containers do.

All of them tend to trade on smaller markets, generate high returns, and importantly, their value is unrelated to the drivers of traditional stocks and bonds.

“GDP growth doesn’t really affect the price of artwork. The growth of the economy doesn’t really affect esports or vintage sneakers. These things are divorced from the normal drivers of stocks and bonds,” Mirabile said.

Although most exotic assets are only to be available to high net-worth individuals, there are exceptions. If you want to buy farmland, Mirabile notes you can buy a fractional interest in an almond farm in California, and you might own one-hundredth of the property. Not into land? You can do the same for an Andy Warhol painting as well.

“There are many credible platforms that will break up a Picasso into fractural ownerships, or that will break up a baseball card, like a 1952 Mickey Mantle that just traded at $5.2 million,” he said.

A Market for Vintage Sneakers

Neither second-hand designed wedding dresses nor American Girl dolls—both of which retain or go up in value—met his parameters, but that the vintage sneakers like Air Jordans did.

“There are actually exchanges where you can go and get a quote if you want to resell those sneakers, and there are indices that Nike and Adidas put out that track the trading of those sneakers after their retail offering. I was surprised at how big that market was, and how much infrastructure has developed around it.”

The cache attached to sneakers is fragile, of course. Mirabile noted that they’re not just items to wrap around your feet; they’re culture totems associated with an artist, which creates value. Other alternative investments may derive value from a current trend.

“Some of the downside risks are if those tastes and preferences are a fad, they collapse. There are many people today who have garages full of Cabbage Patch dolls,” he said.

Some exotic investments also bring with them ethical minefields. You could profit off mortality if you invested in life insurance contracts because your returns go up if people die sooner than expected. You could also invest in a fund that’s trying to monopolize the market on usable water in San Palo Brazil—a legal, if ethically dubious proposition.

Fortunately, there are plenty of investments that are on solid ethical ground, making them attractive to investors who see interest rates at near-zero and stocks at an all-time high, Mirabile said.

“A lot of people are interested in understanding these other investment categories because they don’t have a place to put their money,” he said.

On March 2 at noon, Mirabile will talk about Exoctic Alternative Investments as part of the Gabelli School’s Centennial Speaker Series. The event is open to the public.

One year later, O’Donnell, the associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, also began working on a book-length study of race in the writings of O’Connor, whose estate formally endowed the center with a grant in 2017 to sponsor programming exploring the work of the famously reclusive author.

In a case of publishing kismet, both volumes were published earlier this year. Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor was published by Paraclete Press, while Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor, was published by Fordham University Press.

“It was kind of great, because I was getting to use two sides of my brain. There was the analytical side, which was doing research and writing about O’Connor in the context of the history of the time she was living in during the Civil Rights movement and analyzing her letters and her stories,” she said.

“I was also writing these poems, which were an imaginative enterprise in which I would channel O’Connor’s voice, enter into her consciousness, and have a conversation with her about things that mattered. They’re entirely fictional, but at the same time, I think they get at some essential truths about things that O’Connor believed.”

Although O’Connor is celebrated for short stories that she wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, such as those in the compilation Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), she was a complicated figure whose attitudes toward African Americans were sometimes problematic.

O’Donnell addressed the issue in her critical biography Fiction Fired by Faith: The Life & Work of Flannery O’Connor (Liturgical Press, 2015), but ultimately felt she needed to dive deeper. For Radical Ambivalence, O’Connor’s estate enabled her to do just that, by allowing her to quote from archival letters that have previously been off-limits to the public.

When she sat down to read them, O’Donnell had already written three-quarters of the roughly 100 sonnets she penned for Andalusian Hours. Reading the letters changed the course of the rest of that volume; the later ones were darker, she said.

“I knew that O’Connor wrote some things that were unsavory, but actually reading them was nonetheless surprising and disturbing,” she said.

“I had to deal with that new understanding of O’Connor at the same time that I was writing these poems, which were much more playful, and not engaged in social issues. They were about things like her work, theological questions, her falling in love, her not getting along with her mother—everyday things about her life.”

“Radical ambivalence,” she said, is how she sums up O’Connor’s attitudes toward African Americans, who she wrote about, but never from their point of view. That was a conscious decision, O’Donnell said, as there was at the time no opportunity for whites such as herself to engage with black and brown people in a normal, natural way. Rather, relationships were governed by an elaborate code in which they spoke with each other in very formal, reserved ways.

“O’Connor often said, ‘I can’t write about characters who are African American, because I don’t understand them. Segregation is segregation,’” O’Donnell said.

“She understands her limitations, so she sticks to those limitations and works within them as well as possible.”

O’Donnell says there are important caveats to keep in mind when reading the letters, not the least of which is that many were written to friends and were therefore much more informal than published stories.

One of those correspondents, a friend born and raised in the South who’d moved to New York City and embraced progressive values such as racial integration. The two played a game where O’Connor would exaggerate and tell racially charged jokes, because she knew they would get a rise out of her friend.

“Reading these letters as a Flannery O’Connor fan, it’s very troubling. She’s very good at telling the jokes; she enjoys them, you can tell. She has a wicked sense of humor,” said O’Donnell.

O’Connor was also surrounded by family and friends who routinely used the N-word, and O’Donnell noted that for a writer whose Catholic faith was a driving force, it’s also noteworthy that she attended a racist church as well. In this area, O’Donnell said she drew inspiration for her book from the work of African-American theologians, including the writings of Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham.

“She never received communion from the hands of a black priest, she was never taught by a black nun, and she never worshipped in church with black people. She had no example set for her by her church of how black people ought to be thought about and received into the church,” she said.

In the end, the opportunity for O’Connor’s thinking on the subject of race to evolve was cut short, as she died from lupus one month after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“I’m quite convinced that had she lived past the age of 39, she would have changed her mind and her ways of thinking about the relationship between the races and integration,” O’Donnell said, noting that even George Wallace, the staunchly racist former governor of Alabama, saw the error of his ways at the end of his life.

“My hope is that the effect of the book is to deepen our understanding of her radical ambivalence towards African Americans and towards Civil Rights, an attitude conditioned by the historical and cultural context in which she grew up, and ultimately to deepen our understanding of O’Connor’s writing.”

If Radical Ambivalence is scholarly, Andalusian Hours is theatrical. Each sonnet is prefaced by an epigraph featuring an excerpt from O’Connor’s writing. The poems are chronological, making for an autobiography in verse, written by someone else. Only the final sonnet, “Poem’s Apology,” is written in O’Donnell’s voice, and in it, she writes, “Forgive me for these brief trespasses on your private mind.”

“More than one person has asked me, ‘Don’t you think this is presumptuous of you, to pretend to know the thoughts and words of Flannery O’Connor?’ And my response is, ‘Yes, absolutely, but this is what artists do,’” she said.

“We put ourselves in the position of other human beings and try to imagine who they are and try to clothe their thoughts with words. We’re compelled to do it because we love these people and we want to bring them, with all of their virtues and all of their flaws, to life.”

Robin Andersen, Ph.D., a professor of communication and media studies, hopes to show how, with Media, Central American Refugees, and the U.S. Border Crisis: Security Discourses, Immigrant Demonization, and the Perpetuation of Violence (Routledge, 2019).

The key to understanding anti-immigration rhetoric in blaring headlines and incendiary tweets about an “invasion” of migrants illegally entering the United States from Mexico, she said, is to recognize the language as a “security discourse.”

The narrative starts with a “security” concern, which recently has been the southern border. It asks,What is causing this dire, fearful danger? Immigrants. When news starts from the position of fear of invasion, it must be assumed that those arriving at the border are inherently criminal; they are, after all, invaders, she said. “When news demonizes people who are refugees, they become the enemy; they become othered.”

The next logical step in this media framework is to focus on what security forces are doing to stop them, she said. We look to authority, in this case, the military, for protection.

“The way you open the story and start to talk about it dictates the way the story is going to be narrated in the press,” she said.

“Then we’re going to hear about the soldiers going down and putting up concertina wire and beefing up the border with more weaponry.”

Andersen noted that this is not a new phenomenon. In a 1983 television address, Ronald Reagan warned that unless a tough stand was taken against communism in Nicaragua, a “tidal wave” of “feetpeople” would be “swarming our country.” But a better way to tell the story, she said, is through a humanitarian discourse.

“If you turned the narrative around and started by asking, ‘What’s making it impossible for the people of these countries to stay there, prosper, to make a life for themselves? Why are they being murdered?’ Those questions would lead to a very a different narrative, and a very different news story,” she said.

“What is happening in the countries of Central America? What’s been the U.S. role there? After all, the U.S. has been policing the hemisphere for years. So, let’s take a look at what we’ve actually been doing.”

Andersen, who visited El Salvador as a graduate student in 1979, details in the book multiple instances over the last three decades in which she says the United States contributed to the instability of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the so-called “Northern Triangle” of Central America.

To understand how the security discourse was embraced and repeated by major media outlets, Andersen, who co-wrote the book with Adrian Bergmann, a research fellow at the University of El Salvador, said one need look no further than the ominous warnings of an “invasion” that President Trump repeated about a caravan of immigrants making its way toward the U.S. in the months before the 2018 midterm elections.

What finally “shook the media frame,” she said, was the image of Honduran mother Maria Meza grabbing the arms of her 5-year-old twin daughters Cheili and Saira as they frantically ran from a tear gas canister spewing fumes on the Mexican side of the border wall. When it was published in November, Andersen said, news organizations began quoting from humanitarian aid and human rights organizations. Those perspectives are inherently different from security frames. Our concern was drawn to preserving life and dignity, she said, and we felt compelled to embrace those who have been persecuted in their own countries.

“We rarely discuss the ways in which our culture and our economics have been influenced by military discourse and military practices. We’ve lost a language of diplomacy and negotiation,” Andersen said.

What would a narrative that embraced a humanitarian discourse truly look like? Andersen said it would acknowledge messy truths such as those revealed in Dana Frank’s  The Long Honduran Night Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup (Haymarket Books 2018), which she cites in the book.

“We basically helped the military in Honduras depose a popularly elected president in 2009, Manuel Zelaya. That led to the complete destruction of the rule of law in Honduras. The cascading effect since then is that now it’s a dictatorship, and one of the most dangerous countries on earth,” Andersen said.

Today, she said, the exodus is being driven in part by the countries’ own leaders. Whereas urban violence is forcing many in Honduras to flee, she said, in Guatemala, indigenous people are being evicted from their lands by national security forces loyal to elites.

Multinational corporations controlled by those same elites are then moving in to exploit natural resources such as palm oil, biofuels, timber, and sugar cane, she said, adding that any story that addresses migration should also address environmental degradation and the extreme risks faced by those who resist.

Andersen expresses frustration with the Democratic party as well, which she said hasn’t mounted an informed, critical perspective in response to the president.

Instead of challenging the need for more border security, she said, what they say is, “a wall isn’t the best way to secure the border.” What they should be asking is, “What can we do to stop the dismantling of these countries, to stop the forced out-migration of refugees?’” she said.

In a new book, John Fortunato, Ph.D., delves into how the Professional Golf Association (PGA) Tour keeps people tuning in to the sport year after year.  Fortunato, a professor of communications and media management at the Gabelli School of Business, had long explored the business models of sports organizations like Major League Baseball and the National Football League in his classes. But when a student in his sports media course asked him questions about the PGA Tour, he admits, he didn’t have complete answers.

Making the Cut: Life Inside the PGA Tour System (McFarland, 2019) is his way of answering them.

“Golf is much more complex as far as who qualifies for tournaments, what it means to win, what it means to make a cut, what it means to qualify for the FedEx playoffs, and graduate from the Web.com Tour onto the PGA Tour,” he said.

“There are all these dividing lines that are really meaningful in terms of the opportunities that the players get, in terms of their financial prospects. I wanted to capture the human stories that are in this system and make it compelling.”

To capture those stories, Fortunato went beyond well-known stars like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, and interviewed up-and-coming golfers like Keith Mitchell. In March, the 27-year-old native of Tennessee won his first PGA tournament, the Honda Classic, held in Palm Beach, Florida. Fortunato interviewed him when he was still just one of the top 25 players on the Web.com Tour, which is a level below the PGA Tour.

At the final hole of the last regular season tournament of the Web.com Tour, Mitchell needed to birdie, or hit one under par, at the final hole to automatically qualify for the PGA Tour. Otherwise, his path to the PGA tour would have to go through the Web.com Tour Playoffs, a series of four more tournaments that would start four days later. At that moment, however, Mitchell was under the impression that he needed to eagle, or hit two under par, to win. When he failed to do that, he thought for sure he’d failed to qualify.

“He actually has a putt to make the PGA Tour, but he already thinks his time is past, and that he didn’t do enough to qualify,” Fortunato said.

“He said to me, ‘all week, I wanted one of two things: A putt to win the tournament, or a putt to make the PGA tour. I had it, and I didn’t even know it, which is just incredible. It was just a miscommunication.’ He was literally tearing up as he learned this.”

As it turned out, Mitchell’s regular season performance on the Web.com Tour was still good enough to qualify him for that tour’s playoffs, and it was there that he redeemed himself by finishing in the top 25 on the prize money list.

That qualified him to play for the PGA Tour, where Mitchell made a 15-foot putt on the final hole of the Honda Classic. He won $1.2 million, qualified for all the major tournaments, like the Masters and U.S. Open, and kept his PGA Tour card for the next two seasons of the PGA Tournament.

“I think there’s these really compelling stories that emerge because of the system, and that’s what I really wanted to document. I wanted to explain the system and story lines that occur because it,” Fortunato said.

The book profiles stories of the likes of Greg Chalmers, who was successful enough to make a career playing golf, but didn’t win his first tournament until his 386th career start, and Joel Dahmen, who overcame testicular cancer to make it onto the PGA Tour.

Drama, Fortunato said, is also built into the way the sport’s winnings are parsed out. As opposed to football and baseball players, who get paid by their teams, golf players compete for cash prizes paid by the tournaments. Every shot can affect their winnings.

“You could find any sport where you could point to one play or one game that really changed it. Where golf is unique is, every stroke and every spot where you finish on the leaderboard of a tournament has a dollar value,” he said.

“So Tom Brady misses a pass on first down? OK, it’s just second and ten. Here, every shot matters.”

What separates the elite golfers from the rest, he said, is their ability to both swing the club, ignore the fact that they just lost, say, $10,000, on a shot that went awry, and stay well under par (typically 70 to 72) for four days in a row.

“Any guy on the tour is talented enough where he  could go out and put up a 64 in one round. But to be able to do it four days in a row, have great rounds, and to do it against the elite of the elite … I have a real new-found appreciation for what these golfers do,” he said.

In addition to getting a better handle on the PGA system, Fortunato said that he’s able to bring what he learned while researching the book into his classes, particularly the ways that sponsorships are negotiated and how the media factor in the sport’s operations.

Above all, he said, a casual sports fan will understand the appeal behind the book.

“There are compelling story lines that attract you. You’re going to see live drama playing out. You’re not going to know the outcome; it’s unscripted,” he said.

“I think that has an appeal for all sports fans. And if you know what the outcomes of those consequences are, I think it makes it more compelling.”

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and other members of the country’s founding generation would be likely be dumbfounded by that answer, said Saul Cornell, Ph.D., Fordham’s Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History.

In The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s–1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019), a new book he co-wrote with Gerald Leonard, Ph.D., of the Boston University School of Law, Cornell tells the story of how the Constitution was shaped; what it was supposed to do when it was ratified; and just as important, how it began to change almost immediately after it was ratified.

A Sharp Break With the Past

For starters, he said it’s worth remembering that in one generation in the late 1700s, aristocracy and monarchy, which were the two central institutions of European government for thousands of years, were tossed aside by the leaders of the American Revolution.

“So, what were the American revolutionaries going to do to replace it? We tend not to think about that because we’ve done it successfully for 200 years and we take it for granted. Today most countries in the West are parliamentary democracies, but our constitutional form is unique,” he said.

The original answer to this question, he said, was far from the “government for the people, by the people” majority rule that we envision the country to be now.

“We still mistakenly think we were always meant to be a democracy. We don’t realize what a struggle it was to take a government that was not designed to be a democracy and make it one,” he said.

Far from being open to a full-fledged democracy, the founders actually established a republic governed by an enlightened elite.

The book, which is geared toward everyone from casual readers to graduate students, sets the scene of the creation for the Constitution, which was ratified in 1788. At the time, he noted, constitutionalism pervaded American culture in a way that’s inconceivable now.

“People were saying in private letters that, ‘Everyone from the doorman at the tavern to the governor is talking about the constitution.’ While I’m sure there were some people who were too drunk to know what was going on, or just not paying attention, what’s remarkable is how many people were caught up in it and paying attention,” he said.

Government by the Few for the Many

Of course, that didn’t mean that everyone actually got a say in the conversation about the Constitutions.  Women, slaves, and native Americans were not directly part of the great debate.

“The general view of most legal scholars is that the people must have been quiescent or just inarticulate. But in fact, they were very much trying in whatever ways were available to them to have their voices heard. There were a lot of people doing the best they could to take the ideas of the American Revolution and make them their own,” he said.

The founders also created the Electoral College as another check against unrestrained democracy setting it up to be something akin to the College of Cardinals, the small group that chooses the Pope.

“You’re essentially creating a filtering mechanism so that the people will not directly elect a president who might not be sufficiently educated, informed, or wise enough,” he said.

He noted that the Electoral College was also meant to be a bulwark against the rise of political parties. Thomas Jefferson famously quipped, ‘If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.’ It was a generation, Cornell said, that was very suspicious of democracy.

“The Founders wanted the people to be involved, but they feared turning over the reins of government to the people; they were deeply worried about that,” he said.

“They’ve looked at the history of Rome, and they know that republics fell because of rabble rousing and the mob: turbulence eventually led to tyranny. So they were trying to create a republic, not a democratic form of government, with checks and balances built in throughout.”

A Populist Movement Emerges

Things began to change pretty quickly, though, thanks to people like Andrew Jackson, a Democrat who was president from 1829-1837. A product of the west, Jackson embraced a more democratic vision for the country, but he did so by appealing to voters who would deny equal rights to women and minorities and who cheered on his vicious treatment of native Americans.

“It was not pre-ordained that America would exclude woman, blacks, Indians. The idea that there was no room for these nonwhite, non-European people in the growing American republic takes center stage with the rise of Jackson,” said Cornell.

The notion of using legal barriers to exclude everyone but white men from political power is obviously absurd today, but Cornell said we’d still be wise to consider the balancing act that the founding generation embraced when they crafted the Constitution. Although ideally democracy and liberty go hand in hand, for most of western history that has not been the case. Many of the populist leaders who have risen to power in recent years, for instance, have done so via democratic processes, but they do not necessarily value or promote liberty, certainly not liberty for all.

“We have this idea that democracy and liberty always support one another. Well, democracy doesn’t always lead to freedom. That’s an important lesson we need to learn,” he said.

If there’s one image that encapsulates Cornell’s thoughts about the American Constitution, he said, it’s the image of Odysseus tied to the mast of a ship in Homer’s The Odyssey. Odysseus understood that if he did not bind himself to the mast it would drive him mad, so, he had his crew plug their ears with wax, and instructed them to not untie him.

“Constitutional governments strive to tie the people to the mast so that they will stay alert but not be swayed by the siren songs of demagogues. The founders sought to build the right kind of mast to tie ourselves to, so we can get back to our safe harbor,” he said.

“If you tied yourself up so tight that you strangled yourself, you haven’t really done yourself much good. If you don’t tie yourself tightly enough to that mast, you’re going to just jump in the water, and you’re another victim of the siren’s song. The nature of constitutional government is to find the right balance between liberty and order:  popular government restrained by the rule of law.”

When Cleon Brown, a white sergeant with over a decade of experience on the Hastings, Michigan, police force, submitted DNA to Ancestry.com in 2016, he hoped to clarify stories he’d heard about having Native American ancestors.

Instead, the site informed him that he was of 18 percent African descent. And that, he alleged in a lawsuit he filed against the city a year later, was when the trouble started. His colleagues nicknamed him Kunta after the character Kunta Kinte in the miniseries Roots, and ultimately, he was denied training he needed to maintain his rank.

For Tanya Hernandez, Brown’s case, which was settled last month, is the perfect example of how discrimination is alive and well in the United States, even for people of mixed-race ancestry. Hernandez, the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham Law, cites Brown’s case in the opening of her new book, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (NYU Press, 2018).

“This needs more attention in order to dispel a growing trend of people in the public discourse viewing discrimination about mixed-race people as different, and talking about it in ways that undermine discrimination law for everyone,” she said.

Brown’s case, she said, shows how multiracial discrimination can happen to a person even if they don’t identify as multiracial.

“I’ve been doing this work for many years, and I started to see this emerging group of people writing about multiracial discrimination, and characterizing it as something novel and new, and how that necessitated changing our civil rights laws,” she said.

“That didn’t at all correspond to my own experience as a mixed-race person of Latina and African origin, so I thought, ‘I need to look at this a little more closely.’”

For her book, Hernandez explored lawsuits that claimed discrimination against multiracial individuals in housing, employment, education, criminal justice, and public accommodations. Employment cases were most common, which she said wasn’t surprising. She was more surprised to learn that people who file claims against housing discrimination tend to win them much more often, and even more intrigued to learn that many of those cases were actually brought by white grandparents and parents of multiracial couples.

A white grandmother might buy a condominium in Florida, and catch flak from fellow residents when her multiracial grandchildren come to visit, or a landlord might stop by an apartment and see a picture of a nonwhite grandchild on the wall, and then mysteriously decide the tenant is a problem.

“I can’t say I find it surprising, given everything else, but at the same time, it was something that I took note of that I didn’t expect,” she said.

Hernandez said these examples show how in the legal realm, discrimination can be thought of as not a “white versus black” dynamic, but a “white versus everything else” phenomenon. And it should give pause to those who advocate abolishing affirmative action, including members of the Supreme Court who look at the growth of mixed-race citizens and ask whether the country really needs policies of social inclusion anymore.

“The thinking is, people are finding ways to have relations across race lines, so that must mean that the race lines are no longer significant. How will we be able to draw lines if everyone is mixed? These arguments are very familiar to me because they’re part of a long-standing Latin American racial discourse with regards to management of race,” she said.

“That is problematic.”

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.

At the same time, the decline in newspaper readership started to accelerate, said Beth Knobel, Ph.D., associate chair for undergraduates at the Rose Hill campus and a professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies.

“I kept asking myself, what is this going to mean in terms of what newspapers were going to be able to do?” said Knobel, an Emmy Award-winning journalist who has worked for CBS News, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

“When I started working on this research project in 2011, I actually thought that I was going to be chronicling the death of watchdog and investigative reporting,” she said.  “It seemed logical to think that the watchdog function was fading away because newspapers had gotten smaller.”

For her new book, The Watchdog Still Barks: How Accountability Reporting Evolved for the Digital Age (Fordham University Press, 2018), Knobel assessed the front pages of nine American newspapers around the country, of varying sizes.  Included in her study were large papers like The New York Times, metropolitan dailies like the ones in in Minneapolis and Denver, and small papers like the one in Lewiston, Idaho. She aimed to chart how investigative or “watchdog” reporting has evolved since 1991, as the Internet transformed communications.

“Much to my surprise, I found that when I actually looked at the front pages, which would be the place that you would most likely see a big watchdog or investigative piece, the amount of accountability reports went up over time,” she said. “In the 2011 sample, there were actually more deep watchdog stories being done at these papers—more than ever before.”

Knobel spoke with current or former editors of all the newspaper studied, including the Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Albany Times Union. She learned that investigative reporting, which informs the public of falsehoods, wrongdoing, corruption, fraud and other offenses, remained a high-priority because the editors felt it was in the public interest.

“Newspapers do the job of trying to hold government accountable,” she said.  “That’s why they were enshrined in the Bill of Rights as a critical institution for our country.”

Among the newspapers that have championed watchdog reporting over the years is the Wall Street Journal, she said, citing a 2001 investigative report and lab study the paper did that exposed misleading GMO-free labels on foods.

“This was the kind of story that served public policy well and suggested that companies were not being truthful with consumers,” she said. “But that was an expensive story that took months to do.”

She learned that smaller papers, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had almost no investigative reporting on its front pages in 1991. But by 2011, more than 11 percent of its front-page content was focused on stories that required advanced investigative reporting techniques.

“The profile of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has grown dramatically because it now focuses so much on accountability journalism,” said Knobel.

Nevertheless, newsrooms still face several hurdles today, she explained.

“Just trying to decide what to cover with a newspaper’s limited resources is always a challenge,” said Knobel. “The government is so huge now that it’s impossible to cover it all. One of the things that I found from my research is that there are vast parts of government that are getting very little attention, like the judiciary and intelligence sectors.”

In recent months, she said, the free press has been disparaged by President Donald Trump—yet it remains vigilant.

“Just because the press is being criticized by the president and the administration, doesn’t mean that it’s not doing its job,” she said. “This book only proves that. The watchdog function is alive and well.”

At the time, hundreds of Salvadorans were being slaughtered each month by soldiers and right-wing paramilitary death squads.

“Let no one be offended because we use the divine words read at our Mass to shed light on the social, political, and economic situation of our people,” he said.

Though Archbishop Romero was accused by conservatives of using the Gospel to meddle into politics, Michael E. Lee, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, argues in a new book that he was modeling how faith can be lived out in an authentic way that changes the world for the better.

“His awareness of the reality of poverty in his country and the structural causes of it made him think about living his faith in new ways,” says Lee, author of Revolutionary Saint: The Theological Legacy of Óscar Romero (Orbis, 2018).

Not Partisan

The 1977 assassination of Romero’s close friend Rutilio Grande, S.J., a Jesuit priest in El Salvador, inspired his activism. He famously boycotted the presidential inauguration of General Carlos Humberto and other government ceremonies in protest of Father Grande’s death and the slaying of other community members who spoke out against repression.

“Romero always said faith had a political dimension—but it’s not partisan,” says Lee. “That’s an important clarification. It’s not about making one’s faith the same as one’s political party.  Romero is talking about letting your faith and its conviction motivate you to transform society.”

Shortly after penning a letter to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter in 1980 asking him to reexamine U.S. support of the ruling Junta government, Romero was murdered while celebrating Mass.

“He was killed by people who ostensibly called themselves Christians,” says Lee. “Romero’s dynamic and engaged faith led to his death. Much like Martin Luther King Jr., Romero died in the struggle and out of a motivation of his own faith.”

Symbol of Conversion

In Revolutionary Saint, Lee contends that Romero’s death and journey to sainthood offers room for a larger discussion about themes like conversion, martyrdom, and liberation theology.

He notes that when Romero was appointed archbishop, he was initially a conservative priest who the Vatican believed would promote order and endorse the interests of the wealthy.

However, the kidnappings, torture, and massacres of coffee farm laborers in his rural diocese opened his eyes to the sufferings of the poor under the ruling elite.

“Romero was always charitable to those who were poor, but what marked him as an archbishop was that he stood for justice,” says Lee. “He called for changes in the structure of his country.”

Romero later established a legal aid for the Archdiocese of San Salvador to support victims.

“When the United Nations was investigating the human rights violations after the civil war in El Salvador, the office set up by Romero was one of the great sources of information,” says Lee.

‘A Church That Is Poor and for the Poor’

 Thirty-eight years after his death, Romero is challenging the notion of what it means to be Catholic in a conflict-ridden society, says Lee. The similarities between the archbishop and Pope Francis, who supported the slain priest’s beatification in 2015, are reflective of Romero’s legacy.

“Romero and Francis have both adopted a preferential option for the poor, and when you do that, your idea of what the church should look like and what it should do is profoundly shaped,” says Lee.

As the process of Romero’s canonization continues, Lee notes that it is about more than just this one man’s legacy. It is a negotiation about how Christianity should be lived and the legacy of liberation theology—which is still viewed with suspicion in some Catholic circles.

Still, Romero’s beatification encourages Catholics to consider the vision of the church that Pope Francis has.

“When he became pope, he famously said, ‘I want a church that is poor and for the poor.’ And that is the vision of the church that Romero embodied,” Lee says. “It’s a way of moving forward that is hopeful for the Catholic Church.”

It seems like a no-brainer: When a sitting Supreme Court justice is presented with a case in which they have a personal stake in the outcome, they should recuse themselves. To do otherwise is to damage the credibility of the court as a neutral arbiter.

Yet when the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act was presented to the court in 2012, neither justice Elena Kagan nor Clarence Thomas stepped aside in the face of calls for both to do so. And the court still stands today.

In Ethics and Accountability on the US Supreme Court, (Suny Press, 2018) professor of political science Robert Hume, Ph.D., explores recusals, a much discussed yet poorly understood phenomenon.

“We have a lot of political talk about recusals out there, but no empirical work to find out if any of this talk is based in reality,” he said.

“There is no formal public process for recusals, which means it’s very hard to get data. You can observe when justices withdrew from cases, but what you don’t know is all the cases where they could have withdrawn but chose not to.”

As part of his research, Hume reviewed ten years of financial disclosure reports submitted by justices, and he found that in cases where businesses and corporations are involved, the justices do recuse themselves when they stand to benefit from a decision.

On the other hand, Hume found that when a case is expected to be close, and every vote is possibly a pivotal one, justices are less likely to recuse themselves. The Affordable Care Act case is the perfect example. Kagan had been the solicitor general for President Obama when some of the legal arguments for the Affordable Care Act were first being developed, while Thomas’ wife Ginni Thomas was actively campaigning against Obamacare.

“The justices tend to be mysterious about the recusal process so they can have that kind of flexibility. They don’t want to find themselves down a member and risk dividing equally on a really important case like health care,” Hume said.

“They’ll say they have an obligation to follow the ethics rules, but they also have an obligation to decide the cases before them, and you can’t substitute for a Supreme Court justice.”

Hume traces an uptick in interest in recusals to 2004, when Antonin Scalia was criticized for participating in a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney, even as the two went duck hunting together. This was not a new phenomenon; Hume notes that as recently as 1963, Justice Byron White went skiing with attorney general Robert Kennedy while the court was considering two cases that involved Kennedy.

But the public’s blasé attitude toward this sort of fraternization was tested severely by Watergate, and today, Hume said hyper partisanship has made recusals game for political activists seeking to sway court decisions in their favor.

Fortunately, he said that case outcomes rarely change because of recusals, and even though the court operated with only eight justices last year, it rarely issued 4-4 rulings. Justices, it turns out, make extra efforts behind the scenes and find consensus, because the courts’ legitimacy rests on its ability to reach decisions.

“The most consistent trend you find when a justice recuses themself is not that a case outcome changes, but that the tone of a majority opinion will change. A majority opinion will become somewhat more conservative or somewhat more liberal if certain justices sit out,” he said.

“That matters because it affects what the scope of the precedent is, but the bottom line tends to be the same, and the impact is relatively modest.”

That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers, but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In his new book, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017), Stoll visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wages-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

“I wanted to write a book about notions of progress and why we think of certain people as being in its way,” he said.

“How is it that we refer to billions of people in the world as backward and primitive, as being either incapable of what we consider to be progress or in need of some kind of transformation in order to be part of the ‘modern world?’ I see all of these characterizations as fictions.”

Stoll has studied the reasons why people get kicked off their land, and in Ramp Hollow, he interprets it through the characteristics of capitalism as it originated in seventeenth-century England and the way it organizes life in the United States. In that system, land and labor have to become commodities, and both need to be free from any traditional claims on them. The process is known as “enclosure.”

The Way Capitalism Works

“In enclosure, not only does the lord take control of a piece of land and turn it into private property, but laborers are also available because the peasants who lived on that land and produced their own livelihood now need to make a living. They make that living by earning wages sometimes in the very fields they tilled for their own good,” he said.
“Enclosure is essential to capitalism everywhere; otherwise people who are producing their own wherewithal have no need to work for wages.”

Appalachia is an ideal archetype of enclosure, he said, because coal mining transformed the region very quickly. Eastern elites, like English lords, saw the transformation from an agrarian to an industrial/capitalist economy as necessary.

The book focuses on the formation of the rural working class during the 19th century. It details episodes such as the Whiskey Rebellion, the founding of West Virginia, and the arrival of timber and coal companies. Stoll relied on records he discovered during trips to the area, like a trove of documents from the Flat-Top coal company stored haphazardly in a dilapidated library in Bluefield, West Virginia.

“The archive in Bluefield began as the obsession of one person who’d collected an enormous trove of documents. Nothing was catalogued, things were just laying around. I’d never seen anything like it, but that’s where I found some of the most important documents in the making of the book,” he said.

Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

To give a voice to the voiceless, he also paired previously unpublished letters by residents with literature by authors born and raised in the mountains. One of these was G.D. McNeill, whose collection of short stories, The Last Forest (1940), includes a story called “The Last Campfire,” about a group of men who return to their boyhood home for one last camping trip. As they take in the view of a mountain called Big Black, that had been so important to all of them, “they cry out at the sight of the barren mountainside,” said Stoll, upon seeing how clear cutting had stripped it of vegetation.

“Those documents showed me the transition that people went through, from autonomy in their mountain households to dependency living on wages in lumber camps,” he said.

Although Ramp Hollow does not delve into the current state of Appalachia, Stoll said that it might interest those living there. It’s common to find residents who take pride in playing a part in America’s energy independence, but yet dismiss black lung disease and disasters like the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion as a necessary and noble sacrifices.

“I’m not trying to embarrass anybody, but I want to present to them their own history in a way that is much more truthful than what they might have heard elsewhere,” Stoll said. “They were taken advantage of by government and by capital, and the two cooperated to dispossess them for the most selfish of possible reasons.”