Fall 2014 – Fordham Now https://now.fordham.edu The official news site for Fordham University. Fri, 19 Apr 2024 19:27:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://now.fordham.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/favicon.png Fall 2014 – Fordham Now https://now.fordham.edu 32 32 232360065 Anne Williams-Isom: In the Zone https://now.fordham.edu/education-and-social-services/anne-williams-isom-in-the-zone/ Tue, 09 Dec 2014 17:45:36 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=843 “One, two, three, four, peace is what we’re fighting for!” Thousands of young Harlemites and their families stride past Anne Williams-Isom, FCLC ’86, carrying homemade signs and chanting proudly in the August sun. “We’re the future, don’t you agree? Stop the violence on kids like me!”

From her perch on the raised street divider on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, the new CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) jumps down to greet marchers with hugs, cheering them on and hurrying stragglers. It’s the organization’s 20th annual Children’s March for Peace, and it’s Williams-Isom’s job to make sure that all the marchers make it to their destination—literally and metaphorically—when so much threatens to derail them.

Though these streets are safer than they were 20 years ago, gun violence has cut short many young lives here. And poverty—which affects 65 percent of children born in central Harlem—throws up other roadblocks on the path to success. Forty-eight percent of households receive food stamps, 19 out of every 1,000 children live in foster care, and high schoolers have an average college-readiness rate of just 12 percent, according to 2011 data.

More than 12,000 children depend on Williams-Isom and HCZ’s “cradle to college pipeline,” with programs aimed at breaking the cycle of generational poverty in and around a 97-block zone in central Harlem. New parents can take workshops at the Baby College, kids get academic help in charter schools and traditional public schools, teens receive college prep, and families receive social services.

“It’s not just me running a school well or an after-school program well. I’ve got to run 24 different programs really, really well. Mediocrity can’t be,” she says. “It comes down to this sense of urgency: How many generations are we going to let fail?”

In her office at Promise Academy II, one of two HCZ-run charter schools that serve 1,800 kids, Williams-Isom reflects on how she came to lead this prominent organization, which attracts two-thirds of its $114 million budget from private donors—and which President Obama has touted as a model anti-poverty program for the nation.

Five years ago, she was leaving her 13-year career at the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), the city’s child welfare department, and she wondered what she should do next. She met with Geoffrey Canada, high-profile education activist and founder of HCZ. The two had co-chaired a subcommittee for ACS, and she admired his work. He invited her to join HCZ as chief operating officer in 2009, and in February 2014 announced that she’d succeed him as CEO, with responsibility for running the organization’s diverse array of programs.

“Truthfully, I had no real experience in any of that [when I came to HCZ],” she says. But she had Canada’s confidence and mentorship. And she had her own experience, both professional and personal, to draw on.

fordham_harlem_childrens_zone-7805“I started to ask myself, ‘What would I do for my own children,’” she says. “I was using all of my skills—the legal skills, the skills from government, and the mommy skills,” and, she adds, the firsthand knowledge of Harlem that comes from raising a family there.

When she and her husband graduated from Columbia Law School, they bought a townhouse on Strivers’ Row, once a home to the city’s black elite. The couple raised three children there with the help of Williams-Isom’s mother, who lives with the family.

“I [had] the Baby College every day in my house!” Williams-Isom jokes. She’s very close with her mom, a Trinidadian immigrant who earned a nursing degree and rose to become one of the first black head nurses at Long Island Jewish Hospital. She raised Williams-Isom and her brothers alone in Queens after divorcing their father, also from Trinidad, who became violent toward her.

“The reason that my mom’s children and grandchildren have a different trajectory [than other struggling families] is because she had an education,” Williams-Isom says.

“The importance of education to change and end poverty has been instilled in me. But the other thing is, there was a lot of chaos in our house, and there was a lot of stress and trauma. I think I understand what that can do. You could go down one way or you could go the other.”

When it was time for her own college education, Williams-Isom chose Fordham College at Lincoln Center partly because she wanted to stay close to her family. She majored in political science and psychology.

“I just remember loving the plaza,” she says. “I thought it was great because it attracted so many different people.” In her office she keeps a photo of herself and her best girlfriends from Fordham, including Debbie Mitchell, FCLC ’85, who is godmother to the younger of  Williams-Isom’s two daughters.

Mitchell said her friend was always very focused. “She knew how to have fun, but she also worked really hard.”  When she read about Williams-Isom’s appointment as CEO, she “thought it was a perfect fit.”

“She loves children,” said Mitchell, a television and digital media producer. “She’s always thinking about how to make things better for them.”  After graduation, the two went to St. Thomas together. “We had a great time. We felt as though our lives were ahead of us.”

After law school, when five years as an attorney in law firms left her unfulfilled, Williams-Isom began her career at ACS. Working closely with then-ACS commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, she helped reform a child welfare system that was rocked in 1995 by the tragic case of Elisa Izquierdo, a 6-year-old girl who was beaten to death by her mother.

“Anne is enormously committed to the population that she’s serving now, and she always felt that way at ACS,” Scoppetta says. “She’s very strong, she’s very tough, but that doesn’t detract at all from how appealing she is. And that all comes from life experience that is very relevant to what she’s doing.”

In July, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Williams-Isom to the advisory board for his initiative to create Community Schools, which will offer health services and family support in addition to academics. She hopes the new schools can be a step toward reform.

“When we think about income inequality, when we think about what the future looks like for our communities, [troubled schools are] no longer just an isolated problem,” she says. “It’s a problem that we as Americans have to face, and if we don’t, we’re going to have a workforce that’s poorer and less prepared.”

Williams-Isom says replicating HCZ’s success requires talented, tough-minded people with a vested interest in their community.

“Somebody met me the other day and said, ‘You seem like you don’t take a lot of mess.’ And the truth is, there’s a bunch of us here who are like that. We are loving,” she says, singing the word, “but … loving the kids is not enough here. You’ve got be able to move these kids.”

She says teachers also need to be data-focused.

“We want to make sure [kids are] prepared, and I don’t know how you do that without making sure you’re keeping really good data and making sure we’ve got the best and the brightest working with our children. Because that’s what I would want for my kids.

“I never thought I would have the capacity to have another 12,000 in my heart,” she says, “but I do.”

 

 

]]>
843
Don DeLillo’s Masterwork, Annotated by the Author https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/don-delillos-masterwork-annotated-by-the-author/ Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:11:59 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=2056 Magazine_DeLillo_by_Joyce_RavidOn Dec. 2 in Manhattan, a first edition of Underworld, the 1997 novel by acclaimed author Don DeLillo, FCRH ’58, sold at auction for $57,000.

It was no ordinary first edition of the book.

Earlier this year, DeLillo spent several days revisiting the novel. He made handwritten notes on nearly half of the book’s 800-plus pages, commenting on characters and themes and his creative process.

The auction, hosted by Christie’s New York, featured 74 other well-known books annotated by their authors.

Called “First Editions/Second Thoughts,” the benefit raised $1 million for PEN American Center, the largest branch of PEN International, which promotes literature and freedom of expression.

Magazine_Underworld_coverDeLillo’s copy of Underworld—with its original cover featuring Andre Kertész’s iconic image of the Twin Towers, a church in the foreground and a lone bird flying near the buildings—brought in the second-highest bid of the evening. (Only one other work, Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral, with a winning bid of $80,000, raised more money for PEN.)

For years, DeLillo has participated in PEN-sponsored public readings to raise awareness of human rights abuses and help persecuted writers throughout the world speak truth to power.

“Writers who are subjected to state censorship, threatened with imprisonment, or menaced by violent forces in their society,” he said in a 2010 interview, “clearly merit the support of those of us who enjoy freedom of expression.”

The Shots Heard Round the World

Magazine_Underworld_NYT_10_4_51DeLillo’s magnum opus opens with a bang—two bangs, actually, both based on actual events.

At the Polo Grounds in Manhattan on Oct. 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hits a home run to help the New York Giants win the National League pennant. The game-winning blast is dubbed the Shot Heard Round the World.

Meanwhile, on the same October day, the U.S. government learns that the Soviet Union has successfully tested an atomic bomb.

The two events are fused in the novel through a fictionalized version of J. Edgar Hoover, real-life director of the FBI, who was at the Polo Grounds that day.

In one of his notes on the book, DeLillo describes the front page of the October 4, 1951, edition of The New York Times, which featured matching headlines about the dramatic game and the atomic bomb test, each headline the same size, in the same typeface.

“I discovered this coupling at a local library—on the microfilm device—while reading a news story in Oct. 1991 on the 40th anniversary of a famous ballgame,” DeLillo writes.

The juxtaposition fired his imagination. He once told an interviewer that he felt the events marked a “transitional moment” in American history, a change in the tenor of the times.

“The ballgame was a unifying and largely joyous event, the kind of event in which people come out of their houses in order to share their feelings with others. … With the onset of the bomb, the communal spirit becomes associated with danger and loss rather than celebration,” he said.

“And the sense of catastrophic events, framed and defined by TV, grows ever stronger: assassinations, terrorist acts, even natural disasters.”

An Underground History, Five Years in the Making

Magazine_Underworld_titleIn a note on the book’s title page, DeLillo explains why he called the novel Underworld. “Title applies to a number of events and themes ranging from J. Edgar Hoover’s presence in the Prologue to an underground nuclear explosion in the Epilogue,” he writes, “from subway graffiti to a (fictional) movie directed by Sergei Eisenstein (etc.).”

After the prologue, the novel jumps to Arizona in the early 1990s and introduces one of the book’s central characters, middle-aged Nick Shay, a waste-management executive with a deeply troubled past.

When Nick was 11 years old, growing up in the Bronx, his father went out to buy Lucky Strike cigarettes and never returned home. Nick imagines that his dad, a small-time bookie, was whacked by the mob. And his young life becomes defined by his father’s absence and an ever-present sense of violence.

The narrative of Underworld moves backward in time, from the 1990s toward a reckoning with the day—Oct. 4, 1951—when a 17-year-old Nick kills someone. He serves time in a juvenile correctional facility and is later sent to a Jesuit reform school before establishing a more stable, middle-class life for himself.

Throughout the novel, Nick and various other characters reckon with historical events and cultural forces that shaped the second half of the 20th century: the rise of the Internet and global capitalism, nuclear proliferation and waste, the construction of the Twin Towers, the Vietnam War, rock and roll, the ’60s counterculture, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, among others.

DeLillo’s Bronx, Jesuit Roots

Like the fictional Nick Shay, DeLillo grew up in the Belmont section of the Bronx, a stone’s throw from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

In some of his notes on the book, he calls attention to the parts of Underworld that were drawn from his own experiences.

“I didn’t realize until now,” he writes on one page, “that there was so much of the Bronx in this novel.”

DeLillo, who earned a bachelor’s degree at Fordham in 1958, recently told an interviewer that he felt he was “the only guy in America who walked to college.” On another occasion, years ago, he said that at Fordham “the Jesuits taught me to be a failed ascetic.”

The University is mentioned a few times in Underworld, and there’s even a fictional Jesuit, Andrew Paulus, S.J., who holds “a chair in the humanities at Fordham” and later instructs Nick at a Jesuit reform school in Minnesota.

In one scene, a Bronx high school teacher tries to persuade Father Paulus to talk with Nick, then a 16-year-old boy he describes as bright “‘but lazy and unmotivated.’”

“‘I’m speaking on behalf of the mother now,’” the teacher says to the priest. “‘She wondered if you’d be willing to spend an hour with him. Tell him about Fordham. What college might offer such a boy. What the Jesuits offer.”

At the reform school, Father Paulus introduces Nick to the word quotidian, calling it “an extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace.”

As an adult, Nick reflects on the education he received and how it shaped his life and career. “The Jesuits,” he says, “taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections.”

“He speaks in your voice, American … ”

Magazine_Underworld_first_pageThe first sentence of Underworld was the last one that DeLillo wrote for the novel. In his notes, he refers to it as “a final addition to what I’d previously considered a complete manuscript.”

The reference to an American voice calls to mind the title of DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, and his stature as one of the country’s most celebrated literary voices.

In September 2013, more than 40 years after he published his first novel, he received the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

The award “seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something about the American experience.”

]]>
2056
Fresh and Local https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/fresh-and-local/ Mon, 17 Nov 2014 14:48:46 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=847 Paul Lightfoot and BrightFarms are working with supermarket chains to fix our broken food system.

One June morning at the sprawling BrightFarms greenhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Paul Lightfoot, LAW ’96, pulls a Styrofoam board bursting with arugula from its hydroponic home. Just three weeks after seeds for the popular salad green were germinated in the grooves of the board, the crop is ready for harvest. A day later, the arugula will be on sale in one of more than 100 A&P-brand supermarkets in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. It’s part of Lightfoot’s bold initiative to grow vegetables locally that need less water, require no pesticides, and have a carbon footprint considerably smaller than those greens raised by agribusiness giants out West.

Dressed in a striped oxford shirt and a floppy beige hat, Lightfoot beams when talking about growing 125 tons of produce a year with the latest in hydroculture technology.

BrightFarms has been growing 125 tons of produce a year at its Pennsylvania greenhouse, using the latest in hydroculture technology. (Photo by Bud Glick)
BrightFarms has been growing 125 tons of produce a year at its Pennsylvania greenhouse, using the latest in hydroculture technology. (Photo by Bud Glick)

“We’ve shown that we can grow produce on a commercial scale year-round,” he says, noting that the greenhouse turned a profit in its first year in operation. “Americans are making the connection between what they eat and their health. And locally grown has trumped organic in the marketplace. Consumers want to know where their food comes from.”

The 1.3-acre greenhouse in Lower Makefield Township, just west of the Delaware River on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border, was built in a corner of the municipality’s 234-acre Patterson Farm. It’s the prototype for facilities the company wants to erect in urban areas throughout the country. Some, like the one in Lower Makefield, will be built on the ground, with a 15-inch-deep pool of nutrient-rich water set on an impermeable membrane and sided with cement walls. Others are designed for rooftops.

In June, BrightFarms signed a lease agreement with the District of Columbia, where the company plans to finance, build, and maintain a 120,000-square-foot greenhouse near the impoverished Anacostia neighborhood. The company has partnered with the supermarket chain Giant Food, which will distribute what’s grown to its 50 stores in the capital region. Lightfoot believes the site will become one of the world’s most productive urban farms.

BrightFarms is also working with the New York City Economic Development Corporation in the hopes of finding a suitable location to build, possibly in the South Bronx.

“We’ve found that every city has tons of space, once you leave the most sought-after neighborhoods,” Lightfoot says. “There are great opportunities if you are willing to go there.”

An Innovative Business Model
A farmer places seedling-filled boards in the greenhouse's 15-inch-deep hydroponic pool. (Photo by Bud Glick)
A farmer places seedling-filled boards in the greenhouse’s 15-inch-deep hydroponic pool. (Photo by Bud Glick)

The BrightFarms concept builds on the increasing clout of the local-food movement, as consumers seek produce grown close to home and raised in an environmentally friendly manner. Locally grown food can also be tastier and more nutritious because growers don’t have to limit themselves to producing varieties hardy enough to survive a transcontinental journey. Lightfoot notes that 90 percent of America’s lettuce comes from California and Arizona, and gets trucked thousands of miles across the country to East Coast supermarkets.

“It’s no surprise that lettuce is prone to rotting before it’s purchased or right when people bring it home,” he said in January 2012 talk at a TEDx Manhattan event called Changing the Way We Eat. “This causes huge losses for supermarkets, and it makes my wife, who loves fresh baby spinach, unhappy. Which makes me unhappy.”

Shrinking the supply chain is one of the central benefits of the BrightFarms concept, with monetary and environmental costs of cross-country trucking significantly reduced.

“We need a revolution in the produce supply chain,” Lightfoot says. “More than half the cost of lettuce today is in the supply chain.”

The current system is also “industrialized and centralized to the point that it’s an enormous consumer of land, of water, of crude oil, and of natural gas,” he adds, noting that the extended drought in the Southwest underscores the need for change. “The growers out West have structural problems, with the water table there dropping fast. Their costs are skyrocketing, which makes us more competitive.”

BrightFarms was founded in 2006 by Ted Caplow, an environmental engineer who designed the Science Barge, which uses hydroponic methods to grow food on a vessel docked on the Hudson River in downtown Yonkers, New York. For nearly a decade, he’s been a leading advocate for the use of hydroponic methods to spur the growth of the urban agriculture movement. In 2010, he turned to Lightfoot to develop a strategy to help make his dream a reality.

Before joining BrightFarms, Lightfoot led two software companies, Mincron and Al Systems, that helped retailers move merchandise more efficiently from distribution centers to stores. At BrightFarms he decided to implement a business model popularized by the solar-power industry, in which solar firms negotiate long-term contracts with commercial electricity users to buy power the firms generate. The deals are called Power Purchase Agreements, or PPAs. Lightfoot wanted the supermarket industry to ink long-term contracts for produce.

He had some convincing to do. The industry had little experience with long-term fixed-price contracts. Venture capital firms, meanwhile, were leery because Lightfoot’s model lacked a track record. If BrightFarms succeeded, these investors would make money and their equity stake in the company would grow in value. But Lightfoot had to prove that his large-scale greenhouse project could turn a profit.

The Next Big Thing
Arugula in the early stages of growth, two days after seeds were germinated in the furrows of a Styrofoam board. (Photo by Bud Glick)
Arugula in the early stages of growth, two days after seeds were germinated in the furrows of a Styrofoam board. (Photo by Bud Glick)

By mid-2014, BrightFarms had produce purchase agreements valued at more than $100 million. These commitments have provided the financial stability to attract nearly $20 million in capital from investors betting that sustainable, locally sourced produce grown in high-tech greenhouses is the food industry’s next big thing.

Fast Company has recognized BrightFarms’ promise, naming it one of “The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Food” for two years running. In March 2014, the magazine praised BrightFarms for “pulling gas-belching 18-wheelers off the road … cutting transportation costs and waste, lowering prices, and adding days to the shelf life of perishable foods.”

Caplow, who chairs BrightFarms’ board of directors, credits Lightfoot for his creativity, skill, and persistence in “unlocking a door for us in the supermarket industry.”

“Startups are not easy, and our business is not always simple,” he says, “but Paul has completely embraced the cause, constantly learning and correcting as we have grown, never giving up or taking ‘no’ for an answer.”

Colin Cathcart, associate professor of architecture at Fordham, has served as a consultant to BrightFarms. He says the company’s concept, with its large-scale urban greenhouses and long-term produce agreements, is attractive to consumers, retailers, and investors. “You can expect that others will copy his model,” he says. “They will have competitors.”

Better Food for Our Families
From left: BrightFarms' CEO Paul Lightfoot with Carlos Mendez, head grower at the company's Pennsylvania greenhouse, and Dominick Mack, production manager. (Photo by Bud Glick)
From left: BrightFarms’ CEO Paul Lightfoot with Carlos Mendez, head grower at the company’s Pennsylvania greenhouse, and Dominick Mack, production manager. (Photo by Bud Glick)

Developing urban agriculture wasn’t on Lightfoot’s radar screen when he arrived at Fordham Law School in 1993, after earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Lehigh University. He was the latest in a long line of family members who’ve matriculated at Fordham, including his father, an uncle, a grandfather, and his sister. He also met his wife, Karen Milhoua Lightfoot, LAW ’95, in the Law School library. They were married in 2001 at the University Church on the Rose Hill campus and now live in Briarcliff Manor, New York, with their three children: Amelia, Charley, and Annalise.

Lightfoot says law school taught him to consider every side of a difficult issue, a crucial skill for a social entrepreneur bent on creating new ways to develop a profitable business.

After law school, he was an associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. But two years later, as his interest waned in the practice of law and his father’s health deteriorated, he took a leave of absence to spend time with his dad in his dying days. He never returned to Cadwalader.

Instead, he began his life as an entrepreneur as CEO of Foodline, an online restaurant reservation platform that was introduced in 23 urban markets with the aid of $13 million Lightfoot raised in venture capital from such partners as American Express and Ticketmaster. When the 2001 dot-com bust dried up Foodline’s funding, Lightfoot discovered the field of supply-chain management. For the next decade, he built a business that devised strategies and software to improve the flow of merchandise from distribution centers to stores.

At the same time, he became increasingly focused on having his family eat healthier, moving “away from processed food,” he recalls, “into a more organic diet.” After connecting with Caplow, he decided to follow his passion. He began BrightFarms’ transformation into a leader in the sustainable-food movement inspired by the most local unit of all: his family.

“[My daughter] Amelia and I like to discuss how the most important ingredient in food is love,” he told attendees at the 2012 TEDx event, “and how you find love in the food someone grows or prepares for someone they care about personally.”

Two of the seven varieties of lettuce that find their way into BrightFarms' Spring Mix and Asian Mix products. (Photo by Bud Glick)
Two of the seven varieties of lettuce that find their way into BrightFarms’ Spring Mix and Asian Mix products. (Photo by Bud Glick)

At the BrightFarms facility in Pennsylvania, Lightfoot takes a visitor for a tour through the climate-controlled greenhouse, which cost $2.8 million to build in 2013. The air temperature stays in the range of 68 to 72 degrees, with a Dutch computer system running the greenhouse’s fans, chillers, and heaters. On the roof a rainfall collection system conserves water for the 15-inch-deep hydroponic pool, which is controlled for acidity and infused with fertilizers, iron, and dissolved oxygen.

Growing there are arugula, basil, kale, and seven varieties of lettuce for BrightFarms’ Spring Mix and Asian Mix. Seeds are germinated over two days in the furrows of Styrofoam boards using a system developed in northern Italy. The boards are then placed in a line on the far side of the pool, which is divided into seven ponds. Farmers move the seedling-filled boards toward the near side of the ponds over three weeks.

Boards at the front are harvested at 6 a.m. six days a week, with the produce fed into a machine that cuts the stems and packages the lettuces and herbs in containers labeled “locally grown.” The packages are stored at 34 degrees as they await a truck to bring them short distances to regional supermarkets.

“We’re producing large quantities of food, which is good quality, and at low prices. We’re improving the supply chain.

“I’ve got three young children,” Lightfoot says, “and I want to leave them a better planet.”

—David McKay Wilson, a columnist for The Journal News, is a frequent contributor to FORDHAM magazine.

]]>
847
Seven Questions with John Johnson, Broadway Producer https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/seven-questions-with-john-johnson-broadway-producer/ Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:28:45 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=905 New York native John Johnson, FCLC ’02, was a Fordham junior when he began interning with Joey Parnes Productions, helping to coordinate the annual Tony Awards show. Thirteen years later, he’s a Broadway producer with three Tonys to his credit. As one of the executive producers of A Raisin in the Sun, he took home the 2014 award for best revival of a play. He’s also a producer of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, which won the award for best musical. He earned his first Tony in 2013, when Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike won best play.

You were still a student when you started working with Broadway producer Elizabeth McCann, LAW ’66. How did that happen?

Larry Sacharow [former director of the Fordham Theatre Program]was my adviser. He said, “If you want to be working in the business of theater, you need to work with Liz McCann.” She is a legend and has blazed so many trails for so many people. For the 10 years that I was in an office with her, Liz gave me this really broad perspective about the business. What she taught me, as a theater producer and as a human being, was priceless. She’s like my third grandmother.

Does success bring its own set of challenges?

Every year you are doing a new set of shows that present challenges in terms of how to sell tickets, how to establish an audience, how to work with the artists. The challenge for A Gentleman’s Guide now is how do we keep the spotlight on us as the sort of reigning champ? There’s no getting to that place where we can kick back and have some cocktails and just rake in the money.

Have theatergoers’ interests changed since you’ve been in the business?

They’ve definitely gotten smarter. The amount of content that we are producing is a lot. People have a big range of options. Normally there would be one or two A-list stars that would come to Broadway in a half-season. Now, this half-season alone, it’s Hugh Jackman, Bradley Cooper, Glenn Close, James Earl Jones. You don’t need to be an industry insider to hear about what’s happening so early on with a show anymore.

Is there a bigger risk with producing an original show versus a revival?

Oh, always. Original shows like A Gentleman’s Guide or Vanya and Sonia come with higher risk, but they also come with a reward, that you get to participate in the life of this show. At the same time, we did A Raisin in the Sun with Denzel Washington (FCLC ’77), and that was a huge success. If you have a known title or a known star, it helps build the machine easier.

What qualities should a successful producer possess?

A certain amount of levelheadedness and confidence. Even with an amazing director, an amazing design team, amazing writers, amazing actors, the producer has to be the one at the end of the day that says, “We’re going to do this show. I know we have to work on this, but we’ve got to do it.” So you have to be a risk taker.

How do you get a show from script to Broadway?

Obviously the goal for a lot of people is Broadway, but there are also many shows that don’t go to Broadway and have a great life in the regional theater circuit or in Chicago or off-Broadway. There’s no exact formula to it, and I think that’s what makes it exciting, because you can’t predict it.

What do you have in the works?

We have This Is Our Youth and A Delicate Balance. We’re working on Larry David’s Fish in the Dark, a play that he wrote and he’s going to star in. Then a production of David Hare’s Skylight with Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan, the Gentleman’s Guide tour, and hopefully some other things I wish I could tell you about.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Rachel Buttner.

– Rachel Buttner

 

]]>
905
The Inimitable Dr. Bia https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/the-inimitable-dr-bia/ Sun, 16 Nov 2014 15:04:06 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=886 You know you’ve made it when a famous actress portrays you on stage. Margaret J. “Peggy” Bia, M.D. (TMC ’68), is a professor of medicine at Yale University, where she co-founded the clinical skills program and won so many teaching awards she’s lost track of the number. Six years ago, at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, she watched herself rendered by Anna Deavere Smith in Let Me Down Easy, a highly acclaimed one-woman show, based on Yale doctors and others, about the American healthcare system—and the strength and fragility of the human body.

Deavere Smith, known for her roles on TV’s The West Wing and Nurse Jackie, transformed into a short, fast-talking, Brooklyn-accented, brilliant, and compassionate physician. That’s Dr. Peggy Bia, who says the actress exaggerated the Brooklyn accent.

Despite Bia’s quibbles, the question Deavere Smith said drove her show—“How do we pursue grace and kindness in a competitive and sometimes distressing world?”—mirrors Bia’s own mission as a medical educator and caregiver.

Long before she was spearheading a new way to teach Yale medical students and long before she was one of few women entering medical school, Bia was paving a path for undergraduate women at Fordham. She was a member of the first class of the all-female Thomas More College, which opened its doors at Fordham 50 years ago this fall.

Bia credits her liberal education—science courses in addition to theology and philosophy—and Fordham’s commitment to community service for molding her into the kind of doctor she has become.

“She’s a dynamo,” says Nancy Angoff, M.D., associate dean of student affairs at Yale Medical School. “She’s tough and gets things done, but it comes from a place of compassion and caring. That’s really what permeated her program in the teaching of clinical skills. This love of being a doctor was so picked up by the students.”

Bia grew up in Brooklyn, the middle child of seven siblings. Her father died when she was 11. Her mother took in foster children to make ends meet. She also took in cousins when they needed a place to stay. “There were always tons of babies in my childhood,” Bia recalls.

She went to an all-girls Catholic high school and met her future husband, Frank Bia, M.D. (FCRH ’67), during socials with the all-boys Catholic school he attended. They’ve been together ever since. She started at Thomas More College when he was a sophomore at Fordham.

Frank always knew he wanted to be a doctor, but Peggy hadn’t considered medicine as an option for women initially. Most of her many female relatives became missionaries, teachers, nurses, or nuns. (One of her sisters is a Sister: Elizabeth Johnson C.S.J., distinguished professor of theology at Fordham.) Bia knew those careers weren’t for her. She toyed with becoming a chemist, but, as she puts it, “I didn’t want to spend my days with test tubes.”

Her pre-med adviser at Thomas More, chemistry professor Frederick Dillemuth, S.J., encouraged her to go to medical school. At the time, she had little confidence in her abilities, but Father Dillemuth and Frank insisted she could handle the work. After she graduated from Fordham summa cum laude in 1968, Peggy and Frank were married at the University Church, with Father Dillemuth presiding. They went to Weill Cornell Medical School and did their residencies at the University of Pennsylvania before earning fellowships to Yale, where they joined the faculty in 1978. They now have two grown sons, each in graduate school.

Bia says she chose to specialize in nephrology because during her residency “the best and most fabulous teachers were nephrologists.” Besides mastering complex renal physiology and caring for kidney transplant patients, she has been a caregiver for her medical students.

She worried at one time that they were not getting the clinical skills to be good, caring doctors. So 15 years ago, she developed a program that emphasizes mentoring. First-year medical students are connected with a physician to help them practice taking medical histories and performing physical exams on patients. They also attend weekly sessions where these skills are practiced in a safe setting.

“There is so much unhappiness in medicine in this day and age,” Bia says. “Finding the joy in practice is a lot harder now than it was years ago. I wanted my medical students to find that joy.”

Despite the complexities of today’s healthcare system, Bia wants to ensure that her students become keen diagnosticians and expert caregivers who form bonds with their patients, listening carefully to their stories. She believes the altruism woven into the Fordham curriculum helped to shape her view of medical practice.

Around Yale, students perceive Bia as tough yet tender—and not without a healthy sense of humor. Indeed, besides being mimicked at the Long Wharf, she’s been lovingly impersonated by her students. Last spring, at a reception for her when she stepped down from leading the clinical skills program, four students donned big blond wigs and took to the podium, each one claiming to be the real “Doctah Bia.”

Although Bia no longer runs the program she founded, she’s still a full-time faculty member in the renal section, lecturing and running workshops on kidney function for medical students, nursing students, and fellows.

“I grew up with this very Catholic spirit that fostered community service,” she says. “I was teaching younger kids since I was in eighth grade, and a group of us taught math and science to underprivileged high school students when I was at Fordham, so that whole aspect of service was really, really emphasized, and I savored it. It definitely informed what I felt I wanted to do with my life.”

Bia may have grimaced at Anna Deavere Smith’s rendition of her, but perhaps the audience grasped what being Dr. Bia really means. Which is also how Deavere Smith once described the central point of her entire show: to pursue and “find grace in the face of a complex world.”

Or, as Frank Bia once put it to a graduating class of medical students, the message Peggy Bia has been transmitting for years is this: The key to a happy, fulfilling career is “listening to and with one’s heart and using one’s hands to both diagnose and touch another person’s life.”

Maybe that’s why everyone wants to imitate Peggy Bia, on and off the stage.

—Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D., is one of Peggy Bia’s former students at Yale. She’s a freelance medical journalist and the author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank (Norton, 2010).

]]>
886
A Century of Excellence https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/a-century-of-excellence/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 21:48:20 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=972 In September, four editors of the Fordham Law Review (above, from left: Amanda Shami, Alexandra Sadinsky, Louis Russo, and Matthew Sorensen) met in a third-floor seminar room of the new Fordham Law building to discuss several articles that had been submitted for publication.

This year, the Law Review—one of the most-cited law journals in the country—is celebrating its 100th anniversary by republishing a series of six influential articles. The first is a student comment written in 1978 by Naomi Sheiner, LAW ’78, that formed the basis for enterprise liability in tort law.

“Ms. Sheiner’s work,” the editors write, “illustrates how much a student note can accomplish.”

]]>
972
T.J. Alcalá, First-Year Teacher https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/t-j-alcala-first-year-teacher/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 21:12:34 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=965 Five years after leaving Dallas to attend Fordham University, T.J. Alcalá, FCRH ’13, GSE ’14, is back at his high school alma mater. He’s teaching math at Cistercian Prep, supported by a fellowship from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation, which provides STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) teachers with stipends for professional development.

When did you become interested in teaching?

I didn’t know I wanted to be a teacher until my freshman year at Fordham. I was taking an honors course on Euclidean geometry that just floored me. I understood the basics, and my peers started looking to me for help. I loved helping [them]build their own understanding.

You’ve traveled a lot, both on your own and through Fordham’s Global Outreach program. How have your travels informed your desire to teach?

A family friend of mine traveled to Gulu in Uganda and spent some time at a high school there, where they have an annex for blind kids. She invited me to come, and I tutored a student named Bazil. He had to pass a national exam, and he was doing well in every subject except math. I was probably the least qualified person in the world to teach a blind student math, [but]I tried to come up with different ways to teach him, [and]he taught me Braille. After I got home, I received an email that said Bazil had passed the exam, and he was one of the first blind students in Uganda to ever do so. It was another step in the universe telling me that I should teach.

How will the Knowles fellowship help you in your early years as a teacher?

For the next five years I’ll be getting support, like grants for materials and professional development. And I’ll be a part of a huge community of teachers very excited about what they do and constantly trying to become better.

What do you think of the Common Core standards?

My experience with the Common Core was in my student teaching, in a middle school in the Bronx, M.S. 331, and a high school, Bronx Collegiate Academy. Those standards make sense. They are good goals. They’re very well thought out. The idea that we are assessing our students on these standards as if students are all the same is the scary part.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Nicole LaRosa.

]]>
965
McKeon Hall, 15th Floor https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/mckeon-hall-15th-floor/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 20:48:11 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=961 Photo by Chris Shinn
Photo by Chris Shinn

Elodie Huston (above, left) and her roommate Sithumi Narasinghe Priya Dewage are among the first residents of McKeon Hall. The new residence hall is home to some 400 undergraduates, including 62 enrolled in the Gabelli School’s new undergraduate program at Lincoln Center, offering a B.S. in global business.

“I’ve found that I’ve really come into my own in the city,” says Huston, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center freshman from Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. “I thrive on being surrounded by conversation, movement, and color.”

She also considers herself lucky to have been assigned great roommates. “I was paired with two girls who have been a constant source of energy, hilarity, and support as I’ve transitioned into college life.”

]]>
961
Lavera Wright, GSB ’14: Startup Success https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/lavera-wright-gsb-14-startup-success/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 20:38:28 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=957 Sitting on her front stoop at 1900 Hennessey Place in the University Heights section of the Bronx, 8-year-old Lavera Wright told her best friend that she wanted to be an accountant when she grew up.

Some 40 years later, Wright sits at her own desk at the Fordham Foundry, Fordham’s small-business incubator, as the founding CEO of the financial advisory firm L. Wright Co. LLC.

It was not an easy journey from University Heights to Fordham.

In 1999, Wright’s young son was hit by a bus and killed while riding his bike. Two years later her marriage fell apart. Wright says her ex-husband continued to be a good father to their other three children, but the increased duties of raising a family left her little time to go to school.

“To do the right thing, I had to put school to the side,” she says. “I just wanted to make sure that I raised my kids in a nurturing home.”

Eventually, Wright managed to take some online classes, and she gathered credits at Bronx Community College. When her childhood friend asked her to accompany her to Fordham while she applied to a master’s degree program, Wright had no idea that she’d also be recruited. Having recently been laid off from her job, she says she had little to lose when a Gabelli School of Business adviser encouraged her to apply for admission. She fretted about her writing skills, but was certain of her love of arithmetic and logic.

“I’ll never forget the call,” she says. “It was September 2008. The man on the phone said, ‘Congratulations, welcome to Fordham University.’ The tears just came down from my eyes and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I made it in.’”

The first year proved the toughest, Wright says, but she eventually found her footing. She even conquered her fear of writing.

“All I could see were the grammar mistakes, but one of my professors said, ‘Lavera, you’re going to be a beautiful writer one day.’ He saw the potential in me and knew that one day I’d be in a place where I could accept my voice. I thank God for my professors, because they didn’t give up on me.”

Wright graduated last February with a B.S. in public accounting. A couple of months later, her daughter graduated from college and her son graduated from high school. Her third son continues to do well in high school.

“When I walked down that aisle at graduation, it was like a domino effect,” she says. “I made that first impact, and because of that, it opened up many doors for my children.”

—Tom Stoelker

]]>
957
Lori Majewski, FCLC ’93: Just Can’t Get Enough https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/lori-majewski-fclc-93-just-cant-get-enough/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 15:36:59 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=896 Magazine_Majewski_MadWorldTo Lori Majewski, new wave isn’t just a favorite musical style; it’s a passion that’s driven her professional career and inspired her to co-write Mad World, an oral history of 36 of the genre’s most memorable songs. In June, Amazon named the book one of 2014’s best so far.

“I wanted to be a music journalist because I wanted to meet my favorite bands,” says Majewski, whose love of artists like Depeche Mode, New Order, and especially Duran Duran dates back to her childhood in Weehawken, New Jersey, where she’d go through a can of hairspray a week to achieve the look of the era. She chose to attend Fordham because its Lincoln Center campus “made it easy for me to go to class during the day, and then go to the hotels where my favorite bands were staying and talk to them.” (She once saw Bono getting out of a cab. He signed her school binder.)

While at Fordham, Majewski interviewed bands for the student newspaper, The Observer, while also running a Duran Duran fanzine with more than 5,000 subscribers. That experience led her to a professional career in magazines, and she’d go on to hold the top job at Teen People and serve as an executive editor at Us Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, and YM.

But in 2011, Majewski decided to get out of the magazine business and focus primarily on an idea conceived with former Spin colleague Jonathan Bernstein. The two had read an interview with Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp in which he revealed that the lyrics to their hit song “True” were inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Says Majewski: “We were like, what if we did an entire book with nuggets like this?”

The result is Mad World, a history of the big-haired, synthesizer-loving new wave artists that provided the soundtrack of the 1980s. “I got my favorite artists to talk about the songs that mean the most to them, and I get to share it with so many like-minded people,” says Majewski. Indeed, there’s an audience that still adores what Majewski calls “the new classics.” At a September event at Brooklyn’s Rough Trade record store, some 50 fans turned up to watch Majewski interview Ultravox’s Midge Ure.

“It’s the first book that gives credibility to this era,” says Majewski, who is interested in working with Bernstein on a sequel to Mad World. She also wants to tackle a book on the late ’90s teen-pop explosion. But whichever era she’s chronicling, Majewski does it all with the enthusiasm of a fan, not the dagger of a critic. “I’m kind of a fan who made it,” she says.

—Joe DeLessio, FCLC ’06

]]>
896
When Women Came to Rose Hill https://now.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/when-women-came-to-rose-hill/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 15:16:53 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=892 Fifty years ago, in September 1964, Fordham opened Thomas More College, the school whose students helped pioneer the presence of undergraduate women on the University’s Rose Hill campus.

They were not the first women to attend Fordham. The Law School began accepting female students in 1918. Women also had been earning Fordham degrees at the Graduate School of Social Service and the Undergraduate School of Education, then located in Manhattan at 302 Broadway (a precursor of the University’s Lincoln Center campus). Women in the School of Education had even been commuting to the Bronx to take their science lab courses alongside male students at Rose Hill, where women had also been part of the School of Pharmacy’s student body.

But, as Raymond Schroth, S.J., noted in his book Fordham: A History and Memoir, Fordham’s Bronx campus was still “a male enclave” at the time.

The Thomas More women “radically transformed” the University, he wrote, “forcing men—faculty and students—to rethink the role of women in Catholic education and in their own lives.”

In 1974, Fordham College at Rose Hill began accepting women, and the University closed Thomas More.

This fall, the college’s alumnae returned to Rose Hill to celebrate their place in Fordham’s history. Read “Alumnae Celebrate 50th Anniversary of Thomas More College.”

]]>
892