“I said, ‘Of course you are. You’re part of the University.’ We were laughing, but it emphasized for me that perhaps there isn’t a [strong]  sense of belonging [among graduate school alumni], and we want to work on that.”

Hence her mission as the new chair of the Fordham University Alumni Association’s (FUAA) Advisory Board. Benner, who graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1984 and previously served as the board’s vice chair, will be taking over for John Pettenati, FCRH ’81, the FUAA’s founding chair, in January. And when she does, she wants to unite all University alumni, all around the world, during her four-year term.

During this year’s Homecoming celebration, members of the FUAA ­gathered for a toast to recognize the advisory board’s ongoing work and commitment to the University. During the event, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, recognized all that Benner has contributed to Fordham thus far. “You brought in grit, courage, determination, and you never lost it,” he said. “You brought it to Fordham. You endowed Fordham with your enthusiasm.”

Referencing Benner’s undergraduate involvement with Mimes and Mummers, the theater group at Rose Hill, Pettenati added, “I know how passionate she was about that organization: She’s going to bring that passion to the FUAA.”

Benner said she has been thinking about how to stay engaged with Fordham almost since she graduated, and her leadership role on the advisory board enables her to get involved on a deeper level.

A Buffalo, New York, native, Benner said that in the ’80s, she was one of relatively few students from outside the New York metropolitan area. In recent decades, Fordham has transformed itself from a strong regional institution to a prestigious national university.

As board president, Benner plans to offer FUAA programming and events designed to unite all University alumni, particularly those who tend to think only of their affiliation with a particular campus, or with an undergraduate or graduate school, or who live beyond the New York metro area. “The thing we have in common is Fordham University; that’s what’s printed on each of our degrees,” she said. “Once you’ve graduated, you are in the world, and you wear lots of hats. You’re not your major.”

Benner added that although many of us have Zoom fatigue after being in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic for nearly two years, online programming has afforded alumni who live outside the New York metropolitan area far more opportunities to get more involved with their alma mater. She’s optimistic that it will continue to be “a portal through which alumni can stay involved and feel that they have a role—that they can volunteer in some capacity from where they are.”

Benner’s first six months in office will put her mission to the test, with both virtual and in-person events planned for all alumni. The fifth annual FUAA Alumni Recognition Reception will be held on January 20 in the ballroom at the historic 583 Park Avenue. Created by the advisory board’s networking and engagement task force, the reception hasn’t been held in person since 2020. (Last year, it was held virtually.)

And Forever Learning Week, planned by the Forever Learning task force to offer alumni “master classes taught at Fordham,” will kick off on March 28. Last year, the programming was offered virtually throughout April. “Hundreds of alumni from around the world dialed in,” Benner said. “It was fascinating because it was the mosaic of all the parts that make up Fordham.”

In addition to uniting alumni across schools, Benner hopes that she’ll be able to unite alumni across experiences, too, recognizing that Fordham is a different university than the one she attended—but in the best possible ways.

“We’ll all have different experiences, increasingly diverse experiences, more cosmopolitan experiences,” she said. “But we are all from Fordham University, the Jesuit University of New York. We have New York in common. So, whatever our generation, whatever our school or campus, we’ve got that to open the door. That’s our calling card to have something in common.”

What are you most passionate about?
Doing all that I can to open doors to opportunity for others.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Some decisions make themselves.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
In New York, anyplace where the Chrysler Building is within view. In the world, in Paris, sitting on the Seine River’s stone embankment watching boats and people of the world glide by while imagining scenes from history play out in that setting.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (HarperTorch, 1974) by Robert M. Pirsig

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you remember most?
English professor Richard Giannone because his syllabus introduced me to the writing of the masterful author Joan Didion.

What are you optimistic about?
That whatever our troubles are in whatever our era, solutions can be forged by the handiwork of people coming together sincerely to find a common cause.

Sitting in a course called Portfolio Management, the New Jersey native said he just “knew what I wanted to do,” so he asked the professor how to get started. The brazen suggestion worked, and Brett, who first enrolled at Fordham in 1977, left college to begin his finance career.

“I started on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and I worked there for two years,” he said. “Then, I got a job at Morgan Stanley [as an equity derivative sales trader], and that’s when my career path took hold more clearly.”

Now Brett, who describes his life in three phases—learning, earning, and returning—is retired. After two decades on Wall Street, during which he finally completed the Fordham business degree he began pursuing in the late ’70s, Brett is focusing on service. He’s heavily involved with the Equus Effect, a Connecticut-based nonprofit that uses equine therapy to help military veterans and others better respond to and recover from stress and trauma.

Learning

Knowing he wanted to work in business but unsure which sector of the industry was for him, Brett decided to major in accounting at Fordham. But after taking two accounting courses, he said he remembers thinking, “Oh my God, I don’t want anything to do with this!” He changed his major to finance, and it ended up being just what he was looking for. But deciding on a major wasn’t his only challenge as a student.

“College was tough for me,” he said. “I had to work a lot of jobs and I was working late at night—some of these jobs waiting tables—while I went to school. It was hard to really balance my life.” At one point, Brett was even commuting to campus by bus from Bergen County, New Jersey.

Brett was just three courses shy of graduating when he decided to jumpstart his career. He didn’t return to Fordham to complete his degree until the mid-‘90s, when he said he realized it was “kind of silly not to” finish. “I wanted the degree. Nobody on Wall Street cared whether I had a degree or not, but I wanted to do it just for my own benefit.”

He finished in 1995 and took part in the University’s 150th commencement ceremony, which featured Mary Robinson, then president of Ireland, as the keynote speaker.

“It was one of those beautiful days out on Edwards Parade, and here I was 30-something and I was hanging out with a bunch of 20-somethings getting my degree,” Brett said. “It was a big deal; I was really glad I did that.”

Earning

In 1984, Brett began working at Morgan Stanley, where he started to feel that he might want to do something more than what he did working on the trading floor.

“I had a sense that maybe I could have a more structured and prolonged career,” he said. “The floor was kind of nutty. I had become a broker and then a trader, and then I learned about stock options and that was the thing that really helped me through the rest of my career.”

Brett stayed at Morgan Stanley until 1993, when he made a lateral move to Paine Webber, another investment bank. In 1995, he went to work at UBS, where he served as a managing director until he retired in 2005.

Returning

As Brett’s Wall Street career came to an end, he began trying to find his next path, which he said has ended up being “not any one singular thing, but a bunch of things mostly involved in service.” Today, he serves on the boards of several organizations, including Sharon Audubon Center, which manages three nature sanctuaries in northwest Connecticut, and the Little Guild, an animal rescue in Cornwall, Connecticut. Brett also serves as a hospice volunteer and a volunteer artist mentor for high school students, and he is a certified alcohol and substance abuse counselor.

He also found his way back to Fordham, this time as an alumnus. “Fordham just creeped into the picture in the last few years—not in any big way, just a means of staying in touch,” he said. “I sign up for some webinars and [events]that they have at the Gabelli School. They have these really interesting speakers and lectures and things like that on a range of topics.”

Amid it all is his work with the Equus Effect, where his current position is best described as jack-of-all-trades.

The Equus Effect’s four-session curriculum is designed to help veterans better address life’s challenges through purposeful engagement with horses. Working together in a peer-to-peer format, facilitators teach veterans the principles of horsemanship, which can then be applied to help them “gain the trust, respect, and willingness to collaborate” with the people they live and work with in their daily lives, according to the organization’s website. “We believe that If veterans can learn to use emotions the way horses do—as information to help them stay alive, set healthy boundaries, support one another in times of need—there would be no need to stay stuck in the stories we often tell about what we might have done differently in the past or what may or may not happen in the future.”

Brett has been involved with the Equus Effect since its inception. His partner, Jane Strong, co-founded the organization and serves as its lead facilitator and executive director. He said she came up with the idea after reading a statistic about the number of veterans who die by suicide on any given day.

“I helped her get not-for-profit status and round up some people for a board, and then I was their very first board president,” Brett said. “Like a lot of things like this, it starts out as a mom-and-pop kind of thing, and then it developed into what it is now. She’s made great progress.”

Since then, he’s served as a de facto consultant, helping to fundraise and foster new connections in a way “that’s very involved but in a quieter way.” He also occasionally fills in as a part-time instructor.

“I would say, at this point, my life is all about being civic-minded. My community really matters to me.”

Now, more than five decades later, Ninehan is supporting her old New York City neighborhood, one of the hardest hit by COVID-19, while paying tribute to the lifelong mentor and friend she found at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

Her gift to Fordham’s new Cultural Engagement Internships program—made in honor of the late history professor Anne M. Mannion, Ph.D., UGE ’58—helped make it possible for the Elmhurst Corona Recovery Collaborative to offer a paid internship this year, giving a Fordham student an opportunity to support the collaborative’s efforts to meet the food security, mental health, and other needs of community members impacted by the pandemic.

For Ninehan, who graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) in 1974 and earned a Master of Science degree from Fordham’s Graduate School of Education in 2000, supporting Fordham students is a way to express gratitude for the education she received.

“The people I met, the professors I had: It was a whole world. The elevator doors would open up and you didn’t know who was going to walk out—what new celebrity,” she said, recalling one particular instance during her first year when she attended a lecture by noted anthropologist Margaret Mead, Ph.D., who was teaching at Fordham at the time.

This access to outstanding professors was eye-opening for Ninehan, but it certainly wasn’t rare. She said history professor John F. Roche, Ph.D., who died in 2012, “was really an inspiration,” and Mannion even attended Ninehan’s wedding to fellow Ram William J. Ninehan, FCLC ’93, in 1975.

Ninehan remained close to Mannion, exchanging annual holiday cards with her until she died in 2013, a year after retiring from her 53-year-long career at FCLC. She credits Mannion with not only teaching her about history but also modeling how to teach.

“She was really the most outstanding professor,” Ninehan said. “Her enthusiasm, her love of subject: It all enhanced the pedagogy. You can learn methodology, you can learn classroom management, but if you don’t bring that spark that’s a love of your subject with you, it’s meaningless.”

Never Say Never

Despite her passion for teaching, Ninehan didn’t secure a full-time teaching position until 14 years after earning her bachelor’s degree. In the meantime, she parlayed the part-time job she’d held at Bloomingdale’s as a student into a full-time gig as a personal shopper. Due to her background in history, Ninehan often was assigned to work with foreign dignitaries and political figures, but she said it was “not what I intended to be in my life.”

Finally, while reading the newspaper on the way to work in 1988, she saw a classified ad for a seventh-grade social studies teacher—“just by the grace of God,” she said. “I never used to take the newspaper to work and one day I did.”

“I called when I got to my office and the secretary said, ‘Sister will call you back,’ and I thought, ‘Catholic school?’ And that’s where I’ve been ever since.”

Funnily enough, if it hadn’t been for some insistent advice Ninehan received as a student, her path may have differed. When applying for New York state teacher certification, someone suggested she also apply for New Jersey certification. As a “kid from Queens,” she thought, “I’m never going to live in New Jersey,” but that’s where her teaching career has taken place, the bulk of it at the very first school she found via the newspaper ad: Perth Amboy Catholic School in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

In addition to serving as a seventh- and eighth-grade teacher at Perth Amboy, Ninehan was a principal there. After an autoimmune disease diagnosis in 2011 prompted her retirement, Ninehan continued to teach part time and volunteer at the school. Due to COVID-19, she hasn’t been able to return to Perth Amboy yet, but she said she helps out however she can.

“I’ve done things like revise the handbook and helped with alumni affairs—things of that nature,” Ninehan said. “Things that are not classroom per se, but school-oriented. So, it’s kept me in the loop.”

A Cause Close to Home

As a faithful Fordham donor for more than 20 years—a milestone that earned her entrance into the University’s Doty Society—and an “Elmhurst girl” who walked to PS 13 and high school, Ninehan didn’t think twice about supporting Fordham’s Cultural Engagement Internships program after learning about it during this year’s Lincoln Center Block Party reunion, held virtually in June. The program offers FCLC and Fordham College at Rose Hill students the opportunity to participate in paid internships at local nonprofits and cultural institutions, like the Elmhurst Corona Recovery Collaborative.

Ninehan is one of several alumni donors who have stepped up to help fund student pay and expand the program. She said that while Elmhurst has “taken quite a beating—economically and physically”—over the years, it “was a wonderful place to grow up,” and it means a lot to her that people are interested in preserving the community and helping the people who live there.

“The fact that an intern can help, it’s a double blessing,” she added. “I can help [a Fordham student]do something that’s meaningful and you could help the community you came from; it just made perfect sense.”

Fordham has meant a “great deal” to Ninehan, and she’s looking forward to a time when she can connect with the Fordham community in person again. (She’ll have opportunities pretty soon: Numerous in-person alumni events are returning this month, and Homecoming, scheduled for Saturday, October 9, will be in person, too.)

“In terms of the guidance I got, in terms of my courses, the influence of the professors, and then the lifetime relationships and the friends I made, the friends I still have, my husband: It’s all Fordham,” she said.

What are you most passionate about?
I am most passionate about teaching.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
The best piece of advice I ever received was to go to Fordham, because of my lasting personal relationships and its impact on my career.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
Although I have enjoyed visiting many places, my favorite place has always been my classroom.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
I couldn’t possibly name just one book; influence or inspiration comes from many and sometimes unexpected sources.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
Anne Mannion’s love of history and her infectious enthusiasm made her a truly great teacher and role model.

What are you optimistic about?
Despite the many challenges that face us all, with the grace of God, I am optimistic about the future.