Throughout the weekend, 35 members of the Class of 1968 participated in the Thomas More College Oral History Project, which was supported by Fordham faculty and run by a team of students spearheaded by Nutting, a professor emerita of history at North Seattle College.

The project, including audio recordings and transcriptions of the interviews, was published on the Fordham Libraries site last August. It highlights the kind of reminiscences often shared at college reunions—favorite classes, lifelong friendships, and defining moments—from a group of women who saw beyond the boundaries of expectation, both at Fordham and beyond.

‘A Real Blessing’

Nutting, a Washington Heights native who later moved to the Bronx, told stories both hilarious—like the time a professor threw a bologna sandwich out a classroom window—and moving.

“A real blessing occurred when Fordham decided that it would open its gates to women here at Rose Hill,” she said of the college, which opened in 1964 and closed a decade later. “If I had not come here, I would not be the kind of person I am,” she added. “Intellectually, socially, politically, religiously, Fordham transformed me.”

Nutting said that one of the most powerful memories she has of her time at TMC is of taking a Greyhound bus through the American South with Lorraine Archibald, her only African-American classmate.

After working together in Mexico and living with a local family as part of a Fordham program one summer, Nutting and Archibald were forced to take buses home because of a national airline strike. Out of fear for Archibald’s safety, they decided that Nutting would get off the bus alone to get them snacks at a rest stop in Texas.

“I was coming back,” she said, “and all of a sudden I was surrounded by what I call ‘good ol’ boys’ who wanted to know why I was sitting with that … they used the n-word. And I lost my Irish temper in a way a New Yorker can lose a temper.”

Nutting’s response defused a tense situation, but the long bus ride home “profoundly changed me,” she said.

She also recalled taking a course with legendary media critic Marshall McLuhan, who held the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fordham at the time. “He taught us about the global village and he talked a lot about looking at the rear-view mirror as you go forward. Those two lessons became really important as I moved forward in history, and particularly as I taught history, because you need to have that perspective when you’re heading in a new direction.”

‘She Expected Great Things of Us’

Barbara Hartnett Hall, a Bronx native who discovered TMC when a recruiter came to her high school, also told her story as part of the project. She did not always think of higher education as a realistic possibility, but after receiving scholarships from New York state and from Fordham, she was able to attend.

“I felt like the luckiest person in the world,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine that that world was going to be open to me.”

Now a shareholder at Greenberg Traurig in Fort Lauderdale, where she practices land use and environmental law, Hall recalled being intimidated by the academic options at TMC. She signed up for 18 credits in her first semester before meeting with assistant dean Patricia R. Plante, Ph.D., who encouraged her to drop three credits. “‘You’re in New York City,’” she said Plante told her. “‘You know, this city is an education. You have to take advantage of it.’”

“She was pretty amazing,” Hall said of Plante, who later became the first woman dean of TMC, “because she treated us like she expected great things of us and that we were capable of it.”

Hall also shared memories of her time as co-founder and captain of the women’s basketball team. The women wore uniforms designed by a teammate’s older brother. “They seemed cool then,” she recalled of the outfits, “but they were funny when you look back.”

In talking about her time at TMC and afterward, Hall recalled walking into many new and unknown situations, including in the workplace. “I think there were a lot of firsts in our generation” she said, “and Thomas More was just one.”

‘My Life Was Suddenly Changing and Expanding’

Like Hall, Marie Farenga Danziger was born and raised in the Bronx, and saw a previously unthought-of opportunity arise with the opening of TMC.

She said that coming back to the Rose Hill campus for Jubilee last year gave her “this instant recall of my very first day at Fordham in September 1964. I remember walking up that path, in particular, focusing on the lovely trees on each side of the path and somehow knowing that my life was suddenly changing and expanding, and I was enormously excited.”

As a junior, she took the transformative step of studying abroad in Paris for the year, an opportunity that had drawn her to Fordham when looking into colleges. Despite having never flown on an airplane before leaving for Paris, Danziger became worldly during her year abroad, traveling throughout Europe and becoming fluent in French.

“It changed the rest of my life,” she said of the experience. “It made me the person I am today.”

Other formative experiences Danziger had at Fordham came from her time as the social chair for the Horizons club, which invited notable speakers to campus. In that role, she brought famous figures like Helen Hayes, Salvador Dalí, and Sidney Lumet to Rose Hill. This kind of cultural exposure made Danziger “feel that there [was]this wider world out there, and maybe, maybe, I had a bit of access to it.”

Danziger, who retired from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government just before the 2018 reunion, was touched to discover that several of her fellow alumnae still remembered her speech as class salutatorian in 1968. The speech, which came on the heels of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, referenced the movie Zorba the Greek, in which the title character teaches a young man how to dance in the face of sadness and violence.

“Fordham taught us to dance,” she said. “It certainly did that for me.”

Nutting expressed the same sentiment with a different metaphor: “I have told many people in my life that Fordham gave me wings,” she said.

“I want to see you soar,” she told the student interviewers. “In 20 years, I want to find out what you have done with your lives. And one of the things that you’re going to find out as women is that there are going to be some really difficult choices. Make them the best way you can … and you’ll find that you can do that.”

Jubilee 2019 will take place on the Rose Hill campus on May 31 through June 2.

—Adam Kaufman contributed to this story. 

In July 1947, Fordham opened a new building next to Keating Hall that would provide a home and a sense of community to Jesuits-in-training who were dispersed around the Rose Hill campus.

This Month in Fordham History…

IIn May 1931, the University held a new event to bring its colleges and schools closer together beneath “the common parenthood of Fordham,” as an article in The Ram put it.

The first faculty convocation, held on May 10, brought together more than 400 faculty members from St. John’s College, the Graduate School, the School of Law, the College of Pharmacy and the School of Sociology and Social Service, according to the article. Most of the graduate and professional schools had been founded after Fordham officially became a university in 1907.
The event was held to show appreciation for faculty members and highlight their common purpose—“to show unity in spirit,” in the words of Charles Deane, S.J., vice president of the University, who spoke at the convocation.

At the event, seven faculty members received the University’s first Bene Merenti medals for longstanding service to Fordham. One awardee was too ill to attend, so Fordham president Aloysius J. Hogan, S.J., went to his home to present the gold medal and read the citation.

In April 1959, Fordham President Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., announced that the University’s Jesuit community would gain a new seven-floor living space with the addition of a wing to their residence at Loyola Hall.

In mid-March of 1984, when the Fordham University Board of Trustees voted on a replacement for retiring Fordham president James C. Finlay, S.J., they picked a well-traveled Jesuit with a flair for words and a strong drive to boost the University’s national reputation.

Joseph O’Hare, S.J., editor of America magazine at the time, was a prolific writer of articles on religion, politics and justice whose studies and service activities had taken him as far as the Philippines, China and Eastern Europe.

Under his leadership, Fordham added numerous facilities including the William D. Walsh Family Library and residence halls that helped to attract a more national and diverse student body. The Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses gained a common core curriculum, making it easier for students to use both campuses, and applications surged, in part because of Father O’Hare’s drive for academic excellence. These and other changes transformed the University during his 19-year tenure, the longest of any Fordham president to date.

In February 1922 at Fordham, a young a Jesuit scholastic with a passion for theatre kicked off a new activity to train freshmen in the dramatic arts.

Impressed with the work of the students in his theatre workshop for freshmen, he arranged for them to stage a one-act play contest in the University auditorium.

The students wrote and directed the plays and staged them with the help of Fordham’s Mimes and Mummers. The contest—hailed by The Ram four years later as “one of the most important events of the year”—helped inaugurate a 40-year tradition of one-act plays at Fordham, culminating in the annual Jesuit Intercollegiate One-Act Play Festival, which ended in 1962.

The contest was but one part of the dramatics legacy established by that young Jesuit, Robert I. Gannon, S.J., who also wrote a manual for one-act plays. Later, as president of Fordham, he built a theatre in Keating Hall as part of his emphasis on dramatics, which had been fundamental to Jesuit education from its earliest days.

On Dec. 14, 1968, Leo P. McLaughlin, S.J., stepped down as president of Fordham, ending a tenure marked by new ventures that reflected the experimental spirit of the 1960s.

One of them was Bensalem College. Founded in 1967 and housed in an off-campus apartment building, it provided for student-directed study under the guidance of a faculty mentor, with no course requirements or grades.

Another program allowed students to graduate from Fordham Prep and Fordham in a total of six years. Among his other initiatives, Father McLaughlin launched the Lincoln Center campus’s College of Liberal Arts, which had a novel curriculum with an urban bent, and hired famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan, author of the seminal work The Medium is the Message.

In November 1968, the new chemistry building rising at the southern end of campus was named for the Fordham trustee whose $2.5 million gift covered a big chunk of its construction costs.

The trustee, John A. Mulcahy, was a native of Ireland who attended City College of New York and worked his way up to the presidency of the Quigley Company. At the time of the building’s naming, one of his sons was enrolled at Fordham and another had graduated. The latter, who died this year, served as a professor and dean at the University.

The new building doubled the space available to the Department of Chemistry and continued the discipline’s ascent at Fordham, begun 60 years earlier through the efforts of Edward Tivnan, S.J. Tivnan, who had a doctorate in chemistry, taught the University’s first real course in organic chemistry in 1908 and, as University president, set aside funding for the newly created graduate and undergraduate chemistry department.

Fordham played host to a serving president of the United States for the first time when Franklin D. Roosevelt visited campus in October 1940.

Roosevelt came to the University inthe climactic week of his campaign for a third term, which was both historic and unsettling, even to some of his supporters. In a symbol of the campaign’s pitched battle, FDR arrived at Fordham on Oct. 28—two days after a visit by his Republican rival, Wendell Willkie.

Crowds lining the Grand Concourse cheered Roosevelt as he rode to campus. But he received a more measured welcome from Fordham’s president, Robert I. Gannon, S.J., whose anti-Roosevelt views were no secret.

In his welcoming remarks, Gannon called Roosevelt “a man whose imprint is forever fixed on our national history.”

“Our country has been reshaped in the last eight years and will never be just what it was before,” he said.

Roosevelt reviewed Fordham’s ROTC coast-artillery unit and presaged America’s involvement in World War II when he referred to the days when “every able man had an obligation to serve his community and his country in case of attack.”