Florio, a 2015 grad who majored in business administration with a dual concentration in entrepreneurship and marketing, was among handful of college seniors and recent grads from across the country to appear on a special episode of ABC program, which aired on Oct. 2.

The episode featured hit show, Shark Tank’s, “Mr. Wonderful,” Kevin O’Leary, putting college seniors through a sales boot camp on the art of the sell, prepping them for the show’s second annual sales challenge. After the field was narrowed down to three, the newly minted sales force headed to New York City’s Union Square Park to see which of the final contestants learned the most, in a competitive sales experiment captured on hidden camera.

The contestants had to sell cupcakes out of a truck from a company in which O’Leary had invested on Shark Tank, Wicked Good Cupcakes. O’Leary and ABC/ESPN anchor Hannah Storm provided live direction and commentary, and, in the end, Florio was the victor.

Christine Janssen-Selvadurai, the director of the entrepreneurship program at the Gabelli School, said she was “so proud of Tommy Florio’s representation of Fordham.” Watch the segment of 20/20 here.

The 2013 Conference was held 11-13 June 2013 at Fordham’s Rose Hill Campus. It was on “Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine.”

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, laid out the challenges that face Fordham, and the University’s plans to confront them, at the 16th Annual Faculty Convocation.

“The state of the University is pretty good, but the environment in which we operate is more and more challenging every year,” he told faculty and administrators on Sept. 15 at the McGinley Ballroom.

“We could not achieve greatness with out your vision, creativity, and generosity of heart.”

For this year’s report, Father McShane concentrated his remarks on the University’s admissions, finances, and physical plant, with specific attention given to the dramatic transformation of the Lincoln Center campus.

On the former, the University’s Graduate School of Business has seen robust gains in enrollment, while enrollment at the Graduate School of Social Service has been steady. Other graduate schools, such as Law, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School of Education, have seen an erosion of enrollment, however.

Undergraduate admissions have been a bright spot at the Lincoln Center campus, where a brand new residence hall and law school building opened this fall. Fueled by greater-than-expected interest in the Gabelli School of Business’ inaugural cohort at Lincoln Center, the University increased the size of its incoming class by 250 students, he said.

In addition to noting the Class of 2018 features more students from the top 10 percent of their high school class, Father McShane said it has a higher percentage of African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians than in previous years. Continuing the University’s trend toward becoming a global institution, the Class of 2018 also saw a 21 percent increase in its international student enrollment.

On finances, Father McShane reported on the success of Excelsior | Ever Upward | The Campaign for Fordham, which closed in March at $540 million. The successful campaign had a significant effect on the University’s ability to expand its physical plant, offer financial aid, and shore up its endowment, which currently stands at $702 million—up from $621 million last year and $548 million the year before that.

The additions of McKeon Hall and the new law school building at the Lincoln Center campus, and the renovation of Hughes Hall at the Rose Hill campus are the most obvious examples of the University’s drive to add sorely needed academic space. Prior to their construction, he said, it had been 40 years since new academic space had been built. When the University renovates the old law school building and takes control of the former College Board building across the street at 45 Columbus Ave. that it bought last year, it will have added 570,000 square feet to the campus.

To pay for the new construction and operations at Lincoln Center, the University relied on $200 million from the sale of two properties on Amsterdam Avenue and funds raised in the capital campaign.

The $250 million price tag of the building is worth it, he said, because such a structure can help attract students from far afield.

“McKeon Hall has 430 beds. Those 430 beds will enable Fordham College at Lincoln Center and a small cohort at Gabelli to attract students from distant markets, and thereby lessen our dependence on the market in the Northeast, where the numbers are shrinking,” he said.

“We saw this as a strategic move that will enable us to stabilize ourselves as we move into the future.”

With the old law school building now open to other schools and departments, a reallocation of space can happen at the Lowenstein Center, where Father McShane joked, “Life was lived on elevators.”

Going forward, he announced the creation of a rolling University Planning Committee that eschews the traditional “once-and-for-all 10-year plan.” Ten years ago, he noted, few would have predicted the exponential rise of massive open online courses (MOOC’s), the pressure on colleges from state and federal governments, or the various emergent fields in technology and medicine.

“Strategic planning in an ongoing way will give us the agility that we need not only to stay even, but to move ahead in terms of quality and in terms of programming,” he said.

Other University achievements include:

-Several schools rose or retained places in this year’s U.S. News and World Report rankings. The Graduate School of Social Service is ranked No. 11 in the country, while Fordham Law rose two places, to No. 36., and received high marks for its intellectual property, clinical training, dispute resolution, and part-time programs. Bloomberg Businessweek named the Gabelli School of Business the 38th-best undergraduate school in the country, up from 40.

-Last year, students won 13 Fulbrights for a total of 101 in the last decade (making Fordham one of the top Fulbright producers in the nation), one Boren award, a Gates-Cambridge scholarship, a Truman Fellowship, and a Beinecke Scholarship.

-Fordham faculty carry $53.1 million in multiyear grant funding, and this year, 78 of the faculty received faculty fellowships and 45 received research grants, representing total University support of $4,848,000. Across the schools, faculty members published 261 books and 454 scholarly articles.

Rachel A. Annunziato, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of clinical psychology, A&S,

“7 Ways to Nurture Your Geeky Kid,” The Stir, June 5

Tom Beaudoin, Ph.D.,
associate professor of practical theology, GRE,

“Anatomy of a ‘Deconversion’,” Eureka Street, June 10

Fran Blumberg, Ph.D.,
associate professor of counseling psychology, GSE,

“7 Ways to Nurture Your Geeky Kid,” The Stir, June 5

Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D.,
professor of English, A&S,

“Spotting a Bad Adviser—and How to Pick a Good One,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21

James Cohen,
associate professor of law, LAW,

“Dewey Execs Likely Bound for Trial Despite Ace Legal Teams,” Law 360, July 14

Mark Conrad,
professor of legal and ethical studies, BUS,

“Student-Athletes to Get Paid? It Looks That Way,” NBC News, August 12

George Demacopoulos, Ph.D.,
professor of theology, A&S,

“Iraqi Christians Flee Homes Amid Militant Push,” ABC 13 via Associated Press, June 16

Deborah W. Denno, Ph.D.,
Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law, LAW,

“Lethal Injection: A Pharmacist Balances Profit and Karma,” TheStar.com via Global Post, August 11

Karen J. Greenberg, Ph.D.,
director of the Center on National Security, LAW,

“Who Gets to See the CIA Torture Report,” WNYC, August 7

Christina Greer, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of political science, A&S,

“‘Are You, Like, African-AMERICAN or AFRICAN-American?’,” NPR, August 9

Constantine Katsoris,
Wilkinson Professor of Law, LAW,

“Critics Charge Termination Forms Ripe for Abuse,” Bank Investment Consultant, August 11

Beth Knobel, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of communication and media studies, A&S,

“Russian Perspective on Airline Shootdown,” CBS, July 23

Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of biology, A&S,

“Elephants Can Outsniff Rats and Dogs,” Live Science, July 22

Paul Levinson, Ph.D.,
professor of communication and media studies, A&S,

“Live Chat: The Life and Legacy of Robin Williams,” ABC News, August 12

Mark Naison, Ph.D.,
professor of African and African American Studies and history, and principal investigator of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), A&S,

“Panel Discussion on the Black Arts Movement,” CSPAN, July 12

Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D.,
Archbishop Demetrios Chair of Theology and Culture, professor of theology, and co-founding director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, A&S,

“Russian Orthodoxy,” Sightings, July 21

Christiana Peppard, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of theology and science, A&S,

“The Pope and the Sin of Environmental Degradation,” NPR, July 18

Candace Rondeaux,
fellow at the Center on National Security, LAW,

“Taliban Deftly Offer Message in Video of Freed U.S. Soldier,” The New York Times, June 4

Susan Scafidi,
academic director of the Fashion Law Institute, LAW,

“Hello Katey? A Push Into Cat Fashion From Kate Spade,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 12

Olivier Sylvain, Ph.D.,
associate professor of law, LAW,

“Great Privacy Essay: Fourth Amendment Doctrine in the Era of Total Surveillance,” Network World, July 30

Terrence W. Tilley, Ph.D.,
Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Professor of Catholic Theology and chair of the department, A&S,

“Theologians Critique Cardinal Dolan’s Defense of Capitalism,” National Catholic Reporter, June 6

Alexander Van Tulleken, M.D.,
Helen Hamlyn Senior Fellow, IIHA,

“Fordham’s Alexander Van Tulleken on CNN’s New Day: Chikungunya Virus,” CNN, July 29

Ian Weinstein,
Associate dean for the Clinical and Experiential Programs and professor of law, LAW,

“How Far Have We Come a Year After Stop and Frisk Ruling?” WNYC, August 12

More than 2,200 freshmen participated in Fordham’s Opening Day, with 1,700 students moving into the residence halls and 539 commuter students checking in.

Despite the crowds arriving at the Rose Hill campus, the day unfolded with its customary precision.

“When you get to the residence halls, don’t pick up a thing,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, greeting caravans of freshmen and their families. “The students will take care of everything.”

As cars from as far as San Francisco and as near as White Plains pulled into the parking lot, Father McShane and student volunteers offered the travelers water bottles and some helpful pointers.

“You must visit Arthur Avenue while you’re here,” Father McShane counseled. “I recommend Tra Di Noi. Tell them I sent you. Do you like veal? You can cut it with a spoon there.”

He motioned to an SUV with Louisiana license plates to roll down the windows.

“You’re moving into Loyola?” Father McShane asked a student in the back seat half-concealed by a mini refrigerator. “You are so lucky.”

Making Rose Hill history, about 130 students participating in the Manresa Scholars Program moved into the newly renovated Loyola Hall, which was once home to more than 100 Jesuit priests. The 86-year-old Gothic building includes classrooms equipped with SMART technology, a kitchen, study nooks, and the St. Ignatius of Loyola Chapel.

On the fourth floor, Maine resident Sarah O’Connell was moving into a spacious triple overlooking Cunniffe House. As she placed keychains shaped like work boots (tokens from her home state) on her new roommates’ beds, she recalled her first visit to Fordham.

“It was like a scene from [the TV show]‘Say Yes to the Dress.’ I stepped on Fordham’s campus and immediately knew that this is where I wanted to be,” she said.

“One of the deciding factors was that when I came for a tour, everyone was wearing Fordham apparel,” she added. “It sounds trivial, but it showed that the students here have a sense of pride in their school.”

Meanwhile, across campus new commuter students were checking in. For some, the day was an introduction to the Bronx campus, while for others it was a homecoming.

“I wanted to stay in New York City and go to a school where I could study environmental science,” said I’aliyah Wiggins, a Parkchester native who had already taken summer classes on campus.

“Fordham seemed to have everything I wanted.”

At the Lincoln Center campus, the soaring, 22-story high McKeon Hall was the star of the day. Perched atop the new Fordham School of Law building, which opened its doors earlier in the month, the Pei Cobb Freed-designed building was buzzing with movers from 7:30 a.m. until late afternoon.

West 62nd Street was closed to non-Fordham and Lincoln Center traffic for the occasion, and while workers toiled across the street on Fashion Week facilities at Damrosch Park, Fordham families arrived at times pegged to their floor number.

With roughly 100 international students already there, the four elevators delivered 306 more to the eco-friendly high-rise, which features modern bedroom suites, common living spaces, study lounges, a movie theater, a dance space, a dining hall, and great views.

Mark Mecurio drove down from Providence, R.I., to drop off his fourth son, Nicholas, who will pursue theater at Fordham College Lincoln Center. He marveled at the operation from the sidewalk.

“Out of all four, this was the easiest. The service is unbelievable. You come in, they tell you where to go, everybody’s here to help you, they unload your car, and in ten minutes, you’re out,” he said.

“This is in the city; I figured it would be the most difficult, and it was the easiest.”

Among the new residents of the building are 62 students enrolled at the Gabelli School of Business’ brand-new, undergraduate program at Lincoln Center, offering a Bachelor of Science in Global Business. Some, like Whittier, Calif. resident Gregory Govea Lopez, needed to only visit New York City once to settle on Fordham.

For incoming Fordham College at Lincoln Center student Esther Feliz Terrero, moving to Manhattan from the Dominican Republic was both exciting and bittersweet. She was born in Yonkers and lived there until her family moved to Santo Domingo, but she was drawn back to the United States for her education.

“I always loved New York, and I’ve always come back for the summer. I just love roaming around the city,” she said.
“Fordham is a very good college, and it’s liberal arts, which I wanted. I like that my classes won’t just be my major. I want to become a global citizen and know a bit about everything.”

Fordham welcomed 2,246 students to the Class of 2018, with 1,678 of those students at Rose Hill and 568 at Lincoln Center—a 15 percent increase compared to last year’s freshmen class. The University made just over 19,000 offers to nearly 41,000 high school applicants, an acceptance rate of 48 percent.

The freshman class has a mean score of 1260 on the SAT and ACT and a mean high school GPA of 3.6. Additionally, 192 students enrolled as presidential, dean’s, and merit scholars. Overall, 91 percent of the Class of 2018 was offered some sort of financial aid.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Class of 2018 is its diversity, said John Buckley, associate vice president for undergraduate enrollment.

The new class hails from 43 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. “We have over 50 students from the southwest region of the United States, and we have more than 140 from the west—including more than 120 from California alone,” Buckley said.

In addition to being more ethnically diverse, this year’s freshman class includes 171 international students from countries as far as Ghana and Myanmar. Of that population—which saw a 26 percent increase since last year—111 students come from abroad, while more than 60 are international students who attended high school in the United States.

“To have students from diverse backgrounds engaging with one another in conversation, debating ideas, and having both academic and social experiences together — that is essential for a quality educational experience and for a strong community,” Buckley said. “And when you consider the city in which we’re located, which is truly global, it’s important for the Jesuit University of New York City to reflect that environment.”

Sanghyun Lim, a Columbia, South Carolina resident who hails originally from Seoul, South Korea, is one of those 60 international students. While his two roommates unpacked their belongings in their new home on the 15th floor of Lincoln Center’s McKeon Hall on Sunday, Lim raved about the space, with its view of the Hudson River and Midtown Manhattan to the south. Like his fellow international students, he moved in before his fellow classmates, to allow for more time for adjustment.

A student at Fordham College Lincoln Center, he plans to major in communications and media with a concentration in film, and hopefully become a film producer or distributor.

“I came here once in seventh grade with my brother, and both of us said, ‘This is a great place; we should come here when we grow up,’” he said.

Now that the celebratory dust surrounding commencement is finally settling, the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) deserves a shout-out for some impressive recognition it received recently.

Each year Fordham’s Executive MBA program is recognized by Poets and Quants magazine, as the program climbs its way up the magazine’s ranking of rankings list.

“It’s based on performance on other rankings so it’s very interdependent,” explained Francis Petit, Ph.D., associate dean of executive programs. “So if you keep doing well on other rankings, like Financial Times or Bloomberg, it’ll have positive effect.”

Poets & Quants ranked the program 39th worldwide, up from 41 in 2013, and 42 in 2012. Petit cited the program’s international emersion elective as key to its success.

In addition, CEO Magazine ranked Fordham’s EMBA as a tier one program.

Another big win for GBA came directly from one of its students. MBA student Michael Hartigan took first place in this year’s All-America Student Analyst Competition sponsored by Institutional Investor magazine.

The competition brought together more than 2,100 students from over 81 universities, to trade $100,000 in virtual money. The four-month contest scored students in the same manner as any major investment house would to assess their own employees.

“Michael took a very solid approach from constructing a sound portfolio of three stocks that he felt were uncorrelated and took calculated risks,” said Robert Fuest, an adjunct professor at Fordham and the faculty advisor for students in the competition.

“He understands the difference between a good company versus a good stock; sometimes it could be a good company, but it’s a bad stock. And he gets that.”

In addition to Hartigan, seven other MBA students made it into the top 100 contenders, making Fordham the leading school in the competition.

“Part of what we’re doing is giving students practical experience and discussing business as it is in real life, not just theoretical,” said Fuest, who is also the COO of Landor and Fuest Capital.

“I think that taking a clinical aspect to learning is critical. They do it in law, they do it in medicine, and they do it in some business schools. This competition helps us to do that here.”

But when you’re uprooted by political violence or a natural disaster, that stress can actually be traumatizing. So it makes some sense to expect that refugees will experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while voluntary migrants will be dramatically better off.

Except when they aren’t.

Andrew Rasmussen, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology and director of the master’s program in applied psychological methods, said that despite the more severe experiences that lead refugees to migrate, there is a remarkable overlap in the ways that both voluntary migrants and refugees cope with the stress of relocating. He joined Fordham’s faculty last year after working as a clinical psychologist and supervisor at Bellevue Hospital, where he interacted extensively with both groups.

“We have all sorts of policies that favor people who come over for refugee reasons, and while I believe that refugees are different from other immigrants, I’m less convinced that the differences are as extreme as our policies seem to indicate,” he said. “There are lots of refugees who are coming with an incredible amount of psychological reserves that don’t fit the traumatized refugee stereotype that we see in the news and in some psychological research.”

Consider Somalis who have struggled every day for 17 years in Kenyan refugee camps to make a living in the camps’ black market economies until they can resettle in the United States. While they may suffer from a form of depression, their psychological reserves likely surpass those of someone suffering from severe depression who is not able to get out of bed.

And there are also voluntary migrants who may have very difficult experiences in their backgrounds, said Rasmussen—experiences that can cause them psychological problems here in the United States.

Rasmussen has studied both refugee and immigrant families. In both sets of families, it’s common that children will have been unaffected by the upheaval that drove their parents to leave their home countries. He has observed similar “generation gaps” in both.

“They’ll say they (children) are becoming too American; they don’t have the same cultural values, they’re wearing funny clothes, and they’re not being as respectful to their elders as they should be. Those are things you hear as much among refugees as you hear among voluntary immigrants,” Rasmussen said.

Refugee parents do differ from voluntary immigrant parents, however, when they’ve been personally affected by political violence and show symptoms of post-traumatic stress as a result. Conflicts will happen more often because parents with PTSD are more likely to be irritable and have trouble sleeping.

“The point is there’s not a ‘refugee family syndrome’ that’s specific, but there are elements of the immigration experience that may be affected by a parent who has trauma symptoms,” Rasmussen said.

The Bronx is an ideal place to explore these differences because it is home to many residents from the same country that have come here both as voluntary migrants and as refugees. Rasmussen recently worked with a community group in the Bronx that caters to the Fouta, an African ethnic group found in Guinea and Sierra Leone. He found that one area in which the two migrant populations diverge is after-school childcare.

“There were just one or two places that voluntary migrants will send their kids, whereas refugees wouldn’t send their kids to any after-school program. They’d send them home to be with brothers or cousins or sisters,” he said.

“So it may be that some of the stress related to being a refugee translates into suspicion of government-sponsored care programs in ways that it doesn’t for voluntary migrants.”
Rasmussen also researches how other cultures express distress. Recently he teamed up with Partners in Health, which is setting up a mental health clinic in central Haiti. Through interviews with Haitian residents, Rasmussen was able to design a questionnaire about mental health that was compatible with Haitian culture.

The questionnaire had to be different from one he’d used in the states because depression in Boston, where Partners In Health is based, cannot be compared to depression in rural Haiti—where residents don’t even have running water.

“Even though we may not be able to create a measure for every single person and then try to compare, we do need to understand the importance of recognizing that culture affects the things we talk about, and the way we talk about it.”

Jackson has been studying the phenomenon, known as microagressions, since the mid-1990s—well before the term took hold in academia.

“Race is a difficult topic for anyone to talk about, but this is the kind of racism that’s more ambiguous and more chronic, so it’s harder to track,” she said.

Regardless of whether someone’s emotions are ambiguous or not, Jackson’s science demands evidence. As such, she has developed questionnaires and methods that produce hard numbers and compelling narratives in response to a variety of circumstances. Her subjects range from urban middle-school students trying to get into a good high school to veterans looking for work.

Jackson said that microagressions often shape the way her clients perceive themselves and can shade their ambitions. The insults can be racist, sexist, and/or classist. They are often unintentionally insulting.

“It’s not just ignorance that causes this; we all have biases and we all step in it,” said Jackson. “But we must find a way to deal with it in a manner that brings us closer rather than distances us.”

Jackson designed two training methods that involved a counselor interacting with a client and a third person of the same race and gender as the client. In one method using confrontation, the third person played the aggressor and challenged the counselor’s unintended stereotyping, giving voice to what the client might be thinking. This caught some counselors off guard and they responded defensively.

But in a stereotype reversal method, the third person used “Imagine if…” statements to reframe the stereotyping assumptions as if they might apply to the counselor’s own racial or cultural frame of reference.

“The study was to examine what was more effective in terms of empathizing with the client,” she said. “[And] it helped put the counselor in the other person’s shoes.”

Jackson is more than simply a casual observer. She is a white woman who is married to an African-American man, and she is the mother of biracial children. Through personal experience as well as research, she has come to learn that a lot of what she considered to be isolated slights were actually part of the daily grind for her subjects.

“A lot of people think that we’re post racial and that all the ‘isms’ are a thing of the past,” she said. “But systemically these subtle biases add to the achievement gap, untapped potential, and barriers to well-being for members of groups that are vulnerable, like women, homosexuals, people of color, and older people.”

In Jackson’s terms, people who work with people—like psychologists, teachers, and employers—need to identify the challenges facing members of groups vulnerable to discrimination and then identify strengths that could help them overcome those challenges.

“But first, we need to identify our own hidden biases, not only to challenge our blind spots, but also to build on our empathic resources as potential strengths for multicultural perspective taking,” she said.

In one study, Jackson and her team of graduate students interviewed New York City middle-school students who were struggling academically about their experiences with success and their personal accomplishment stories. Before the students began taking “gateway” courses in high school that could determine their access to college and careers, Jackson investigated whether “success learning experiences” could be linked to educational and career pathways.

The researchers hypothesized that identifying sources of self-efficacy might help the teens overcome the challenges partly brought on by microagressions. Four categories of self-efficacy were identified as: 1. One’s direct experience with success. 2. Vicarious effects, such as seeing someone else succeed. 3. Social persuasion, being encouraged to succeed. 4. Physiological arousal, such as the experiencing pride and joy in success.

A subsequent series of studies has culminated in a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project “For and By the Participants.” Jackson and her team of graduate students have collaborated with middle-school students from groups underrepresented in professions grounded in science, math, and technology. The middle-school student members of the PAR team are scholars in an enrichment program at the Fordham University Science and Technology Entry Program.

Together, they have developed a 72-item measurement tool of sources of self-efficacy and they are building scientific evidence for its utility in theoretical, psychometric, and cultural relevance.

The measurement tool has been “incredibly useful,” Jackson said, allowing her doctoral students to test the validity of self-efficacy theories and to make the process more culturally relevant.

She said it has been most effective in small, well-facilitated groups where, taking turns, each speaker’s success story can lead participants to hash out what they understand the speaker’s strengths to be.

Jackson integrates service and teaching in her research projects. For example, she has provided her PAR team with scientific training on how to evaluate the reliability and validity of items in psychological measurement. She has also trained and supervised her PAR team to provide individually tailored career counseling exploration experiences that help participants in small groups to strength-based career-related sources of self-efficacy.

The PAR team had its peer-reviewed proposal accepted to present a workshop to facilitate this exercise at the Winter Roundtable for Multicultural Psychology and Education held at Columbia University in February. The middle-school students (all but one who are now in high school) and their graduate student partners co-presented the findings. They explained and demonstrated how the exercise functioned, and helped lead workshops where participants could experience the exercise themselves.

“The middle-school students were able to name their sources of self-efficacy, name their strengths, and name what they wanted to learn about, as well as co-facilitate this process with workshop participants who were professional educators and psychologists in training or practice.”

“The power of psychology is really just helping people name, own, identify, and build on their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in constructive ways” said Jackson.