“Students taking classes across the broad range of our undergraduate curriculum—from music, theater, and media to political science, theology, and more—saw their coursework come to life through the Met’s world-renowned productions,” said Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center. 

First-Timers at the Opera 

Most recently, nearly 200 students attended X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a musical interpretation of the life of the iconic civil rights leader. Among the students was Cambria Martinez, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who studies communications and culture. The Nov. 14 performance was her first time at an opera. 

“The closest I’ve ever gotten is listening to one song from The Phantom of the Opera,” she said, chuckling. 

Martinez attended the performance as part of the course Photography, Identity, Power. “It’s about visuals and how we can use specific artistic mediums to tell a deeper, more powerful story,” she said. “[In X] I think of the scene … an empty stage with just the chair that had fallen, and we all knew that was a symbol of [Malcolm’s] anger, his rage. … How does that simple visual mean something greater to the rest of us?” 

For Allison Anwalimhobor, a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who majors in political science and minors in music, the event was an opportunity to experience not only her first opera, but one that pushed the boundaries of the art form.

“Musically, it was very different because the opera wasn’t very traditional, from what I understand,” said Anwalimhobor, who attended the opera as part of a classical vocal instruction course. “It was nice to get acquainted with a new genre and style of music.”

A Longstanding Relationship

Fordham has long held ties to the Met Opera. Ever since the famed opera house opened its doors at Lincoln Center in 1966, scores of students and staff have attended its shows, including the men’s basketball team. Others have participated in conversations surrounding the performances, including President Tania Tetlow, who recently welcomed members of the Met’s Dead Man Walking to a poignant discussion about the opera, art, and faith. In addition, former members of the Fordham community have worked with the opera house, including Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, dancer Erin Moore, FCLC ’05, director Michael Mayer, and Bronx Arts Ensemble founder William Scribner.

Through a new initiative, hundreds of members of the Fordham community were able to  experience the grandeur of the Met Opera this year. Using funds from Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s endowment from the Mellon Foundation, the FCLC Office of the Dean, Center on Religion and Culture, and the Office of Government Relations and Urban Affairs worked together to purchase group tickets for four productions, including Dialogues de Carmélites and Champion, and distribute them to courses whose curriculum intersects with the opera. 

This fall, for example, students saw a dress rehearsal of Dead Man Walking, which is based on a bestselling memoir written by a nun who tries to save the soul of a condemned murderer. The tickets were given to courses that touch on the topic of capital punishment or faith. Students were also given copies of the original bestselling book by Sister Helen Prejean. 

Encouraging Students to ‘Embrace the Arts’ 

For Samuel Scriven, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, attending the Met Opera was nothing new. (He had already attended the Met twice.) What was different this time around was the contemporary nature of X—the avant-garde musical choices, jazz elements, and political commentary—and the groundbreaking nature of the performance itself, he said. 

“Now we have the Met making intentional choices to put the work of Black composers on stage. That hadn’t happened in Met history until 2021,” said Scriven, a music major who attended X through the course Music in the Modernist Age. 

“I was really glad that [Fordham] wanted to take advantage of the fact that the opera is right next door to us—and arguably one of the best performance stages in the world for this kind of thing,” Scriven said. “I’m glad to know that they want to encourage us students to embrace the arts.”

“The history of this area is absolutely remarkable and unknown, including the history of Fordham,” said Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., a psychology and urban studies professor who teaches the course. 

Urban Psychology offers Fordham students and visiting students a dynamic learning experience in the middle of Manhattan, he said. Through lessons in the classroom and walking tours in the city, students learn how living in an urban environment impacts them—their personality, behavior, values, and relationships—and what makes New York City unique. 

The History Behind Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s Name

Since the course began in early July, the students have explored sites across the city, including the United Nations headquarters, Wall Street, and the Javits Center Expansion Rooftop and Farm. Their final tour, co-led by Takooshian and longtime city tour guide Lee Michael Klein, revealed little-known facts about the Lincoln Center campus and the surrounding area. 

One of their first stops was Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “This became a world-class arts center. It was one of the first places to not just have a symphony, ballet, or the opera, but everything at once,” said Klein. 

In 1968—four years after the center was established—Fordham College at Lincoln Center opened its doors, said Takooshian. 

“The structure of the buildings in Lincoln Center is kinda weird, the way they put those windows, because it’s designed to match Lincoln Center,” said Takooshian. “Fordham College at Lincoln Center is literally part of Lincoln Center … It’s part of the complex that Robert Moses developed.” 

Denzel’s ‘16th-Century England’ 

Another highlight of the tour was a visit to the residential apartment garden where Denzel Washington practiced acting with his Fordham mentor and professor, Robert W. Stone, at 30 West 60th Street, where Stone once lived, said Takooshian. 

“This garden has been here since the building was built in the ’60s,” he said. The garden was freshly manicured with paved walkways and bright hibiscus bushes, but Takooshian drew the group’s attention to a shadier, less colorful part of the garden that borders 9th Avenue. “This side is older. Look over there, and you’ll see old benches and a tree with tiny little apples. I’m guessing that’s where Stone and Denzel met. It’s almost like being in 16th-century England.” 

While Takooshian spoke about the neighborhood’s history, a city ambulance drew near, siren blaring at full blast. 

“That’s New York, isn’t it?” Takooshian joked. 

‘No Matter What You See … There’s Always Something Else’ 

The afternoon tour was attended by a small but eclectic group of full-time Fordham students, summer session students, University faculty and staff, and friends of the group. Among them were students in Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, including a former ballerina from Los Angeles, and two U.S. Marine Corps veterans. 

Yuntong Zhao, a student at Barnard College, said that as an international student from Beijing, China, the tour was a special experience. “I don’t really know the city as well, so it’s an amazing opportunity to learn while experiencing the city,” said Zhao, who is living in New York City for the first time this year. “When I was choosing summer classes, I found Fordham to have amazing course offerings. It’s one of the most flexible programs out there at this time.” 

The tour was a unique experience for longtime New Yorkers, too. “Being raised in New York, you become accustomed to not doing the touristy things,” said Sathya Samuel Hayes Houston Breckinridge, a summer student from Cambodia who was raised in New York City. “It’s definitely an experience to do the things I’ve always heard about.”

There’s always something new to see in the city, no matter how long you’ve lived here, said Klein, who made the city his home since 1992. 

“The thing about New York is that no matter what you see,” said Klein, “there’s always something you’re overlooking—there’s always something else.” 

The paper’s lead editorial writer, Francis P. Church, a 58-year-old journalist who’d been a Civil War correspondent, received O’Hanlon’s handwritten note from his boss. He reportedly “bristled and pooh-poohed” when asked to respond. Yet he quickly crafted a 417-word reply (first published anonymously) that has moved millions of people, becoming history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong,” Church began. “They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.”

He continued in a manner both cosmic and direct: “In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”

O’Hanlon’s letter and Church’s wise, generous reply first appeared on the editorial page of the Sun on September 21, 1897. Since then, they have been translated into dozens of languages and appeared, in whole or part, in countless books, movies, and newspapers.

A Grown-Up Virginia’s Fordham Dissertation: ‘The Importance of Play’

The experience had a profound effect on young Virginia O’Hanlon, and it clearly influenced her doctoral dissertation, “The Importance of Play,” which she presented at Fordham in 1930.

By that time, she was using her given name, Laura, and her married name, Douglas. Laura V. Douglas had a daughter of her own, Laura Virginia, and was working as a New York City public school teacher after having earned a BA at Hunter College in 1910 and an MA at Columbia University the following year.

As her dissertation title suggests, she remained a child at heart—a child with a sense of social justice.

In her thesis, she called play “one of the chief educational factors in the small child’s world” and expressed particular concern with conditions among immigrant communities in Lower Manhattan, where, she felt, poverty contributed to an anemic play life and kept children from developing the “spontaneity and intelligence which make quick learners and apt scholars.”

In discussing the shortage of toys in certain neighborhoods, she wrote, “The pushcart displays an occasional doll or tea set for sale but not such as make glad the heart of childhood”—drawing the last phrase from the final line of Church’s famous editorial. (Santa “lives, and he lives forever,” Church wrote, and “ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”)

Douglas traced the history of play, from Plato to the Bible to Elizabethan England to her own time. And she devised a “play program” for children, using “an experimental and control group” to “test whether or not play is important in quickening the development of intelligence and enhancing the changes of greater happiness for the child both in school and in life.”

Her conclusion: “The writer, of course, realizes that too wide or too sweeping conclusions cannot be drawn from this study. She does, however, feel that it offers quite conclusive evidence that through play a child may reach fuller development than without it.”

In closing she quoted the Gospel of Matthew. “‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’” she wrote. “[A]nd how can they come to Him more beautifully than thru innocent, normal, childish play, which if their home cannot give them, their school should!”

A Message for Children of Yesterday: ‘Seek Out These Trusting Children’

During the 1930s, 40 years after her letter first appeared in the Sun, Douglas published a follow-up letter in a booklet titled Is There a Santa Claus? A Little Girl’s Question Answered. She wrote:

Dear children of yesterday and today, when that question was asked, I, a little girl, was interested in finding out the answer just for myself. Now, grown up and a teacher, I want so much that all little children believe there really is a Santa Claus. For, I understand how essential a belief in Santa Claus, and in fairies too, is to a happy childhood.

Some little children doubt that Santa still lives because often their letters, for one reason or another, never seem to reach him. Nurses in hospitals know who some of these children are. Teachers in great city schools will know others.

Dear children of yesterday, won’t you try to seek out these trusting children of today and make sure that their letters in some way reach Santa Claus so that “he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

That, I think, is the best way of proving there is a Santa Claus, both for ourselves and for the children. Do you remember how Peter Pan once asked us to show our belief in fairies? You will of course do it a little differently, but you will each understand how. So, like Peter, I say, “Show you believe, please show you do,” and I shall always be gratefully yours,

Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas

Virginia’s Legacy: ‘A Wonderfully Full Life’

Laura Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas died on May 13, 1971, in a nursing home near Albany, New York. She was 81. But the message she elicited through Francis Church lives on, as does her own faith in the spirit of Christmas.

In December 1960, one year after she retired from the New York public school system, she appeared as a guest on the Perry Como Show. She spoke about her career as an educator and her family, saying she’s had “a wonderfully full life.”

“In other words, you’re convinced, really convinced there is a Santa Claus,” Como says.

“Absolutely,” she responds, before proceeding to read the words that made her famous. “This letter has been answered for me thousands of times.”

AUDIO: In 1937, a 48-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas spoke with WNYC’s Seymour Siegel about her letter, her belief in Santa Claus, and her daughter, Laura Virginia.

VIDEO: Watch a clip of Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas’ appearance on the Perry Como Show.

It’s a warm autumn day in the Bronx, and the dining room at Part of the Solution (POTS), an emergency food and social service provider, is full. Since 10 a.m. scores of people have been lined up on Webster Avenue, just across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, waiting for the dining room to open. The lunchtime crowd includes homeless men, young women with small children, and working Bronxites who can’t afford groceries. Families and individuals sit at seven tables covered in red-and-white checkered tablecloths, as volunteers serve food from the restaurant-style kitchen to each guest.

Patrick Janeczko and Danielle Rutsky are in the dining room for the first time. The two Fordham undergraduates learned about POTS in late September at a volunteer fair on campus sponsored by Fordham’s Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice.

“You see a lot more regular, working people here than you would expect,” Janeczko says, as he gathers silverware. Rutsky is struck by the contrast between the comfortable lives of many Fordham students and the poverty of POTS’s guests. “This is so close to Fordham,” she says. “It’s very enlightening.”

In a neighborhood where the median income is $26,000 a year and the unemployment rate is 12 percent, POTS operates seven days a week, offering people in crisis a place to find succor and start moving toward stability. Last year, the organization served 160,000 meals, making it the largest emergency food service provider in the Bronx.

But POTS is far more than a soup kitchen. Guests get help with immediate and long-term needs. There is the daily meal and a food pantry, a barbershop, and a no-fee doctor’s office. Homeless people can get their mail, take a hot shower, and clean their clothes. POTS social workers help clients navigate the rocky shoals of welfare bureaucracy, signing families up for food stamps and helping veterans and disabled people enroll in federal benefits programs. People who have received an eviction notice or live in substandard housing, whose public benefits have been suspended, or who have immigration problems can get free advice in the legal clinic. The organization helps 20,000 people a year, 6,000 of them children.

“Poverty is a complex problem,” says Christopher Bean, POTS’s executive director. “To be able to work with individuals in all these angles allows us to have an impact.”

It’s a relationship Jack Marth, FCRH ’86, director of programs, says is deeply valuable to the organization. “We would not be able to exist without a lot of volunteers,” he says. “Having a neighbor like Fordham, with students ready, willing, and able to volunteer, allows us to operate.”

Marth was a Fordham freshman in 1982, when POTS was just a tiny storefront soup kitchen. He volunteered to help, working closely with Ned Murphy, S.J., GSAS ’66, one of the organization’s three co-founders. Marth says that experience grounded his education. He was studying Catholic social teaching in the classroom at Fordham and practicing solidarity at POTS.

“Being at POTS was an opportunity to sit down and get to know the people better,” he says, “not just hand them a plate, but to get to know the reality of the people we serve. Father Ned used to say, ‘There is no us and them, it’s we. We’re somehow in this together.’ That’s a message POTS still wants to impart to the students who serve here.”

Marth joined the staff of POTS a few years after graduating from Fordham. He worked in the dining room and helped with renovations, then left to work at another nonprofit and earn a law degree. He returned to POTS in 2000 to start the legal clinic.

Today that clinic is led by Scott Wagner, a 2010 Fordham Law graduate. “My job is to try to create an environment that’s conducive to the clients getting services in an atmosphere that is dignified and warm,” he says. “Hopefully our response is one where we prioritize each human being as an individual.”

That compassionate approach to serving people in need appeals to Harrison Pidgeon, a Fordham senior who has been volunteering at POTS since his freshman year.

“I came here with Urban Plunge,” he says, referring to Fordham’s pre-orientation volunteer service program. “I knew I wanted to be part of this. Ultimately, I can never have the perspective of someone going through financial difficulty, but I can be here and eat a meal with them.”

Tucked behind the first-floor dining room at POTS is a pantry that provides groceries to 5,700 families a year. Using a voucher that accords credits based on family size, guests shop among shelves filled with pasta, dry beans, oatmeal, and brown rice, and refrigerators stocked with fresh eggs and produce.

For the past year, Pidgeon has been coming to POTS for Family Club. The 12-week program invites a total of 24 families to meet once a week, on Sundays or Wednesdays. Kids get help with their homework, while adults are paired with case managers who help them set goals and untangle impediments to economic and emotional progress. The centerpiece is a cooking class. Adults learn to make a delicious, nutritious meal, and go home with the ingredients to replicate it on their own. At the end of the evening, everyone shares a meal—together.

Pidgeon, a biology and Spanish major who hopes to become a doctor in a developing country, is as much tutor as big brother, playing easily with young kids and joking around with teenagers. He says POTS feels like home.

“Service has always been a part of my life, but the reason I’ve stayed with the Family Club is I know the kids now,” Pidgeon says. “I have a connection to the Bronx now as a place where I live.”

—Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, a Bronx-based freelance writer, volunteered at POTS on her first day as a Fordham student. It’s where she met her husband.