“It’s unprecedented. Kamala Harris would be the second person of color who ever served as president,” said Dr. Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University who is a regular commentator on cable news. “We’re one of the last democracies in the world [that’s] never elected a woman to the highest office. The silver lining is, even though it’s late in the game, it’s not too late. And it’s before the convention.”

Greer said that Harris will likely continue Biden’s radical attempts to relegate, reform, and abolish student loan debt, something that has actively changed the lives of millions of student borrowers. Some of Biden’s policies for higher education were more popular than others, so Greer added that Harris will have to thread the needle carefully when sharing the Biden administration successes while highlighting her own policies.

At a Feb. 18 event launching the initiative, Provost Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., said that Fordham is far from immune to national “trends and concerns.”

“I’m uplifted that Fordham is taking time to reflect on what the challenges are that lie ahead and is reimagining together how we prepare students for a world in flux,” he said in what would turn out to be a more prescient statement than he might have imagined.

The initiative is split into two groups. There is a reading group led by Eva Badowska, Ph.D., dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and Kendra Dunbar, assistant director for equity and inclusion for the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer. That group acts as a think tank, exploring pedagogical solutions inspired by various readings assigned each week and the University’s Ignatian principles. It’s composed of faculty and staff from across the University, including deans and professors from all the schools as well as representatives from IT, finance, enrollment, development, mission integration, and the libraries.

The second is an incubator group led by Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and special adviser to the provost, and Roxana Callejo-Garcia, associate vice president for strategic planning and innovation. The incubator is composed of administration, faculty, staff, graduates, undergraduates, and members of the community. From classroom inequities to climate change to community-engaged course work as part of the common core, the incubator was formed to propose a variety of practical ways that Fordham can address the pressing issues facing higher education within the community, which includes its Bronx neighbors.

The incubator is broken into five subgroups that presented their proposals at a ReIMAGINE Incubator Showcase that took place on April 21 via Zoom. More than 275 attended, including viewers from Qatar and Trinidad. The showcase featured short video presentations of the proposals with a Q&A for the presenters after their presentation:

• College Launch Summer Camp: a summer camp on campus for local K-12 students with on-site admissions component
• Initiative for Ignatian Climate Leadership: a climate-change themed cohort to be integrated within the core curriculum
• Project FRESH Air: the Fordham Regional Environmental Sensor for Health proposes a citizen-science project for Fordham students to work in collaboration with K-12 students
• The New Liberal Arts: a one-credit course for sophomores on leadership, advocacy, and the purpose of college
• Fordham Ignite: a credit-bearing course for first-year students aimed at building advocacy and community

Next Steps

Initially, there was funding in place to implement at least one of the proposals, but with the current crisis forcing the University to constrain resources, the ReIMAGINE management team is looking for ways forward. Each project, if chosen for implementation, would have taken a year to plan out, and all are relatively inexpensive, said Fernald. For example, Project FRESH Air might cost about $10,000 to execute, plus administrative time and effort.

“After the presentations are made, we think about implementation of a proposal, as well as how to continue this creative energy,” said Fernald. “There’s the great hunger to see it continue. This isn’t over, but it’s going to have to take a new shape.”

Indeed, many of the participants in the working group testified that the process has changed their views of Fordham.

Judith Insell, director of curriculum and artists development at the Bronx Arts Ensemble, has worked with Fordham for years. The ensemble’s professional musicians play at Fordham’s Lessons and Carols celebration and Easter Mass each year.

“It’s been really insightful, in all the years I’ve been working with Fordham I never had the chance to think about the Jesuit connection, that was new for me,” she said.

Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Bella Wood said she felt like the student voices were being heard in a concrete way.

“After four years of being an undergraduate, I could just come out and say ‘These are our qualms’ to faculty and students of all ages and not have it be like we were just bemoaning things,” she said.

Fernald said the process has been hopeful and positive and that it’s important to think about the future with hope.

“I’ve had more than a few people say how inspired they’ve been by learning the extent that innovation is possible at Fordham and how that has renewed their faith and hope about the future of the institution,” she said.

FCRH junior Andrew Souther blogged about how inspired he was that the groups continued to meet unabated.

“The Reimagine Higher Ed leadership team was clearly putting in so much effort to transition our [incubator]work online, and I felt compelled to match that effort with whatever I could manage,” he wrote.

The Show Must Go On  

In the weeks leading up to the incubator’s April 21 showcase, both groups met in person and eventually online. At an initial Zoom meeting held on March 24, members were on track to discuss that week’s readings and assign the various tasks needed for completion. Yet, the work had taken on a new dimension, significance, and urgency, participants said. Badowska summed it up her opening remarks.

“The world has changed since we last saw each other,” she said plainly. “This is a crisis that is all-consuming and that includes academia.”

Badowska acknowledged that everyone present was concerned for those who were not able to attend the meeting and for those who had lost loved ones. She said the crisis had made their efforts all the more significant, even though the situation felt like a “very cruel experiment.”

The reading group members were all in the throes of learning new technologies, some for teaching and others for meetings. The professors in the group agreed with marketing professor Sertan Kabadayi, Ph.D. when he stressed there is a distinction to be made between remote learning that they and their students had adapted to and courses designed for online learning.

However, all agreed that interaction with students must be maintained.

“The question is how do you express empathy with these tools,” said Sharif Mowlabocus, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies.

Kabadayi concurred.

“You need to be able to show compassion and remember that it’s a human in charge of the technology and not the other way around,” he said.

Mowlabocus reflected on the group’s recent reading that focused on “robot-proofing” one’s career.

“In this moment we have to reimagine the university, but next time we need to ‘crisis-proof’ the university,” he said.

Samir Haddad, Ph.D., associate professor of philosophy, pointed out that that the digital shift was well underway before the crisis and that a large part of the population is not able to participate.

“There are questions of equity and we need to make sure that these changes don’t harm people,” he said.

The Future Is Now

Both Badowska and Fernald were acutely aware that members of the group had been directly affected by the virus. Preceding the Incubator Showcase, Badowska said that given the environment, it felt almost unethical to talk about the future when so many were still suffering. But a community had solidified amidst the crisis, she said. With the funding pulled, figuring out the future for that community would be complex, but efforts were underway. Initially, the three-year plan was to replace group members each year.

“Now, we’re thinking more about the need for continuity because we’ve created knowledge together, but at the same time to figure out how we need to adjust our purposes and goals,” said Badowska, adding that any future effort would obviously be leaner.

She said the crisis has altered everyone’s sense of time.

“We talk about the future as if it’s to come and give ourselves over to the safety of the present moment, but the safety of that moment has been removed and future is here, it happened to us,” she said. “The fundamental adjustments to higher education that we’ve been discussing are needed now.”

She said the crisis has revealed a need for better integration of interpersonal and online teaching, issues that had been discussed in the reading group. She said that the moment of “Zoomtopia” had already passed so that questions of technology are now merging with questions of pedagogy.

“How do we engage students and how do we feed our community virtually? That was not a question before,” she said. “There’s a newly emerging appreciation, maybe more than we realize, of how desperately our students miss that community and each other.”

If colleges really want help disadvantaged and minority students, they need to consider the myriad ways they differ from more privileged students—and from each other, scholar Anthony Abraham Jack Ph.D, told an audience in Butler Commons at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus on June 6.

“I have long grown tired on analyses that just focus on students whose parents went to college, and students whose parents did not,” he said, adding that colleges and universities need to assess these student’s needs and put into place structures that provide the appropriate guidance and assistance.

“We cannot escape the fact that while some neighborhoods and schools keep us and our children from hurt, harm, and dangers, others place us in the thick of it. America’s streets still bear strange fruit,” Jack said during his talk, part of an event titled “Makes Me Wanna Holler: Rethinking Access and Belonging in the Shadow of Increasing Economic Inequality and Political Polarization.”

Systemic issues like segregation, joblessness, and poverty all come into play in the lives of college students, he said. And while some poor and minority students have benefited from the culture of elite private high schools, many have never learned to advocate for themselves or navigate a complex educational environment, said Jack, an assistant professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

In his talk, he shared the findings of 103 interviews of black and Latino students he conducted for his book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students (Harvard University Press, 2019).

Higher education has become depressingly stratified, he said. Just 14% of undergraduates in the most competitive colleges come from the bottom half of the nation’s income distribution. Meanwhile, 38 colleges have more students from the top one percent than the bottom 60 percent.

But while many colleges have made efforts to diversify their student body, minority students have been recruited both from high schools that are economically disadvantaged and those that are well off. In the past, social scientists and journalists alike have lumped them in together, he said.

“They wrote of a single experience dwelling on culture shock and isolation. They talked about a group of students at risk. All the while, as my research uncovered, colleges and universities were hedging their bets,” he said. “They were getting their new diversity from old sources: The Andovers and the Exeters of the world.”

Using Cultural Capital to Get Ahead

By admitting students who’d succeeded at places like these prestigious boarding schools, Jack said, colleges could be certain they’d possess cultural capital, which he defined as “those taken-for-granted ways of being that are valued in a particular context.”

“Colleges expect students to be comfortable and proactive in forging relationships with faculty from the moment they set foot on campus. This is the road to recommendation letters, internships, invitations to special dinners,” he said.

“Yet this expectation to be more proactive remains unsaid.”

This is an example of a “hidden curriculum,” he said, and it became abundantly clear when he interviewed a woman named Alice for his book. She came from a public high school where trash cans were set on fire and teachers exhausted themselves just trying to keep order. So when she hears professors say their doors are open, she doesn’t believe them.

“For Alice, hunkering down and doing things on her own was the way to get ahead. Her behavior makes sense. It helped her through high school, where contact and help with teachers was not always a given. It helped her get to college,” he said. But when she got there, simple phrases like “office hours” didn’t make sense to her.

“Why don’t we define what office hours are, instead of just repeating what’s on the syllabus? There are lessons that colleges need to learn too.”

Combatting Food and Shelter Insecurity

Colleges and universities also fail to help poor students when they close residence halls for spring break, or they charge extra to those who would like to stay on campus. Food insecurity is a major problem as well; during his research, Jack encountered a woman who lines up extra social dates for the week of spring break.

“Banking on gendered norms of men paying for the first date, she felt that her only option was to treat OK Cupid as if it were Door Dash, Tindr as if it were Grub Hub. In order to eat, she offered her time. This is a reality for far too many undergraduates every year,” he said.

Ultimately, Jack said colleges must move from merely admitting students to making them feel like they belong.

“Undergraduates from America’s forgotten neighborhoods and ignored schools are truly disadvantaged if colleges and university continue to privilege privilege,” he said.

The gathering was hosted by the University’s Office of the Chief Diversity Officer.

“Teachers are not just thinking about math, reading, and writing,” said Marilyn Bisberg, a clinical instructor, adviser, and professor for Early Childhood/Early Childhood Special Education programs. “They’re thinking about vulnerability. How do I protect the children in my classroom, and how do I protect myself? And where do I stand on all of this, in the political climate?”

Last March, a former student sent Bisberg an email. The young woman, an assistant teacher, wrote that her head teacher had announced they were going to prepare for a potential school shooting through practice drills. The head teacher’s nephew had been at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the February massacre.

“She [the assistant teacher] was totally distraught by it. That angst can break down her ability to feel empowered to help in some way,” said Bisberg. “She said, ‘We need to talk about this in higher ed—preparing teachers to be aware of this new part of their teaching.’”

“How can we prepare teachers better in relation to their role as teachers in the social and emotional area?” Bisberg said.

Encouraging Emotional Education in University Curriculum

For years, colleges and universities have overlooked social and emotional education in the curriculum for teacher training, said Bisberg. Instead of making it a critical component in course content, many schools make it optional. Most teachers across the nation gain these skills through workshops after they graduate. But while in their teaching programs, said Bisberg, they should learn more about the relationship between teachers’ emotions, motivation, regulation, and stamina and how that interplay affects children’s learning and behavior.

The importance of social and emotional education is gaining traction across New York state. Last summer, New York became one of the first U.S. states to mandate mental health as part of health education in schools. And now, Bisberg is part of a team that’s trying to bring social and emotional teaching and learning—a critical aspect of mental health—to teacher education in colleges and graduate schools.

In 2016, Bisberg was introduced to Craig Bailey, Ph.D., Director of RULER for Early Childhood and an associate research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. The center has a novel evidence-based approach called RULER (recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotion), a method that develops emotional intelligence not only in students, but also the adults involved in their education—teachers.

“There may be many different curriculum ideas in terms of teaching kids how to handle their emotions, but RULER is unique in that it includes the adult in the process,” Bisberg said.

Now, Fordham’s Graduate School of Education and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence are working together to bring RULER-inspired ideas to higher education and pre-service teacher preparation.

In spring 2017, the Graduate School of Education piloted a series of workshops as a semester-long course on social and emotional teaching and learning. Bailey came to Fordham and taught a cohort of students about the importance of authentic listening and empathy. He also engaged students in role-play and self-reflective activities to help them become more in tune with their own emotions.

In spring 2018, Bailey came back to present his workshop. This time, he didn’t just present to GSE students—faculty also participated.

Promoting Strategies for Teachers and Children

Going forward, Bisberg hopes to bring this social and emotional education to more students at GSE, offering them strategies they can use to understand their own emotions as they prepare to support the children in their future classrooms. This school year, she’s bringing Bailey’s lessons to a new group of GSE students in the early childhood program to further research the effect that Bailey’s strategies have had on teacher preparation. After analyzing GSE student anecdotes and short- and long-term data, she will determine how to best integrate social and emotional education in GSE classes and create additional curriculum that supports it.

Ultimately, she hopes this will become a bigger discussion in higher ed circles and that this type of education is no longer relegated to only professional development.

“It’s not just about pre-math, pre-writing, pre-reading for new teachers,” she said. “This is about us as people—as teachers.”

Wisdom and Learning.

Inspired by this motto, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J, Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, made it the central focus of this fall’s McGinley Lecture, which took place Nov. 15 at the Lincoln Center campus and Nov. 16 at the Rose Hill campus.

The lecture, “Wisdom and Learning: Higher Education in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Traditions,” acted as a conversation between the traditions of the People of the Book, with Magda Teter, Ph.D., Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies, representing Judaism, and Ebru Turan, Ph.D., assistant professor of history, representing Islam.

Father Ryan noted that the notion of wisdom is prevalent in all three religious traditions because it “enables us to attain to an overarching moral and spiritual perspective on our world.”

“It prompts us to discern how learning or knowledge should be used and how to live as perceptive and virtuous citizens of our world,” he said.

Just as the three traditions share spiritual roots, they also share educational ones; some of their structures of higher learning all come from the ancient Greeks. However, as the religions began to develop and change, so did their educational structures.

“The Jewish and Christian and Muslim traditions of education have diverged greatly on the detailed contents of their curricula,” said Father Ryan.

In the Jewish tradition, education is an important aspect of the faith’s identity, said Teter, who talked about the difficulties Jews faced in the modern era when entering institutions of higher education.

“Jews were excluded from education until the 19th century,” said Teter, “and even when they were accepted, many schools did not support Jewish studies—or forced the students to learn from the Christian perspective. They lost their identity in their own story.”

The Jewish response was to create its own educational institutions, which began to thrive in the early 1900s, she said. It allowed Jewish populations to continue spiritual instruction outside the synagogue and the home, creating the chance to integrate into society.

Islamic instruction, which is heavily based on the memorization of the Qur’an, embraced higher education because it standardized Muslim beliefs, said Turan.

“Higher education provided a cohesiveness and unity to medieval Islam,” she said. “It gave Islam a global identity.”

Muslim schools called madrasas, derived from the Arabic word “to learn,” focused on law, theology and logic in their earliest iterations. Now, there are Muslim universities around the world that provide a diverse selection of study. Turan said that the translation of the Qur’an into other languages allowed Islam to be studied by a greater population.

“The translation . . . empowered Islamic education and opened it up to the rest of the world.”

In the Catholic tradition, Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, complimented university education with humanistic studies. By drawing from his own experiences at the University of Paris, Ignatius wanted to ensure that his students “went through systematic humanistic training in grammar, literature, and rhetoric.”

Jesuit education evolved around this foundation and now includes a diverse selection of fields of study. Father Ryan stressed that Ignatius’ humanistic training is ingrained in Jesuit education’s infrastructure.

“No one finishes any undergraduate college at Fordham without some exposure to philosophy, theology, literature, the natural and social sciences,” he said.

A Q&A segment following the lectures raised the question “Will the three faiths ever agree on the definition of wisdom?”

In response, the panelists laughed.

“We are all conscious that wisdom is important to our faiths and recognize it is something worth pursuing,” said Turan. “But besides that, I think we are fine agreeing to disagree.”

–Mary Awad

Leonard Cassuto, professor of English, is determined to change it.

In his new book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused it and How We can Fix it (Harvard University Press, 2015), Cassuto beseeches his fellow faculty to (perhaps paradoxically) present their students with viable role models in the workplace other than themselves.

This is because graduate advisers typically work at research universities, and the number of tenure-track faculty positions at research universities is small. Leading students to expect jobs just like the ones that their advisers have, Cassuto said, sets most of them up for disappointment.

Cassuto presents some alarming statistics. In a hypothetical group of 10 students entering a doctoral program in the arts and sciences today, 5 will drop out, an attrition rate of 50%. Half of those non-completers—25% of the whole—will leave soon after entering, which is, said Cassuto, a reasonable outcome: “doctoral study isn’t for everyone. Some people try it and decide to take the master’s degree and do something else.” But another 25% of that original cohort will drop out only after they’ve spent many years in the program—and that number, says Cassuto, needs to be lowered.

Of the five who do finish, Cassuto noted that, first of all, their average time to degree will range from seven years (in the sciences) to nine (in the humanities). Then, after all those years, only about half of them will get jobs as a college professors, and most at colleges and universities that place a higher premium on teaching than on research.

“If I described to you a workplace that people have to train for nine years to get into, where at the end of all that time, half of them will be gone, half of those who remain won’t get a job in that workplace at all, and the remaining quarter are going to find themselves facing a range of possible jobs that doesn’t reflect a reality that they’ve been taught to expect, what would you say about a workplace like that? You might call it laughable and ridiculous, and yet this is the workplace we run,” he said.

Siren Song of Research

Cassuto, who writes a column called “The Graduate Adviser” for the Chronicle of Higher Education, blames “research chauvinism,” in which professors tend to place a higher premium on their own positions at research universities while giving short shrift to other career possibilities.

“If a graduate student hits the market with the expectation that he or she will only be truly fulfilled by a research-centered job and then confronts a market where—even if you succeed in getting a tenure-track job—it’s not likely to meet that expectation, that student will not be happy,” he said. “Teaching students to think that way is not just unethical. It’s immoral.”

In fact, he said that preliminary research indicates that students who earn PhDs in the humanities often have successful and satisfying careers in an array of other fields. They just have to get past the initial feeling of failure, because they never grabbed the “brass ring” of a professor job.

“One businessman I talked to for my book who likes to hire PhDs said they’ve got a great skill set that someone else paid for, Cassuto said. “He’s happy to hire them; they move up very fast and do very well.”

Aside from the moral imperative of helping students fulfill the potential of their degrees, Cassuto said professors should broaden their horizons as a matter of survival. Like it or not, the American public is skeptical of how much “use value” lies in a graduate degree today.

“If we want our enterprise to survive and thrive in the decades to come, we’d better broaden our hearts and minds and teach our students to broaden theirs. Otherwise, we’re going to be fighting off discontented graduates and a discontented public, and who wants that?”

This was the finding of Anya Kamenetz, NPR’s lead education blogger and author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010). On May 12, Kamenetz gave the keynote speech at this year’s Faculty Technology Day, sponsored by Fordham IT.

It is well known that colleges and universities are facing major challenges, some of which threaten their very existence. Rising cost is one big issue, Kamenetz said, and access to higher education is enormous.

With these issues in play, the debate about the relevance of higher education, especially the role that colleges and universities will play in an increasingly technocratic society, is the issue that “trumps them all,” she said.

Historically, universities existed to transmit prior knowledge to current generations, Kamenetz said. But today’s schools also need to prepare students for the future. What makes this task difficult, though, is that 65 percent of current students will end up in careers that haven’t even been invented yet.

“The question becomes, ‘What are we doing?’” she said. “If we need to prepare students for jobs that don’t yet exist, then how do we teach them?”

Coming up with an answer to these questions becomes urgent in light of the “race between us and robots,” Kamenetz said, since computers have assumed jobs that humans used to do in the past.

She noted, however, that this “race” isn’t about figuring out how to work better than computers, but rather understanding how to draw on our uniquely human abilities to work well with computer technology.

“The emotional aspects of leadership, teamwork, collaboration, and interpreting knowledge and information to people are something we’ll have to emphasize more and more in this race with computers,” Kamenetz said. “We [may]have a computer program that can read a CT scan, but we need a doctor to sit with a patient and tell them about a poor prognosis.”

Going forward, universities and faculty will remain relevant by fulfilling those “human” roles that computers cannot replace—for instance, providing mentorship, inspiration, and support to students, and helping students to make sense of the plethora of data available in this information age.

“Technology helps us to streamline what we do… But people still need to be in the driver’s seat,” Kamenetz said.

“This forward march of technology is giving us information about the long-term mission of education, which involves things that haven’t changed in a long time,” she continued. “The things we associate with philosophy and the humanities are in fact the most relevant for this generation. This is how our institutions are going to adapt.”

Yet she was deeply unhappy.

Lord, who loved museums and thriving metropolises, found herself living in Bozeman, Montana 14 hours from the nearest major city and unable to afford a car on her assistant professor salary.

“One thing graduate students don’t do enough is think about themselves as a whole person—what do you want? What kinds of sacrifices are you willing to make to be an academic?” Lord told a group of master’s and doctoral students at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) on March 24.

After two years in Montana, Lord committed what many consider to be “academic suicide.” She left her tenure-track position and took a visiting professorship at the State University of New York at New Paltz to start fresh on the east coast. Two years later, she left academia altogether.

Alternatives to academia

Lord, who is now the chair and curator of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, said that her situation is not uncommon among graduate students. Within her own field of history, a mere 30 percent of PhD holders both obtain and remain in tenure track positions.

Many students mistakenly believe that the only outcome of graduate education—particularly at the doctoral level—is academia, Lord said. If these students do manage to secure tenure-track positions at universities (an arduous task in itself) but then realize they aren’t keen on the often-nomadic academic lifestyle, they may be left feeling trapped and disenchanted.

“It takes an average of eight to nine years to complete a PhD,” Lord said. “That’s a long time. Most people enter graduate school in their twenties, which is a time of incredible change… It’s not surprising that so many people change their minds.”

Lord is a strong advocate for what many in higher education call “alt-ac,” or “alternative academic” careers—jobs outside of the conventional tenure-track professorship. However, she disagrees with the view that these jobs are somehow unconventional or merely the post-doctoral “Plan B.”

“There are all sorts of terms batted around for PhDs who leave the academy, for instance ‘Alt Ac’ or non-academic. But what bothers me about those terms is that they always define themselves against the tenure track.

“I don’t see my career as an alternative to something I ‘should’ have been doing,” said Lord, who has also worked as a historian for the U.S. Public Health Service and as the branch chief for the National Historic Landmarks Program of the National Park Service.

She urged the students to explore opportunities in libraries, historical societies, archives, museums, and more in addition to considering academia. The federal government is an especially favorable option for those with PhDs and has long been the largest employer of PhD holders in the United States, she said.

Moreover, these jobs allow graduates to factor in their personal wishes, such as where they want to live and whether they want a nine-to-five job.

A career for the whole person

Regardless of whether students choose the academic route, they can take certain actions now to keep all doors open, Lord said—for instance, writing for non-academic as well as academic outlets and conducting “informational interviews” with organizations to learn more about careers in these fields.

Most importantly, she said, think outside the box.

“In the academy, we get hung up on specialization, or thinking that X field hires only X type of person,” she said. “[In fact,] jobs hire people from all sorts of fields and backgrounds. You can remarket yourself in a way that you can’t do in academia.”

The event was sponsored by GSAS Futures, a professional-development initiative that prepares GSAS students for careers after graduation.

Crain’s New York recently published an education report that included “People to Watch in Higher Education.” Father Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, made the list.

The leaders profiled “play a critical role in the city’s culture and economy,” it said in the Oct. 14 issue.

Crain’s writer Judy Messina described Fordham’s growth strategy as ambitious.

“Under its president, the Rev. Joseph McShane, 64, Fordham is in the middle of a $1.6 billion, 25-year effort to expand its Bronx and Lincoln Center campuses. It is part of a larger strategic plan to raise the rankings of its graduate programs, attract a more national and international student body and turn the 172-year-old institution into the country’s pre-eminent Catholic university. 

“We want to be a destination for the brightest kids in the country, Catholic and not,” Father McShane said.

The article pointed out the “growing allure” Fordham’s location in the heart of New York City.

The theme of the 2011 Conference was “Strategies for Securing Equity and Success in Higher Education,” and examined the extent to which government and institutional policies and programs around the world succeed in increasing equitable access to, and success in, higher education. Freedman also attended the 76th IAU Administrative Board Meeting on Nov. 15 and16, in Nairobi.

The preamble of the IAU 2008 policy statement, “Equitable Access, Success and Quality in Higher Education,” states, in part: “A well-educated citizenry is the foundation of social equity, cohesion and successful participation in the global knowledge economy. As a result most countries have set goals to increase the share of the population with higher education and/or broaden access to higher education for individuals that are under-represented because of socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, [dis]ability or location.”

Founded fifty years ago, IAU is a global forum where higher education leaders come together to discuss, examine and take action on issues of common interest and achieve shared goals through cooperation. The organization has 605 member institutions from around the globe, representing almost every continent. IAU’s core values include academic freedom and institutional autonomy; the responsibility to respond to the needs of society; and to promote justice, freedom, respect for human rights, human dignity and solidarity.